| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 1 - 1992 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st December 1992 A dream last week. Red feathery dust on the edges of the Jansen house floor. I look into the near left corner (SW) and find there's more than there was, a stairs, and under it some jars? In a cubby - something interesting, unexpected storage. There was much more in this one I thought I should remember. Reluctant to write this. Today Luke went back to London. He came home early and I cooked. Scribbled his dream, seven pages. He went to return his pager and have his hair made perfect. There sat his packsack, his plane clothes on a hanger. Room empty. When I got back from the laundromat his stuff was gone - oh. No note. Then I hear a car door open and yes there he's getting out of a new red car. Woman with money. Meet him at the door. Yellow teeshirt under blue jean-jacket under black leather jacket. Nice. He takes the two top layers off, in one piece, lays them on the floor, bends his knees to be my height. A hug. A beautiful one. Mm he says. I don't have to hurry away. My chin's in his collarbone hollow. Umh I say too. Sunday night at Roy's on Burrard. She seats us next to the fishtank. I'm simply happy, I notice, looking at the pink and blue fish with a yellow stripe. A rusty oxblood color of flat short deep fish with a turquoise stripe. Blue fishies with yellow tails. A puffer unpuffed staring in the mirror. He knows the name of a wine. A pinot gris. The sorbet doesn't surprise him. (It does me - what's this?) Beautiful small sphere of white ice with a raspberry ripple. His pager beeps twice. He gets a cordless phone from the desk. We don't begin talking until we're outside crossing the street in the rain. He says I was in a dream. We get to the car. I ask about the dream. A long story. Then a longer story. He's behind the wheel. My feet are cold. He turns the key to get the wiper on for a sec. His extraordinary dream. Cross cut. We say what we have to say as if he were not coming back. I'm very grateful he came. His dream says he's pulled himself off a wall of razor barbs. A landscape with violence and survival, yes he has done something, we agree. Now he'll do something else. When he drove away in the red car and she and I had looked at each other fast and thoroughly, I changed his room around, took it back, couldn't want to linger in transition. Mary phoned last night. She and he moved into their penultimate home. Full of widows she notices. So grateful, I am, to have been given this sweet clear end to my time with Luke, shouldn't I be willing to give her something? But I'm not. She will want to tell me details of a life she should never have had to live, now it's off-white carpets and heavy traffic on Clearbrook Road. She could have had a real life with thoughts, politics, her intelligence in its own map, hard laughter, real sex. Another sort of body, not her knobbed burled pent little pot. I wouldn't believe she couldn't be saved. If I had believed it what would have been different? I'd have removed myself sooner. And then - what I imagine is a sterner eye. And does seeing her with a sterner eye help to make the sweet meeting with Luke? Yes. 2nd Happy. Today reading Rosen. Asides keep coming. Sometimes film notions. Contact, that had in it a bit of yellow sky between power posts, quivering faraway with black small branches. Newton's streaking particles all around some figure on grass at night. Put a brilliant white light in the bathroom. Want to clean. Want a single bed, to have more room in this room. What's so spry and bright, is it finding a story that goes deep enough into the past of science and far enough into the present of math to give me the distinction I need to reset the intuition one has about non-syntactic brain? Robert Rosen 1991 Life Itself Columbia Up at five-thirty, strong all day. Rosen. If mental modeling were thought of as a part of biology and biology were modeled as a complex system, and machines as simple systems inside the larger category of complex systems, then: Is what I've felt in the connectionists, the something-but-what, and the something-but-what in notions of analog rep, something I can get at finally, with Rosen's category theory? (I smelled that category theory has something.) But. Does it have to do - what does it have to do - with simultaneity and sequency. Why isn't simultaneity transducible into sequency - is that the question? And can there be a math model that isn't a sequence and can't be a sequence. A graph. There's also something about it that cuts through my own layout: he isn't reductionist like Churchland and he sounds, his graphs sound, functionalist. He wants to reduce dynamical physics within biological/complex physics. What is the alternative to mechanism? The analog term is unstable, nobody knows what to do with it. "It is not a matter of mechanism or vitalism. It is a matter of simplicity or complexity." Whether the atomic model is/can be functionalist because it's approximate, but it holds locally. The part of epistemology that is modeling theory The part of science that is learning to observe
