| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 3 - 1993 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
12th January 1993 Dreaming I'm somewhere with Louie. A place where my bed has been changed, a slanting shelf, not on the right side of the room. I want to send her away for good and I'm going to tell her she's a boring girl, she's less intelligent than I am and it cramps me to be with her. How much I liked the time when I was away from her. I'm watching Trudy with Rhoda. It seems I've sent Trudy away and she's back with Rhoda, and I do feel it a loss, as if my life has fallen into a vacantness. There was much more. I woke and lay thinking about the questions I'd taken to bed, said those dreams were probably about them, and my body sighed. What was it. What happens on the other side of the transducer - the signal takes the externally imposed form of the code - it feels like colonization - why am I blank - it was thinking away and has stopped, because I got up first - the questions are what's the difference between the way an analog computer computes and the way a neural net computes? If an analog computer had its components and wiring changing in relation to experience it would be connectionist. That difference - reconfiguration of the hardware with experience - and not needing storage. Could the digital computer be reconfigured with experience? Switches? If it was, what would be its relation to the code? I don't know whether the code would be at a loss because it depends on the machine being exactly-so. If the machine changed it would be as if a compiler had reset a bunch of switches rather than reordering the data. Changed their thresholds. It would not be the same program. The inferences would come out different. Yeah why not. Or it couldn't run at all. That's what I wonder - is there an inadaptability, a systematicity that sez if you change one thing the whole is out of whack - I think so. Is this a difference that amounts to analogicity? There's still a proportionality of effect with respect to outside? Impossible to say. We don't have a sense of what's being <represented> apart from it - of what's being presented, apart from it - what about in our baby systems, vowels pronounced - there's a correspondence question - what's it doing, not representing but sorting, dividing and connecting. You can say the weights represent the signal because they would simulate if set off without input. That pattern presents that signal. The relations of weight spaces can be seen as representing similarity net - all at once. Connectionist is easier to see as presenting. Digital and analog both are representing - in other words, they're doing it for us, in relation to our system neural net has inherent semantics - more so. - Thinking people want to love in a different way than they want to be loved. They want to love in a way that puts them in touch with the gifts of their young circuits. They want to be loved in ways that allow them to love in that way, that's the whole story. Louie doesn't want to love me in a way that will allow me to love her in that way, so she's useless to me. Rob and I do sort of allow each other to love in that way. What difference has the day on the hill made? I was friendly, available, unfocused. Came off it wanting to blank out, eat, sit in a café. When I got to work hours later I didn't have focus and even today, thinking about personalities and stuff like the above. Losing intent. What's the way to do it. Mondays - onto the hill and off fast. Wednesday, long day, do something after. Prepare for people. Film called The day. 13 Rowen in a deep bath, candlelight and foam, paddling, singing. Looking at National Geographic with him, he's so quick to see how anything in a picture would work, what people are doing, but when he moves a bowl to open the door he doesn't move it far enough and crashes. Teaching. Do I have a single bright pushy female student? Nice boys I look at too much. Boys in the corridor with long hair. Beauty. The boy grad students: wanted to be in an office with Lou and Paul not Randy and dull Armin, and absolutely not with Barb and Lauren. Kind of liking the other Dave, the delicate point he has on his chin. Had a chance to grope him, nearly running into him at the corner, and did, outrageously, I guess. Liked it. Bragging to Lou about hitching alone through Turkey, exaggerated how long I was there. 14 Watching again how before I wake I'm thinking about work in one voice, which is a steady level neutral voice, and then when I realize I'm thinking another voice crashes in, which is a loud social voice much stupider-sounding, and in this voice I can't remember what I was thinking. It was about analog signals and digital packets and their relation. Something like, that if the analog signal can't be seen as symbols it can't at the same time be instantiating (?) yet another language from elsewhere. The feeling was of a code riding on a code, beamed onto a code from higher up and off to the side. Which side. The way a formal language can be mapped onto any other formal language, and a language can only be mapped onto something that's antecedently partitioned. - Rowen last night in his undershirt and pyjama bottoms, another kind of body than he's had, a boy's long strong shape with a solid bum. He was making pop-out cards and had in mind a room with a window through which you can see a man on a chair. Couldn't figure out how to do the facing wall. Wants