the golden west volume 20 part 5 - 2000 august-september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

7 August In the welter of chapter 4, which overlaps chapter 5 SPL and chapter 2 Aboutness. Cleaned up today. A file for each chapter. Erased the copies. It's evening in the armchair on the back porch. Light in the leaves of the black sage and the pineapple sage. There's autumn powder in the air. Cognitive bodies. Ch 1 our theory does not make contact with what it is like to know. Ch 2 whole bodies are about, by integrated evolution. Ch 3 what happens in the brain is widespread and integrated. Ch 4 think of perception as embedded engagement. Ch 5 the where system and spatial engagement. Ch 6 simulation as-if engagement. Ch 7 representation practices are social control of engagement and simulated engagement. Ch 8 rep uses of IPL. Ch 9 rep effects and metaphoric use of sim engagement. Ch 10 show how it works with four kinds of rep. Ch 11 what does it say about what it's like to know. 9 Chapter 4. I already said quite a lot of it in chapter 2 Aboutness. What do I want this chapter to do. Reconsider the notion of perception in light of wide nets. It's multiple response, it's codetermined in the moment, it's only partly conscious, there's no line between perception and action, it's inherently locational, it's inherently situational, which includes configurational, something about fictional perception of relations, it's logically at many levels at once. Will you help me unjangle     I'm afraid I can't do this     Do you want to comment     you're withdrawn I was feeling there's something wrong with me     Is there something in particular I'm withdrawn from     no Fear of the first chapter     Because it wasn't good     Will you lead me     end of illusion About the first chapter     Shocked by how bad it is     Crash deeper     no Lead more     losses What happened yesterday jangled me     I let them confine me     Is that what you mean about being withdrawn     It hardly bothered me     no It bothered me but I didn't want it to     Is there any more I should feel about it     Tom was more help than Louie     What more should I feel     betrayed By Jam     no, by Trudy She was evil     YES The party was her idea     She hoped to spoil my work     YES She planned it because she knew Jam was in town     She's done it before     YES It worked before     She's still competing     and what's the question Why is she still competing     Because I humiliated her     All of it unfolded from that     Did I humiliate Rhoda too     Is this true     I shocked them     YES Is that the thing I needed to know     Will you explain this to me     process, love woman, betrayal, of early love I should     Everyone's betrayal of early love     Is that the point     YES I'm holding them at siege with my eyes     Am I winning     no Are they winning     Are they better looking    no Are they more accomplished     More famous     no More successful     no I challenged them     YES And have won many rounds     Right at the moment I'm not winning     Are they doing anything     no Did that party ruin my project     no Are they capable of ruining it     no Was I frightened away from the computer     YES Is there any more I need to know     now you're not withdrawn Will you tell me what's my best possible attitude     come through, to completion, of happiness and improvement Something particular about how to do that     deep change Truly give up considering them     YES A better struggle     YES Make real what is more real     YES - I asked the string yes or no for all the parts and did what it said, carved the chapter back to something I can work with tomorrow. Found melatonin! Under the counter at Choices on 16th, because Dr Jay said it's around though restricted. Oh now my sleep worry is fixed. And some of my computer worries since I've organized erasing and saving in batches at the end of the day. Tom's new tape came today and is on. My mix of feelings. I resent giving time to his inventions when my inventions haven't been taken. The engineering is sloppy - for instance the way that song cut out in the middle. The level jumps. Something woozy in the tape wind at the front end? That's not Emmy Lou Harris, is it? Sounds drunk. And also his impulse is in child's heart and I don't want it to stop. The songs are better after once through. Is there anything you want to talk to me about     no Will you tell me how it's going     you're not withdrawn Do you mean emotionally     intellectually In some of it I was     YES Earlier this summer     Will you tell me what makes it     illusion, of improvement, balanced force, coming through When I have illusions about work     NO Some sort of illusion about myself     An illusion that I can't come through     That I can't push what I've done already     YES Laziness gave me that illusion     Thank you for helping me     YES Anything else     no Is there anything I should be doing     be more responsible About everything     All my encounters     I would like to     Friday 11th The bulk of the space chapter - divide it into two, decide the emphasis for each. It helps immediately. Do chapter 5 as old vision and act constants, do chapter 6 as new vision's use of the dorsal - is that right? Treat it as an add-on. It's doing something different at the same time. Does this make a difference to how I proceed? Yes but don't go there yet. The lead is the way object vision has to have focus. These two chapters are going to take time but they are worth it. Central. The where chapter is about act coordination and location, including act constants at the end. I'm going to learn things I didn't know. Chapter 6 is deixis as integration of object and action. Chapter 5 is abstract structural sense. It's getting better, this is where it's jelling. Exciting. 