| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 2 - 1992-1993 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18th December 1992 Yesterday Luke's birthday, Rowen and I having an evening before they're gone for three weeks. He puts on his new clothes. We go to Church's Chicken and the tree lot at the PNE. There's the way we aren't interested in each other. He had an urgent interest in his present. I'm his robot auxiliary picking up torn chunks of wrapping paper, reminding him to take off his coat, setting out rice crispies and milk. Would a girl be physically mindful by the time she's seven? I was wondering - watching him watch Scratchy jump at the Christmas tree, forgetting to put his pyjamas on, unable to do both at once. And in Rowen's Book where the B is sheep grazing and the K is a springbok, his first drawing is of a US bomber. He drew it end-on, teeth first, very rapidly, projected from slightly above so you can see parts of the wings and bombs on the far side. Another plane in the distance trailing black smoke. The café is filling, Gold Pavilion. People here are in modern Hong Kong for breakfast, more than at the Golden Horse. The coffee isn't western and congee is brought in a serving bowl not an eating bowl. In the mirror wall I'm a handsome but worn and yellow old thing, dark and creased around the eyes. Many white wires in my hair. Thinking of my young fancy what I feel is how much I have that I've found and made - the way it was, showing my house, knowing it's adventurous, beautiful and strenuously constrained. And the exchange has been for my smooth brown hands, tight shiny cheekbones. Dreams last night, waiting for Michael's wake-up call, very strange. Candace bursts through the downstairs door with a stick. I'm ready for her with a long pole. This is tedious but I should tell it. I drive her down and find her and other women phoning, at least three on separate lines. Jeer that they're calling the cops. Then a lot of young men of a certain kind, a New Age kind it turns out. "You need thirteen goons to look after you?" My place is full of that sort of people - out, out - driving them out finding a huge gathering getting larger, monks in brown and yellow coming from a monastery far away on a hill, rows of people in brown and yellow forming for Sufi dancing maybe. I don't like them - they're that medium-safe unindividual kind of person Candace is too (the way she's whiney and dull in her subartistic lifestyle). But I'm impressed with the number of them. And there's their leader, a big old East Indian man. I shake his hand. A very large warm strong hand. Say I want to ask him questions. A woman secretary appears to make an appointment. The card says he's going to explain the ---, something or other, some well-known stuff about photosynthesis, common knowledge. The appointment is for when I can call him in California. I just want to ask him what this group is. It goes on to getting off a bus, losing Rowen temporarily, being in a hostel with German women, there being a sort of barbecue broiler in the room. It's a women's shelter etc. And - I forgot this - a moment in a sitting room with Louie. She wants to tell me how hard a day she's had, she looked at something horrible and came out in welts. She's starting to show them, crying. I gather up my sheet and drapes and walk out, making an effort to speak at all. "I can see you need to unload but I'm not available." And something about Paul K. He's naked curled on the floor. Marie-Paule naked steps on his back. They're kneeling. Her breasts take a shape like cow horns, pointing at him. He laughs at them, teasing in a warm sexy way. - Nice Scratchy in the red chair with his nose between leg and tail, the fur just behind his haunch opening and closing. He hears letters on the hall floor, a sound like mice. Sits up intent, stretching his neck. Silence. Rewraps. Now I'll go down and get them and then I'll go in the warm room to the yellow-light table. And then there's a postcard. I stare at the handwriting not recognizing it. A good decision and a good card. She wrote it the day my book talked so unlikelily about her and Michael. M who's making his bed with a woman who owns land, a truck, a boat, a house, and is "maternal." And came here yesterday, was welcomed officially looking ugly in a tubey toque. A good solution if it lasts. The instability will be Michael's romantic weakness for another type. She should get pregnant fast and have two close together. That I lose Rowen is overdue, I've never deserved his attachment. Luke liking me is the right child. Emotionally deserved in a way. I was an incubator for Rowen, we aren't kin, it's just a fact. At dinner with their friends he said (Michael said it was sardonically), "Lise, what is my fate?" - Haven't said I've bin imagining having old friends again. 19 Mary yesterday. The prurience in her voice talking about Jennifer, the way she says "Her breasts haven't developed much" and and that she's careless about her menstruation - her clothes in the laundry. It sounds like sexual excitement, though Jennifer will read it in Ed but not in her. And the way she said "And how is your health?" I hate her talking about my health, she's complacent and competitive and wants me properly disabled. How do I know? Louie blew her liking and gratitude reserve by phoning today. I spoke to her the way I do to Mary, fast and cheerful with tongs. Just get her out of here with no damage. There always is damage. Would have escalated if I'd said how angry I was. She spoiled something I wanted to be able to feel for her, that she thinks she wants me to feel, for the sake of relieving a tension. And lied about her reasons. Such an aggressive act. I'm angry still, though it only stopped me for an hour. And was that her just now? Three rings, no one there. Deep snow this morning. Going out for milk (and bacon and eggs and cheese and bananas), holding onto the wall feeling my way through eight inches of snow on the steps. The storekeeper cold in a colder daylight. Horrible Al Neil fish-gaping with a newspaper. (I dreamed I stood seeing myself about thirty and happy and pretty with Bill Jeffries' arm around me.) Christmas bush short and round, all its dangling stuff on the upper branches. Doing yoga on my belly on the carpet I smell the air under it. Now I'll go to sleep. The sound of snow melting rapidly in a rain is not the sound of rain. It's more bunchy, like lumpy air. Oh