| aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 7 - 1989-1990 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
25th December 1989 What is it tonight. Let me say this quickly, to have other things to say. R here last night, I wasn't lively and my silence let him speak, and then I have to hear how little I like his talk. Lying with him uninterested, lonely and dreaming badly, waking sad. I talk about Catherine and feel better but what I hear is maybe indelible. What I know about last time, is this depression comes when we don't fuck, but his dirty fingernails in my infectible parts frightens them. I'm a challenge he can't sustain, he says. We don't have a future but we have a present, I say. Up at his house he among the boys screeching over the video game, so young, not only that, the kind of nine year old he is, is not a kind I've ever liked. She can have him, ay. I like going up among the trees and I like seeing new stuff like the video games and I like looking at Chris, but the aura of pitying compromise is a waste of me. The fifty dollar doll for Rowen, a good one. 26 Barbara at Seabus, Martin her friend, and how much I liked his face and his look. I liked her less but have a slightly sick attachment to her that was making me speak wrongly. It's the trough of the year, don't I know it from other years? Lonely. - It's a death festival I realized, lying down touching myself into the soft state, sleeping, waking, lying on the pillow in my room feeling the way they claim thanksgiving for eternal life, eternal life the light in the darkness. The light is true but eternal life isn't, we never celebrate death head on, say, here's to death that cleans up the wreckage. We're here but we're deteriorating, death cleans up the wreckage but it takes a while. The way Mary and I have died for each other. Having to go on thinking about the party [at the Mills house] yesterday. There are no kids, the boys are the kids. Rowen's face going down the stairs in his red hat, ascendant and bright. In pain I look for Michael, who if not always true has interesting clothes on, and often is true. 27 In the middle of the day, riding downtown on the bus, struck with pain and fear again, it's the back of the throat - as if in a trap. Do I have to come to account with the worst of RM, now? If not now, later. The worst is, he is an opportunistic coward, whose face is horribly deformed by refusing to speak. It's not that he'd like to be invited to be true - yes, he would as well - but it's not what he wants most. I can't trust his will for himself. And the great joy of the private times, last week and other times marveling at the contentment, imagining it can go on. Baling out would take more strategy than I have probably. If he cooperated maybe. Don't want him to leave the garden, don't want weeks and months in tension wondering where he is. 28 Then what happened - I phoned him and said, I have to talk to you - when - now - okay. Him too, same state. "I said I wouldn't do this," crying. He wouldn't fight from across the room, he wisely comes close. He was brimming with tears, months' worth. We had to say the bad things, he wanted to say, you have to take all of me, or nothing. I made an eloquent speech that said, You have something so good in you that is more than what I have, and that I need, but then also in the rest of your life you are very compromised and it distresses me to be there. I said he balanced me, he said he wasn't balanced because he needed the two sides brought together, me to be there in his place and life. I thought he might mean focus or consciousness, which he doesn't dare. Why do you sit like that, so slumped and helpless? I'm hiding my height. Your height is your beauty. Seeing what he's frightened of. At times looking at him given up to desire. Then chilling and closing again and wrangling, testing agreements. Afternoon going to bed and wanting him straight in. As soon as I touched the base of his penis, while he started with the condom, seized with ardent longing. Amazed how unambiguous it is. There was no coming to the end of it, I'm still there. When we went to bed we were lying with the Christmas tree lights still on, my front following the zigzags of his back, melded in gold-colored heat. So that's the story of how I am unsatisfied with the boy and raving in love with the man. And showed and saw my twining shapes. Out of pyjamas into the mirror, for us both to delight in. I see the covered spots in this account - having to do with very nearly but not coming - but want to say how he got beautiful this morning, his eyes opened and he was pink where he'd been red-eyed and haggard these weeks. How is it I don't remember ugliness is a state not a person? By contrast, the essence of metaphysics is always to go straight to the heart of the concrete quintessential metaphysical act, combining a logical operation with a mystical intuition ... the great joy of metaphysics is the warm and powerful conviction that by force of intellect one can proceed straight to the root of the most palpable things, to the fragrance and texture of the world. Michel Tournier. I started copying it, liking what it said, and then with "warm" and "root" and "palpable" I saw the fantasy. 