12 I felt like a horse being led over the mountain blindfold - I told Tom - what it was like working with the book on chapter 5, which is now the first half of the old chapter 5. Last night Ann Pollock, interesting to look at, pale eyes with big square eyelids, a lippy soft mouth, thick ash blond hair well streaked and cut so she could push it back and let it fall. Her voice bothered me. I felt it as weak - something in the way she spoke, she kept saying she was curious about this or that, formally, so I didn't know whether to believe her. Although she was curious: she kept thinking of questions about the brain and art. A professional self-effacement, Tom said, what he calls an adept - that? Yes it says. She also kept talking about bringing strands together, as if it were the only notion she has at the moment. I liked her interest but I didn't like the way when I asked her what photographers she's liking she didn't have anything she wanted to say - I wondered if it's the curator's need to be fashionable, so she can't afford to really like anything. Enough about that? Tom caught a wave today. The moon came from between two branches of the cedar as we talked, yellow in the powder blue and pink. 13 I'm not doing well     I'm struggling today     Do you have any advice     process it Finish slogging it through and then process it     I don't know enough     YES And I'm afraid of spending the time     This is the last barrier     More     deception, by pleasure, loss, honesty There's a deceptive pleasure making me lose honesty     YES Do you want to tell me which     pompous Not wanting to not know     I'm afraid of the mess     There are holes     YES Can I deal with them w/o knowing more     no Can I deal with them w/o reading more     Stop at 4:30 today     14 Does the chapter need to start with focus     Task axis, dorsal and ventral uses of     Ch 5 was about the SPL and act constants     Ch 6 is about spatial vision       Will I keep fixing this chapter     Is it as if we are looking at two things at once     The two foci of the right hemisphere     A decentered axis     Peripheral     Axis is dorsal     Ventral makes use of it     Can there be as many foci as there are matrices     The oval window is the relation     Sometimes the reference object is the hand     When we look at a room as such dorsal holds it as the shape of an object     V4 into dorsal     Is focal object seen as part of ref obj     Background is a many-part whole     Hello. Here I am. I can take a day off if I want to. I was panicking diffusely, because I can't keep track of all the parts. I can't see them all at once. They overlap. I feel it's too much. It was pain at the heart. It's bad, I can't do it. Something about this section. Being vague and bluffing is what makes panic usually. I must go into it and take out the bluff and vague and work with what's left - is that it? - (There I went to the computer and worked a twelve hour day.) - Cornelia Oberlander on Gzowski's show, talking about the legislative buildings she did in Yellowknife. She collected seeds and did tissue culture, wild roses, blueberry and kinnick-kinnick. I ached to have been a landscape architect. She could know she wanted to be that because she had culture at home, she didn't need to spend her first fifty years finding it fragment by fragment. 15 Louie is wanting my book to give to yoga teachers. Ann Pollock wants the implications for art. I am writing technicalities thinking will they be able to use this - it means the last chapter will have to be where I say what thinking the body the place of aboutness suggests about those enterprises. What comes to mind is [George] Whalley - the sense he already had, of tone as the person. I got something today I knew I hadn't got yet. More than one task axis. Do something about the forebrain network first     Attention and gaze are synonymous     In relation to focal object     With trajectories is the twoness of objects present and future position     Schemas are organizations, ways of using the --     There is too much     YES And I don't understand it well     Do you suggest something     about adjustment Adjust the project     integrate control, deception and honesty Say what I don't understand     Is that what you mean     Sketch it in and keep working on it     process withdrawal to succeed/improve success I'm withdrawn in relation to this stuff     Something about that area in me     It's damaged     no It's frightened     YES I associate it with my father     The world of motion in space     YES The fear is earlier than the leaving     YES The blur is it     I was afraid he'd kill me     He was in a rage when I was in her arms     The background object     YES That's what's blurring me     A fear installed in the base     Do you want to lead     beginning The fear is from before birth     YES Does the baby know there is an outside     Did he hit her in the stomach     It's dorsal before there's light     The phone rang in the early afternoon. A light, small voice, Hello. You! I