| the golden west volume 22 part 4 - 2001 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
20th March The purring of cats, 27-44 Hz for a house cat, 20-50 for wild cats, frequencies that strengthen bones. Oh let me try to figure out where I am in this fruitful rat's nest. It's fruitful because I figured out an important something about the whole history of lateralization. Today I got the section on wireframe surfaces and edges right - I think. cleaned up hippocampus and places as wholes. What's left? 21 Standing above water divided by a concrete edge. On the right it's clear and very deep. On the left it is milky and shallower, a swimming pool. I am standing above the deep side but I don't want to dive. I'd be near the concrete edge but it's too deep. A platform I'm on swivels so I am over the swimming pool side. Now I am afraid to jump because I am quite high above it and I can't see how deep it is at the point I'm over, halfway down its length. The platform lowers itself so I can step onto the poolside strip. It is the moment in the church service when we are supposed to dive in. There's a throng of people. I see someone in a yoga shape, the bow. It's a man. I jump into the pool, a shallow dive. The water is warm. I am swimming breaststroke. My left arm is so weak I can only complete half a stroke on that side.
22 Gulls land into the wind and brake by presenting the full surface of their wings. Steiner: thinking from things. [Practical training in thought, 1949] Seeing as food. "What is good for you is the attitude of trusting devotion for humans and natural creation." - Albie Sachs on Ideas, the men around him are cultural men, he is a political man. He speaks clearly and joyfully about the possibilities of committed life. He said the conflict was patriarchy and intimacy. "In many ways things have improved." 24 I met Louie yesterday in the atrium of the downtown library. We hadn't seen each other for two weeks. I wore my new green jacket, my blue beads, the white Indian cotton shirt she gave me. While I waited I set a chair and posed in it, so she would find me looking at the ceiling listening to the velvet murmur of the many voices risen in that tall air. My stratagem worked. She liked me when she saw me. I liked her too. She also had on a new jacket. Hers was burgundy. We hugged each other and went to the Pan Pacific and sat by a window in the lounge that looks toward Stanley Park. What should she drink, she said. This, I said and pointed to Laphroaig, $11.50 a glass. On ice? the waitress asked. Yes, said Louie. No ice! I cried. I'll bring some ice on the side, the waitress said. She was pleased with us. When I told her the story about Peter Manning Louie's face changed maybe three sentences before I got to the turn in the story. She was feeling my feeling as I began to feel it in the approach to the telling. One of her stories was about being able to do a yoga posture where she stands on her head, lowers her feet backward to the floor, sustains the arch while she walks her feet sideways, flips her hips, continues to walk them across the front, flips her hips again, scrabbles her feet back to where they started, and then does it in the opposite direction. She said she liked the feeling afterwards, because everything was connected to everything, and she said in one version of the exercise there was a bit of the motion she couldn't do because she didn't have the connections. I've suddenly got it, I said. What I got was that yoga is not about recovering the body's original capacities, it is about hyperconnecting, making a larger net. Specifically in the frontal/parietal, frontal to parietal because it's intentional, so it increases consciousness in the parietal. The parietal is unconscious in most people, therefore 'intuition.' The ventral stream is intensively speech-related, it's mainly about nouns, being able to evoke things by reconfiguring. Think of the temporal bulge as an appendage to the arcuate fasciculus. It's where noun-evoked object structure is set up. Prepositions use SPL. IPL does many-way connecting. Temporal-SPL, frontal-parietal in ventral stream, interhemisphere through callosal, hippocampus too? it's the cultural crossroads. In language SPL is another appendage to the arcuate fasciculus. Am I right about SPL as a kind of wireframe perception? Does ventral use it for form precis? TE has to do with remembering it not perceiving it? Is ventral marks on surfaces? Are marks on surfaces small-scale wire frame? Texture is relevant to the fingertip. The shape of the bed or rug is relevant to large-scale motion. Is it volume geometry plus a cladding of surface? Can I actually see through this? I'm stuck on how to talk about the all-overness of spatial organization. Is it one fixation point per object? Do the directions of eye motions give the directions of things? Does motor memory for eye movements make the sense of the layout of a