Structural unit. Wholes made of parts. Functional unit. Parts getting their properties from wholes. Does machine functionalism try to use quasi-structural units? Does Rosen have to be functionalist? Friday 4th In Ping's Café. She says it's easier for the book if she comes and sits on my side. She puts her chin on my shoulder, closes her eyes and goes far forward to the place over the water. From there she is speaking to both of us about the center. (We'd eaten. She's drinking coffee, three cups. She's fretting still. Does she have to break up etc. I say it's such a scare word. She finds something with that. Such a word to live with for a week. I say suddenly, Can I talk to the book? Dear book, I'm going away for a while. You know that already, but. Long silence while I feel various things I shouldn't say.) Then how does it get to the road into the water. Her voice comes slowly and with a slight drag. "Have you seen a wooden road going into the water, with some birds at the end?" "I'm seeing it now." "It's where you are walking," it says. I'm frightened. Is Louie hypnotizing me with an image that says die? To walk into the water. I ask. It says, "No one can tell you to die, no one can tell you to live, do you know that?" I don't know that. "The road is a road you are building. You (swim out with a plank and push it back - something like that). "It is not meant to go to the other side, it is to go to the center where there is water and sky in the water and water in the sky, and light. The birds are light small spirits. When you get there you never want to come back." "But do you look like a corpse to other people?" I still have to check whether this is a trick. "You are doing what you always do, riding your bike, talking to people. But you are yourself. You aren't worrying about how people see you." I'm in the familiar puzzlement of being near something I know, tantalized, not knowing how I'm supposed to act. I know what it is to be myself and not stopped by other people. After sesshin, that drive; on acid looking at Josie. The afternoon after I conceived Luke. That's the center. "It's telling me that I could be there all the time?" "Yes." "Would I do what's necessary?" "Yes. There's no store there, no storage." The night at Rumsey. The time I spoke to my father, other times around it. I'm remembering now how it began. "You were brave defending your joy this morning. There is danger. Joy is like you, it doesn't want to be married, it doesn't want you to say You're mine, it wants to go away from you and visit other people. You shouldn't call it "I". You should speak to it, you should say, How are you doing? What do you want to do? Let's go, and See you later. See you later." "Is Ellie bad for me?" asks Louie. Silence. "Why don't you answer that?" "You used a censored word." "Does Ellie want to get rid of me?" "She wants to get rid of herself." "Which self?" "The anxious one," I say. It corrects me, "No the one that doesn't feel. The anxious one feels." "Is it the one who doesn't feel who wants this break?" "It's both. Here is a model you can use: there are two people and they both want the same thing but for different reasons, with different outcomes. This makes confusion." "Should I have a baby?" sez Louie. "Yes." "Will it be able to go there?" "How should I know!" After I asked whether Luke can go there, long hesitation. "He might, but he has obstacles." "Doesn't everyone have obstacles?" "Not obstacles." "It isn't a state, it isn't esoteric." "What are these café people thinking?" "That someone has died who you didn't like." Two people in dark clothes huddled somberly and bursting out laughing. - My dream in the rock circle. A large house I'm looking after. They have left the baby with me. Sleeping in his room I see him lift himself bearishly and use my couch to tumble out of his cot. Looking at a pile of Louie's papers, brittle sheets, old, dark orange-brown. Many letters to and from men she's known. She keeps in touch with so many people. Showing her in a corridor a homeless person's nest I found. There's a foam pad that looks familiar; and then I see that there too are my Portuguese rag rugs that I threw out years ago, when was it, after Burghley Road. Now I'm seeing them much older, faded and more tattered at the edges, less faded where I lift the other rag of a blanket. Lederhosen harnesses hang up from pegs. Do I know a schizophrenic on the street, who wears lederhosen? Hearing Ray Jennings' voice, go downstairs. He's outside in front of the house. I find myself in the doorway with Judy and Paul at my left shoulder. Introduce them. Ray is beardless, looks younger, less powerful, a bit awry. He's come to say something to me but isn't saying it so I go outside toward him with the baby on my back. Forgot to say I was washing the baby. His clothes fell