said. It was Luke. His news. Sara in radiation therapy but she had her old voice back, she wasn't ethereal. Catherine had a stroke and was confused on the phone. "She was there for me when no one else was." Yes. And Luke has a job. He's production manager at a multimedia house called Platypus. They are sending him to a technical fair at Cannes. He's going to therapy still. He and Cheryl are tense. My Luke. Later Nathalie phoned. She's interviewing Thursday at an xml house called Antarctica.com. She says production manager is high responsibility, high stress. She's interviewing to do 2d visualization. I didn't let her whine about Loki though she wanted to. I can't stand it now. Will you keep leading     persist I'm scatty     YES I don't understand     I don't know how to focus     Brain fog     Will you lead me     love woman, asking, to succeed in processing Love woman wants something     no Ask her?     Love woman will you talk to me     YES conflict, delay, liberation, honesty You're impatient     yes You want the project to be done     no You want to speak     YES Her impatience is beginning to interfere     Sweetheart it's not much longer     yes Will you help me finish and then you'll be able to speak     yes Is there more you want to say     no Heart came on     Feel my own heart instead of his     Put up that photo     Will you go on leading me     loss, coming through, writing, honestly I will come through losses and write honestly       Will you talk to me about this chapter     Apart from a few things that chapter is very good     YES It's better written than anything I've written     no I feel I can't write as well now, will you comment     something you didn't know There were things I didn't know yet     Mainly the aboutness     It's important     Add a section about simulational task axis     Is there going to be a lot to add     Four days total?     no, a week That leaves me ten days, can I do it     Are 4, 5, 6 okay     YES I still need to get clearer about stuff in the parietal     no   Start mentioning IPL     Am I right about IPL tying together SPL and temporal     And being the engine of representation     SPL operates back to organize object segregation     An axis for every object     Should I start writing two-page segments     Like one a month     Will I really lose my blubber after this     17th, Thursday Chapter 7 Simulation. Imagining is where I started ten years ago. I wanted to write a book called Seeing and 'seeing'. I wrote a beautiful paper, was reading it on the screen yesterday feeling I can't write that well now. Joyful graceful clear. The book said no, there was something you didn't know yet. What I didn't know was that aboutness isn't in the brain. What I was coming to at Christmas in Tom's room, struggling to write about perceiving. I've got that uncertainly - I regress. If aboutness is not in the brain, simulation is what I said it was but less spotty, more integral. 18 A day working with simulation notes. Pollen's very detailed paper on visual consciousness. Imagining uses part of the circuits, but the very same circuits. The energy for dreaming comes from limbic, the energy for imagining comes from forebrain. It's a network that sustains attention for action, back to parietal to hold direction of attention. To understand simulation understand through-lines. All simulation is action simulation. Pollen D 1999 On the neural correlates of visual perception, Cerebral Cortex 9:4-19 19 A dream with Rowen. I'm walking with him back to the car, it's night, we can see the car in the distance but we have to walk past a strip of buildings. We are singing as we walk through a field. I'm syncopating beats, thinking, as we come through silky long grass, this is one of those moments. We walk through a restaurant, a sort of Viennese carved wood décor. Straight out through the other door. Then there is a tourist restaurant of some kind, plates of floppy pancakes displayed on the steps. We're in a big high-ceilinged room upstairs, walking through. Then I don't see Rowen. I stand waiting. He doesn't come. The room is very open but I don't see him. I call his name aloud. Four times. I am feeling I will never see him again. I look or am shown behind a curtain. I see a metal wall, the room revolves on tracks, there is a window onto a beach. I see type, large letters, scattered toward the sea. I understand that it is Rowen who is the victim in the murder mystery. 20th A dream where I tied a poppy-red silk cloth into a pocket - I tied the four corners together so it was like a bundle - and hoisted it up. The wind filled it so the surfaces were smooth. It was as high as a kite. Looking at it I saw the shadows of a V of birds, and then the shadows of other birds. Catching shadows was its function. This book will be full when the summer ends. When the summer ends this labour will be over. Every day for a hundred and ten days, all of a summer, unspeakable faithfulness in isolation, effort, intention. I feel I haven't written here. I've given up even that company. I don't have young gladness in the telling. I'm tired. Depressed maybe. The letter from Jon Driver frightened me - feeling how unsupported I am at school, how valiant I've had to be, keeping quiet, keeping my head down, embattled, unloved, bewildered not understanding why it is that way. Not believing, not really believing, anything will come of this huge work. It won't be seen. It