30th [Adonis notes: product of female seduction and incest his mother Myrrha, ... myrtle female genitalia, to myrton myrtleberry, clitoris a timid young lover who has to be seduced passionately devoted but less brave and enterprising than his lover the boar ... aggressive masculinity ... destroys his genitals ... Aphrodite mourns him excessively moved to the roofs of their houses and spent the night in the open amid flowerpots, fragrant plants loudly bewailed carried in effigy around the city and buried in the sea made women have orgasms Marcel Detienne 1977 The gardens of Adonis: spices in Greek mythology, trans Janet Lloyd Humanities Press 31st What there is to do - photos for publicity, write-ups, find out how to publicize. Pre-reading for course, garden application, wild area notes, talk to someone about the pool. 4th January 1990 A rough morning, premenstrual grief. R hurt me. It's not better. I kept on doggedly dryly except for one tear I wished he'd see pushing for more damning information. Got up and left. It seemed I shouldn't look back. Now for suspense and unknowing. Does it add up to saying I quit forever? If I don't, am I going toward more? Yes. If I don't quit it will get worse. I'm not willing. Is that it? Yes. Then how to come out least damaged. Need violent pick-work. What to do about loneliness. Yuh, I don't know. Tracy Kidder 1981 The soul of a new machine Little, Brown Sherry Turkle 1984 The second self: computers and the human spirit Simon and Schuster Hard masters and soft masters. Abstraction, imposition of will and clarity. Negotiation and identification. Body syntonic: body to body relations. Transparency vs 'magic' Risk/reassurance Control, complexity of machines, simplicity of the human, sport death, "ideas" The labyrinth "As we grow up we forge our identities by building on the last place in psychological development where we felt safe." They are fascinated with those experiences in which they felt themselves the builders of their own minds." Psychoanalysis requires that logic as the ---- of mind be replaced by something more capable of dealing with elements of knowledge that struggle with one another" "has to be replaced by a logic that assumes inconsistency and then knows how to transcend it" New process logic "the process approach, seeing what the steps are, seeing what the inputs are, and providing algorithms to get from one place to another place" Wittgenstein as AI - let's look at the old philosophical questions in terms of what we do - truth is a non-meaningful AI term Descendents of Rabbi Loew, the Golem "My notion is that for an ordinary person to get along in society in a conventional way requires 110% of the capacity of the human mind, causing breakdowns and troubles of various sorts ... most of what's there isn't designed for living in high society but for getting along out in the fields." local response to aggression, attraction entities for global thinking When we talk about how we grasp visual images there is a tension between the atomic and the gestalt. People want to find a way to think about what they experience as the machine aspect of their natures; this is at the heart of the computer's holding power. what makes appropriable theories of mind Romanticism answers rationalism an ethnography of a science of mind Minsky "In the past our reservoir of ways to describe complex processes was too feeble, I think, to deal with human processes and their development." several hundred terms each standing for some clear and well-developed conceptual model, in contrast to the handful of quasi-mechanical concepts from mechanics, hydraulics, and Newtonian dynamics at the root of earlier thinking about thinking. Turkle 350 5th Second day. It's not the clamp of forehead pain, but when I stop moving, beleidigt discussion. A black and very bright Hawaiian shirt. Leather coat for Rowen's dolly. Should I see what's the worst of him, is it safe to make a reckoning? Of the good, not yet. No I haven't the joy of it. Don't want to say much. What am I saying when I hear it arguing on? That he doesn't value me, he doesn't know what I am. Doesn't have the courage to know what he was being offered, is weak. Chinless, dopey, stingy, miserably poor, ugly, (patient), ill-kept, crooked about aggression, passive, surrounds himself with layers of junk, very small place packed with unchosen stuff, neglected stuff - that says his body's insensitivity, like his dirty claws, like the horrible false-massaging touch on my back. 6th How to be in this kind of time. What is it for, what does mourning do. 7th I liked the creativity. We made beautiful shapes and lights different every time. And stories too. You don't acknowledge it, you don't dare to honour the gods. You think you'll get rich by withholding from them. - Eric said two-timing might be of no importance. Louie said she saw my young man's sadness like a brown-colored pumpkin-shaped cloud over the kitchen table, directing the light straight down in the manner of a prism. RM on the phone. I outwaited him. 