off as I brought him near the tub. Shitty bum. Just put him in the water without testing it. He squirms desperately. Too hot? Doesn't feel hot to me but I'll put in cold. When I go down to talk to Ray I'm wrapped in Luke's big blue towel. Behind him I hear a young man's voice. A horse saddled and packed. The young man as if behind Ray in my line of sight so I can't see him. (Also forgot the baby seeing my breast. No milk. You try if you want. He tries. "No milk" he says.) Ray says something I don't remember about how I am about his not saying what he has to say. I agree I'm like that. We're walking in the garden. He says the long red whips of red-stem dogwood should be pruned. I say they're beautiful, thinking what a conventional gardener he is. At Trinh T Minh-Ha's ponderous lecture, "quote", "end-quote", Jan-Marie, Scott, hundreds of Vancouver's best. David Rimmer coming toward me with a face so swollen and creased, pained, as if he's swelling and cracking himself with booze. A spirit-decrepitude and yet a glad open look when I said hello. Touched my arm in a way I had to look at again later. A history in it. A change, too, he wasn't thinking himself more important than me. - Connectionism has a way of allowing more than one production to be in progress at a time, the preparation of the other fingers in the typist's hand. [MA thesis outline] The engineering description - I want to set the distinction in its own larger context of origin, so its uses in phil of psych / cog psych will stand against the more physical distinctions of engineering theory. The larger context is general systems analysis, a mathematical methodology, mathematical practices for modeling systems. A system is defined as anything you pick to study, that can be modeled as in and out and a function over them. The system is the mathematical artifact not the physical whatever that is being modeled. It is the model. Within systems, signals are defined - they are changes in the system. They are said to be functions: 'signals' here is neutral between energy or power signals and information signals, which also, as pulses in the physical system, are energy signals - the distinction is not a distinction of kinds of pulse, but of use in the system. Information signals because they are informational, ie because they have interpretations outside the system and so are considered code, are spoken of as if they are not physical. They are of course physical but the system is designed to transmit them in an unaltered form rather than 'consume' them as energy. Where systems are designed and built as informational systems, we are in the realm of communications engineering, which includes telephones, telegraphy, audio recording technologies. It is in comm. engineering that we meet the analog-digital distinction (discrete time and continuous-time signals but not A or D proper). In communications engineering then, we get discussions of the properties of A and D in terms of the components of generic communications systems. We have A and D sources, source coders mapping these signals onto whatever formalism we are using to describe the system, whatever formalism we wish to think of the system as using, and then as a second coding step we code the code onto a physical medium, the channel coder. The channel as physical is presumed to be continuous, but it will carry waveforms that can be read as discrete. At the other end we will have the coding process reversed. Channel decoder decides what symbols were being carried, sometimes by a process of reconstruction or guessing. The destination decoder puts the 'internal' symbol system into a format usable by recipients. Computation engineering, it can be seen, is a subsection of communications engineering. We have already seen what A and D amount to in more general information processing engineering. Here they are the basis for alternate systems of computing. Two well-developed computing technologies with distinct computational specialties, forms of organization, types of hardware, and mathematical description. Newell's summary of analog computation in the 50s. So these are the main features of A and D computing: 6th At Martin's [Hahn] party. Kim [Sterelney] is further gone toward something sorrier, as if he's rounded a curve. But I liked telling him what I was doing - "Yes that's certainly scratching where it itches," pushing up the bridge of his glasses. Wool down over his eyes, more bulk in his legs. Ray [Jennings] squatting down holding the cake while Barb unpeels aluminum off the bottom of it. That he has sweet humble feeling for a girl who is girl spirit of so old-fashioned a kind. Modest, big eyelids, little mouth, a snood, practically. Martin's joy at the single malt I brought. (Three shelves of cookbooks, a hanging battery of copper pans.) And then seeing my boy in the rocking chair holding some of it in a glass, looking at me. Had a glitter elastic on his pigtail to go with his party vest. White shirt with sleeves rolled