me to help. I'm in my bed wanting to read about Hopfield nets but get interested in the problem. Okay, maybe this way. Two folds instead of one, cut across, fold it back, glue it on a backing. There's the room. He skips with joy. Oh so nicely and innocently. "I really like doing projects with other people not by myself." Kneeling on the rug talking about Read. "Michael said ever since I was a baby he wanted that for me" - to live in the country. A serious moment. "It's because he grew up in the country and he liked it so much. He wanted you to have it too. And I grew up in the country too and I liked it very much and wanted you to have it." For goodnight hug he lies down carefully on top of me. In the morning when I'm getting out of the bath he comes in to pee and jeers at my breasts (Lise's are bigger), "Your tiny little..." I'm put out - will I hold back? - "Well your penis isn't very big either. Is it." 15 A day of dullest slog, 36 pages fine copy took all day, aching and so stupid I could hardly revise a sentence. The writing before it catches at about 35 pages on is one word slabbed down after another, not a sentence with a springy spine. A dream that kept coming back through the day, Art Pape and Maxine, their house. I'm in an upper floor looking at something, don't remember what. They have another child since I knew them, a boy who's in bed. The two daughters with their profiles together, very similar and strong black-eyed black-eyebrowed young women. It has just occurred to me that it is their marriage I dream them for, the marriage visible in the two daughters, a native woman and a Jewish man, the man autonomous enough to marry into another tribe, across a categorical boundary. The woman beautiful and lucid. I once dreamed Doris Lessing lived upstairs in their big house. Was remembering Arthur's kindly look last time I met him on the street. He'd been doing legal work on land claims in the Northwest Territories. Remembering him today feeling the unexpected patience of that conversation. The dream wasn't easy, it was as if I was reading his journal when they came home and I had to leave uneasily. Seeing Jada and her sister on the way down. 3rd floor. 2nd floor. There was a later dream that had an apartment building with a woman on the top floor growing vegetables in vast greenhouses. Downstairs a dirty backwater of the inlet with a large tree shading it. I came to the building through a parking garage. A car took a short cut through the window and down onto the grass bank. Black tire streaks. Later I tell the story and am running it again, driving north off the bridge, turn hard left across the traffic to avoid getting caught in one-way streets, the parking garage, the window, but this time the bank much farther below. 16 In bed with my horse. It's bigger than I am but I'm feeling I can trust it. If I hold the rein and stand on a box it will stay still so I can get onto its back. It turns a loving face. I'm saying 'it' because I wasn't thinking of its gender. It had a female feeling like June, but as we're shifting our bodies in the night's restlessness I'm wondering whether I'll encounter a penis. The restlessness is sexual, body surfaces keep moving. Tarzan naked charging through the snow with muscles flopping, calling to the wolves, who come round him, people dressed in summer clothes. Four under the belly of a semi-trailer on good bikes like couriers. They all have to scatter. Trailers parked with insulating air-filled walls that get deflated and peeled back when the campers wake. A remembrance demonstration at the edge of a cemetery. I'm assigned a job before the ceremony. I'm supposed to write on the sidewalks in peanut butter. A list of slogans. "Companions and friends" I think is one. Sunday 17th A red poppy uncreasing, the furry bud falls off. It's slow-mo and in brilliant white light and shows every crystal, 35mm. And there are some shadows on white paper, the grain of the paper
Susan Sontag on Eleanor Wachtel's program stammering, allowing herself to stammer and hesitate, and then again long splendid rolls of prose assurance. A mastectomy. Her father died when she was five, in another country; she wasn't informed. She's posthumous. A firm level uningratiating voice. When she reads her work there are words she sets into place in a way no punctuation could indicate. And oh silly Prince Charles, I like that he's been so goofy for sex with a not very beautiful old friend, forsaking the perfect princess and losing the throne probably - "Oh God I should just live inside your trousers." I like the end of privacy making monarchy obsolete. He can't just say he doesn't feel like being king but he can blow it. 18 Monday night. The window rattling in the frame, which it hasn't done for a month at least. This 6 weeks in isolation, month of snow that has been dirty ice for weeks. As if it will melt when the thesis is done. Monday night - I taught this morning, and must again on Wednesday; Louie on Friday night; marking next week. Or it will melt and the thesis won't be done. What I have left: Pylyshyn, nets and brains and connectionism, and summary. Amounts to 3 papers. What do I need from Pylyshyn? His relation to the philosophy of mind questions. His notion of analog and how it sets up those other. What it means that he's interested in program as medium. Show how a certain take on analog goes with a whole list of other things. 19 Dark early morning, window still thumping, here I am under the lamp, so reluctant. My skin is sore. Into the press again. What would I rather do. Nothing, but what am I hanging back from. Moon is waning sliver, was, before the sky shut down. Early period coming on. Getting ragged, body and intent, and it isn't done yet. Not in touch with my black and bright or my own soft spirits. (Is that the seven o'clock whistle? My clock is lost.) All this long ordeal and it isn't like a finished paper, it will go on. An initiation, sure, but am I initiated into what I want to be. The hideous department where there isn't a man apart from Bjorn who will respond to anything I say. And Bjorn will be more careful since I asked him to be my moral tutor, he'll be worried I'll claim his time. -