Scratchy, the way you sleep with your paw curled round by your eye. 20 How's it going. There's working and its hours at the table. I take up a sheet and distribute what's on it onto other sheets in red green and blue ink. Don't I have anything to say about today? I'm often patient, go over something until I have it. But why is it dull today? There was a moment when I began writing. If there are more of those, notice them. In the afternoon, I went into the streets. Slush in ridges. This sort of shopping [low-carb no caffeine organic food diet] has given me a strange new neighbourhood, the thrilling food and spirit, unalternative young persons, at Circling Dawn. Carrying home new things: unsweetened blackcurrent juice, barley coffee, walnuts, silk tofu, steak for breakfast. This is something I have every day - not eating fruit makes its taste perfectly bright: carrot rounds, cabbage shreds, walnuts, raw turnip, with olive oil and salt in the Japanese black bowl. That's my emotional life. Food and house and now Scratchy who is beautiful at all scales. His flattened stretch from armchair arm to windowsill, watching birds. The hair-by-hair texture of stripes next to his nose, the stretched grainy stuff of his yellow iris, what does it remind me of - glycerin. A dedicated life, could I sustain it? A film a year. What I see academically is a doc in Special Arrangements, between film, computer sci and philos. Make it two publishable pieces and a film. Visual math. And write. 21st "To get away from the conflict of love and fear." The two lips. She is two, one. The internal self-division, self-connection, of the bilateral brain. 22nd I woke - at night? - when? - with an image, like a single frame, so brief I saw it already remembering it - of something I took to be, or was told was, the way an image - was it 'a thought'? - is made: grey and white, a rectangle, clumpy agglomerations, [drawing] like that maybe. 23rd Asking what happened today and then remembering the morning dream where I was smothering Louie, pressing my hand over her nose, yelling about her having phoned me. 24th A beautiful misquote of Frege in Wilden. In the external world , there are no concepts, no properties of concepts, no numbers. The laws of nature, therefore, are not intrinsically applicable to external things; they are not laws of nature. They are, however, applicable to judgments having value in the external world. They are the laws of the laws of nature. They assert not a connection between natural phenomena, but something similar [Zusammenhang] between judgments, and among judgments are included the laws of nature. 1884, #87 The Eve This time I didn't get her away pretending not - went quite far into pain - heart and solar - spoke from it - came away from it alright, picked up work. She left with tears, though. In the garden at nightfall I found Gordon just coming out of the shed. He'd repaired two rakes with peeled branches, wire. Had on strange head-gear made of layers with bicycle helmet over all, sat on the bench to demonstrate the Hui chant - no, not the hu chant - a word he pronounced so quietly I had to ask. Eckankar. His sweet confiding manner. He's beautiful - and he's definite: "I'm not on call at the garden" - and I don't make up my mind whether he's simple. There's never been another Christmas bush like this one. It's near midnight, I'm celebrating with candles and all my flowers brought in with them. Cambridge dweebs - don't know why I want to call them that - talking about god - a story that seems more ill-intentioned, this year, than it ever has - Oh come let us adore him - the name could have something still - the roundness of the C - howley spirritt - horrible the way he said that - a very predictable descant about to break out - if trees have spirits then indeed it is bizarre to kill them or rather cut them off and bring them inside to die slowly. Really this is a beautiful and interesting one, thick to thin trunk in four feet, shelves of scallopy skirts spread wide as it's tall. All the loved seedpods and roadkill bits of metal hung on the top half because of Scratchy who tears into the room and dives under the branches like a cat diving under the skirts of a bed. Now I'm goin' to sleep, 'bye. 26th Saturday. Hi little writing where'd you come from. I never know who it'll be and don't think to wonder ahead. What to tell. Dirty fingernails, Boxing Day workparty. Sky cleared and showed the mountains deep and white. The same shining white floated across them, showing one thing against the blue. I saw it very briefly. Back to the table and the lamp. Maybe there's a way to use Halliday's grammar. It looks connectionist to me though Day's programmed a bit of it on standard. Candace's Jewish party stopped me at seven - I have my festival of lights. Put on the kimono and for the first time missed Shorty, a loud pang. Listening to a Mozart she, somewhere, sometime she remembers, recorded off a radio. What does missing her have to do with having had my Christmas dinner at Rob's, that I needed and would've resented missing. Dinner, yes. Charlotte russe and white fluffs of shortbread and molded cucumber jello and cranberry sauce and turkey properly juicy, mashed turnip, cheesed green beans (V Woolf never said what there was to eat did she)[yes she did], some smoked cheese dip with celery, pistachios, almonds, walnuts, brazils. Grapes. Drinks if I'd wanted. Family abundance. The right kind, no thought of cost, no thought of impressing. Natural welcome, no obvious scrutiny. I liked putting a drop of rose oil in the bath and ironing clothes and fixing the strap of the satin camisole, knew I was haggard from reading all of every day, but liked knowing there was a bum behind me I could like to show. To whom. To Carol accumulating mass between breasts and pubes and in a glistening sac under the chin. To any of the boys who'd like to look - they're four years older than when I first felt them. Looking at Chris thinking a few more years and his face won't hurt me. Malice in the thought. But we looked at each other this year, across the table, a long taking-in. He had red rings around his eyes, ecstasy Christmas Eve. And Jeff whose young woman has a son twenty-four, all the sons with older women, except Chris who seems without. And my one - a photo I liked - four men, he's the one on the left closest to the camera. Looks sixteen, a kid's sound face, straight dark eyebrows, red mouth. What moved me