| aphrodite's garden volume 12 part 1 - 1991 january-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 26 January 1991, Saturday The night I was finishing the math paper, got to the state where I was staggering and my eyes fuzzing over, lay down for half an hour investigating with quite a lot of attention. Don't remember the procedure, maybe it was the same time I discovered that I could keep the magnetic rise coming up into my head if I kept seeing something. Having let it press the sides of my head just up from the ears, realized I was fresh and could get up. (No, that was in the aft of the same day.) A moment when seeing became autonomous, a head looking at me, top of a woman's head, lower face like an ostrich, a quite frightening look. I say, I need more seeing like this. Deep sigh yes. The autonomy. Just remembering one of the ways I got it to come: was actually looking at what my eyes had going. - Sad tonight. Smell of hyacinth. As if Rob is gone, and Louie if he is - because I'm supposed to start over - and will have to suffer through the rest of the winter to get there - My room in colors - the green in front of my eyes - a soreness - lighter when it's found - alright - - Beginning to work on simulation. Lewis in Modes of meaning - "That some fish are edible follows logically from the fact that many leaves are green is false; though 'some fish are food' and 'many leaves are green' are expressions having the same extension, both being true." What about it. Something I feel about the world being such that it does follow from many leaves being green that some fish are edible, if not logically, then what's logic. Tues 28 A moment undone - teaching today - Andrade and Zrno caught me saying sth stupid - I was stunned with shame for the rest of the class - was rattled out of knowing what to do next - had to bluff overtop of a yawning blank - did pick up and go on but stood there staring at them as if they were confused - it felt as if I'd never get my authority puff back - realized it's into the material where there are going to be students better at it than I am. The story Deborah told me - I like Deborah for her look, bright and balanced - about an instructor at college yelling after her You goddamn fucking cunt because she didn't come when he called her. "The world isn't what you think it's going to be in high school." Macho men, she said, in the graphics business. "I'd still like to be in graphics." The men in the department standing around animated about the technical details of the war - funny how I keep seeing Armin the pacifist in a uniform - so German a look he has. 29 Sometimes again it's womb centre burning not solar plex. Breath [agreeing inhale] said connecting with the abilities of that time. Breath said also it doesn't like the way I'm hanging onto Louie. And it wants own images not TV. Woke thinking it's a relation of one language to another, spacetime and numbers. 1st February A meeting with Ray and the grad students. Sam in her whiney tenacity gets something going about keys. It goes on. Ray's saying there's a spirit of the department and Dennis is it. Andrew and Bob are saying everybody just be nice and even Ray is saying everybody just be nice. I say suddenly, "There's more to this, the spirit of the department likes to draw a distinction between graduate students and adults, he sets up an atmosphere." (His loud conversations in the center of the department.) (I didn't say.). "He's in a key position in the department and I have sometimes wondered what it would be like if someone like Merilee was in that job, it would be entirely different." Besides that, Ray making me laugh and what's that laughter. He says students are kept out of department meetings where they want to talk about 'delicate things.' Like what? Salaries. People drink a lot. I laugh about that more than I understand. You have to figure out what you want and then how to get it in the easiest and nicest way, he says. 2nd January sickness. I lay in sweats and chills, sinus aching, gigantic sneezes, blowing my nose on the sheet, no hanky is good for more than 3 blows. Too sore to sleep. Saying the worst, Louie and I are loving away but if we don't understand especially what the childish structure of loving is in each other it is a delusion.