- Then in the post a card from L saying 8 PM or phone. There was a line about a revelation. I take it as a warning. The universe of personal fear opens. Three kinds of threat, that are threats of the same pain, clear to see - clear to see - why my body sighs yes when I say it's more peaceful without her - of the dissolution of the defenses current. Bought a clock. The little Sharp for ten? years - but this one is too simple. "Standing up on any table by the time it leaves here / by itself / lovely shadows by night / when I'm home." Terrorized, and it isn't her fault though she amplifies it. - What am I seeing - that loving boys has always saved me from the crucifying treachery of women - and that other women have their identities safe by just that transfer - and that I have it complicated in two ways - by a much more global treachery, and by having the transfer to father blocked by the nature of mine. - And that men are more vulnerable and maybe more driven/mad by the nature of their personal choice. So I'm like men in being more vulnerable and more driven/mad. - Dear you - I haven't seen you for such a long time I'm not feeling you now, though sometimes in a day I'll think of something about you I like. The way you came in and looked at things, the way you're active and autonomous but not aggressive. You're alert and have space around you, you're not hustling because you know you'll miss things. How is your quest, how is your free time? What do you do in your days? Do you go somewhere for coffee, where I could find you on weekday mornings when everyone is elsewhere? Sitting across a table from you in a café - would I want to fall silent and feel the air? Silence of relief. Silence to feel the standing light of heart. And then would you notice? And know what it was. No, you would think you should ask me something. I am thinking of the escalations of bravery there can be when people feel each other. I would say something it frightened me to say and you to hear. Is it true I'm not feeling you? I'm feeling what it would feel like to feel you. If I saw you - when I see you - it will be there - and you will remember it too. There'll never be a time in the rest of our lives when I see you and don't feel you. 20 Wednesday the work day. Coming into the department after Larry's lecture. I see your back at the xerox machine. Have to get my stuff fast and go to my tutorial. Coming through again, your back. The difficulty of saying your name aloud. A loud syllable. You're slow to turn. What are you thinking. You liked the book [I lent]. I go to my tutorial, the kids will think my hand is shaking because I'm nervous of them. When I have them discussing in two's I'm there with my eyes closed and is it the first time I imagine I'm this close to your chest, to your thin upper arm. The moment of sinking forward, acceding. I have to hold that moment together with the ones I've had this winter, a way the flesh of my forearm mottles and puckers. 21st Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday - four days of thesis. There in the corner a teddy bear stood on its head, Rowen left me a joke. I liked how persistent he was putting the typewriter ribbon cassette back together, its little logical parts. I heard him from my bed, "This is very frustrating." His beautiful little ski-jump nose and the way his haircut is grown out enough to peak down into the hollow between tendons on the back of his neck. The way he looked in black leggings and wide-necked black sweatshirt. Here I'm noticing a buzz at the back of my thigh, thinking of the mole there, wondering about the resignation I seem to be feeling at the thought of fatality - what is that? As if I should ask my body what it would need to be more interested in going on. Recovery. Archeology of Venus. Has him and breasts and pink and a cellar and a book. The snow has melted, it's moon-dark, pre-period, I worked like a fire today and finished Pylyshyn all but a half page. Mary called and I burnt right through her, quite liked her. The phone rang and I shouldn't have answered it - it's her, I said. She blew it. The fury didn't arrive 'til after I'd hung up. I didn't like her voice, no, or the way she said "I'm really pooped." But afterwards my heart shook with rage. "She needed to blow it, she needed to blow it." Marching down the hall. A rage like fear. I keep writing. Phone her. She's not at home. Laiwan's voice with its porous attention. I call back and leave a message I know will pass the rage to her. (Though it isn't gone from here.) She phones when she gets in. Her densest hardest most South African voice. She doesn't understand. She says I don't understand. She has made weeks of sacrifice, in her sense of it - she did what I