| the golden west volume 22 part 1 - 2001 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
26 January 2001 What are my points and questions for perceiving - looking at the day - but I'm full of quirks of misgiving - Mary's horrid note saying she's still my mother, and I'm cold and distant. Delete, I said. You are not still my mother. I do not trust you with my discoveries or my difficulties. And Tom last night telling me Lorie is married but not telling me that a year and a half after he met me he still wasn't sure he wouldn't go back to her. I'm lonely today. When I was working with what came up with Lorie I remembered Rasheed and Judy. As if I didn't feel it at the time. The first man I slept with slept with my sister and took her picture in a bathing suit sitting on a tractor tire to show his friends. Judy's betrayal. It's still January: Mary's betrayal. What about it. Feel it more? Yes. How do I feel it now. Stoically like a child. Lonely in stoicism. She sold me out. How does that feel. Small, subdued, silenced. She silenced me when she sold me out. Was it her intention to break me? Yes, on some level. She didn't want me to be what she hadn't been allowed to be. Was she happy that I was maimed? Yes. Were she and Ed in cahoots? Yes. She broke all her children. I have broken mine. This is true isn't it. Yes. Do you want to say something about this? Family, balance, crisis, completion. Does broken stay broken? Yes. I accept that she meant to harm me. Does she still? Yes. He doesn't. YES. She means to harm Luke too. And Rowen? No. Don't argue with her, just send her work. Does Ed understand that she means harm? No. Do the Republicans all break their children? Yes. Do the Democrats? No. Will you tell me what breaking means. Dishonest teaching despair instead of coming through. Creation of helplessness. Yes. 27 Waking from a bad dream. I don't want to be awake. It's only four, black and clammy. I was with Frank. He was showing me pages of a story. Then later he had come back saying he had smoked a big joint. He seemed stupefied. I gathered my few things. I guess I'll leave. He's indifferent. See you. Then I'm walking around looking for my car. What I feel waking from this is that I'm in a drugged state, the way I was with Tom last night, nothing to say. I kept ripping through books as if I was getting away from myself. Or else it's that Tom smoked a joint yesterday, it says. I thought with Frank that he was cutting himself back. - Have to reorganize 4, 5, 6. Re-merge 5 and 6. Add orienting and task axis to 4. I'm overwhelmed in the disorganization. Can't read it. Worried that it will take too long. - Do I have it now? Presence - pointedness - flow through - hearing - how to talk about perceiving. Yes, I can go ahead with that. And then the next chapter is the parietal where/how. - What do I want - heart - but look, so many piles still - What I've learned since I wrote these chapters, a sense of the scatter right through of sensory and right back to motor, sense of directedness. I'm not the reason she's moved, she is. All I do is say the words: cornfield and Mother and algebra and Chevy pickup and cold beer and Sunday morning and rhubarb and loneliness, and other people put pictures to them. I feel the same way about Stearns County and Lake Wobegon. It isn't up to me. I can't recreate it. I find that if I leave out enough details in my stories, the listener will fill in the blanks with her own home town, and if a Freeport girl exiled in Manhattan hears the story about Memorial Day, she'll put it right smack there in that cemetery with those names on the stones, and she may thank her uncle Alcuin who went to France and didn't return, and get out her hanky and blow. Garrison Keillor In search of Lake Wobegon, National Geographic Dec 2000, 109 29 It's the dead time again. I wake too early. When I can't work any more I have nothing to do. There's nowhere I want to go. I'm nostalgic for being in love. I'm going days without speaking. My stomach has a pad of fat. The streets are dirty. I'm boring, boring.