3rd Sunday. If I could now start working on what I want to know, what wd I like. To be physically right. That always comes first. And not to be psychically wrong because I'm physically wrong. The way it comes is, wanting to be thin. The second hobble is when I want to hide from 'them' (Louie or -) that it is 'really about' this leg and its life of disgrace. Also: not knowing whether it isn't better to ignore it, because it builds anxiety. What do I want a pretty body for? The way there are two series of answers. One is, to please and hold lovers. One (would be) for grace, for strength, for balance, for ease, health, security of motion. How can I take care of myself in relation to this? - The dream I wrote Louie - plucking her out of a pool a tiny being draining watery blood out of her mouth. I was the only person who realized she hadn't come up yet. That was this morning. -
Does it mean I lose Louie too? She has been saying no, the omens always say yes. 4 A long day. Getting Rob to admit yesterday [that he's with someone] made me euphoric it seems. So much comes of half a dozen phone calls. A naturalist arrives to set John right about the wild area. A list of resources for schools packages. Gay says yes she'd much rather do the fence. That leaves the greenhouse for Jill who'd be better. Ros says yes she'll be pres. Mickey says timidly she'll try schools liaison and then is thrilled with possibilities when I hand over the resource list. Message left for a biodynamic lecturer. Eric was raging to Muggs that I am sleeping with Evan and that's why I installed him there [in the green shed], because he saw my mattress leaning on the wall presumably. 6th Is Louie alright? As if she has stopped. 7
Long dream of a house beside water in woods. We find a fourth room which is a house itself, around the back, with a door looking onto a low spot among bare trees and folds of earth. It seems to be Michael thinking of living there. It's a dream of looking at things left behind. A closet door opens to be a pantry with plates, bread boxes, lots of knives, a white and blue washcloth very thick. Then we find its towel, exclaiming how large and thick it is, but unfolded it shows worn through. A beautiful little stove with a fire burning. I'm cleaning up, sorting the stuff under the sink. Putting firewood aside. Go to light a fire but it's lit already. Standing looking at long boards lying next to the stove I see fire begin to flicker on them, starting there, and there. Odd they're just combusting like that. 8 Nothing to feel or wish. Vygotsky says inner speech starts as outer speech and branches, gets less social, turns into murmurs of predicate, finally so unsocial it's impossible as speech and goes inside. 9 On a surface of water sitting and moving, sailing around an island with a structure [drawing of posts]. If I go around behind it into the mist I may not be back, I'll have left them. In a house where I'm staying, I see when I get home some Chinese pottery on a table outside the dining room door, gold painted. I gather it's because Jam is invited to dinner. Her horrible loud laugh many times, etc. 12 A flat time - teaching reading garden Rowen - the ugly time of year, fat seat and gullies under the eyes At the casino [nonprofit fundraising], so many mirrors. I looked degenerate. 13 Wednesday. L phoned when I was writing, a conversation made of unsuccessful effort. I suspected her of - what - meanness maybe, a cold eye. I can easily return that. Ingrid phoned last night. "You seemed depressed." "How did you notice that?!" "Your voice." "I didn't notice it myself until I was sitting on the bus, and then I thought, I'm depressed." Andrew invited me to coauthor a notice of Penny Maddy's book - what's going on? On the bus yesterday thinking of the grim years of academic initiation, my stomach kept sinking in fear. Then at night with Rowen coughing caught in surprise by Andrew. Why is he doing this, to patronize? I hope I will not tax your kindness, I said, laughing miserably. My spine aches too. Tired the way I am when Rowen has a sick night and tanks up on my vibes. A drunk man at the casino caught my eye, "What are you looking at with your sad eyes." "I only looked at you accidentally." "She wants no part of me." This aft in the rain with Mike and the crew we moved a wild pear, the orchard hawthorn to the west edge of the herb garden, a big crategus back into the top west edge, and the beautiful peach-leaf tree holding up its wide red net against the pines. The big rock is shifted, they're starting the benches tomorrow. Maddy Penny 1990 Realism in Mathematics Oxford University Press - Most of our words are for that purpose, says Minsky - preventing us asking what's going on. It's like a spiritual need - and what's that - a need for feeling I'm a soul - I am sad - I'm sad - and it's not obvious why - there have been some strong years, ay. 14 "I wanted to be a writer." I said that and burst into crying but all the while watching, isn't it interesting. Sardonic, so that it lasted six sobs and was over. 15 It's maybe illness. Muscles hurting. At the typewriter last night I said There's nobody who knows me, cried a bit more, and at night again. I want to get rid of everybody. The way encounters with people have been off these days. I go away and squirm. Eric deserted over Evan. Rob asking can Catherine come and work with me in the herb garden! (Is that what I'm angry about? Yes.) The way I asked Ray about Andrew's