asked. No, her sense of it is really not that she held off from pestering me but that she obeyed me for six weeks, she says eight. "Beautiful, intuitive solutions Thursday." I was looking at the date yesterday thinking, what is this date. Now I remember. It's my day of exile. So both of us are blowing it each for our own reasons. I will not knock on her door tomorrow night. I have Joyce for Tuesday. Will I be in pain by then? I could be now - it's here - I'm afraid if I allow it it will make me act wrongly to keep it going when I should let it drop. No - if I'd had the sense not to answer the phone tonight or tomorrow. I could have known she'd have to try. But did I really expect to sit in her room tomorrow? I thought maybe turn off the light and just listen to her. I would have had to be so careful what I say. What should I do with the pain when it hits. Be active, it said. She doesn't understand that it's an issue of trust. And oh the grinding is here again, protest and defense, the voice I was so glad not to be. But it will fade. Something will go out of things, though. It has already gone out of the Christmas tree, a fullness given by love in reserve. It will go out of Rob and Dave too, that's the irony. But go in peace Louie. Not my monster forever. The new clock. Found the old one though. It's one in the morning. 22nd And then I dreamed not Louie but Rob. I thought Christmas was days past, but it's tonight, now. A gathering where we're learning about classification, a number system like the Dewey decimal that allows adding on at front and back. Rob has brought in a man to teach it to the group. I don't want to be bothered learning the details about 0's and 8's. Someone saying Kerry and his girlfriend added some quality to the meditation though they're not impressive. As if a lost night. Do I have my keys so I can take the car home? In my handbag, yes. I get into the white rowboat and shove off toward shore - the one shove beaches me so hard the keel breaks open, I've wrecked the skiff. But then I have to move fast out of the way of a huge black freighter that's breeching hard behind us, three quarters of its length on shore and writhing. A college radio station? Or some gathering with its people. Tall fair-haired young man walks in wearing close-fitting plaid, a shirt and a kilt. He has the sort of wide flat light triangular chest that's beautiful on men. Has a German name like Lothar but a narrow fine head I take it is Scots. He bustles into the control booth in front of me, sits down, has an air of knowing his business. He's a DJ for some program I take it. It's early morning of the day after our sprawl with the numbers man, passing Rob's door I see his arm off the edge of his bed, he's asleep. I'll go in, a giggle of embarrassment from Catherine curled up behind him. Did you hear us? he asks. A meditation they were making up together. He's moved over to make room for me on the bed and I could lie down too. I know I'm welcome. Thinking about Louie that we should do it in a cleaner way, there should be some agreement that doesn't leave us sealed. We should break off but I'm thinking of the video and how she has custody of the DAT tapes. And I owe her $400 I don't have. And I want to finish the thesis before I have to handle abandonment grief. And I'm thinking of the moment when Dave Carter asks me how I'm doing and I tell him I've broken up with someone (and am free). I'd be sorry not to hear later episodes of her story, her life with the book. I said with such grief in my voice, I can see you tomorrow or not see you tomorrow, but I don't look forward to it now, I don't care. It will be years before she understands. She said, in quite a good quiet tone, Don't see me then. I can see sky above the roof, and hear a gull, and the 7:30 train at the crossing on Venables. A skin of frost on the roofs. Pale orange on the eastern edge, the color of streetlights spangled across the last strip of land beyond False Creek. A day of my own, my own. Plumes. 23 And all that has happened since. Reading Coetzee in bed this morning, thinking I've been doing this work in philosophy to find the name of my art. It is construction of the partitions. Touching my forehead gratefully. Why do I feel I'm dying? That I pat my body, is it ingratiatingly, in a way I never did. The winding-up feeling. Change in my flesh. Not having lovers. The departures around me, Luke, Michael and Rowen, Louie too in some way. The woman I saw across the table was a woman gone on ahead, with longer to live than I. I don't like to say I feel I'm dying, and I also feel I have time to assemble my time into work of another kind, but what is it these days and others. Is Coetzee's book dangerous? A white woman, he says old, but not more than seventy, in her last months with cancer, prepares her soul, she says, with the company of a stinking drunk called Verceuil, the Cull, by speaking the way I do every day, to a you who, like you, is a woman and not an old one, her daughter. JM Coetzee 1990 The age of iron Random House The note I wrote yesterday afternoon said what I came to know, I'm terrorized. I knew the word would help. If the phone rings after 4:30 don't answer it, I thought. It rang at 4:30 and I answered it. You phoned. "This is the last time I will ...." "Did you get my letter?" "No." Someone tall put it on top of the letter boxes where you can't see it. You phone back soft in tears. It's alright. It was beautiful intuitive