30th
Fullness of heart. Place in the depth of the cunt where I am home. Closer to the wind. A life in feeling and images. Grief at not being included. Unwanted on the road, nowhere to be me. Flirts with Tom. Army jacket white Indian shirt blue jeans silver boots. Asking what is the essence and being answered. Green parasilk loose pants. Can write only lyric bursts. A sense of being close to death. At seventeen looking at runnels in the mud. Honed, like a new moon, in bone of ribs and jaw and shoulder. Sitting with a book about Einstein feeling the structures of intuition. When I was reading a voice forming on the right, a parallel voice about something else. Was it carried in the voice written? No, your own. I had come into existence with yoga, the women's movement, Sufi exercises opening the heart, sex, suffering, music, Luke, Roy. Centeredness in instinct, in adoration. She had never seen a real love woman. Living as she would, with shining silver eyes. Floating or flying or falling. The righteous investigator. Eating, color. Wanting to be with the beautiful women. Wants to be where someone is wilder. And now work woman's best company is always love woman. A great scorn of people sitting in churches. Someone in open fields, in gardens and farms. The woman in a blue dress in a white marble room. Aphrodite who rewards with shining skin and deep fucks. You were a seagull, you rode alone with that keening cry at the shoreline. But there is something else, the light we saw together. There's always structure out of sight, off side, the way ripples come into frame in Trapline. There, I feel my heart now. Grateful. It has to do with listening. Speaking through. Coming from the side, beside. Tremor. I used to give my mother small containers. It is the fine beautiful one. She is Elfreda. What I see in them, ageless. Write the story of being two women. I wrote looking at her in the mirror. Her head is open at the top like a window. Elfreda Mor. - Feel the compressed heavy thick one. Oppression, compression, pressure. Release the air around me.
- Tom is full of sex, he says. He lies awake at five imagining that we have a room we go into where we are going to seriously FUCK. And so on. I like what I am hearing but I hate the way these speeches leave me out. He can't stand me to say anything. He rides over anything I begin to say. I have to keep making do with serving to hear him. The fact that he is promising me wonderful sex makes me probably more tolerant than I should be but I come away bored and irritated. "I have to go make a phone call," I say.
31st The perception chapter, it's the heart and I can't rush it. What I'm understanding now is clearer. I'm saying directedness, pointedness, is common to perception and action and calibrates them. 1. Presence is what I'm calling the configuration of both. 2. Presence is epistemological base level. 3. It has two aspects, what is done to make contact, and what occurs as a result of contact. 4. The second is generally thought of as 'perception' but sensor restructuring goes right through to action, and it's very diffracted, split, on the way through. 5. The two broad streams: the what stream goes to 'conception,' the where stream goes to action. Implications for how to talk about perceiving. There are no walls between sensing/perceiving/acting/concepts. Ch 8, how directedness is common to acting and perceiving. Perspective, axis, attention, orientation. How to understand the multiplicity of response from sensors. Bat audition as an example, human audition as understood. Draw some of the lessons for philos of perception. Ch 4, the dorsal system. How to understand where and how as connected. 'Spatial function.' Perceiving is a spatial function. Ch 5, simulating presence. 1st February Janet last night, a conversation. She talked and I talked. We both asked questions. She had gone through my first two chapters on her laptop, commenting in red. She was whipping through the pages, showing me she'd been there, through every line. She brought me books. Fox Keller has a new one on genes. In the bibliography I saw that Kim has a new book on the philos of biology. I did what I do, jump on the metaphors. "We interpret the senses," and more of those. I don't want to go on telling for some reason. But having been out till midnight happily talking I came home and slept eight hours with no struggle. She is a bad cook though, lentil curry on white rice, the curry a dull paste with black flecks of burnt bottom. - Alright, the presence introduction. Presence is the core of the epistemology. What happens in contact is more secure, as knowing. Person structure is most and best structured in the moments of contact, most finely deeply clearly pervasively structured ( - except for all the people, most of the people, who are cut off, which is why what I am saying is pagan post-post-modern hope not recognizable to most even of the artists) when there's a world it is working to see. Presence is the evolutionary core, say. Presence is the paradise people expel themselves from. Yeah, and why am I not there now, but away away in theory. Because, because. Talk about it later. Presence is the epistemological core. 2nd Disgust. What right did you think you had to pull me in with lies. I stood on rotten ice. I paid for the first three and a half years. What is my other side. I have pulled people in to save me when I was wrecked. Jam, Michael. What I don't like when I remember that, is that I didn't really want them and it implies Tom doesn't really want me. Well I didn't really want him either. I got hooked. How do I feel when I say that. Hard but not a victim.