about it. As if of someone he still is, who he doesn't look like now. It was a picture of his loving joy and his confidence in it. When have I ever liked unwrapping presents as much as I liked unwrapping those little tissue rectangles, a boxful. Over the summer walking to the garden he collected bits - "no this one isn't ready yet" - filigrees of rust, a beaten slug of aluminum, something red and gold, round and squashed, all with unimaginable provenance, what machine could they possibly have served, how did this ring get folded to a new moon. Extraordinary tiny forms chased to perfection on the roads. That Japanese icon with round arms. And a string of his heritage beans - the pink kidneys and vine red kidneys, soldier beans, Jacob's cattle, black little beans like jet. Also he was medium drunk, excited, talking loud and a lot. I hurt his feelings and he went to lie on the floor by the fire. I made amends and he accepted: went to take hold of his hand, sat feeling the heat in his palm, that goodness regardless of drunk. And Pat sees her son loved and asks no questions. Two years she said since I'd been there - is it? Looking in photo albums for pictures of Rowen. He was there in her family. And what else. Pat's love without sentiment, lucid I'm not sure, but dry. It's as if there aren't covert hatreds in her family. Secular, a secular family. Is that it maybe. A secular family with abundance, like Greg's family without the lowering patriarch. There's death properly present in their feasts. They celebrate. Secular and celebrate. When I go home she packs me a little bag. We swoop cautiously down the black slick loops of three-lane highway, over the bridge, for the first time through the new tunnel. Park at his house. Unbuckle my seatbelt. No I won't come in but I'll give you a good hug. As if I've accepted him more. How do I know that. I wasn't holding onto my reservations. I was a bit nasty about his drunkenness but I wasn't saying it to myself. There were moments when I talked. I talked to him in their presence and they'd pipe up. Or laugh. At the work party I was singing Anne Murray, May I have this dance / For the rest of my life. Can't write that without feeling L feeling it, and not angrily now. I could like her family too, and sit on a couch with her. Enfold. Would she be proud and ardent and want to tell. A father who would have liked me, talking fast to Lieb. Reservations with her sisters. Her mother cordial. A life that isn't here. What it is, is, I do love the people they are. And don't have to belong to anyone. And can love Blackbird too, when I know him, if I do. And even that won't be the end. There was a moment in the kitchen. I found Chris carving fine slices at the counter, with his back to us, Pat stirring gravy, Rob leaning on the corner of the stove. "You'll have to butter up the one who's carving," they say. I'm leaning back against Rob's side, facing Chris's back. "How should I butter him up? I don't know his weaknesses." What about it. The truth all around. 27 It says Blackbird's made up with his beautiful Francie. I mind. It says the thesis can bring me money. And what's going on this morning. Restless. I want something. Haven't looked onto the table yet though it's ten and I've been up since six. Antsy. Sex? Period. A long slick cock. Yes. Kisses. 28 The building from many dreams. I'm climbing into the second floor by a dusty rough staircase. There's a dead owl dried on a beam, it's very dusty, there's a sense someone was killed in this upstairs. I find a brisk older woman with a bucket of hot water. She shows the stove she was able to heat it on. She's washed the spot against the south wall, a pillow. We stand looking at the dirty white walls, high ceilings. I say we should clean it up. She says we should renovate, meaning tear out the old plaster and start with new walls. I say the people who've renovated the rest of the building own this part too. Lean out the window with her to show her the new windows in the wing behind and above this one. There's a sense of the two apartments that are always at the far east end of the building. They're empty maybe. I'm seeing an overview of the yard in front of the building, as if explaining to Rowen. Then walking toward the ground floor. A woman pulling a man by the hand carrying a large rusty key comes through the gate. She has this key from long ago and now she can use it. The feeling is, for an assignation. The bar on the ground floor has just gone out of business. I see the swing door - why not - walk in. Empty floor. Looking at a few of the tables left standing, looking for a good round wooden one. Alongside this room I see a dining room abandoned with glasses still on the tables and serviettes standing in them. Go through the end wall into another room, this must've been the tavern. There are customers still sitting in this long narrow room with tall piles of food partly eaten in front of them. (They stopped eating it seems at the same time as the business shut down - the food looks like a solid with mass carved away from one end.) I look with interest at what they'd ordered. My way's blocked by a turn in the table. I'm going to have to go back and around to get to the door at the far end. This dream followed one about a job. I'm standing on a balcony in a large new building looking down into an open office that's pink all over. Women workers, I see one at a desk, dressed all the same color. They're even wearing pinky-white stockings so as not to jar the harmony. I have been hired here and have a working group of young women. My sense of myself with them is vague, as if I feel I'm their age. They meet and chat here and there. Wash their dishes. What work are they doing? What am I supposed to do? Could I find an office of my own and really work regardless of what they're doing? It seems to be a government job that no one is fired from. There's a filmmaker on the team. His name is --- Conrad. Did I see something of his at the international festival? At the experimental conference? I say I'm a filmmaker too. The man next to Conrad sneers because I've said so. But if we're here developing ways of showing or perceiving, as I'm suspecting from his being on the team, isn't it relevant what I can do? I've been taken into a room with another team, and this one is much better. There are more young men, everyone is more focused, I feel myself my real age. I've somehow been hired in among these young