solutions after all. You've understood. I won't forget my own self. I was going to the Princess Café one day this week, pushing the button to cross Hastings, standing in the sun at noon, and thought my spirit isn't going to leave me, I don't need to have that fear, it has been with me 'til now and will go on. I will never be the people I don't want to be. I told you this story and others. You told me Lasha said you'll be married soon, you'll have children, it will be a man with land, a rich man. It's true I see it accomplished when you say it. Your beautiful breasts can bring you that. You lay down and closed your eyes and saw a farmer in Africa coming toward you, looking at you, with land around him. And the other side, you had a dream. We, you and I, are in a village oasis, at a hostel. In separate rooms. I ask if you'd like to go for a walk on the long road that goes far away to a triangular brown mountain. You're looking for me. Muggs and your mother's aunt. "Can I help you?" says Muggs. "I'm looking for Ellie." You try my room, lift the curtain. I am sitting with Rob. He has his back to you. He's naked, has long golden hair down to the floor. A fairy tale. You close the curtain and go away. In your room your cynical student is cracking up over a book. Dutch titles of the year. A walk at sunset and the like. You laugh with him, but then you think, I'm looking for Ellie. You leave, over your shoulder you say "Goodbye, by Louie Loots." I said I would go for a walk but I am not coming. You are in crowds looking for my back or Rob's. We aren't there. You will commit suicide by walking to the triangle mountain. Three days of heat. You won't make it. Joyce says to her, I think you're bluffing. When I hear this I relax, I'm lying back in my chair washed with relief. I feel pinker. She has slipped a mention of Gary into me. I will take that up too. I see her flattering me the way she does Rowen, with notice of some charming particularity. There are reasons I sit with an alarmed heart hidden under my flattered confidence. Hidden from me, so I don't take account. Saturday noon, debriefing. How did you look? Younger and more seasoned. Younger, like a girl with a bunch of hair at her neck. Older leaning forward at the table, with wisps seen at the side, like Doris Lessing with a bun, a writer talking. I said I would edit your pieces. Oh be careful how your life will change if you publish. I said I thought of writing a book about love, the seed is the child writing a first love book. You, Blackbird - you say, "I'm interested in love and friendship." And you are the one who is announcing a new time, for death and life. 23 There were triggers and I'm still feeling them and not wanting to be feeling them, like seeing allergic reactions. 24 A dream so much like a visit. Louie is leading. It's Kingston, that city where I am always looking for a place to rent. We are walking southwest into the poor part of town. There's a long pile of gravel Louie turns onto. A garage she wants to show us. We skirt the gravel and then a long low weathered-dark wood building. Stepping over regular rain-squashed piles of catshit on the raised box insulating the join of floor and walls. Knock on the door on the south end. No one comes to the door but we go in. It's a long corridor with shallow cubicles spaced down either side. A light on in one of them. Louie's friends, French Canadians. I'd guess they're all French-Canadians. A young boy with hair almost shaven, two older brothers, young men. It seems Paul is there too, speaking French better than I thought. We sit feeling the wonderful penetrating heat of the woodstove. Louie talks to the boy, who is the one she's friends with. I'm left with the two young men on a sofa in front of me. On the wall above the cubicle across the way I see a poster of a man in a dark red robe raising his left arm in a gesture that mocks the pope - it's Marlon Brando I think. Next to it another copy of the image, darker, closer-up, and reversed. I take off my cap and see in a reflection how when my hair falls down I'm prettier. I'll talk English, I understand almost nothing they've said to me, even their names. Tell them how, when I was in Montreal, I wanted to go to Québec and had my four-hour trip, two going and two coming back. By the end of the sentence they've vanished. I guess they're radical Francophones. I've woken lonely and shocked - a bit heart-shocked. As if I don't want the isolation of the day I have ahead of me, day at the table. Want something warm and sweet, really I suppose I'm longing for Louie. - Am I staying out of deep openness to beauty because I feel vulnerable to her and them when I am that. Can they still harm me psychically. Come through victorious in some way. By art is the best way. Harm to my liberation. My pretension to sensitivity. Truth is I'm brash and audacious like at the garden. They really are more sensitive than I. - Phil phones this Sunday night and says he couldn't put it down. I'm happy. What do I see. What I immediately see, a doctorate, a job. Hello. It's Sunday night. I'll see you tomorrow maybe. What should I say about the way you drag your heels? I don't like it. You have a chance you're not bold enough to take. Put my book in my mailbox and go your way, I'm annoyed, what's keeping you? Don't you even want to know? What's the worst that could happen - you could find yourself in the arms of an old woman. Either liking it or not. What's the best that