won't be seen. I will finish it faithfully and go on. I was at the computer today forcing myself to write. "The labour into which a heart has poured its whole love - where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?" That's Kawabata, the harsh hawk face of the back cover, a cold stare. And yet it's an old woman's face. I read Snow country tonight. Red, white and black. A book about seeing. Thought the commentary will have it about male coldness. I don't care whether Shimamura does Komako justice, I care to see what he sees. 21st Dennis says the TA appointments have been made. He denies they do it at the last moment. I was four weeks late for the deadline. - I did what I should today [went to talk to the graduate dean] and am here something like euphoric. Is war strengthening me? Good if so, because there are two weeks to go. I'm listening to Wade Davis talking about psychobotany [on Ideas], stoned shamans facing down the jaguar in a sea of green. Is what I'm feeling the burning of a bridge? 22 Anything you want to say?     yes there has been a turn for the better Anything else?     no I hear the heater in the hall. Sun is striking across the yellow door. The house is dirty. I am close to the end of my credit, my hair is falling out and the strange dry mouth affliction has come back. I'm lost for proper names and some nouns. It's time to be done. Do I need to win back more size to be able to finish well? The stiffness in my trunk as I work, that has to do with needing to be large to do the work and needing to be small to keep from being punished in the department. You're doing it against a resistance but you're doing it, it says. - Oh - at the end of this day I do have 8 pages of chapter 7 and what I saw of chapter 6 was good. 23 So is it true that Rowen is the victim of a murder mystery? When I spoke to him last night he was flat. I think what has happened is that they've said he can't do what he wants until he is sixteen. He can come into town for a month every other month and do his thing. That means he can come into town but not go to school. It feels like sabotage. It seems willful destruction of Rowen's possibilities. I didn't fight with Michael this time. I was friendly trying to discover how he's thinking. Lise was there in the background and none of us were speaking freely. 24 I think it's called Being about. 26 "and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole." Has love in me been replaced by greed to know     no Did you want me to hold that woman's hand     Did I     sort of But you wanted me to really do it     Would it have made any difference to her     no And yet     I should really have done it     YES And then got off the bus at my stop     Do you want to comment     she wouldn't have come through and fought to balance and be happy Because she can't do it and I can't help     YES Just that     Do you want to say more     the work, overview, not evading, intelligence Do you mean at any moment     When I finish writing     YES 28 Into the furnace for the last section. I'm there. Is there a section missing     imagining early love to improve childhood More?     look for, crisis, waiting for, your mother This isn't a written section     no it is Do you mean chapter 12     YES It's not for the defense but it's for the book     YES Chapter 12 is about you     Start thinking about chapter 12 as I'm writing chapter 11     YES - Gabriele Wienhausen at UCSD, 6th college, arts, culture and technology. Science and art. Hardly any time after Tom phoned to tell me that, someone from Kwantlen College, do I want to teach a couple of courses starting next week. No! I want to finish chapter 11. 29 I read with my left eye and write with my right hand. I look at the world with my right eye and weed with my left hand. What does that make me - crossed anomalous dominance? Slow in speech, unconventional in intuition. Left eye makes sense with right hand. I look into the hemisphace where I write, and while I'm doing that, left hem parietal is gating right hand muscles, right hem occipital is seeing letters. What is right parietal doing - thinking. think of grammar as wording/acting decisions. The brain's skew, a rear bulge for seeing the right hand. I want to say, here in the last chapter (second last, but last for now) having laboured with the floor since years back, here I am in the midst of the rich field of the cutting edge of intuition - again. So rich. It was Tom's turn to phone. I asked about his day and then had stories about the West, which I love to hear. On Friday a big man stuck his head in through the wicket and said Fuck you. And Tom coming out of the office folding his glasses into his shirt pocket flared into battle rage, No, fuck you, and was out of the cage it seemed without going through the gate. He had already calculated his attack but had a moment of clarity, he said, remembering the months paying his fine in Bellingham. He changed his tack. They traded insults of the suck my dick kind, that strange erotic robotic fight language of the street man, Tom seeing if he could sucker the other man into landing the first punch. Backing him out the door taunting him. That, and this afternoon keeping Ed Campbell, dying of cancer, company on the sidewalk as he waited for a cab, putting his arm around him. These stories interest and move me, he is so well suited to his work. Platoon sergeant skills he says he learned at officer school. 