people but it's not unsuitable. Already things are happening that are quite subtle. One of the women says there are 16x2 possibilities for 1x1 connections. As if that's one of the ways we're going to work. - Three in the afternoon, third time the phone rang. Outside it's a clear space of charged light between snow and grey cloud. I'd been joyful in my complex systems notes. "Hello" I say. "Hello" says the man. "Hello - oh it's you," overtop of his saying hello again. "It's very happy to hear from you!" He says he's been depressed. Sara in the hospital, Roy opting out, the kids a sink of responsibility if he's willing. Cold rain. My obvious joy at speaking to him is lifting us both. I don't ask if he's coming back. At the end of January a lecture series on chaos, in Cambridge with Carlos, Miguel, Manuela. His alternate family he won for himself (his version of secular and abundant). "No, I mean I was literally just looking at my chaos notes when you phoned." And he has his copy in front of him. "I was so glad to get my books out." Ranier like Fuji turning under the wing. Irrigation circles near Denver, where snow blew over the runways and he joined a flight from Honolulu, half empty carrying home celebrators in Hawaiian shirts. He could not see New York as they flew out over the sea (how did I know that was the route) but there were so many stars. How is it I assume my spirit is seeing in him too - as if I feel or imagine the space in his head and it's the color and specific density of the space in mine. Do I feel that about anyone else? What it was like speaking to him - is like, thinking of it - is elation. A banner. In the throat, is it? And forehead. 29th Tuesday "To name it and know it belongs to me" : "sad". Hard to know 'lonely' because the minute it comes you disappear into the spot on the wall. It's such a place of no interpretation. I love to be with pink street lights, I love to be with chandeliers. I just sense them and I grasp their system and that's enough. I don't need to know what they had for breakfast. Carol was like a repertoire of acting-normal bit. It was like using the self as a puppet. Willie was like a storage place for all the knowledge. A war strategy. Throw something at them. Keep them moving. I had met some more people who were like me. As Carol and Willie I had sacrificed all relation to my own body. For the times that I get to hold onto a whole self it's worth it. I have to give myself my right to that. I interact with these things. I know myself in relation to these things. I see because of these things so much beauty in nature. All the different colors in the blades of grass. I question whether I do miss .... From having some meaning, to having none at all! And back comes familiarity, ha! I'm back again. Hey! That's a wall. It's more than waking up. It's coming back to life. You say hi! I know you! I could speak but it was all stored things. Still they thought, she can't hear it. I shadow-spoke. As the person speaks, you speak as them. You can speak. And I try to understand what I would mean saying what they were saying. I was meaning-deaf and meaning-blind. Donna Williams 1992 Nobody nowhere: the extraordinary autobiography of an autistic Doubleday 30 Wednesday, the moment of dawn that's shades of blue on the snow roof, on the white apartment building, soaked in the sky. A fluorescent white-blue with black and with spots of color from other worlds altogether. The orange fire in electric lights. The cat quiet staring out. It's eight o'clock and no one in this neighbourhood is awake - the houses are all unlit. No one in the park. But crows ferrying back and forth shouting. The streetlights just went off. Aaaaww Aaaaaawwwww. Scratchy jumps to the window and whips the end of his tail. What's the sadness. It came last night when I wrote him. When I had written him. A simple exercise. See who I will be if write what I have to say to him. If there is something I have to say. At this moment it came when I thought, "I'll have to be him." Because he won't be with me. She gave me a word for what happens to me with people: autism. There's more to find. Not concentrating though I'm in this room - does it need - candied fruit - a walk - a touch. Real tea. 31st/1st January 1993 I always like the ships' horns, all the years. Sitting in bed with my journal hearing it begin. Slow and dull these morning, what is it - my brain isn't in overdrive yet - get out - do something to the hubcaps. Needing to paraphrase to get anything down on state space math. What I've got is very sloppy. But it's nine, ten, pages. What can you tell me about this writing? You have to hack out this early stuff, don't worry you'll fix it when you've got your speed. Keep moving and just lay down your base in math. You'll have threads to pick up when you need them, and when you know what you've picked up you'll know how to set the start. But don't bluff. Write with a sense of the limit of what you know. In the morning get started by writing something on the typewriter - whatever has come to you overnight. Don't lose your early mornings. Have tea only if you have to. When you've done the math section go over it quickly and then do the analog-digital using its terms. Do yoga at midday too. Long stretches at night. Phone Randy and Larry. More vegetables, less meat fat. Green vegetables. Better cooked. 3 A group of men who're blowing up the world. We're in and near high snowy mountains. They are up there somewhere - men I know, tall literate types. One I might have liked. Everyone in the world is dead, all the villages everywhere. I'm looking at photographs, two little boys (next to a piano I think); one of them is mine. She says, This one is still alive. I'm not certain which she meant. There's a sacred place somewhere among the peaks. Something about it and the men. Seeing it like a cemetery. A very small patch of ground with wreaths standing and knocked over, a sprinkler and hose. Didn't say a dream some mornings ago, it seems about writing. I was painting, or seeing paint itself, the head of a Sikh man with white turban and beard. Turban and beard are painted as clouds on top of something like a National Geographic photo. The head faces right. I see that on the facing page another image has been painting itself. It's something like this one in its shapes but it's not a face, it's more like actual clouds, or something abstract. Scratchy in the corridor playing hockey with the