could happen. You could feel yourself standing in white light at home in love more terrifying than you can imagine. You could be struck by lightening I mean. No? Maybe when you're older? Are you wise with your limits or playing safe? 25 For the record - after that warm unusually direct conversation with Phil I dream we're in his office discussing the paper. At the end he hesitates, comes kisses me on the mouth. It's a claim I'm surprised I'm falling in with. Sits on a couch putting on Frye boots. Stands against me crying for a moment, the school is moving toward theses and thesis theory, there'll be no scope for his feeling, his wish to know real things. Kisses not at all sweet. Wednesday 27th The department. Last tutorial. Andreas who watches with German brown eyes, observant and amused. We sit on the table after class talking about computation, feels like pure liking. Then it's time to go home and I'm at a loss. I want there to be more talk somewhere. More of that being in the center. I'm hungry. I sit at the department table thinking someone will address me. I was hungry last time with Rob. And last night with Louie. Seeing her in cowboy boots and tight jeans and a sweater tucked in and hair loose, a viable woman, where I'm feeling not. It is like seeing her after a year not 6 weeks, she's in a life I don't know. I'm exasperated with being lonely and hungry and feeling too old and having my current of money reverse so I'm getting toward two thousand in debt. Car unfixed. Loves ebbing away elsewhere all of them at once. Asking myself to practice an austere restraint that may be just what's making things ebb. And now I don't have the sense of what might come instead. It's holding off the kinds of power I know, dangerous, and for why - as if no love will come of it - so I'm grumbling, flapping my hands. And oh I could blow it in a minute, I could fuck Rob and be satisfied and confess to D so he shuns me. Oh. I could do that so easily, not to be held to it - a sadness but no more suspense. And what about Louie. I could say no, this has gone too far, it hurts me, 'bye, sweetie, let's know when to stop. Out, out, all attachments. 28 There were other students yesterday. Judith Stapleton who tells me she won enough money in court to take her through medical school. An astonishing smile. She's a thin worn mom, and then she's suddenly a bright pink radiant kid. And Babby Tiong who was so annoyed with her C that she sat through the tutorial refusing to take notes, after class expostulating in Cantonese to Diana Tu, with Sean Seah cocking an ear from across the room. I know to catch her on the way out: How are you doing? Fine, she says. "I thought you might be unhappy about your grade?" She admits it. I say come talk to me. She doesn't sit down 'til I ask her to, a skinny boy-girl with hair cut under a bowl, uningratiating, headlong in the way she moves. She's very insulted. I ask how she's managing with lectures. She says she doesn't understand a word. Listens twice to the tapes and picks something out of them. I know what she has to hear from me. I say I know what she's doing is very hard. I say it with specks of tears in my eyes, taking that in passing as just something that happens. And I say I know she's smart, I can see in her paper that she's smart. Tell me the truth, she says. I say I think we can get her to a B. She gathers her stuff muttering You. are. a. good. TA, which is the point of the story, and which in this instance is true, because I was unerring in my instinct about her. And also: this unerring instinct has a sadistic root. Another fact, when I faced my Monday 9:30 group for the first time I felt an unconfidence I haven't felt in any of the other tutorials - there were no women in the group, and four bright boys positioning themselves as the bright boys but not the bright girls usually do, in a phalanx opposite me. Last time they defeated me. We ran dry. It's as if they've decided on opposition, and it's Michael Yee who sets the tone. They were alright the day they broke into groups and got to talk. (The bright girls tend to sit near me on either side.) When I faced them the first time something was palpable immediately. I thought - I have to speak to this lot at a higher level, and at the same time I was thinking, is it because they are all boys? And there was Michael Yee looking disaffected in the far corner, lowering actually and slitting his eyes at me. I could weed some of them into other tutorials. I could try weeding Michael into the one with Andreas, because Andreas can overwhelm him. Rowen's National Geographic brings me Venus technologically imaged, "temperatures similar to those in a self-cleaning oven," "rent by rift valleys, scarred by comets and asteroids, and blackened by seas of hardened lava," a "textured surface" formed by "volcanic and deformation processes." Aphrodite Terra "a continent-like region about the size of Africa." "Stretching and failure of the surface." Sharp black band, a data gap. "Complex deformed terrain called tessera." 