'Telling' him was a cold distant operation. A cold state - thinking, this has been so painful, why aren't I feeling it now. He was crying immediately. He can't do anything about it, he says. That's not so, I say to myself. I'm clear about how I feel, he says. It makes no difference. It was as if he was nothing to me, I was making conversation. 9 Second day on the hill. Ingrid dumped as TA. They want me to help humiliate her. Told Tietz I would take the flunk to be able to get on with it, walked out grinning because I was free. Dave Stevens says the Youth Corps will be back. Rob's phone machine has a loud silly duet of what sounds like celebration, "For either Catherine." "Or Rob." [department chair asks me to co-teach with a TA they disapprove]
10 Speedy yesterday - untuned, the above seems - Monday Tuesday Wednesday saturated and buffeted by the department, replaying what he and he and I and he said - looking for what? and why - as if I'd registered the events as crumples of my body, that I have to hear again as they release - I'm remembering something inexactly, last night, turbulent memory - what kind of person so amplifies these small events - this kind of language helps. Wanting to say how much pleasure Ray gives me. Was sitting with Louie at the philosopher's table talking about Dorothy Richardson, feeling Ray at the far corner unfolding his lunch cocking an alert eye toward the sight of me joyful and conspiratorial in the presence of my own knowledge - or so I felt it, as an increase. It was his day at the colloquium, there he sat in his shiny orange shoes, on the table, one leg crossed in front of him, straight and bright like a four-year-old. Discourse values, discourse adverbs. He has been thinking, I think he said, about how or can mean and, an etymology of -- [Greek word] against, again, meaning, he says, Let's try that again. My name is Cupid - or Eros I should say - well, it's both, but .... Like him, I thought, to say there are discourse motions nothing like PvQ, and like that lot to disagree, since their conversations have none of the live dimensions of his. 11 Sitting down to imagery anthology scattered: writing complaint to Tietz, Explorations application, thinking about how-to with Ingrid, excited and jumpy - in the broad sociable excitement that works in negotiations and teaching but not in fine reading or listening. Got into it by sorting 'representation' in the dictionary, planting the five Carnegie Christmas trees with Eric (by appointment) and Rob as it happened, at the foot of the garden to be a dark grove behind the robinia (Akazie Baum). Came back and pushed though it was suddenly 8:49. My spook friend with another injury. I keep asking my safety pin whether he's hurt. Want him to be. It says my quitting will make him less with her. As if that's what it's for. He can go back to the Rose and Alpine and Beekeeping Societies. 12 Thinking how to set up tutorials with Phil realized I have to do a lot of rehearsing because on the spot I am the other person too. So my interests have to be sorted when I'm alone. I said that and body heaved a large sigh of confirmation. 13 Laing, Louie . Tom Shandel and Kirk Tougas 1988 Did You Used to be R.D. Laing? (documentary film) She describes how his face has pain and joy both, and where each emotion is, when he says relations with people have been that. Of another man, how his face was questing left and right, for a shape it hadn't got. 14 It's 5:30 Sunday, I must write a paper still, for Phil tomorrow. And be ready to teach. The five pieces on imagery - thinking I must do some philosophy-style paper. Pile of notes but I don't know what the question is. I don't understand what contrast is being held. Disagreement says it hasn't been well-stated yet. I'm panicking because I don't know what to write on. Write about something that strikes your eye, he said. - Then I found the topic but there doesn't seem to be time to finish it by tomorrow morning and next weekend must be the Sterelny paper. And after that another of these. [Kim Sterelny visiting professor from New Zealand, author of the recently published The representational theory of mind.] 17 Wednesday morning. drinking chicken broth for my sick throat. In Kim's course yesterday 'doing' philosophy as it's done, dodging in and out of arguments very fast. Ingrid shows me how a Turing machine works. Lee says Suzanne Langer brought her back to school. Taking pleasure in Peter's jargon. The moment in the libe when Phil showed me the difference between the real and the rational number systems, that one is continuous and the other discrete, and that they can't be mapped onto one another. Teaching. It's different this term, more brisk less present maybe, not the first session with Tim and Barbara, marveling. I saw them marveling, I thought, some