scene? Is hippocampus motor memory for motion in a place? Is hippocampus motion memory for eye movements in a small space? Are eye movements the key to relations? Is motor memory felt? Cumulative, the way place cell configurations are? Object edges plus motor memory? It isn't view dependent in the sense that the vista is taken as one object, that had to be learned. The units are objects relatively positioned by motor memory for eye movements. When we see a perspective drawing we evoke eye movements. Should I revise chapter 9 at the same time, before I do ch 5? And ch 8 IPL? Then do sim/rep/rep effects? Make a summary box for each chapter. One fixation = one object? Which is why there are many objects in a face. Repeating saccades strengthens motor memory? They set the scene relative to the viewer? A web of relations in the sense that eye motions draw lines? Is simultanagnosia a difficulty with eye movements? Are eye movements and attention the same thing? ('Covert' has suppressed eye movements.) There's a fuzziness at the heart of this project. unavoidable. It finds the place that needs focus. Just acknowledge it. In the blind does auditory attention work the same way? Does it use eye motion areas? In cortical blindness through the supe collic straight to SPL-frontal? In eye blindness the ear sets up eye circuits? 'Abstract' can mean the points, abstract can mean the surfaces? Eye motion memory is of related points. The relation of volumes is corners. I'm lost here. I haven't got it. I don't know enough and I don't think reading more, or reading a little more, will help. Surfaces versus marks is what I got this time through. I don't have the kind of topological brain I need. I'm not strong in SPL.
Patiently name the questions. Don't bluff. 25 All night talking. I sat down after work last night and reeled off in 5 minutes a bottom-level four-point analysis for gender studies. Judith Stapleton asked. She won't use it because it's not shallow enough. It goes like this. I won't write in the details. First questions:
Second questions:
I am telling this because I am happy to find that despite the way I am crawling through the end of chapter 4, I have still got incisive speed. Hello. Sunday morning. Damp and grey.
- Tom watching TV looks at the female newscasters wondering whether they got laid that morning and whether their undies are a little bit damp. When news cameras went into homes around the high school shooting in Santee he was looking at the furniture wondering whether her hubby ever sprayed against the plastic-covered couch. This came up because I mentioned women and media. Let me give you my perspective, he said. I was hungry for life outside today. I didn't work. I talked to Tom, I ate, I went to Commercial Drive and looked at a Playgirl magazine that had bulked crooked-legged dumb young men with their wieners flopping one direction or the other. I had a nap and what I liked best was the few moments on the way through the intermediate zone, where I remembered feelings of being somewhere, out, with air and space and light around me, common day. 26 Alright, take Sundays off from now on. Push more on the other days. 27
I finished ch 4 today, reordered the piles on the long table, so it definitely looks like less is left. Two on deck, and then four on this end, and that four includes ch 10. Tom phoned when he got home from work. He'd been himself all day he said. He was stammering. He had a breakthrough, he said. He feels I'm his friend. 28 I have been curious about the authoritarians. Is there a core of what they are. Augere to increase. Is that the core, a tribal attitude to wealth? The rules that would create a materially successful culture. Is that what it's about, organizing a collective? So the other wing, liberals, the free and generous, are the smart or gifted or unusual people who leave the collective. Authoritarian cultures benefit the mediocre who cannot do well unless the whole culture is competitive. Liberals are individuals who can do better outside the collective's rules - is that it? This economic motive is built on top of a psychological structure that has a tension between L and R hemispheres. Authoritarians deal with the tension by walling off R hem, which is why they advocate the word, the gun, lies and secrets, environmental exploitation, prisons and a transcendent god. Liberals deal with the tension by processing, coming through, treating. So are authoritarians a subset of liberals? Liberals are frightened into defending only the R hem because the authoritarians want to wipe it out. It is a mistake to identify with the R hem. Identify with a related state of R and L. The concerns of the authoritarians would be met if they felt the liberals in that position. In fact it is the position a liberal must find to be economically viable, because the R hem is too young. I like the feel of this analysis. It makes me happy. It means I must play with the enemy. 