900 degrees F. "Volcanic, tectonic and impact processes." Lada Terra, Ammavaru Caldera. Arachnoids surround by spider-web like fracture. Lakshmi Planum of Ishtar Terra. Sif Mons. Gula Mons. But beautiful images of what cannot be seen. A dull orange light through sulfurous clouds, turbulent order, no softening of the surfaces by water, sharp billowing of the plane. Then these exquisite maps, sharp white lines on black, seeing them like feeling in perfect detail the sweep of intelligent sensation through junctures of a neural net. Just that. Intelligent feeling. intelligence like the most minutely structured run of fire. Like light on the floor of the sea, caustic nets. Retia interlacing arrangement, as of nerves; network. rete. retis. rhema. rhetor. rhetorike techne. rheos a current. It's Thursday. The other work week begins. Thursday one o'clock. Still in the grip of dread. Reluctance. There is a tune these days - no words - something familiar - what's it saying - the violins attack - it's maybe four bars, I don't know what emotion - just the way the violins jump in at once and then jiggle away. I dreamed the next door neighbours, on the west, the Chinese family, were moving away in the middle of the night, leaving a scatter of stuff in the alley. There is a tree in our garden the man will want part of, I've been told, and there he is tearing the tree down the center, half the roots left in the ground. Rose English on a tour with four children. I meet her on the street. Thinking she must have married but they are four third-world orphans. When she lifts her sweater the four of them swarm at her breasts through they're big children, as big as six year olds. I take one of them to the washroom. A man with the face of a petty crook lifts the curtain, etc. Friday A time the phone rang and I was sure it was Koo. [Dave phones] Off guard, thought maybe at the party but not just this minute. And then what - frightened and bluffing and badly uncomposed. What do I have to do to be balanced. There's sun at the west window. Look at this soft light on the stair post and the blue jean skirt, the primulas and freezia and leaning narcissus blades. Tap drips. Bird whistles. The end of January and a light like spring. Oh light don't leave. What I'd like is to tell him everything. The cards say no, save your inspiration. I don't like the suspense, I'm hostage. I'm frightened. If I don't throw it away I'm frightened. What else. I was so frightened I gave up working and went to the bank. And cleaned my house. I said I'd meet him at his coffee shop. He said no he had something else in mind. "I've been thinking about your kitchen. It's so quiet without a fridge." "So you want to see my kitchen again! Okay." It's good but it means I'm on my own ground and will be shy. And also that he's determined to steer. Alright, I've noticed that. What do I have to do to be balanced. The true joy and curiosity. And stand the ground of the moment, go slower and don't bluff. Saturday 30th Grumpy, it didn't amount to much. The kitchen was nice but he wasn't seeing it. We weren't. He came with two pimples and his hair down. The shape of his eyes [drawing] I liked seeing across the room, but it was - a life - and what was I, floating unmoored quickly down the social current. I'm wanting to write him off, why, come on, Epp. "Were they flirting?" "Madly, but it wasn't going to come to anything." Story he told me instead of telling me how was his Christmas with his friend. I'm annoyed because I think he's thinking he's managing me and I don't think he's done anything with his few years to earn feeling that. Why have I turned, it goes that way doesn't it. It isn't his fault I fancy him but after a while if it doesn't go my way I decide he's unworthy. What to do with that. It was fun when I was talking about caustics and he said "I saw a film like that once, light in water, I don't remember who made it." Actually I'm mad at him and there is a good reason. It's what his eyes aren't doing, not taking me in. I was altogether outside, all the while, kept out, and is that true? But now what - see, it isn't annoyed it's sad, I'm about to cry with disappointment at not being loved. Being left outside talking by myself. Okay Joyce, if the hope were true, what would it be - a hope of - what did I say - confident love. Alright he isn't David McAra, no confident love, now I'm sulking. She said, Better to supply it to yourself. I said, But I failed to. And: I don't want there to be no one else. She said, Now we're getting somewhere. All my wares are failing. Alright, I'll be self-sufficient. But all my wheres, all my wheres, are here sore and annoyed. Alright. Dear you, it's Saturday night, you were here this afternoon. I will speak to you as if you were real and I too. I'm sore. It went alright and very badly. What it was like seeing you at the door and after that, this is what I should pay attention to. There you are when I open the door. - No, before that, sitting in the red chair, what am I feeling, joy and fear. Is it more like fear than joy? I can't tell. The door knocks. You have your hair down. Here's a face. I have talk. Go on talking, boldly. You can handle yourself with that. No, but back of it, what's the air like. Not good. The way it is looking at you and realizing I can't feel you. You'll be blinded, you said. No, I can see you, but there is a haze. But it was true I couldn't see you. When I talk I look out the window because you can't see me either. I wasn't able to be openly there. I wasn't able to be openly there. Like being chased out of my kitchen. I could feel the air as the air between us, and I forget to. We aren't good company. What do you have to say? Sunday 31st A long dream in the building, that large many-storied building where I lived with Luke long ago when he was a child. Big empty rooms. I'm going to share an apartment with other people. This