of the women students. The special comprehensions of transitions. Being there with a very ready political analysis. I use what I know to stay ahead of the women too, anyone I can. It's coldly canny and allows me to be warm, takes quite a lot of attention the pros use on being pros. But I know by now that it's a foundation and has to be seen as it's done. It's not cold so much as it is set. I'm not wavering. I'll support my constituents but with calculation - [for instance] I set up the student evaluations, some. Willing to mix now. 18 Seeing whether people have sparkle or not and assuming when they don't, that it's to do with sexual damping. Friday 19 Last dream before I woke, Sterelny. Bigelow comes from the front of the class, a large class - we'd been humming because a woman student at the board had said to him in a challenging way, "You like to sing don't you" - straight to my desk at the back. Sits down on the edge of it, says to me, I can't give you Jewish grades, meaning A's. I'm annoyed, "I'm not stupid, I'm not quite up-to-date on terminology but I can learn that. I haven't even done a paper for you yet, how do you know I can't do it?" "You're interested in vision and ---, aren't you, I'm interested in 3's and 4's." He means to say my capability isn't abstract enough. What's the unconscious charge to the imagery question. something they're afraid of or valiant advocates of - ghosts - 'the imagination' Trudy is saying - "into imagination, as into a wide dark." [notes on Explorations grant for a video on the community garden] 20 Green dream of Louie's. She finds a green snake, very beautiful, shining as if wet, heavy. She is taking it to show me, where I live in the forest. It seems to want to crawl away under the fence to the shade. She reckons if she goes toward the countryside she'll meet it because that's where it wants to go. Her plan works. They meet a black cat. The snake is afraid of it and climbs comically up on her shoulder, in a catlike way. Somewhere I say it might be a mamba. She says yes certainly it is a mamba, she thought so herself and an African man in the dream said so. The snake, she said too, had some quality of both a cat and a bird. They go on through forest more like jungle than like Canadian forest, and come to my house. I live on one side, someone else on the other side. On my side, I'm not home. There are faded flower curtains. The other person is quite an old woman, no, not particularly thin and small, not large either, the sort who might have pink curls, like an ordinary English old woman. She's thinking the snake's color is fading and it's getting smaller, becoming a mud-snake, and I haven't seen it. The phone rings in my side. It's a big old white phone. She answers it. It's for her. A man calling from South Africa, the old boyfriend of someone she used to know, on an urgent political matter. She's puzzled how he knew to reach her at my house. What I have to say is green mamba, intelligence opened when women are in sexual contact with each other, poem tying hypnotic motion and information - cat, bird, snake skull and the feel of the pubic bone under my hand. The call is for her because I'm some person of her there. The old woman archaic hemisphere. A message on an old telephone = an old message, an old tie. I wasn't as sure about saying I'm not there means it's her place not mine. It seemed I really, also, am not at home when she brings me the beautiful green snake. Only an ordinary old Englishwoman. But a message reaches her even at my vacated and faded place. It's a message from - ? The past, but more, an old boyfriend of her friend. I don't know about that unless it's Jam. She says she takes it that she should talk about her physical attraction. I say I asked the cards and they said she felt that, but I was puzzled. She tracks assiduously. (My hand said he.) "Why are you puzzled?" "Usually if one person feels that, both people do, and to my knowledge I don't." I said, her postcard's language. First time meeting her thinking, this one's good right through, Laiwan should keep her. How she's like Dewey Stickney and other such people I liked, a physical type. Huckleberry Finn. And I haven't been attracted to women since Jam. Am not apparently attracted to her body, and don't want to be romantic with her and want to keep company with her. Hope she's not in pain else she'll be mad at me. She said she wasn't. She said I noticed something in her right away, that has gone unnoticed nearly everywhere, and that has been private to her. She doesn't want to have to prove it. She's like David McAra but the wrong gender. Bright and dark. Laughs. But doesn't make me laugh. I don't want to be implicated futilely with that body I hardly notice. Rob here visiting. Sneaked his toe up against me. I'd run to the other room, come back to a different location. When I liked him was when I was talking philosophy with him, his logic. So direct and challenging. I was looking at him surprised. I'm liking this guy. That he had a good jacket on