new packet of elastic. Thick quiet snow. Gulls and crows. Silent. A tiny whistle from the interstitial middle of the coffee maker. Barley brew foaming up. Last night when I quitted the table I sat as I do with the new typewriter on my lap in bed. The Christmas tree plugged in put colors and feather shadows, many sources, complexly overlaid on the corner walls. Oh Scratchy at the window rattling her mouth at a bird - have I ever heard that? He sees a gull white turning through white. Ha! Starling on the wire. In falling white the neighbourhood houses: blue, green, pink, grey. The fences: red, brown, an old red greened over with moss. It's Sunday. (I have a week left.) What kind of bird is he? A crow in his bright black eye. There is a kind of blackbird, the golden-eye, that is compact like him. When he looks at you, you always know it. What kind of bird. One with a blue shine on the wing as it dips from roof to tree. A local bird. A singer? Is he a singer? Yes he sings in the truck. How does he sing? Plainly, you'd like to hear. The candle flames. Sentient and unspeakable. I'd like to write something that would carry me into the place in his solar plex that's like them. A tethered flame pulling and drifting on its stem. Like a flame off the sun, a tethered center of consumption. That burns a hole in the black back of my eye. Golden-eyed blackbird. What kind of bird. What sort of night. A night with stillness for miles. A moon with a cloud beside it. Not a full moon. The sort of light there is in the sky around a cloud, and the sort of silence there is in the bushes: that's you. The way the sky around the moon holds light, it's like the shining of the air around the candles too. That's you. The solid silver of the mirror across the room. The way when I see your eye - it is your eyes - when I see your eye on me - when I see that I'm in your eye, I'm glad. - It's snowing at a steady serious pace. At the speed of time passing I want to say. The hemlocks in that old woman's yard; and the big pear beside them, in thick coats. The many upper arms of the hemlock stirring weightedly. There's a black car stuck in the alley, spinning its wheels. The car door opens and a young Chinese man looks out. Is he going to decide to dig finally? He's getting in worse. I'm laughing. It's a new little car. Hyundai. Now he's bashed his fender into the old stove. He's going to dig himself out with his ice scraper. RRrmm. Someone's come to help. Lori with a garden spade. They put the baby in the car. Her friend is going to drive it out. This house is warm when it snows, cold when it rains. I'm avoiding the table. Yesterday in a Far Eastern gear shop on Commercial I was trying on silver and gold thread mirrored vests, wearing my laundry jeans, and I saw my bum so tight and round and perfectly nice that I wanted to flash it all around the department. It's the cut of those RG Browns but it's the yoga mainly. - The sky when I woke this morning, the sky tonight again, near midnight, live shining white, uniform luminous ivory-white. (Why aren't we adapted to see in the dark?) Mary phoning to ask if I know why Liz's phone is out of service. So crooked a spirit - she says Jennifer is immature and, ... er (long hesitations) ... wanting to be involved in romantic love. "Sex you mean." Yes. - Oh I can't be bothered to tell the whole tale. She won't phone Eliz's mom because they misunderstand her. If she'd have known Liz was going to read that letter she'd have phrased it differently. Oh these kids, she says again. Dreary and something else - evil-ly averted. She does not want to know that Jennifer is stunned with irrelevance in her presence ("She doesn't want to talk"), or that Eliz is putting off giving out her new number, or that bad Rudy is more alive than she is, or that I'm despising her for being willing to live as a suck. 4 There was a tune this morning. Later I realized it was Courage of Lassie. Later I remembered the phrase, Leise -- -- das Schnee [schuttert]. And later saw how the tune is blown lightly sideways before it slips, a moment of loft before it sinks. Tonight it's a black sky, Arctic air. 5 I've written fifty pages not knowing where I'm going, have five days left, panicking. Don't know what the thesis is about - what do I have - some motives and intimations - they're going to expect a philosophy paper and I can't do that sort of philosophy. I have some chunks of things I looked at. Which. What engineers said 'analog' means. They meant various of the things that analog computers are like. And then some things that analog communications systems are like and then people looking at the distinction apply it to things that aren't either computers or transmission systems. It gets more general until it seems to pick up all the grand dichotomies going. I'm assuming that analog and digital computers are similar in some ways and are different in a number of ways, and that it's as futile to try to nail down the analog/digital distinction as it is to try to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a 'game.' The contrast has had and (in a new form, I will argue) continues to have an important oppositional role in discussions about how we should talk about the functioning of human nervous systems. The analog/digital distinction is not important in itself, But there is something to be understood about the way that analog computers work - the way they compute - that is important, because they seem to provide us with an alternative picture of what representation and computation might be, and, indeed, with an alternative sense of what language we should be speaking when we attempt the discussion. Notions of 'digital' are quite uniform and well understood, but 'analog' gives us trouble. It is vague, compendious, and not anchored to a particular, specific, ubiquitous and ascendant technology the way 'digital' is. So I am going to look at the ways 'analog' is used, first in the communications engineering community. I am looking first at the engineering community, because it is helpful to ground the term in the technologies that were its context of origin. Engineers are not concerned with providing definitions that will withstand bizarre counterfactuals, and their definitions frankly accommodate the range and overlap which characterize our intuitive senses of a term. I am taking this as a virtue, because it will allow me to lay out some of the several dimensions of what 'analog' means in