offer, confusedly, wanting somebody to just say, this is how it works. Ignoring what I knew, that Ray nor anyone will do that for me. And tonight I'm at the conference bored and bludgeoned with career egos, all aft, then five minutes with nice Rudy and Glouberman comes and hauls him away. Sparks from the beginning. "Sorry to take him away from you, but my need's greater" he sez over his shoulder. Rudy jumping up to go have a cigarette with him. "How do you know that" I snap. "You could come along" sez Rudy. I do but not liking the tagging behind. And there are more missteps on both sides. Then Glouberman staring at me says "Is Epp your real name, it's not your husband's name? Because it's a joke, your name's a joke." I'm staring back with unconcealed dislike. He's waiting for us to get the joke and Rudy does, "Alley Oop," in his affectionate quiet voice. "I only hear that from older people," I say, "young people don't say it, in fact it's years since I've heard it." Rudy is gazing at him sympathetically, why shd he be gazing sympathetically at him, he's the vicious one. He's looking, how, silenced, momentarily. We get up and go to the session. The worst is that I stumble on the steps. What else did I see this aft. Martin when he'd done his horrible locomotive paper loud fast macho and been praised by the king of these proceedings (Putnam) passed me in the corridor actually puffed out at the chest. Pribram looks like the king by the cleanness of his skin, something like that. He looks well taken care of, as if someone polishes his ring and his glasses. When he speaks he sits back smiling. Ray our brave comfortable Ray spoke loud and not to the point in a voice surprisingly frightened. Phil quite dishy and graceful. Steven Davis erupting in a squeal of dissent. An old psychology prof saying, ... the the the the memory problem. Rowen's valentine a pricked ceramic heart baked in a "machine called a kiln." He wanted Michael and me and him to have a little party. I took him to the Ovaltine, sat at the counter. What do you want? A milkshake. Chocolate. Sips of it with coffee, delicious. Saturday 16 Verena Huber-Dyson, emeritus from Calgary she said, a mathematician working in category logic. What else - I sat straight up for that session on category logic, which I thought was saying set theory is one way of interpreting something more real. A sense of following but there's nothing I can tell, only an acquaintance with uncolored shapes. Precomprehension. - [notes collected from earlier journals: To the degree that we live generously and discretely, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume eidos species transparency aidon invisible soul arrives at a noble, pure, invisible place "invisible realm akin to itself" We retain only their relations, and enclosed as it were in limpid day. Soul is one that overlies the otherness to add up to the event. Perception that generalizes less or differently than naming does. You get caught in eddies, what's the most important thing, underneath everything. [Joyce] I asked to see what I see in people, knowing it and in relation to what they'd want to be. Knowing the net doesn't join. Imagining - when you imagine you're a god you're being a god. A philosophy on the one hand from the living originality of the spirit who in it has restored the rent harmony, on the other hand from the particular form of the bifurcation from which the system issues. [Hegel] I vow to keep clear of their power language. I so readily dilate with them into the thrill of land and sex, but when they begin to believe in argument how repelled - as by aluminum pans. Yet I assume that dead metal is what has made us able to branch into the proliferation we are, and V Woolf and the rest of those who've brought calculation's net to strengthening the landscape of perception. Each village has a sacred enclosure which is as far as possible planted with an example of every bush and flower that grows in the country, so that it symbolizes the world. And here the general idea of relation emerges, and for the first time in the history of knowledge, the notion of relation and relation of relation are symbolized, and here again is seen the scale of graduation of forms, the manner in which what is difference of form at one step of the ascent is difference of matter at the next. [Augustus de Morgan] 17 Louie dreamed she wanted me to meet a little boy called Robin, 4-5. I squatted to talk to him. It was a two-chambered house. The little boy is put to bed on one side, I go to sleep on the other. A red stain is spreading on the wall. She knows it to be a spirit visiting but isn't sure it's a good spirit. Quenches it with water or burns it out with a flame, doesn't know which. Two monsters appear in the room. She knows they won't hurt the boy but she wants to tell me. There's no door handle. Remembers she has to face them. Puts out her hand with utmost formality. They turn into two men, one in uniform. The door opens by itself and I stand there. Little boy with black hair, white skin. 18 As if the little boy in Louie is the one who follows me so persistently and desperately. I go to a yoga class with Louie's teacher, who is like an old Eskimo woman in fur slippers. What I can see is a quiet creased face. She knows things. (Very dissatisfied with this writing.) I want to tell her I know Louie. Some sense of the lights of the city elsewhere. After, I'm wandering in the large house and come through the same room again but