up and collar open, black slacks that show the round of his bum and are loose thereafter, open black waistcoat, the most beautiful a man can get. Hooking his feet onto the chair rung in their old lumberjack socks. Talking on and not wanting to go away. There was a moment I saw his hand dangled from the arm of the chair and wanted to hold it. Telling him about losing Luke I didn't look at him but I could feel him there. He talked and he listened. His neighbour at his cabin killed two women and then himself. His sister Susan is a feminist at York. He formed hundreds of basements, bought a pliers he loves (just now a man comes into Pannekook talking about the tools his grandfather left him), his grandfather's rusty square. Being a handyman, saying it again, "I was a handyman, at the nursing home." Lighting many times, a face made to light. His dad's an engineer, his mom's a gerontologist. Oakville is urban but they were nice people. He's going to go on being the person he is. "I had such a good day." Raked leaves, changed the oil in his truck, changed the filter, got his new boots muddy. Described his gumboots lovingly. Had drunk beer but wasn't foolish. When I had put my coat on crossing the room to say goodbye to Kim, he looked up from the fellow-students corner. When we see each other across a room like that we're together for a second. That was goodbye and it really was. "How old are you?" Hesitation. "Twenty-five." "You're so young!" He waited some sentences but he wasn't too chicken to ask back. Didn't say, You're so old. Isn't going to be a professor, wants to build homes, somehow. And something to do with Nietszche. Community. Came home and slept and dreamed a dream where I'm next to him at a table and put my hand along his hand and he moves it firmly so I'm not holding his but I'm still touching it. There's something about a movie and going into a tower's round staircase. Wake and go back to sleep and in this dream we're at the party still going on. Kim on the floor has lost his pants. Men students around the table talking better than they have, drunk but not stupid. He's holding both my hands, stroking the palms on and on. Before I wake a man student has got between us. Partly awake thinking of how I'd been sitting in my chair wound around so my legs were over the chair arm away from him, as if I had my body running away while heart and soul ran toward. Dim conclusion was that was why my gut ran wild. I'm moony today, not wanting to stop. Oh beauty, beauty, etc. Sunday afternoon. I won't hear from Louie for twenty days. In the Okanagan, picking apples for gas money one time, he looked up and saw his hand black with juice and grime reaching among green leaves for a red apple. Behind it was the arid sage grey slope, deep blue sky. I want to write down everything he said, to go on being with him. Why. For the way it matters. As if I should imagine it possible and at the same time arrange in myself not to. Something is released with it - the young sense of caring how I look - makes me want to make my house nice - bear myself well - find my poems and finish them and put them together - make nice things to wear. Besides other things I've wanted - to eat as if my body is my friend - to finally go further with Tarthang Tulku's stuff. Beautiful December bright and dark and clean and sweet. 7th And this morning got up, moved my big desk and thesis and thesis books into Luke's room, cleaned this one, bought flowers. Now I can get up when I do and sit down in a warm room. Come at night into this one and do another work in a room with flowers and candles and colors. I worked this morning in a gladness as if bright and dark will love me back. Will see my house. Will like the wood and color. Will see a bright and dark one living and making beautiful. (I'm seeing the green sweater one - taut brown cheek.) And am in eagerness to get my work focused. So much I've done that's in notebooks and not taken through. Abandoned time I don't want to leave abandoned. 8th New typewriter. I found it my way - looked at machines in Polson's and had them explained, drove straight to the pawnshop and found a white Smith Corona, maybe a year old. There was a thin young man with glasses and an intelligent mouth. I had to go to Woodwards to buy a ribbon, and in fact Smith Corona ribbons were all they had. Twenty dollars on spec. (Poor Woodwards - Christmas robots in the windows but interior floors shockingly declassed, heaps of stuff like Army Navy, no staff.) Then the young man fiddled half an hour, so patiently, finding how to get the erase to work. A man like Helmer with a milk-skin over his eyes came in asking for an amp he can play his piano through. Meantime in a color monitor on the counter big-wheel trucks leaping over and onto rows of cars. The old man has been paying off two speakers for a year. "Would you come out to Burnaby and set it up for me?" The young man has to cut off one of the plastic flanges on the erase ribbon. He's listening to the old man without a speck of intolerance. "Did you grow up in Burnaby? You remind me of people I know in my country where I come from," I ask, so my helper can have his mind free. But he doesn't want it free and listens with interest and says his people are from Manitoba, Ukrainian. I notice another young man further up the counter who though he has a brushcut and is dressed tougher, is his identical twin. The twin calls an insurance company; his name is David. The typewriter is sale-ticketed at $89. "I could see whether I can get you a better deal on this." He'd been reading my nonsense trial paragraphs. Comes back and says $75. 