10 things Laura is wrong about (the authoritarian attitude): 1. guns, 2. abortion, 3. lies and secrets, 4. feminists, 5. commitment needing external sanction, 6. morality needing god, 7. sex education, 8. homosexuality, 9. daycare, 10. not advocating coming through. The antiabortionists in various states are campaigning to have license plates that say Choose life. I thought the liberals could let it get well organized and then co-opt it. It's a brilliant slogan for liberal belief. I could ask Nora to hire me and then run that campaign for the liberals. Choose life: choose wilderness preservation, choose public education, choose libraries, choose financial autonomy for women, choose peacemaking, choose universal health care, choose family planning, choose quality daycare, join a choir, abolish the death penalty, regulate guns, support sexual minorities, tell the truth, strengthen cultural minorities, decriminalize drugs, support the arts, start a community garden, investigate bravely, make heaven on earth. Choose life, don't let it happen by accident. It's an anti-Bush campaign. Have each billboard funded by an individual and have the individual's name on it. Also put the artist's name on the billboard. It could be individuals from either side but it would have the effect of preventing Bush from being reelected. Have ghetto boys fund a billboard: Choose life, fund skateboard parks. Consider placement of billboard, consider who has a message, consider style of press interface, use artists wherever possible, have a statement of mission, use ambiguity (L or R), have a thought-out position on every billboard, with written support, press release. Speakers to suggest. The Choose life campaign. A man called Frank Sweetz has offered Tom a weekend job stewarding old people on bus trips to Vegas and other tourist spots. He had watched him on the phone and with the clients and had asked around, Is he honest? People said Yes, he's honest. Second. Tom talked with me for an hour and a half about my idea for the campaign before he told me his news. I didn't like his advice. What I didn't like was the conventional greed and prudence. You'll need to take people to lunch, that's how it's done. Those people kill for their ideas. It won't be fun. You have to know what your time is worth, if you don't charge enough they won't take you seriously. It's war. Etc. The advice I gave him was, Take care of your taxes from the beginning. Don't go back to the Quinta. Thurs, 29th I had a burst yesterday, I want to say a manic burst, because today I'm flat on the idea, the way I go flat on mind and land. I worked all day, hard, because I'm not writing, I'm reviewing IPL, language and some ch 9 piles, the brain stuff. I need this overview because I need to adjust the end of ch 4, ch 8, and ch 9 to each other and there are soft spots: 1. attention, several things and whether it's IPL; 2. Deacon agrees language is both hemispheres but doesn't say whether IPL is callosal gate; 3. relation of ventral and through to forebrain, whether to call grasp ventral; 4. whether wireframe vision is right for dorsal. I've got converging collaboration on quite a bit of what I have said, but I'd have needed much more time on all of this to do it well. 30 [notes from the 1785 edition of The Prelude] "most loving soul" Wordsworth calls Coleridge Wordsworth sells out and says nature's secondary grace an illustration or mirror of the moral world willing to work and to be wrought upon in a world of life united helpers forward a day / Of firmer trust what we have loved / Others will love, and we may teach them how But then he spoils it by saying the mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth.
(- And there he goes to piety.)
this gift Which I for thee design This in tribute to his wife! "And, the meek worm that feeds her lonely lamp / Couched in the dewy grass." Reading this stuff I want to write an autobiography. I want a guaranteed small income for the rest of my life, so I can do nothing but relevant work forever. I want to get all my work out, published, given. I want to be beautiful and feel well. I want Luke and Rowen to thrive. I want to be with the beautiful world, I want a house that opens into it. I want sometimes to be with people who work the way I want to, and sometimes to be with the odd and free of the world in the moment. I want to go on living in trust and learning with the book, I want to keep rebuilding everything mistaken in my structure. Is there more I should want? To use all the strength I have in reserve, it says. Should I want that instead of other things? No, in addition. It's saying take care not to want ease (which I do want). More? Yes, name your husband. Dare to name Tom? Yes. Just dare to want him? Yes. It's better for the connection if I don't want him. No. He wants me more if I don't want him. Yes but that is not the point, being honest in the wanting is.