30 Dennis offering me five sections of 110. What is the new version of this chapter (chapter 10)? It's boring     no It's heavy     no It's incoherent     NO I'm tired     My health is starting to go     no I'm anxious     no, excited A lot of work to make it publishable     no Will it be published     As Being about     I'm not very able to read it     Imagining in my acknowledgment page thanking the book, without whom, and wondering if book is Bukk as in belly, the belly-brain. "I took the little book and ate it, and it was in my belly sweet as honey." The love book hidden. Many things I want to write. - Friday night. Where am I. Email rattled me. Shopping for food for the last burst. Face the politics next week. Still setting it up. Tired. Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Some of Kantian stories is good, edited it today. Whether to use these stacks of sheets. It would take days. Fly over it and extract from hard copies. 2 September A hard day. Tired. Starting to wear out physically, sore throat, sore ankle, sore eyes. Slogged all day to get rid of notes, started at 5:30. I don't have the energy to do this, even. Distracted by worries about next week. Tom on the phone unloaded for half an hour. I didn't have the wit to know I didn't have the strength for it. Louie didn't phone. I'm feeling how much work there will be to revise it. It won't be done. How do people write books, this is a huge job and so far it's not well done at all. 3 I'm discouraged, oppressed, unwell. Feeling my misfit in the culture world, I'm never what people want, it will be that with this one too, it has too many ideas, it is not in touch with the way other people are thinking, and, this is the part that I care about, I haven't been able to sustain the whole thing in me and so I've written in a patchy blind way. I've been desperate to be done, I haven't taken enough time to do it well. It's more than I can do and yet it's what I had to do, it's the only thing I could do. I've had great joy in the work. I've kept breaking out, I've kept finding more and fitting more, and yet I don't have the mental power to see it through properly and burn past people's blindness and resistance. The design of the project is good. In the end, the intuition was good, and I backed it with huge amounts of reading and noting and distilling, but even with all my isolation and care I haven't been able to hold the whole thing in the air around my head. It's a failure, I'm saying, and even if it's a success it won't be seen, it won't be liked. What do I really think. It's a little after six, Sunday, the heater blowing, grey at the window. There's the table with all its white piles, a couple of open slots at the end. Three days ago I was saying I have the epistemology they need. Today I'm feeling but my brain is too old, I'm holding it together with string, I'm having to slog to work around what it can't do, I'm teaching logic, I'm going to have to invent a style to avoid showing what I can't do. The project is a failure     Will you comment     you're withdrawn Will you help me     Will you lead me     improve, by processing, your disappointment in the work There are good ideas in it but it's badly badly written     It will not win anything     no I didn't keep touching into the real     I'm disappointed, yes     I'm angry that I work so hard and it's shit     Please talk to me     something about the quest As a quest it was successful?     Yes I found what I wanted     Does it mean that now I should do something else     NO Other people write for two weeks and get a doctorate     Will you lead me     angry At me     YES For not writing well     YES Is there a next step     ask how to improve The writing     no, the anger I worked so hard and it's shit     Next step?     something about art It tells me I'm not a theorist     NO What about art     it's foolish Is there something that's not foolish     no Will you tell me what it is     anger The anger at not being seen and supported     By Phil and others     Ultimately by my father and community     don't take it there Prejudice and competition     YES I kept going valiantly without support but my girl heart minded     And that oppression shows in the work     I was trying to meet standards that aren't mine     Is my thesis as bad as Lee's     For the same reason     I was trying to meet foreign standards     It's indefensible     no I can get the doc for it but it's not good     Abandon it after the doc     YES It's better than anything Kathleen has done     But that is beside the point     It's still not good     Is there a next step     strength Find my strength     Will you explain     recover child's balance in love In all my affairs     That's what I'm pining for     And that will make the writing better     More?     early love, excluded child, energy, child It will give me energy     Like when I was in love     no A stronger energy     That should be what I do this term     That's what I need for the long haul     That's what succeeds     YES The way the girlheart minds is what you're talking about     Time to go to work     no, track this more - act, to look for, the way tyranny, makes you withdraw The way I withdrew with Phil     Do you mean hold back     no, go unconscious Not wanting to have my feelings hurt by a jerk     But it harms me     Feeling I'm not a victim if I don't feel hurt     But I'm hurt whether I feel it or not     That's the crux isn't it     That's why revenge is better     YES I'm shutting down because I don't want to feel threatened by the powers     I shouldn't have read the email     no you shouldn't have refused to feel threatened by it I'm frightened     He can harm me     no He wants to harm me     no He is another of those men who doesn't like me     no He wants to suppress me     no He wants to defeat me     NO I am embattled     And don't want to be     Next step?     how it affects the writing - men, child, improve, community Ask the men to improve the community for the child     Do you mean Phil     Do you mean really?     