9th Noticing that instead of latching onto the image of Phil/Kim/Andrew etc for the purpose of planning to write, I am latching onto the grad kids. What is this phenomenon, having to have a correspondent in academic writing? 10th The way I'm with you these days every day. What is it? That question takes me on a long track at the end of which I find Louie and Michael still up ahead. I should get my letters back from her before then. But really, she wants that? I keep being amazed it says yes. What I wanted to know was that I'm going to marry bright and dark and be enlightened, diamond body of right moment, the center I'd never want to leave. 11th Saw on a poster that Jam is reading in a poet's series at the art gallery, with Gerry, Maxine, Roy Miki, Roy Kiyooka. When I see her around - this is for the sense of story - a queasy revulsion: she's wearing a hard brown fedora that perches on her head, a purple windbreaker, two signifiers which are, on her, grotesque pretension. But having left her the field is still to be undone. Not that I think she is sailing on my writing (though she took her version of dictionary writing from mine), she's sailing on a cold buffoon she's welcome to. What I would want to write is still love and marvel. I would like to be writing and reading but where, not for the literary audience. 12 Q: what can I do with my early mornings? Dear wiser one
I'm awake, it's quiet, I could go work, but I want some heart and soul before closing off into mind.
The way when I worked on construction and lived with Jam I got up and wrote, had cups of tea and good toast and worked with beautiful images, and at 7 put on my boots and went to work. Or I could meditate, if there were any sense of something happening. I want spirit life. Something moving. I'm even wishing for drugs, small amounts even, to unlock.
I'm dull, it's quiet and black, my room is cold. The middle room is hot but it's full of my thesis.
I sat to meditate. Got cold. At first was moving a bit. The sigh was guiding me. Then nothing. Gave up and went to bed. Was cold by then. When I got warm slept 'til ten. (Beautiful day.)
Warm. Well fed, fish soup. Looking at a day with frost and a bird. Dazzle off the metal roof. Thinking - out, buy tea, walk on Robson, read a paper in Starbucks. Come back to Rosen's next, hard, chapter. But - what about the early mornings?
I'm stumped.
Something cut off. Not a large tree or a small one. About a foot across.
There seems little to say. If I put bright and dark in too. Stories about a lame girl loving. It could be so bad.
Just so it's not Canadian fiction.
Alice Walker? Le Guin? Richardson? Woolf, Kawabata. It's a project and it's hard and has to be active mind or very bad. Ondaatje. I need help to get me into the feeling though. Can you help? Can you say how?
13 Going somewhere with the young man, walking toward a car, happy my legs are showing and I'm confident he doesn't mind. I take giant steps with both legs at once, then calm down and get into the car. We're going to a school, he's saying I'll have tutors, how do I feel about that. I'm saying is there another key so I can come back separately if he stays later. We're in a train sitting together in one seat that faces backwards. Sometimes I'm up cuddling in his arms, other times kneeling on the floor playing with him, looking at him fondly. He's a scruffy thing, a filmmaker (from another dream of a film school, I think), has dirty longjohns on I can see under his pant legs. Dirty hair. He's very direct and warm, has young passion. I say, Didn't I meet you at that convention in Toronto two years, how many years, ago? He says yes, I was unfriendly to him. I remember I thought he was of no account. Now I'm all over him. I thought he was ugly, I agree. "But the hat is very good," I say mischievously, a hat that pulls down over all his hair. Looking at him confident of my liking as we speak, he facing backwards and I forwards. We pass extraordinary sights. A very wide river with lines of magnetic blue light playing on it, like a film of the 70s. A waterfall broad as Niagara where green water pours over a sharp rock edge we're seeing at eye level. There are green lines off every little jag on the lip. The beautiful spring of these parallel fibers of green light. I'm looking back at it as he's exclaiming about something in the grounds