helped. His height is always beautiful. I noticed his hands. Sent him away. I have to work. 22nd Something small and nearly ignored, though, was jumping for joy when he first came in. 23 Tuesday in the dark waking before the 5:30 alarm thinking about consciousness. It seems a young teacher like Amnon gave me the formula, which I had sort of already come to. "A world," but some other mediate term. Judy had spoiled something in the kitchen. She's living with me but I didn't say she could do this. Opened the pantry wall so now there're just plank shelves with mouse droppings along them, and two ground floor rooms dropping back, but with windows into an overgrown yard full of junk. Used to sit in the kitchen but it's spoiled. Used to like that pantry closet. Also something about Rowen. A lawyer, who says I'm the one who should file, tells a story of some trying time when Akasha was crossing a border, Judy sobs and shrinks, she's a 2'-high person with fine taffy hair. - These days at school it's a scrim. I'm learning to run with the ball. Not yet how to feint, but how to sidestep. Peter my beauty of a tutor, an hour on supervenience. It gets very fast. Wonderful classes with Kim, who meets questions so neatly and thoroughly, checking through the branches behind his answer, accounting for where a different answer would come from and what its relations would be to other things on the table. I'm liking Kim, now, for the way he's in the midst of the life of his creation, has it all around him to be joined by the midst of my creation. He is not going to squawk at invention like Tietz does. So fine a day on the periphery today, the wide far periphery off the sides of the mountain, snow halfway down the north shore so one of the juts of the range was showing a shape I'd never seen. Wind this morning, crows trying to ride the tips of Lombardy poplars. Birch twigs easier to ride, for the curve before the dropped tip. Coming down in a car this afternoon, the exquisite lacy feltings of the alder thatch sorting into orientations by the direction of the strength of the light. That, and cream ribbons of patches of ditch couchgrass. And the glittery snarls of salmonberry, which unlike the alder can't be sorted by the light but seem always so marvelous for their color, and something else maybe. The talismanic salmonberry. 24 The 3-day burst over, again. I brought home Pym's journal. In tutorials, just talked. Here's how you do a philosophy paper. Last term I wasn't so sure but this term, see, I'm preaching argument. It's like teaching a focus, and that must be alright. "A philosophy paper is like a machine. You have to figure out what are the working parts." I like the practice of authority. It's a physical sensation of will, a pushing from the brow. It's not a different sensation than when I'm granting authority but determined to learn, as with Kim or Peter. This morning, at the bus window looking out at trees and roofs piled with slush, strangely intent, dreamy, having come from the crew at the garden (a thick grey stream leaping out of the new drain under the log, new kids in their raingear), seeing parts of the new work and own garden (there 'seeing' comes to pass), saying my Mao speech ("architect, polemicist, social planner, garden designer, politician, contractor, construction foreman, fund-raiser, visionary") in a little trance of happiness to have so much action possible now. - The way Barbara Pym when she's young always writes what she and they were wearing, as a mnemonic of the whole time. - I made that up because I used to. The truth is probably worse. Stopped action, maybe, though it's more. No, it's not different from naming places, High Holborn, Marylebone Station. Arabic tilsam magic figure, tilesma sacred rite, teleein to initiate, telos end, completion. 25 Thursday. Hanging back from the Explorations application. Don't know how to work together herb garden and video. Scared by Barbara Pym's story. She kept loving and losing. And wrote valiantly from 22 on, stayed safe in mind but dwindled, was famous suddenly before she died of cancer at 67. Lived with her sister. I'm scared of my light shutting down because of disconnecting from sex. That I'll be an anxious thing at school speeding to keep away from sadness, and so look even sadder. Losing good sense and joining philosophy without seeing anymore what's wrong with it, loving my own words because they make me seem to have a friend. No not scared of something, just a scared heart. 