now old street women are lying down for a morning nap. A bulky black-haired woman. When I turn to walk down the room again she is lying with another woman, blond, singing on the pillow. I step outside the door and am leaning against the wall sobbing. The spirit of their singing moved me, that in their decrepitude they still had such a fresh song. Before the yoga class there was another class I can't remember. What I have is students showing new things and a man in the corner whose class it is though he doesn't say much. Monday working, logic prep. Garden: benches, small buds on roses, the benches being precut and slotted, risky, will the design work. They're going to do rhubarb, cuttings bed, potting table, path to green shed, start orchard ditch, move bees, make a woodbox, nursery beds maybe. I have to weed middle beds and feed the ones that aren't fed, prep for a dozen roses, move some, move buddleias. Greenhouse seeds. 21 Yesterday woke thinking about math and from a dream I wanted to remember, an apartment house I know from other dreams. I used to live there with Luke when he was a child, now I'm just checking through. It was this stairs? No the one over there, and up a flight, and up one more, but there's been renovation and as I turn a corner in the stairs I'm right up against the ceiling. I can't go farther. Reading Quine's autobiography. I've liked him in philosophy but the man's lifetime is ugly with privilege and unconsciousness. There's a lot of gloating over territory taken - physical territory, he counts countries, lists of activities. Was there a single loving observation? A life where men are "my best friend" and women are "the attractive wife of" someone. Or unattractive. A life 'of the mind,' constantly rewarded. Hideous passages about the student movements of the 60s, complacent contempt for students wanting black history taught. He wants to protect 'standards' and never dreams he means privilege. "The ugliness of hippies." Never dreaming the hippies find him ugly too, because they are looking for life in the eyes. Never dreams - no sense of spirit life in himself or anyone. Quine W 1985 The time of my life: an autobiography MIT 23rd Another fold in the story of Robert MacLean. Tonight in the garden I was sitting with Julie somebody on the bench by the greenhouse. Moonlight, half-moonlight. She came this morning and got the rest of the old nursery plots, and standing rather blind I guess in the twilight didn't recognize me from this morning. I wasn't sure I recognized her either but when she asked where she'd met me I knew she was Robert's Julie who ditched him and went to Hawaii. The winter I was writing him from Saturna he was, she said, mooning toward Wren who would send him beautiful little presents. He wouldn't make plans with Julie because he was going to see Wren. I was four years enchanted. At the garden this aft, sitting in the greenhouse for a moment in slightly fogged light, looking at the warm dry paving, through the open door to the clear brown and blue day, soaked flattened grass, the beautiful long throw behind the vinewalk posts over the herb garden to the firehall poplars unleafed and crooky. Starlings falling and falling from the wires to the compost rubble. My loveseat the two-person bench inside the greenhouse where it should stay, looking at the warm floor and out at the little privacy of the nursery beds. That little space, owning it, worth the years - a nook of an estate - a reconstruction - I felt. Working one of the angle beds. Bonemeal around the red horns of paeonies. What am I thinking - stopped there
24 When in the Vietnamese restaurant I told Rob about Julie and Robert he was holding his arm around himself not wanting to hear. Afterward I was asking why. He said people tell him things and he can't hear it, he doesn't know where he is, he forgets where he is, there is too much going on. "He doesn't know how to feel," Julie of Robert, his head and arms jerking when he runs into her on the street. 1st March Snowing dryly. [Listening to a tape of] Louie's family dinner. Penny Maddy all weekend ahead. It's snowing on the herb garden pool. That means, shall I go down? The child voices cut across confidently, Louie's voice and her mother's hold the intersections. Dreamed last night I was talking to a woman who when she'd taken off her hat showed the top of her head shaved. Was telling her what I knew about telepathy, with T and C and then Jam. She in the end was lying in my lap. I had in my hand two books, one American, one about London, very live writing. I thought I'd buy them. One of the women peeling off stickers, $4.95. We're going to the women's bookstore/pumphouse but no one's there, as if they'll end up given to me. They're where it's at in writing. What is it about this last letter from L. Read it in rapid folds of delight, humor, pain, suspense, and then, after, somehow don't like it, as if I don't want to answer it, as if I haven't anything to say to quite a lot of it. I see her differentness. Disconnections. She is generating feeling but not showing her life outside, which is what I want to see. I want her summer and travel. And - she asks to live with me through a summer and winter and then decide to go back to Africa, as if wanting to wear me out. "My autonomy and your vulnerability" she says and I stiffen. It's been my autonomy and her vulnerability, and if she thinks she can turn it ... Also know she's made her political contacts now. The