of the ecclesiastical building next to it. a little bridge someone has constructed on the rocks, whether it's being worn away. The look of the building makes me think I'm in Quebec. He's saying he's discouraged as a filmmaker. "I don't even go into the league anymore. When I was a student I wanted it desperately." What I'm thinking privately is that I can work with him and he'll be alright. He has his back to the window and is still talking but I can't hear what he's saying. - It's 7:30 in the work room, still dark black and sounds wet. Now I go to Rosen's hard middle chapters, having read both easier ends. It's Sunday, a week (only) that I haven't seen Louie. - Visit Rob for an hour, looking at the bulb book: wonders. Cat asleep on my coat on the chair across the room. I talk to the cat in a way I never have. R looks odd - red and rough. But the muscles under my skin get a warm cream interleaved in them if I sit touching him. Direct physical happiness I saw in the mirror, leaving. The brown light beam. And then planing home on Commercial, just crossing 12th, see a small blue Chev pickup in the next lane, roll down my wet window and look as I pass - a white profile. I think. Heart knocks at the coincidence. I take it as our unconsciouses cooperating. The fineness of timing involved. Are there near misses we never know? 14 Morning dream that I visit Louie and don't like it. Don't like the greasy atmosphere. Yell about Laiwan campaigning against me. A tall thin woman, frizzy pale thing, comes to the bed not looking at me when Louie introduces her. Have we met before? Yes, once. Something's up with her. I'm wanting to leave though the idea was to spend the day with L. L distressed. I can't find my other shoe. Walk out without a coat. L running after me says I'll freeze. It's true. I assumed it was summer. "Will you throw it down the stairs? It has fox fur on the hood." Wondering if it's true, seems unlikely I have fox fur. Looking for the jacket, what's the right stairs. Louie's brought other things - baby clothes. I don't need these! All I need is my jacket. People are bringing down food for a birthday party for native people. This I do like. Bowl of ice cream and fruit. I'll stay for this. I like these native people, it was the white middle class atmosphere in her place I didn't like. A little girl whose name is Elfreda. Thin white girl. I say my name is Elfreda too. She says Social Welfare doesn't call her that. I'm dishing ice cream. Counting how many people are left. Seven. When I get to mine it isn't ice cream, it's sweet ice mush. Wake feeling sick with the taste of it. Now it's daylight, train whistle at the crossing, seagulls' bright high lines. An open sky. I'm sitting at the desk with my hand inside the neck of the sweater holding my right breast. I've never seen anyone say that. The quiet of the house before school traffic begins in the alley. I haven't said Michael's working his way toward living on Read or another island. This will be the last of my life with Rowen. Going to the corner for milk. A light, a light on the side of the cherry trunk, on the boles, on the moss. On the grass. A chopper high and far in the northeast swaying on a slow cycle so its light appears and disappears. The mountains white in their whiskers and airs. All so soft and live. And now I disappear out of it into the relational theory of machines. Tuesday 15th It's morning again, frost on the shingles, crows in signifying constellation crossing a blue more translucent than air. A wind contained in the box of the heating duct. Creaks in the floor, a change in the light. The skin over my nose feeling itself, how, bright and easy. Imagine a small cloud in itself. Not a thing with round edges, a mark in few well-organized colors, not held, not set, a shape. So much I can love, so much I can do, day, with you, bright and dark. With you, words and pictures, color and sound. It means beloved. And what is lameness in it. To be beaten, to run away, to run away to a place like this. To run away and be unable to find you. To be in despair that you will not want to touch me. But you do touch me. You don't stay, you are a friend whose time has to be honored. It is not my lameness but my carelessness you mind. My lameness is the shape of a cloud, something you can see and I can feel, another companion. My cold foot. How are you doing? Are you a child left standing in the snow? A girl who'll come with me to the end, who'll follow after if she can't walk beside. My particular. And you, image, what do you say. You're listening, in yourself, in your warm clear usual self. You're smiling. Later in our bed your touch will talk. For now you take notice. And get up and go to work. - There's an area of this discussion that's dead metal for me - Turing computability, decidability, effectiveness, Chomsky's language hierarchy, recursion - all that stuff. What's the metal I'm seeing - aluminum - white ash of - but as soon as I get into nonlinear dynamics I'm