no Please support me     Please tell me I'm a beautiful writer     Please want my project to succeed     Please support my confidence     Please be happy about my talent     Please love my spirit and guard it     Please be on my side     Please want to rejoice in my qualities     Please believe I can do something large and original and true     Please want to help with my project     Please want to help me     More?     And now does he need to say yes     YES So it isn't really Phil     Okay Mr Animus that's what I want from you, will you do it?     yes Is there a next step     restructuring Will you lead me     action Something I'm supposed to do     integrate, process, ask, early love Do you believe he's willing to help me now     Hugging his little girl     Now stop and feel it     Is that it for now     4 I lay down and followed sensation which went into a strip in the lower pelvis. The phone rang. It was Louie. Then I had to start again. Solar, heart, stick close to how it feels. Then it zipped into the temples. The surprise of the shift knocks me out of concentration, start again. Solar, heart, temples, stick with it. Then suddenly a rapid shake or flap twice back and forth as it is flung into the right side of the head. That's it. Then went and worked with concentration. Even now I feel my head cleared. It's lighter. I'm not fighting with anyone. Then at Louie's, in the evening, after Ernst had been and stayed and gone, I took charge for Louie who is very well but desperate and miserable in some hidden self. She feels she's ugly and so it is over for love and sex. The moment when her father said what he did, that she could never be as beautiful as her mother. I say, He's sitting in the chair over there. You can do anything you want. She resists with all her might, she's sticking to the way it was. I'm tracking. When I say the right thing I sigh. She gets up and looks after the blinds and the lights. "Sit here." She should be sitting in front of me with her back to me so I can hold her shoulders. She's crying immediately. "Do something to change the way it will go." I have in mind something like standing in front of him and showing her breasts, calling his bluff. What's interesting is that she's afraid of making it more true that she was not beautiful in various ways. If she gets even, if there are consequences, it will have been true, he will have harmed her. She will be unacceptable. What I can see is that he harmed her but she is more harmed by her defenses, much more harmed. I'll never forgive him, she says. Well, she'd have forgiven him if he had said he was sorry. He couldn't say he was sorry if she didn't let him know. Tell him. She'll talk the way Ansu does, You're such a pig, etc. What I know is that she has to be willing to tell him he harmed her, she has to be willing to tell him what she wants from him. Meantime the girl who shut down and went away is lying as a skeleton on the rocks having visions. She's dead for practical purposes but she can have visions with the best. "Tell her to get up this moment and put on some flesh," I say, "enough with the visions." She laughs at my technique. The session is either degenerating or it has gone as far as it should for today. Louie understood that the skeleton girl is a way of showing what is true. It is starvation by pride not victimization. [summary of work in relation to scientific visualization: I began with a project about spatial visualization used as means and aid to higher-order thinking. The question wasn't very specific: I started from the bare recognition that conditions of the question had changed. They had changed in two different ways: 1) A different kind of visualization was occurring because computers were being used to make images, and visualization was being used in a different way, by a different group of people. 2) A different sort of explanation of the way visualization works was becoming available, because of developments in understanding of the brain, in neuroscience, brain imaging and brain modeling. There was no easy place to begin. The first thing that needed to be done was a clarification of language that survives from earlier mentalist traditions in philosophy: changes in the way we talk. This is related to 2) because arriving at better language involved reimagining how things are done and recognizing the limits and dangers of metaphoric descriptions. This part of the study catches its tail in its mouth, because existing descriptions can be found to themselves involve visualization, so that an account of visualization begins to supply a cognitive science of philosophy itself. It was a reorganization that had to go deep but also wide - it had to reorganize how we talk about all the traditional functional divisions of cognition - perceiving, imagining, representing