practice. This in turn will allow me to show how and why philosophers can carve the concept in the various ways they do. My larger intention is a defense of the cognitive alternative originally suggested by the existence of analog computers. Some of those who have defended the idea of analog cognition have been ineffectual because they were missing parts of the picture that have arrived since. I believe the development of parallel distributed processing models supports, extends and refines the oppositional role played by earlier pictures of analog computation. This is not to say that parallel distributed processing is analog processing, or even generally like analog processing. What I am going to suggest is that analog computing and PDP models can play something like the same oppositional role in the face of classical, digital cognitivism, because they are both pictures of non-symbolic computation. This amount to saying that what is cognitively important in the analog/digital debate is just what is important in the connectionist/language of thought debate - the question of whether or not we have to think of creature computation as employing a symbol system, and further, whether or not the modes of discourse we have developed to talk about operations in formal systems are suitable when we are talking about what brains do, or whether another kind of discourse would enable us to understand more. Analog computers are uncommon engines now, so I will begin with a description of what they are, what they do, and how they do it. I will use Nelson Goodman's specifications of requirements for symbolic codes to show that they are symbol-describable but not symbol-using, and to show what this has to do with mathematical continuity. More than one kind and locus of continuity is cited in engineering definitions of 'analog'; also important are notions of physicality, implicit representation, material implication, and analogy. Analogy is a tricky one: just what is analogous about analog computation? This question will require a section of its own, as will a discussion of transducers. Philosophers' use of 'analog' falls into two general camps. There is a rationalist line of argument - from Lewis through Fodor and Block, Pylyshyn, to Demopoulos - that wishes to support the autonomy of psychology as a special science by emphasizing the language-like aspects of cognition. And this group defines analog computation as law-governed rather than rule-governed: in other words, as physical and not properly mind-like. Another group, which in the empiricist style wishes to naturalize psychology (and philosophy) by emphasizing the evolutionary and developmental and perception-like aspects of intelligence, defines analog computation as computation by working models - computation by means of analogous structure. This group includes Bobrow, Sloman and Boden. Another group, which includes Kosslyn, Rollins, Sloman, and Boden, define analog computation as the operation of working models - computation by mean of analogous structure. Analogy of structure can, of course, be modeled formally, and most of this group is not opposed to rationalist cognitivism. Those who, in the empiricist style, wish to naturalize psychology (and philosophy) by emphasizing the evolutionary and developmental and perception-like aspects of intelligence, cannot get any mileage out of analogous computation unless they show that analogy of structure is modeled in creatures without the use of symbol systems, and that, perhaps, it is just what makes such computation possible. A common argument from the rationalist camp says that anything an analog computer can do without explicit programs or symbol elements can also be done, although differently, by a digital computer. Any real numbered value can after all be approximated to, at any fineness of grain we choose, by a rational number. This is probably correct, and it can be granted at the outset. What is at issue, however, it is not whether cognition can be described, or simulated, by digital computers: anything that can be modeled mathematically can be modeled in base2 notation, even a gust of wind or a topological transformation. What is at issue is whether the mind-brain is a digital computer: whether representation and processing in the brain are what they are in a digital computer. The issue is important politically, because, if we think of human cognition as digital computation, then we will also think of those things a digital computer does easily as being central to human intelligence: we will think of the kinds of people who are good at what computers do easily, as being the most intelligent, and even the most human. Quite a lot is at stake. If human beings are not digital computers, and if human cognitive virtue is of a different kind from digital competence, then we could misunderstand our own capability and fail to be as intelligent as we might be. Current opposition to the view that the brain is a digital computer takes two forms, which I believe are compatible with each other. Direct perception theorists such as Gibson believe that perceptual cognition is not computation at all, but what they mean by this is that it is not propositional - it does not involve strings of symbols. Connectionists such as Hinton, Sejnowsku, Cussins, and the Churchlands have begun to work out ways non-symbolic representation and inference could be understood. I will show what these views have in common with views that make analog computing an alternative picture of physical information processing. In the process it will become clearer that the several aspects of analogicity we have discerned are all relevant to the issue, if they are understood in the right way. The analog/digital contrast has been a useful contrast, although it is more accurate to call it the symbolic/nonsymbolic contrast. [When computers were first ...] When we talk about an analog computation we have to talk about hardware, because there is no program per se. The machine consists of "a moderate to large number of functional modules, based on operational amplifiers, that perform such operations as summation, inversion, integration, and nonlinear function generation." (Campbell et al, 382) In the early days these components would be strung together by hand, later patchboards were provided. The setup was generally thought of as implementing a differentiative equation or a set of simultaneous equations. Potentiometer settings