kind of day this is, CAN'T read Penny Maddy, restless and headache, don't like the cooked air pouring from the vents 'cause it's snowing. Want to go out. Seeing Andrew [Irvine] Monday noon, have to know what I want to say about Realism in mathematics. Naturalized theory of knowledge says we live in the world we see, we don't have to mystify knowing because we're made by the world in such a way that we do know it. Math is something we've been able to develop from small beginnings, along with language. When math and language began to be written it was possible for them to be elaborated more quickly and differently. When math and language are studied as subjects it's possible for them to develop in ways that had less to do with how they'd been useable. Counting and measuring and ordering. Second-order study: what are the properties of counting and measuring and ordering? This is not the properties of collections and measures. She seems to use sets to mean generic collections. I wd say, generic collecting actions. Do it again. Properties of doing something. Properties means what happens when you measure, count, drum. In light of this what's the question about math? Math is the most developed form of one kind of relation of perception/world and language. Other kinds of rep are more mixed. Knowing what kind of rep it is suggests things about what's at stake between genders / kinds of brain. I want to know where women's brains can be included in representing. - After that, looked at Nancy Cartwright, and after that could read Maddy. And went to Barbara Hammer's show through the snow. A Chinese girl in thin low shoes standing coldly on one foot at the bus stop came and stood in my wind shadow. Smiled acknowledgingly, You look warm. Films busy and symbolic, theoretically ingratiating, the way her costume is correct for its time. Her best with admiring students, warm. Her sociality and how it works. I told her what I wanted to tell, but went away distressed and alone across the slushy street because I shouldn't have. And then on Granville, at the third bus stop, Phil Hanson with his hood up. Sitting with him on the bus, he with his dress pant knees far apart in the manner that crowds. "We all wonder why you're doing it." [I didn't say.] 2nd Louie this morning and an unease. She's calling from a little railway station with a radio on in the ticket booth. She's jumbled by what I said about the two men in the dream. My disaffection as if this side of her jumble.
- Needing to say to myself why I am doing it. It gives me a road into the world and doing. Habituates me to public managing. Small cheques every two weeks and enough extroversion to get more. A safe field for my needing to fight with men. The ability to read Maddy and Cartwright and an acquaintance with math terminology. Maybe a platform to be able to fight with the sort of theory that rules in art? A theory of perception I'd like. If I were clearer about what I'm doing there'd be a better sense of me in the department, they'd know how to help me. Perception and simulation, representation, what it does. What simulation capacities say about perception. I want backup in science and I want to back something in science. I want to talk to Evelyn Fox Keller's sort of person. I want access to academics and the better artists. What's the directest way to do this? I'm very frightened now of the direct way, as if it betrayed me horribly into pain and starvation. They say it wasn't that, but having to get away from Jam. Then what could make me more direct and centered now? I keep thinking having perception learning too. but perception there is very little. Afraid I'm being led by childish need to fight with men into giving my time into sterility. That's anguish I don't know what to do with. [opposite page:
- From Hilgard's Divided consciousness, the hidden observer, co-consciousness passive but well-informed. Hilgard E 1977 Divided consciousness: multiple controls in human thought and action John Wiley & Sons He said to the hypnotized subject that some things happening in the nervous system are not part of one's awareness; if there was some part of the subject that had been hearing he asked it to raise a forefinger. ] 4th The food at the faculty club is worse than at the student's union. Andrew - what about him - I keep seeing him like a seamless young man, and then he shifts into cartoon sociability. He pops, he looks like a bland blond balloon. Suddenly he's talking in loud standard phrases, saying something he's said before. Covering something, but what. Or a moment from a nerdy childhood. The way after I said what I like about how he marks he said with that cartoon sound We aim to please. And: he's writing against affirmative hiring. Blushed when he said so. I said I don't care. 6th Past days I'm keeping going but slightly aching all over. Rob sleeping here and I didn't buzz, went to sleep and woke up as these mornings in pain in the solar. An insulated day. Louie on the phone. I didn't care. Who's this I'm sposed to feel. (Look forward to Rowen though.) Haven't wanted to write her. As if I suspect her. It's maybe illness. I'd like to rest from her, not have her phone me or write. 