27 Last night dreamed having to wash or just see my grandmother's dead body, a sort of skeleton carcass lying there very bare of body, ie not much body on. 28 Sunday morning. The way the weeks go by without love, now, my sweet self shut out, a wasteland of mind and rain, sitting in front of xeroxed papers with a red marker. This morning an inner outrage, is this really necessary? It seems yes, but I'm not sure. Fact is he's a gutless wimp. He's never going to take on his erotic truth. What we could do was beautiful but I was always feeling Come on, you, acknowledge it, and he wouldn't. I like loving and I want to have it and I'm not helpless to get it. That feels better. Second item, looking at Dewdney remembering where the heart is in this mind work, and it's in getting ready to do things with imagining. I don't have to be a theorizer on and on. 29th Credit card. [finally approved for] 1st February Phoning around for an old rose supplier, an old Englishman Dennis Yeomans they say. "What you get from him is just a stick in a container." He has 90-odd varieties and says come in June. Greg Marsden and Alan le Fevre about the tank. The crew have moved a lot of the pile of sod, cleaned up lumber piles in the orchard, dug holes in the berm, excavated parts of the kids' area, filled in the rest of the herb garden paths, laid a road-mulch track on the dyke, drained the overflow catch, made half Rob's cross-path, picked up junk round the perimeter. Does it sound sad? The nights of work and more nights, without reward except reading Kipling and TV and tea and newspapers, poor grim loves when there are such pink and gold ones possible, hanging on to see Joyce next week. I am all day busy and cheerful. A scared heart again. 2nd De Klerk announces Mandela will be released. ANC is unbanned. I was in pyjamas in front of the TV set stretched to tears as I'm not for the East Europeans. The ripening of something I began to be connected to with Doris Lessing, and then the long strange story of Roy and Paddy at 4 St Albans, and Roz and Ruth First and Joe Slovo. Gordimer. Laiwan, now Louie. [David Marr notes] 4th With Louie to Karen Jamieson. "The man within." A woman crosses the stage with a man like a big sack on her shoulder, walking from her thighs. He's a man who can fly a bit. Waggles his hand. Later his whole wings. Burdens and chokes her, rises like an eagle totem supported on her. She has a caper, he grabs her from behind, lifts her so her legs flop into the classical jetées. Louie walking home along Pender is so solid a small face. An adventurer. But impervious for all I know: good company but like a button, knopf. Sunday, was bright, is raining. I'm missing RM. His qualities. Thinking this: that he's settling down with her, and he's making up a life in his fair-minded way. 5 Anything to say about today? Katrin [Zaugg], it's ten years? She wrote to the Valhalla address. This kind of working day, sore heart doesn't bite. Phil is oddly nervous and won't make a personal remark. Kim comes close and peers like a friendly animal, blind but as if fond, in his black greasy fur. 6 Garden meeting so in pain. It felt as if the garden were going on without me, with Muggs radiant at the center, Rob's big boots holding onto her chair, Joann the star of compost development and John [Atkins] about to take off with our history and labour into the international leagues, as if he made it. I didn't want to look at Rob. It was as if that did me in, a grudge. What did I want. Him to be hurt too. Howcome it hurt that much? It's only one more day until Joyce. Laiwan phoned. 8 [with Joyce] Being him looking at me: that woman, she has a storm around her head. It was true. "Have you been picking men who'll be frightened of you? How do you feel about that" "I feel kind of proud." "Why?" "I don't have to be scared of them." "What are the other kind of men like?" Passionately: "They'd just as soon club me on the head." I boiled up. Furious, I said. "How you look to me is hurt." She says feel it. "Breathe, Ellie." She has a hypnotic speech for those moments, as if she's talking to the scared one in behind. "You're not in a novel, you're a living, breathing ." Yeah, and I'm in a novel. Telling the story of Roy. Have to tell it again, aye. "When you talk about Jamila you're not in a novel. At least you call her by her name." "I hate her. She makes me sick." "Do you hate them?" "No." "You were in despair about men." 9 Mid-day a stroke of pain I wanted to say. Is it a stroke? A dreadful pressure. It goes when I work. And is there when I stop. What does it say? It doesn't say, it tortures. I see nobody else is doing it. Other people are not nice to me, to different degrees, but I'm the one who hurts me.
10 So murky and troubled, trying to read Marr, beset with men grievance, failure, doom. As if the happiness or gratitude with R was wildly exaggerated by being thanks for saving me from this scale of pain, and as if that function of it skewed it all so I and anyone could know something was wrong. I don't see that there can be a cure for it. 11 And then, going out to Carnegie and laundry I left his tapes with Muggs's dad, heart thrashing at the doorbell. Came back to the garden thinking them at their meeting but there they are working in the compost area. Will I turn around? No I must stand my ground. Up in the far corner past the herb garden, I'll clean up the edge, it has stopped raining, this will help. Sawing blackberry stems to free poplar saplings, picking up Lysol cans. Then: I'll do better, I won't be left out, I'll go talk to them. And