would provide parameter values. An oscilloscope or pen plotter would generally graph the solutions. Analog computers were generally used to model dynamical systems - physical, chemical, electrical. They could, for instance model the response of the suspension system of a car to various levels of stress. This kind of modeling presupposes a good understanding of the physical properties both of the modeled system and of the components of the analog model. Our knowledge of physical laws is used to determine the form of the equation implemented by analog components and their connections along with input and coefficient variations. [To construct a math analogy ...] So an analog set-up is a physical implementation of a mathematical description of another physical system. It is an analogy in the strict sense defined by Robert Rosen (1991, 119) who says that two natural (ie physical) systems are analogous when they realize a common formalism. I will have more to say about this later. Analog computation has found a new use recently in what has been called experimental mathematics. Linear time-invariant systems are the tractable part of dynamical studies. [Linear time-invariant systems ...] Nonlinear and time-varying systems are another matter. A system is nonlinear if even one system component changes its characteristics as a function of excitation applied, the way viscosity changes as a function of pressure, or friction as a function of acceleration: if even one system component changes over time, the way medium-frequency radio transmission changes over the course of a day due to changes in the reflectivity of the ionosphere, then the system is time-varying. Neither nonlinear nor time-varying systems can be described by means of linear time-invariant differential equations. Nonlinear systems, in which variable are mutually dependent, require the use of nonlinear differential equations; and time-varying require the use of partial differential equations. Both sorts of equations are generally insoluble by analytic means. Here the principle of superposition does not hold. [Rather than solve them ...] Although global solutions can seldom be found for nonlinear and partial differential equations, there are ways of finding solutions for individual values of variable, and analog computers, if correctly configured to model mutual dependencies among variables, can solve these more complex systems almost as easily as linear time-invariant systems. The new mathematics of nonlinear dynamics has found analog computers a sensitive, direct, hands-on means of exploring the global behavior of a complex equation by plotting its behavior over a wide range of values (Gleick p 244). At times the aim of this exploration is purely mathematical: we want to see how an equation will behave over a range of possible models of complex physical systems, and then analog computers may have unexpected virtues: [In the qualit ...] 6 Midnight of Wednesday, today it seems to be constructing. I learned my way by writing it here. Finding own thought that was there from the beginning and has been the interest that searched out parts - thank you. Something missing. Scratchy went with Michael and Rowen in a suitcase. Michael and I in such good grace. We're safe, he's on his way. Rowen strange with me when he came in. Sitting on the bottom step looking at the cat, can't remember to take off his boots and come upstairs. Two big new teeth with serrated edges. I made him read my letter aloud, guessing when he doesn't know. I loved the way he read and laughed aloud before the end of the phrase when he came to the part about Scratchy throwing the piece of raw fish into the air and catching it with his paws. Then he was sitting against my legs without thinking. Familiar. Forgetting he's been unfaithful and wants to be more so. Where are his animated strips? "They're on Read." Saying it already like a native. Mittens and hat and day pack, Michael has to assemble him. Michael who was just like that and has half grey hair. He's giving me his partly broken piano. Is that a good idea? Alright, sleep. But there was more today. Ice edges or chunks of granular refrozen snow nine inches deep on the car. Digging out the windshield with folded cardboard and a garbage can lid. And the man at Circling Dawn. The cook, small, spare, fifty, New York Italian with beautiful eyelids. I like to look at him and am stunned with boredom when he fixates me with enthusiasm for spelt flour. A mountain at Silverton in the Kootenays. Eating chile and listening suspiciously to hippy girls' talk about Saturn conjunction and growing your hair. I mind them in the same way I did when they were my generation. Their stupid language. Thurs 7th Why do I mind that Nureyev died? Yesterday. - Have I just collapsed the thing? 8th 5:50 AM Analog doesn't use symbols, it is causal, it is computational in the sense that it comes up with systematic variations that can be used to predict. Continuity is physicality is analogy. Continuous math is never continuous - it is a form of rep function ie continuous math is causal not coded. Digital is symbols is code because we're looking at the description; math when we do it is symbols is always discrete, math from a code implemented top down will be a map of a process which skips the relevance of continuity in the causal process. Connectionist physical/material implication also can be continuous, can be continuous math. Can represent, can predict, a working model known from inside. It's related to category theory in this way. The formalism by which the thing is analogous can be many levels of detail, very fine-grained, very coarse-grained, a whole category of formal structures mappable onto each other. The last one - there may be formal descriptions at the end that are not computable, not Turing computable, and which then are not digital. This makes analog the larger category, digital a subcategory of analog. - I am, I am: an efficient machine for turning O Henry's into pages of prose. About 43 so far. I've loved this day. Dedicated. 