8th Rowen's magenta gladioli on long stalks [birthday]. We sat together on his bed on the floor watching a crocodile mother. The voices of the babies in their eggs deep under the sand. When she hears them sing she has to dig them up. Picks them up with the tips of her eyeteeth and tosses them up into the back of her mouth to be carried to the water. Late, Rowen falling asleep, riingg - Cheryl, her conscious, artful tones - is that all I have to say about her? Lorraine's gone. "Do you want to come to London with me in May?" Her artfully intimate tones. I did think, this is what it's like to be level - and the possibility of shifting up. Thursday at graduate students' meeting. They drink sweet sherry but Ray doesn't either. His nice pink jokes that draw the women and liven me. I notice to say the sort of things I can when somebody else does, "Are there going to be twelve angry men across the table asking me about everything in philosophy?" [about the MA defense] Ray said he didn't like philosophy conferences (but logic conferences) because everyone has numbers on their backs and they all try to crowd toward the other ones with the higher numbers. Their second logic midterm today. I just sat down and wrote it, leaving Armin to supervise. Swartz for some reason beamed at this. Maneuvered me into correcting it with him. I got them all. Sunday 10th Moved the blue buddleia to the right place, where the upright stem can be vertical beside the white rock. Digging holes for Reine des Violettes and William Lobb, slate purples, behind the west gate benches. Have to move pteracantha, saw how big it gets, into the outback where its red teeth can hold light when the sun goes down. Then I can have bushy whites flanking the north gate, Madame 'Ardy and Alba Maxima. - Just thinking I'm being Vita not Virginia, and Vita's work is adored by the wrong kind of people. This morning - I'm off all night but in the morning I notice I'm seeing his bone chest, nice narrow shell, alright I'll do it, and he reaches round without asking and touches my clit (a bluewhite flash and the delightful crumbling of the soundness of the sky) so I'm directly into joy and out again in ten minutes. Don't pick up the phone. At Gomez [deli] later a Chinese woman wanting to use the phone - a nice look, very nice wise gold-rimmed look. I smile. It's Mei-lin, who wants to talk - alright - and says let's get the little boys together. Sure! March 12th Dear Anne-Marie Hogue, Here at last is my final report, B grant 291-881562 in film. Don't know what to say except that I used my B year as well as I could and was very grateful to have it. I did learn optical printing; spent three very interesting weeks at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley; set up American distribution for my work; went to the Experimental Film Congress in Toronto (and that led to an invitation to the Viper Festival in Lucerne and to Experimenta 1990 in Melbourne). Most of my time in the B year went into two projects, one was the groundwork for a video I want to make this coming summer, the other was getting to know a body of research in connectionism, a neurological/computational theory that extends my own intuitions about film grain, perception and imagining. This theoretical work is on-going. What I'm after is a neurological theory of simulated perception (and the reason I'm after it is that I'm still the kind of experimental filmmaker who is more interested in science than in literary theory, and that position has to build its own support). I'm enclosing two kinds of recent publicity. - This morning thinking about the poems. Tonight opening Millennium Film Journal, finding Bill Viola speeding up. landscape is the natural raw material of human psyche duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye narrative of perceptual discovery basic state of existing on earth: just a plain and sky 13 Fear is a way of coming to meet a crisis. It is unpleasant unless I rise on it. It's an instance of what possibility means. Thinking this because of the bee, one of the lost bees, that was running into my hair with an angry sound and came with me quite a way up the path. My heart was beating harder and that alarms me too. But adrenaline is what you need to meet anaphylactic shock, ie the body recognizes possibility. Louie on the phone. I can't write letters any more, I said. That's alright, she said. Today I realized it is alright, and maybe why. 15 I woke at four with so sharp fear/pain in the solar. But what is it? The thread says it's not Rob and not Louie, it's Michael having plans to move. 16 But I don't believe the thread, it is Rob and Catherine. (Going to the garden warned.) She looks nice beside him, a little fatter and it suits her. Bum and tits. Hi Ellie she shouts across the garden. I'm tricked into turning my head but there is still time to be mean and I will. Look around elaborately not seeing her. At that moment Margaret on the other side and far back calls Hi Ellie and I wave my shovel. The difficulty is deciding which false position to take up. Will I be openly malicious and give myself the stress of aggression. Will I 'have a talk' with her. Will I break up with him. Will I hang out elsewhere. Will I hold territory in my own garden which is too close to his. There's only one fact, that it hurts me. My solar plexus hurts from guarding my heart, is it that? A month - I can last a month can't I - cut him off, do yoga, work when he isn't there, it's only one garden meeting - already I could feel what it would be like to be unattached in the garden. Is there still addiction - I won't know till it hits me. Have to get to Joyce. The one fact that it hurts me - it hurts a me I'm not in - can I be in it (Joyce will put me there) and