31st Yesterday the sun shone on blooming trees and mountains blooming with breath and snow. Sparrows were giddy in Bill's birdbath on a fence post. I was happy all day, working my pile of notes on the IPL, much clearer this time through. I was happy having sat in my bed in the sun reading Wordsworth's moment on Mount Snowdon like mine in an airplane over the Grand Canyon, seeing a cleft in the untrodden land of cloud and feeling something. And then after the lights were out at eleven, Art Bell and his callers were all alight with the aurora, which could be seen as far south as Mexico and anywhere in the States with open skies. We were overcast by then but I liked hearing the sky reported from Ohio, from New Mexico. A deep blue-green glow in the north they said, pink streamers, spikes. It is the peak of several sunspot cycles overlaid. Michael Ignatieff has been on Ideas every night this week speaking very clearly although in a rocking horse sing-song about the rights movements of the last 40 years, the historical significance and particularity as an ideology of the idea of rights, the difference of founding a community on chartered rights rather than kinship or common history. A journal project. Every day take a picture of the sky and write a little para with it. Needs a telephoto lens. 1st April There was a man called Bill Giesling who was publisher of the Ramona Sentinel when Tom was hired there. He was country-born, self-educated, brilliant, "one of those sports of nature." He used to drive Tom around the back roads, introduce him to the old people. Tom told a story about an old cowboy they were driving with on the grade down into Lake Henshaw from the east. The cowboy said that one time, years before, when he was a young man riding his horse down the grade, he had what nowadays is called an out-of-body experience. He had seen himself on his horse and he had seen a grove of trees on the lake bottom. When the car arrived at the flats the cowboy said, That's the grove, and Bill had said, Ah those are --- trees. The Indians around here used to come to that grove for ---. It was a sacred spot for them. The story with Bill Giesling went on to unfold this way: he made Tom general manager at the paper. One day the owner called from Iowa when Bill wasn't there. The bookkeeper ratted on him. The owner - Probst? - phoned Tom and felt him out. He flew down and had lunch with Tom. He said he was going to fire Giesling and make Tom publisher. Next day he did so. Tom did not forewarn Giesling. "It was my chance. That's life." He does not know what happened to Giesling.
I went with David to Earle Peach's labour choir in the Maritime Labour Hall this morning - it's my Sunday off. I liked Earle able to set every section's note into the air by perfect pitch. I liked David at the end of the table with the two other tenors, women. I liked the women on either side of me among the altos. I liked the tuning moments. All four voices at their intervals. David was wearing the green jacket I gave him, which makes him ruddy and red-bearded. He looked the way he often does, beautiful, shiny. He was well dressed, had on his black docs, faded jeans with a big black belt, square buckle, green and black wool plaid shirt, and the dark green blazer, sort of a felted wool with broad shoulders and a safety pin under the lapel for when he rides his bike in the cold. Black scarf. He dresses for color, shape and texture. He doesn't wear signifiers of any manly role - there's nothing he wears that I couldn't wear - but he always looks manly in his clothes. He's a nearly perfect dresser, to my eye. I've never said that. I was often pleased today, looking at him. We set the clocks ahead last night. Here I am in the kitchen rearranged for summer. The green chair in its summer spot across the room from the window, where I can see out. I've taken the lights off the ficus, and those Christmas ornaments that haven't fallen in the last three months, and put it in the kitchen on the blue chest where its furthest-forward leaves are glowing like stained glass with sun shooting in from the southwest, a forty degree angle on the window sill. There's a scribble of light on the wall and ceiling, like a bendy long wire - what's it from - oh, from the crack in the glass. I hear crows, cheeping things, Dennis downstairs walking in work boots. The trees are bare. I'm happy. I feel like working. The insides of the windows are clean. Looking at my furniture wondering what I could get for it. I have no income after the end of this month. I am not worried. I'm just going to do it. - Louie was here lying on my bed. I was going to read her Wordsworth. The phone rang. Rowen said, It's me, in a small voice. I could hear something. "What is it?" "Our house is gone. We have no house." The quietness in his voice. "It burned down?" "Yes." This morning after the choir David told me this story about Earle Peach. He was eight