5:30 solar plex woke me loudly. I was writing. Don't lie there, light the candle. Look at the time. Turn on the light, take up the journal, write what it says. The moment beginning to write when I realize sleep thought it was more than it is. Or else something has been lost between then and now. Pick up where I left off last night at midnight (then yoga 'til 1, I'd been so intent I was partitioned - vibrating with black electricity). Write rapidly 'til I have to eat. Run bath water. Rapidly make meatballs to cook in chicken broth left in yesterday's roasting pan. It's daylight. Don't turn on the radio. Put marrow and broccoli in with the boiling soup. Get in the bath. Always the pleasure of hot water. Get out, get dressed, wash one of the good bowls, dish up the soup. Take it into the warm room. (Close the vent in the bedroom first, so the flowers won't dry out.) Pick up Johnson-Laird. It seems alright to just keep going from what I did this morning. Write. Do I need to eat again? Salad. It's noon. Eat in the big chair looking out. Now I have to finish up with Sloman. Cup of tea? Yes. Not more than one. Write 'til it's done. Now I'll type the pile since last night, see whether they connect. Read them through. Candace has the family baby downstairs. Israeli folk music, that means. Keep going 'til I'm caught up. A lot of pages. Take them to the warm room table. Order them. number them. 12. That's the length of a normal essay, which will never seem long again. Now. I'm thinned right out, exhausted. Hot water. Lie there. A bright planet. The sky dark dark clear dark blue, turquoise and salmon pink. Warm enough to go lie down. Turn off the bed lamp. Unplug the Christmas tree. Get in and pull the covers up to my chin. Remove the pillow. Dark aches and buzzes a lot of places. Feel them. Feel the breath in the throat. Think of Blackbird in green army pants and a red sweater, getting up early and sitting at a computer with headphones on. His beautiful hands. Pangs in the kidneys. That's the tea and chocolate bars (I've been running sweat today.) Farther away. I can't remember where, but I was awake. Quite far. Realizing it, come back. I'm awake. Did it go as far as sleep? It wasn't long. I feel amazingly delicious all over. Lie here? No, get up. Plug in the tree, pull up the covers. Heat the soup, eat it. At the table looking at what I have to do next, which is pick up the section on analogy I left 'til after I did part II. Chocolate bar? I'd thought not, but yes. Put coat over undershirt, blue flannel pyjama pants. Pink socks. Gumboots. Leave door on the latch. Come down the ice hollows on the sides of the stairs, holding on. Ice path. Coming to the gate the security light switches on, shines on my back, over my shoulder. Leave the gate open. The bare rectangle where my car was when it snowed. Store man alone in the shop. Eighty-five cents precounted, honours student killed in freak accident on school outing to Blackcomb. Photograph of a high school girl with long brown hair. The bright planet. The moon - the full moon! Oh with a smudge of light over it, but the face of its continents clear. White and high, over RayCam's ugly towers. I'll walk around the block. Looking at houses, each one, their lights, that I don't know and know. Fresh air. Clear black, that nice clear black. Walk slowly on sidewalks glazed in front of some buildings, cleared in front of others, telling stories of who's who. Sense of the open paths of the neighbourhood, that I don't take. Have been eating chunks of the chocolate bar, putting the rest, in its wrapper, in my book pocket. Come upstairs into the warm. Sit at the table with the last half of it. Eating it very thoroughly. Start at the top. What do I have. Numbered piles. It's 6:30. Write, erase, small writing on the graph pad. It goes. Look at number 1. It isn't going to go. Ten o'clock. Stop? Yes. Close things down. Lids on the pens. Vent open. Kitchen light off. There's a sliver I have to get out. Bedroom lights on. Candles lit. The beautiful supernaturally beautiful blue and blue and blue and yellow iris have curled their exquisite edges because it was warm in the room these four hours. I want to say something too about how well organized all of this is. I've got rid of everyone; I could get rid of everyone. I have enough money, or access to. There is nice equipment helping me - the red towels, bowls, the organic vegetables, my blue undershirt. The fact that Rob brought me flowers yesterday "because you're working." The array of vitamins and supps. The typewriter that remembers whole rows of words to erase them and has a tab that works and a shift lock. The bedroom for emotional life. Luke's room with rows of signifying piles round the sides. A big table for work in progress. Another table for the whole thesis, rows for the sections, slots to be filled with paper-clipped pages. Kitchen with the typewriter on a pad. The high octane high technology of an O Henry. The knowledge of when to eat it, on top of a protein meal. The lights to turn off and on. Heat systems for the middle room and this one. The fact that I can see it will be done, I can see beyond. Moments writing when I think of the initiation of duality. Feeling professionally initiated. Last night when I came upon the collapse of digital into analog by surprise. 9 Didn't want to stop last night. Wanted to thank for the snow. A Saturnalia of quiet, the interstitial days of the calendar, the week between Christmas and New Year - extended. But woke this morning with sore palms. It's a sign of something. - Midnight. 54 pages. Hours on the last half page. Stuck on Lewis. 10 Patience got me past it this morning. In the sun in the red chair. Go through it again. There's a definition I missed. Lewis, Fodor and B, Demop, done. Pylyshyn ahead. Then exposition is over. Bought some more days [from Louie] by sending flowers. The card was not easy. Scrutinizing my words and still am. Teaching tomorrow. Don't forget Paul's dream. I had been diving in a deep Egyptian lake and I had found an ancient artifact - a thing like a scratching post for a cat, a post on a base. A religious icon like a cross, encrusted with jewels. I offer to share it with him but he wants to dive for himself, find something of his own. What I've thought is that he's competing with his unconscious. Like Louie does. His wise being maybe. I sometimes say things she would say if she were allowed to. 11th Monday 5:30 Don't know whether Rob will remember to wake me, so I had to get up. Two hours of quiet ahead. I mean, bathed, dressed, fed, lunch made, teaching prepped, moonlight on the hall floor by the west window, sound of wind at the heating vent like a breath of life. Hello Luke. These days I lie down to sleep and some time in my past comes back to me.
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