-
In the last couple of days Janet, Ray and Kirk have said things about chs 1 and 2. Kirk resented what I said about artists, Ray was nervous about the personal voice, nervous for me he said. "People like Phil and Kathleen won't like it. Cozying up, telling us things about yourself. It's your data, of course." Janet worried about determinism and free will and out-of-body experience, and liked passages of writing. 3 Should I do a book about land and mind in art? Misunderstandings about nature-based art. What's the diff between real and sentimental.
4
That was good yesterday. We sorted something - what's at issue for me is whether I can look after myself, what's at issue for him is whether he can look after someone else. The two concerns are complementary. It's Sunday morning. In bed with tea. I'm happy. If we follow the changes and deal thoroughly, it comes out well. A story. Tom is on a dock in Santa Cruz talking to Lorie. He says, It's like this. We can turn and walk away from each other. At any point either one of us can stop and turn to look after the other. If the other one stops and looks too, we can decide whether we want to start walking back toward each other. But at some point one or the other of us will go around a corner. A couple of years later, when they have broken up and parted several times, he is coming home to the Quinta late one night. At a distance he sees a couple walking toward him. He is attracted by the woman's shape, the way she is walking. She's got her crotch against the man's leg, panty-fucking him. That's a hot woman, he thinks. As they get closer he sees it's Lorie. He watches her face go into shock. He passes them. At the end of the square, after he has walked down the steps, he stops and turns. She has stopped too. The man she is with is standing at a little distance from her. Tom walks on. When she sent him the card, he liked her spunk. She was always good at the grand gesture, although she didn't necessarily back it up. -
I wrote a paragraph today that I might see quoted in somebody else's book someday. Here it is. Theoretical worries about activity and passivity have a gender undercurrent, and to those who have not been able to sort this question, there is this to say: a perceiver can be understood as fortunately hermaphroditic, like the snail. Perceiving requires that we poke ourselves into the world while being penetrated by it. I read this to Tom, who was rising through layers of water, more himself than when he is awake. He told a quotation from the Koran that says the eye is promiscuous. They veil women so the women cannot penetrate them - I suddenly saw. The moon is full tonight, and he in his room and I in mine are happy. You blissed me out last night, you were speaking to me with such wonderful naturalness, he said. Nathalie phoning because she was in a panic. That's how it is, I said. Your kind of intuition doesn't write easily. That's what creation is like. 7 I was falling asleep a few days ago, in the afternoon, I think. A noise outside, a sharp but not very loud clank, like a two-by-four being thrown, made me suddenly see a three line title in white type, all caps, big, maybe 24 points, in a slanted sans serif font I never use. I didn't read the words, I just saw them straight ahead as if they were centered on a screen, three words, one above the other, not justified. I was startled and they vanished. What about it - first, what is it about falling asleep or sinking into a trance in daytime. It's like things I've seen with sudden noises at other times, but it was more formed. Second, why that font, which is a font I have seen hardly ever (the name I'm hearing is Avant Garde) and don't like. Subcortical line split? Auditory without damping of focus shoots into early vis. White letters primed from working with them all day. Straight ahead for the same reason. But that font and size were not primed. Some newspaper stories I haven't told. Miss Iowa 2000 a woman born without a left hand. Her picture on the front page of the Post, standing in an evening gown. A fifty year old woman in Ottawa killed on a snowy street, as she walked a dog called Strider, by a drunk diplomatic aide, a sneering Russian coming from an ice-fishing day with other Russians. The newspapers ran her photo for days, because her spirit was so beautiful. She was a labour relations lawyer. When he was little, Tom's mother would say, Close your eyes, and she would stroke his eyelids so he saw red, green, gold, blue. 8 Ray said chapter 2/3 is tremendous, exciting. He liked the description of the complexity of what's happening. Layers of complexity of description. He was thinking about the mathematics of processes in which the transmission medium is changed too. Janet's disagreements enraged me. I'm not sure why. I'll look another day. She said I tiptoe around consciousness. No, I tiptoe around the language. There's something I have to be willing to understand about her and Kirk's dislikes. The things she liked in this chapter seemed to be the wrong things. What Ray liked was the right thing. 9 It says with both of them it is not understanding that they dislike. Consider it my way: I set out language and it doesn't structure them into my coherence. What it structures them into doesn't gel. Trying to find people like me. Construct them to be like me. If I think of it those ways, it's not worth much. What is happening is that I have a device I can use to sound their difference. And I am faithfully willing to discover nothing can be shared - is that what I'm supposed to discover? If nothing can be shared, is there a point? Is there some other way I should be thinking of it?