and thinking. A lot has been done in neuroscience and cognitive science, psychology. The reorganization had to inform itself of brain science and connectionist modeling, but it could not base itself on existing styles of description in these areas, because many of these fields take their vocabularies, as soon as they are speaking generally about mind, from outdated philosophy of mind whose formation I saw I needed to revise. So I had to read neuroscience and cognitive science in a revising frame. Often I could not make sense of it as it was, and had to translate it laboriously sentence by sentence in order to understand it at all. And then there was the empirical platform (where no amount of reading is ever enough), where in addition to the naivete an outsider can only be painfully visible in, the tendency to fall into confident conclusions so obvious they have long ago been tested and discarded by people trained in an area. In all of this I was relying on kinds of formation that don't exist in these fields, which made the work lonely. One was a background in minority politics, which builds an analysis of how the language of a majority in any area will embody prejudgments - a sharp eye on how things are said in an area, on the effect of how things are said. Another is a background in avant garde art whose practitioners assume that what matters is getting to the radical heart of a question, that no amount of creation and revision is too much. What I discovered [in philosophy] was an essentially conservative enterprise. I was scandalized to be told that any amount of creating and re-creating was too much. Also brought a way of working where you move on feel - this is where the solution is, it's in this direction - and find argumentation obviously useless. Where you move on knowing as perceiving. A very different understanding and experience of knowing. In avant garde art the way one comes to know is by developing one's ability to perceive, by building one's capability in various ways. Argument is a pathetic justification and persuasion. The way I experience coming to know was what was at issue in the circles I found myself in - I was expected to bow to their understanding of what knowing is in order to defend and explore an understanding of knowledge completely different than theirs. My actual intention was to raid and revise their resources in order to support my own conception of knowing. So my intentions were at odds with the expectations and requirements of my milieu. There was painful and lonely necessary hiding. To be able to survive in this milieu I could not be outright about my intentions. That is always a painful and lonely situation. Doing the work, there are beautiful breakthroughs, I was impatient to hand them on and heartbroken to find no one wanted them. I will have to take them outside the community I formed them in. If they were intelligible to this community they would already have been discovered here. It is like growing up among the Mennonites and leaving home again. I was a cuckoo who laid myself in a nest of birds who did not at first realize I was not the kind of bird they hoped to find. What I found to say about visualization is this: We think in the midst of perceiving and acting. For instance when placing rocks in a garden, there is a kind of thinking that is very direct. In making anything, the scene of making, the materials, their layout, the body that does the making, are all there together in perceiving and doing. The primal scene of thinking is acting in the world, with materials, by means of the body. That's the template for any kind of cognition. It's not that cognition is external or internal - it is active presence. There are many variations of this primal scene of thinking. Let's say there's an overall shape of activity in the brain, with many possible states in many possible sub-areas, a tree with many leaves. Visualization can be thought to be a kind of working with materials. The qualities of the materials set up actions with those materials. The actions set up include speech. Visualization is like a kind of perception-action task but performed in the presence of other tasks that are mainly simulated. The relations between perceiving and simulating which are the particular genius of representation. There's perceiving and acting and communicating - people directing one another's attention in a mutual place. Then there is communication for the purpose of directing one another's attention in simulated circumstances: that is representational communication. Then there is representational [breaks off] is real. But we do not perceive by means of representations. We do perceiving representing objects. Scientific visualization is a complex representational practice, an integrated representational context, a far endpoint in the development of representational practices, integrated and synoptic. It involves an interaction of natural language, mathematical notation, pictures of different kinds (black and white outline drawings, 3D colored animations), it can include sound. Each of these representational practices are separate arts but they can be understood separately in terms of any representational practices - in terms of the aspects outlined above. I assume the synoptic arts are just more comprehensive evocations.]     volume 21 the golden west volume 20: 2000 april-september work & days: a lifetime journal project