unfold filthy cardboard boxes, and then Rob needs to talk about work. We regard the flood in the nursery beds. And then go to Muggs's house to sign cheques. I say I'm going crazy with work. He wants to pat my back sympathetically. We go off separately. What a long story, am I writing it for some reason. Here Louie phones to say Mandela will speak just now, and there he is reading from a blowing paper, orating in quite a pinched high voice, slowly, very formally and conventionally. "I salute our general secretary Joe Slovo." He is acknowledging all the groups who've worked. "I salute the working class of our country." "I pay tribute to the mothers and wives and sisters of our movement." "We thank the world community." His wife and family. Coming back from the laundromat, bike basket piled with folded pants, I find him coming north though he'd gone away south. Alright, as it's been set up with such exactitude, I'll accept. Come and talk to me I say. "The future of our countrrry can only be democratic ... non-racial ... and Mr De Klerk himself is a man of integrity ... a decisive moment ... the sight of freedom looming on the horizon ... to lift sanctions now would be to run the risk ...." His voice is stronger as he goes. "But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." The light has been fading so fast, that's why your picture is so red, says the moderator. Capetown City Hall, 8:16. Minimal demand is universal suffrage. Then follow: his tears but not mine. He says I could do better than him. I say yes I'd like to, in that he doesn't have his depth, and that I don't think anybody would put up with me, and that I'm sick of how they won't because I have a lot to offer. This with my feet in the oven. The end of it is just that we get to sit in the big chair holding each other very peacefully, his smell. And then I can work, and I can shit, and the toilet is unplugged. Louie was crying because he didn't mention a single woman's name, not even his wife's. and the women only in relation to the men, a bedrock he says. But she knew he was going to be released because two men in South Africa, from whom she hasn't heard in years, left messages on her machine, one after the other. 12 Ashamed to have been foolish today. I lied unnecessarily to Phil, and forgot what day it was, thought I was having an office hour, stood him up half an hour. 15 Lee got a 90 on a paper from Phil, who is avoiding the personal with me in a way that makes me fear he is grading me badly. Snowing, snowing. The work week stops, I'm all on edge, frightened. Getting Rowen to school this morning, wracked by his detours and inventions. Last night three hours getting home from school, standing in the bright lighted flower porch of the corner store at Kootenay Loop, seeing outside in the dark, women passing with their hair and chests caked with snow. Now, ten days different. I have to read Marr, get in the mood for the show, set up garden work. Would like to read background and Kim. 16 Churchland - is very tall, has a short red-brown head, stood gesturing with a silver wand, spoke from a whole moving body and took me with him. I gleamed at him quite personally as if he were a boy from a farm who had found a way in philosophy to defend the pasture. Then Charles replied, shaped and dressed like a belted sack of ordure, bald, greasy, diffident, and reading a long fabulation of language philosophy, dun cows, an argument Jane thought she'd won, Pia and Hugo, milkability. It's true I already disliked him for his weak gaze and the time he said a woman is a woman but a cigar is a smoke. One peek at connectionism and I could see the way it defends what I want defended, which is comprehension made forward from the eyes and set in space. More tomorrow. Conference on connectionism, SFU 16 February 1990. Geoffry Hinton, Paul Churchland, George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier, Jeff Elman, Tim Van Gelder, David Rumelhart. Organized by Steven Davis. 17 In the middle of the day leaving the conference to see about getting a table cut. Rob held the nail at the center and I stretched the cord, with a sharp little nail knotted close to the point, to scratch out a circle. I liked the way we were working. What about it. Having his thought come to meet me in space. There was a moment I realized it. 18 [Conference notes: problem-solving is perceiving other abstract problems converted to work with sensory-motor tools we're evolved for there is no storage reasoning by mental simulation when we get a particular sub-pattern, [the rest] fills out computers store recipes which are images computers build on the image of single-steps, recipes, but that's not how we think just spatial, in the sense that you need for a manifold state space = all the neurons and their activation doesn't have a representation, it just does it meaning = use, no representation of semantics what we call semantics is the grounding relationship
aphrodite's garden volume 11
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