caught up in an eager wind, hungry and joyful - this is what I'm doing here, this is what I need, this brings me to where intuition can learn to talk, this is the far fairyland where my gift joins me. The tactile mind, oh the one I made and found that visited me this morning. I looked longer at the way frost rippled down the roof over its lath support, a motion independent of the lapped wavelets. And at the nonlinearities in the er words around erotic. The mathematical generators of the streak on the lip of an iris, of the streaks on the many kinds of iris. Imagining a film in which there are dictionaries of these beautiful structures made in ways that change as the making proceeds. Linked parameters. Some ways to say what it is about them. What is it we can see in them. 16th Hello today. This day brought me 4:30 AM and then later Michael with frightened eyes saying Lise is absolutely going to have babies. And then your voice on the phone. What was the very fast sorting I went through alone at my end. "Is this Ellie?" Who's this, it might be -. It isn't until he says his name that I hear what's particular in his voice. (It's two things, a near-American-border accent, and some underlayer in the vowels.) - And immediately also that he's frightened or nervous. This is a good sign. Let's do this in a fast friendly way, then. And then: not so composed. A knock before I thought. I tumble down in my singlet - that's true but also contrived - open the door and have to find him around the corner, hiding the way I do when I knock at strange houses for the first time. Looks cold, wooly half gloves and red fingers and red nose. "Come in." He's offering me the thing to sign. "Go up." A tone strangely definite. I won't let him get away at the door like a courier. He likes the courtyard. I'm putting on my shirt that was ready on the banister post. "Do you want to see the house?" Turning on the light and standing there in my bedroom, he standing carefully on the threshold. Realizing I don't know what to say. I'm stunned. At a loss. Dredge up something about the green wood. "Everywhere there's wood, the plaster was falling down." I'm standing on the rug turning around going on valiantly not minding that my fright is showing. There's little space and time in that state, only time for the intention to push forward. My sense of it is he's stunned too. I don't mind because it's a tribute. This is the moment when this is happening, whatever it comes to mean or doesn't. "Two windows, they don't make houses that way now." I'm too rattled to pick it up. "When it isn't raining the mountains are there." We're side by side looking at the neighbour house, at the corner of the Ukrainian Hall. It has been an extraordinary three minutes of confusion, rapid like being hit by a car but not injured. By the time we're together at the window looking north we've sorted it out. Then there's the rest of the house. My grandfather's bench. Pink houses, a park. "You have to sign that thing." Does it mean he's leaving. Get it at the work table in the warm light room. Sit on the chair staring at it. He sits on his heels in the doorframe. Faculty meeting. What they're like. I could have got into him then but it doesn't occur to me, I'm too dazzled by the idea that he's there. (Louie would have had enough space and time around her - I really haven't the moment to see him, it takes all my wit to conceal myself and reveal myself in a measured way.) Hume and Hegel. "Hume's punctuation has to be re-indicated and then he's a beautiful clear writer. Hegel ..." - I get my chair out of the way and sit on the floor too - "... is a grand intuitive, he's feeling around back here, you can't read him head-on." When he talks about Hume I get to see him a bit, he's less cold. I gape at his face like something I thought I knew but am completely startled by. Is this him? This is him? Really it's the confusion of a whole given before its part, a connection way ahead of its constituting contacts. Either that, or a fantasy unsupported by its facts. Bin thinking of Le Guin talking about time, the way I've never been willing to think of it that way - a propertarian sense of time I would have said. But I see what she builds. For the possibilities of the material and the ability of the maker. The joy like yesterday's when I feel separate times' work not gone under. And as for this visit, I hang balanced. I care and want to care and will do what I can carefully and won't resign any speck of what I want and will do nothing to coerce gods other than my own. "Have fun on the plane and get a window seat." And yes I didn't miss the haw-haw grin at drinking on the plane. "Is there another way to get back to the street?" "You came over the fence?! No one's ever done that before." Alright, now am I calm? An hour and a half getting this story down. Hi Louie are you reading over my shoulder? - Grandpa Konrad in a dream, holding open a closet door.
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