10 Cranky. A fight with Louie last night. Louie does not dote on me any more and that makes me like her less. But the fight was an old fight about men. She is on her way to Calvin, who is literary, responsible and drives the worst possible color of van (two-tone tan and brown). It's the right time for a distance. Cranky with Tom too. I couldn't bear him cutting me off. Don't have the energy to say this well. He turned it by talking about me and then I turned it by saying You can talk if you talk about me. And cracked up. He said he saw the black-eyed little girl staring at the photographer. That solid stare. Having him remember something about me helped. It's what I don't get any more from Louie. I said I don't ever want to hear anything any more about you, I just only want to talk, and then laughed hysterically again and again. How long has it taken me to say that. Work. Chapter 4/3 isn't done yet. I have to add a few sections, one about objects segregating/clarifying their own subnets, more about basic organization. Some reorganizing, less in readiness. Integrate the audition/vision sections and how to talk. It is at least two weeks on this chapter so far. There are seven more. 11 I got once through the object subnet section today, read through ch 4/5 this morning. A quick run-through the rest of the base level section. Now it will be fine adjustments, summings and transitions.
12
14
- Have a copy of ch 3, last section not quite done but I am starting ch 4 today. I like the solid pile a chapter is when I have printed a last draft and driven a big staple into the corner. What happens when I phone Tom - often - he starts to talk about something, tonight it was his stereo and its buttons, and I am feeling, this is torture. Tonight I kept talking as he spoke, we talked at the same time on and on. I am bored saying this, even. He hangs on when I try to stop. Two hours of wrestling. I don't get what I want. It's a day I've spent alone and he expects me to listen. I hold the phone away from my ear to shrink him into a tiny voice behind the holes in the handset speaker. 15 Now I'm beginning chapter 4 (which was 5 and 6) and I can see it will need more than a day or two - two weeks? That would mean I'd get through 5 and 6 in March, 7, 8 and 9 in April, and not finish 10 - is that it? And then be broke. Go to Oregon next week. That means get the first four chapters onto the site, that means have a plan for the foundation. Is it called Congeneris? Of common origin. If we think of minds as evolved in natural world, what changes in how we think of both? Congeny. Commonality, common origin. - M says Frank killed himself in the middle of January [19th]. The funeral was the 24th. He'd been in the psych ward with depression, had shock treatment. His marriage broke up some years ago. His two sons weren't at the funeral. He was 60. Mary read Leaving the land and said it was heavy, and because the brain is so complex it can't have evolved, and she never had any feeling for the land. "It had nothing to offer me." How does she feel when other people do? A little bit jealous. Janeen and Frank were my friends who loved the country.
16th I woke thinking about communities of influence. I was thinking it in relation to Frank. He didn't know he was in psychic community with the people around him. He was living among people unconscious by deep lying. People unconscious by deep lying have a crazed right hemisphere - no a crazed nonrelation with a desperate, isolated right hemisphere. His community made him crazy because he did not have the courage to define himself against it. More than courage, resolution. He didn't do the work to save himself.