still hold out? The way it's stuck: he's not worth fighting for but if I don't fight I'm defeated. I'd like to have it clear for L but it could be just that that keeps her. He's too ugly to have a life with but the moments that are beautiful are true. I give up my intelligence to be with him but real sex is hard to find. If I don't cut it I have to spend the summer in pain, like this, like these mornings waking at 4. If I do [make a] break I have lots of pain and I have to avoid him at the garden. Both ways I don't have ease there. If I do, at least he doesn't have both. Apart from that, the ducks kept crossing the path from water to land, avidly rooting. First year they've done that. I would open my eyes onto light so coldly blue. Beds of earth all lightly loose, reflecting that blue from in between its grain. What lines up every dead stalk of yarrow, white glitter between. This year I'm going to grow food. The beds are stripped for working vegetables. 17 [Landlord] Choy and his boys and their screaming machines. Remembering how I used to go up and down this house loving it. - Thin newest moon lying on its back. Rob and I saw as we turned onto Pender after having pho. Vietnamese café with new video, couples singing fake-sadly in new clothes. I said it's time to go cold turkey. Knew he'd cry. A nice hug on the corner. I was squeezing my thighs, I noticed. 18 Daylight at 6:30. A month to get ready. Less fat, clean house, television gone below, forget coffee and tea, write papers, make black thing to wear, weed hair. 19 From Pietermaritsburg: 36 hours through the Karroo. A pigs-ear plant. A girl who slapped her. Louie you faithful. Waiting to see how my contradictions will cash out. The adventure of his unsuitability, the downy aura of my hand on him anywhere, the downyness of his resting aura I guess (unlikely to find again), the way my talking soul with him was nil. 20 At Greg's parents' house getting ready for bed, wash bum, green nightgown, hearing in the next room an old woman's loud voice. We're making our bed in the long living room. Close the door, see trees outside the window lit from other windows. We stand looking at them. The light goes out. Just edges. Do we close off the sight? I don't know but I say to Greg, I'm seeing her pictures. He doesn't and isn't interested. They are like primitive paintings moving. Colors and brushstrokes. A sidewalk with people streaming in both direction on it. I wonder whether I can change the rate of movement which is mechanically even and too fast to get a grip on what I'm seeing. I'm not sure I am changing the rate, maybe a momentary hitch. Then a passage I've forgotten. We're outside. I don't know where Greg is but I want to go through the rows of the orchard to see the window from the outside. Greg among the trees whining that he wants me to do something else. Greg has been on my right and it's as if there is a young boy with him. 21 "This student is not going to be able to make best use of it tho'." Why men like Trapline. I was looking at him realizing that if I have given up RM I will be looking for another one. Trapline. Bashu with Rowen last night. Curled roof tiles, what she's wearing, oven, bedding, trees. Being interested in seeing an animal-human culture. Rowen asking to go except when he was eating popcorn, drinking 7-up. Bahram Beizai 1991 Bashu: the little stranger [Iranian film] 22 Paul Grant comes in through the department door. I am not looking to see his take, I'm watching my own. Disappointment. And then instantly pick myself up to be gracious. That being gracious is like pulling a blind. There are more moments though, sitting across from him, when I don't see the shamed sliding way he moves. That he isn't tall. But it isn't that, it's a weakness he shows, thickness of his glasses and Leah's kind of porous presence. I will be able to say anything to him, but so will anyone else. - Louie on the phone said, "Someone asked why are you going back and my solar plexus tumbled." "Was that fear," I say. "I took it as acknowledgement." Thinking how Jam could describe something in a way that thrilled me, and Louie can too. The point was that Rob can't. But now I want to say but. What is it today. Not wanting. Wanting. Three linear feet of books I want nothing to do with. What do I want. Then I write the story to/with Louie of driving to California and that is what I do want, to move. Janis [Janis Crystal Lipzin, San Francisco Art Institute] sending me guest teacher material. And as for you RobRob I feel quite lovingly like being your stay-in-touch friend. It said that. 23 Windy Saturday at the garden. Didn't want to do anything. Then cleared out the periwinkle bed. SHE wasn't there and later she was. Am I going to do it again? I know how to do this, not say hello back. Frightenedly. Dissatisfied with being so moldy and unright. That is saying it not feeling it. The house is dirty and junky and cracking in new places after the winter. I'm blind and stupid at school - that's true - and wondering if my nerves are infiltrated by fungus, to be so dull and reluctant and misfiring. - Then Ingrid takes me to the philosophy party. Ray is charming. But this is what I should wonder about: Don Todd soon after Ray and Mary arrived asking them where in Southern Oregon they're going to stay on their way to San Francisco next Tuesday. Is there any way to know whether I have to live in the shaman's terror of possession as the only way to be other than possessed? Even