years old, sitting in front of his little phonograph. His dad came in and said, Come on, we're going to the post office. As she was crossing the street from the car to the post office steps, his mother was run over and killed. Earl went home to his phonograph and has been singing for his mother ever since. Rowen thought about it for a couple of hours and called me back. He won't come into town just now. Michael needs him. He needs to feel the family is staying together, the rats aren't deserting the ship. Rowen's words. Michael's the one I am most worried about, I said. Me too, Rowen said. It was close to eleven when Rowen called again. Michael had gone back in the dark to look at the leveled place where the house had been. His drawings, his tools, the few things Michael had from his real life before he married Lise, I want to say. He is standing in the dark, in the damp, stunned and bereft, thinking he is being punished, as he is, I think, by Lise. 2nd Here's what happened yesterday on my day off:
This morning I woke both times thinking about spatial attention and the parietals. What do I have: attention's net, frontal, parietal, medial, and whatever sensory; subitization and tracking, Pylyshyn's thing about how many moving things one can track, the number line's right-left placing, and tracking; gaze control, FEF, supe collic, 7a - are attention and gaze control the same thing? The IPL it seems has to do with seeing configurations of separate things. It is also something to do with 3-D form, the length of an object for instance. I should think of IPL in terms of spatial relation, relational constraints. Left hand gesture in conversation. I'm guessing IPL is where prepositions do their work, should I think of it as hybrid where/what. The where of the what. Wheras SPL is more bare-where of points in space relative to the body. Does this imply hippocampus is a more primitive form of the same thing? Okay, how to calm down and get into it. I'm rattled by yesterday, whizzy. Ronald Langacker 1983 Foundations of Cognitive Grammer Indiana University Linguistics Club -
"There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead, the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages. We would not be rejected from this community; and therefore do we hope." [elsewhere in Wordsworth's prose, 1809] 3 Mary is using her letters to me when I was in London to write about her first years teaching "when the rubber hit the road." She was 45, an adolescent, she said. Phoning people about Rowen. Annie Moss was best. Paul Kinsella was worst. Heart and help. Annie said, Oh the poor sweeties and started to work out who to rally and when to make the trip. 4
There's the evidence: he didn't tell me what I would have liked to know, his tension about that road, his slide into bankruptcy, his callousness in speaking about it.
- Tom has a computer. 5 Michael picked through the ashes and found the handle of the suitcase he'd had his drawings in. This winter he'd been getting up early some mornings to sit with coffee looking at his drawings, sorting them, thinking he might do something with them on a computer. They were like a journal, I said. They were a journal big time, he said. Did Lise burn the house down because she was jealous of the drawings? I have noticed once or twice that Janet is the smartest person I speak to - by that measure of noticing myself speaking best to her. 7 Should I work on what it is with Judith [Stapleton]. She phoned this morning saying it was to invite me to come down and have a holiday in Hawaii, stay with her, work on her women's studies course with her. It unnerved me. I sat reading novels all afternoon. I don't like talking to Judith - I don't like the brittle show-off feeling of it, like talking to Sherry Clough. I keep going at the time but under or beside I'm holding back my skirts in dislike. They're schmoozers, busybodies. They flatter while competing for their lives, is that it? Is that all it is? Are they like that with everyone?
8 With Tom:
You lost faith in your character. The question is what part of your innocence can you regain and what would it take to do it.
T: It puts me in a noncompetitive mode with a dozen men. They're pissed off that I have taken myself out of the game. Serenity. The power that gives me. All of my other ruthless drive. When I was little I was very needful of having a friend, having a good friend, having a best friend, being normal and un-put-upon. I had nothing in common with them because I wasn't being raised in their way. I said, I'm going to make them like me. He said, I was wrong about you, you're really a fun guy. So then I went with it. This is what has to happen for me not to be alone and unpopular. And I went with that all across the board. I was completely cold and callous. Many things about me that were not good. A very calm voice that's talking to me.
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