-
Four things. Louie's instant, full and perfect sympathy when I told her; Tom's hard, egotistical inability to let me feel listened to and then his indulged rage when I said what it was like; the book's clear kind explanation: when he is like that it means he is shut down denying something in particular, and when I am childish expecting to be listened to I lose my ability to see that he is so; and now, Wordsworth in The prelude describing rowing and skating on the lake at night. I've reorganized and am getting chapter 4. The structure is much clearer than it was. I know more about the SPL than I did when I wrote it. Reading I did during the fall term. I found what I needed. Frank and Janeen have died horribly and I am still here, because I fought my community, I believe. I was given to be able to. They weren't. When I lay down this afternoon it had found me, a sore heart for Frank, that I hadn't felt until then. It is an angry, self-hating way to end himself. He had to have hated his story to end it that way. It is an end that hates his children, his parents, everyone. He was happy with me. He was happy in the time he knew me. He loved me, himself, all his world. Olga Broumas wrote Louie a sentimental valentine that said, May the day bring you love. Louie wrote back, The day is love. She meant, whether we feel it or not. When Tom is cut off and cannot feel me in the moment he substitutes praise and flattery for a nonpresent icon of me. 17th Today I want to go into the world and not sit in the back room. I want to buy shoes, work on the website so I can direct people there from the conference. I also want to drop Tom for weeks. I have no more patience with his rages. He won't let me into early love in his presence. It is a blooming I shouldn't have to do without. Yes, it's true that I have to learn to recognize closedness for what it is, instantly. Yes it's true I should write my stories not tell them. But should I go on subsidizing him? No. Er ist trauherzich, Grandma Epp said about Frank. I am seeing his chest and shoulder, the round sweet muscle. His ironic Fraser Valley boy voice. The red truck in the rain. You're one in a million, he said. His stubs of thick curled eyelashes. His brown wrists. You have a kind of lassie quality he said when I wore the spring green nylon blouse. The way he walked in his loose work pants and moccasins. The way we'd stand and hold each other quietly and then he'd want to crush me. His woods and fields. The ironic curl of his mouth. His guns. The fond daily voice of his letters. The easy lucid way we belonged together - very lucid always, clean like kids. He was the only lover who knew where I came from, he knew my grandparents, the farm, my brothers and sister when they were kids, my country, the church. I said I wouldn't marry and I never did. He loved me in the moment to moment way I miss. He loved my being in the moment. He was a lover. He loved his family. He loved his friend Marvin. He loved to walk out into the valley to see Baker far away to the southeast, a white pile on the valley's rim. He was irascible about fools but never with me. He had a hard-working, well-made body, a lean belly. He was 5'8", strong. He wanted to be tall. He looked beautiful, dangerous, in a suit. He was a badboy. He would sometimes smoke a cigarette. His father was a silver-haired man, the choir director, handsome. What was Frank's weakness. He was a redneck. He wanted to sneer at DPs. He was a hunter, he liked killing animals. I believe he was tyrannical with his wife. He wavered about the church, went back to it. "I thought they might have some answers." There was a little girl he liked, in his Sunday school class. He'd often say he wanted to take a gun and just head into the wilderness. I knew he never would. He had rebellion but he did not have courage and resolution. He had love but he took shortcuts into scorn. He didn't have a passion to learn. He was heading to complacency. He was twenty one when I met him, five years older than me. He was probably twenty five when I slept with him. He was already dating Sharon then. There was always a strong physical field between us. I would feel it from across the room. He sometimes said he'd like to shoot himself. He had a streak of anger and melancholy. He'd think everything was going to the bad, his sister Judy, Margaret marrying a Frenchman, Marvin getting married and being controlled by his wife. When he was down I would sink and then he'd cheer himself up cheering me up. He liked to drive. He impressed me driving with one hand, shifting gears through the spokes of the steering wheel. He got kicked out of MEI. He sent twelve carnations for my 18th birthday, after we'd broken up, without a card. What I'm remembering is his live body. The way he moved. He was lithe and electric. He valued me. I'd often dream him. I want him to be alive in an afterlife so I could talk to him. I want to say I didn't forget him, I didn't spoil my time with him, it is alive in me. I thought I would be like that for him, a well of goodness. It will never happen again, he said, it's once in a lifetime. Is it true that he had to have killed himself before he died, because if he hadn't, he wouldn't have had to do it? What did he want to kill in himself? The woman, it says. He neglected her? Yes. He shut down, he didn't stay connected to his sources. He cracked up when he lost his wife because he didn't have his woman anymore. We slept together in the back corner cabin at Dyck's berry farm. I was there alone because Judy and Susan had left to go back to school. It wasn't long. He had the truck parked behind a fir hedge. He'd bring a bag of grapes. That was when I saw the roundness of his muscles. We'd be in the bottom bunk with the hotplate glowing. He'd put the condoms through a knothole in the floor. He'd leave at daybreak. He said it was a splurge of time but I don't think so. It was true. When I ran naked to the outhouse through the dew I felt the immensity of the sky as I never had. This day is very mixed. I put the beautiful front page of Being about on the web. I'm disgusted with Tom and want to pull the plug on the phone. Maybe just about done being sad about Frank. Tomorrow I'll write.
|