that seemed to have been a possession. (The women holding knee tight to knee, three wives self-arranged on the couch.) This whole semester blank and torpid it seems. Sure I come up with words. But look at how little fight there's bin in anything I do, like the logic teaching. [opposite pages: Hebb D 1968/1982 Concerning imagery, in The conceptual nervous system: selected papers, H Buchtel ed Pergamon Press The image is a reinstatement of perceptual activity but has to be organized in as-if motor order. reentrant reverberatory activity of cell assemblies, different depths of subassemblies Actual perception involves both primary and higher-order assemblies, "object is perceived both as a specific thing in a specific place with specific properties, and as generalized and abstracted from" Images need not include first-order cell assemblies This organization or level of function is achieved during growth only as a function of complex sensory stimulation, and further, that once established it is maintained only in the presence of such stimulation. [on classical psychologists] "tend to talk of mind as something quite distinct from sensory processes, and to think of the latter as sources of information only." naturalism: We are willing under hypothesis to include all of his behavings, including his more advanced knowings, as activities not of himself alone, nor even primarily his, but as processes of the full situation of organism-environment. Dewey] 26 "A gay man who cut my hair so sadly telling me about his girlfriend, that I gave him signs of not to. He smiled, seemed incredulous and & hands calmed down." "Sleep at Barry and Pine's where on weekend evenings the young boys have those sexy bodies & there's always a room where they play reggae music & dance. I have joined them & then walked in night streets with them afterwards." "I like hearing sex things from you, with anyone. But that's something else. I think I was slightly shocked feeling your pain with Rob. In the 'perennial being divided' & what lay strangely behind 'god has their [Rob & Catherine's] names written together in the fateful book.'""Sometimes I'm amazed that I'm finding me in a situation where I'm not the claustrophobic one." The talent and decency of her family. She's upheld in quite a high civilization where her voice as a child was upheld with this same patience. High luck. David MacAra walks into the pine afternoon, looks a little older. I see him first in boots, jeans and workshirt going somewhere, looking interestedly at probably the ground. He sees me looking, puts on his glasses, comes a few steps nearer. Says, Will you still be here after supper. Goes away. Past nights I'm asleep when he comes into the scene. This aft very tired at school fading away from Armin's office hour, table conversation, by going on to the later meeting. 28 My accomplice, Ray calls Mary. 29 Somewhere in a hotel, Louie and I and men one of whom is police. There's an air of sex later. I'm at a door (of our room) looking in the mirror at my bum. Is it enticing. Louie comes in saying the policeman is after her. We lock the door, I check the wardrobe, without noting I've gone from wanting sex to keeping it out. The wardrobe slides sideways suddenly and the uniformed big guy comes through. I was afraid of that, said in a conversational way. We unlock our door and go out into the corridor looking for another room with an open door. here's one on the other side of the corridor. Louie looks around and says it's good. We lock ourselves in. Then see someone lives there probably. Clothes on a line, a man's and a child's. We see the man and child at the door with the police horde behind. I wave hello, I know the man and if we're his guests the others will leave us alone. A weak man with a child. Louie on the phone has her voice fogged, not by my letters she says. She sounds tearful. I said there were men she could have and she's blind. I said she isn't telling me what will separate me so I'm blind. (First that she could get men I'd want who aren't interested in me and that annoys me - I mean if I had her body I could have anyone I want - covetousness. Covetousness is not desire. She doesn't understand that my sexual relation to her is angry and sad.) So I'm giving up real desire in favor of something indirect and unhappy, where direct desire is happy as long as it is safe. Thinking of romantic Braden Zrno in leather and 3-day growth, the way he plays with me, lights me up in glee and freedom. 31st Shoveling sand - it has to stick together - we have to turn it into stone if we want to travel with it - if we want what's written on it to cohere. The different parts of a thought have to stand together, they have to be on at the same time - the way the typist's hand is preparing for all the letters in a word - a simultaneous overlap of times - the hand does it - the way in writing a sentence the last word is present in the choice of the first word. (Wilden, the sort of talk I used to have with Jam.) The way Wilden's fast overlapping of domains, psychotherapy, math, psychology, economics, brings about the kind of intelligence I can have. The hand grasps - that's a digital event - in it each finger is grasping differently - that's the multiple support of the digital event - looking at each finger separately the same is so - decisions at different levels - bifurcations at different levels - but the hand can also feel.
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