room. They've provided a plastic toilet, small plastic thing that sets down over this pipe. There's a sink in the corner. But no stove or fridge, bare patches on the wall where they've been taken out. A person walks through. The rooms have been empty a while, they've been used as a short cut. I'll lock this door onto the front courtyard. A cylinder key with prongs off the side. But no it's this other room I'm going to say is mine. Windows toward the mountains. North and west. There are stacks of small paintings someone has left. There was more, a woodstove they were swimming in, a very wide mattress I'm trying to prop. Looking around trying to see whether there are enough fixtures so we'll be able to work. What's the moving-in theme, does it mean new times? The time from before Christmas isn't here anymore. I'm farther from Rumsey, not inspired. It's the end of January and the same 30 pages still to write. Steven Davis giving me a ride [to Andrew's party] asks about my thesis as if he's heard nothing about it, and then decides suddenly to tell me what Phil told him and others. The thesis is good. "He says you're a beautiful writer." And I should think of going somewhere else. They'd write me letters. San Diego? I say. 1st Feb Why'm I happy today, after all? Because I'm going to lie on Wednesday and not go in to teach, and have the week unspoilt and at the end have all the pages done. Because there have been warm days, it's February. Because Louie is still my friend, next week. Because today I have sweet confidence, don't know why, that it was right to hang back yesterday. He's translated into me again, a body. That there can be delayed reaction for him too. And because of how it is at the department, better. Hearing the train, I thought these voices of ours. 2nd, Tuesday Candlemas, and it has been. Light's return. Working today in a light current of excitement and desire. That's all I'll say. Light-hearted especially this morning as if there was a stream of connection going, as if he was thinking of me. 3rd I didn't lie, I said to Merrilee, "I have to call in sick today." Sat all day sorting. Managing energy, slow starting, times I fade, and then always find a way to keep going. Patience is what I need energy for, the extraordinary patience of my method, the numbers of details, the piles on piles of sheets of small writing. The way it works is I distribute into the categories I find, a very connectionist method. Sometimes I see I can amalgamate or must fan out into parts. The semantics pile is key, do I put it at the head or tail of the section. Seeing the semantics pile is key. It is intrinsic content that makes it possible to be nonsymbolic. With intrinsic content, digital doesn't matter. At the end give a connectionist story about code. Digital distinction floated on analog difference. Borne on. How is it that my feeling him supports me? As if I'm floated by the sense of a possibility. That, by itself. Thinking of him floats me. Imagining him, seeing him. All day, when I'm not working. Imagining flirting with him. It feeds me with pleasure. 4th Slow start but writing - 10 pages. Content section organized. Not floating, quite allergic. Tea and choc bars that I use to start myself. In the evening I don't have to add a kick, it just goes. Was 9:30 and then 11:30. Do like the light on this little clock. Was it ovulation? 5 18 more. 6 With Josie and her baby on the ferry deck. The baby girl lying on her back between my legs starts to slide toward the open back of the deck - Josie! I yell. She dives after it. Both of them vanish over the end. Ferry stops. We look around. I think they're underneath it. In the room below decks that's directly over the place they must be, talking to a man. There's no way we can get to them. Later I have three white plastic buckets with water. Josie's son pulls out a hand. I say should he be doing this? He says he's alright. I dump the water down the toilet and see bits of organs in it. Out of the second bucket there falls a large piece of meat that fills the bowl. It's Josie's chest cut off below the ribs and above the breasts, red meat and white bone cut through very cleanly. From inside it I see the breasts indented, round and quite deep. I set it outside. It's quite wonderful. (In fact it's like Josie's hollow clay breast pieces.) I think it was the same baby girl I had with me in a sort of bleachers or arena where Jam was camped in the upper ranks. Suspended tarp and a Coleman stove. I was peeing the little girl, finding a corner where I could hold her over the floor. Jam when the little boy broke something was strangling him. I think they were both Josie's kids and I was taking them back to her. Jam I'm told has a young man as well as several girlfriends. I see her black bra lying on the floor, big cups, the left a different design than the right. Listening to the radio, a show with a certain kind of sensibility I don't have a name for, a modern young man a bit oblique, avant garde, urban, and something else too - oblique, diagonal. I hear a passage from my writing set to music, waffley uninteresting music composed probably by that young man. It's a passage I wrote in the time of T and C. I want to phone the radio station. It's something-KNO I'm told. I think it's Co-op [Radio], maybe Co-op has changed its call letters. Go there, have to climb through several floors of a bible institute, is this really the right building? A dull woman at a table with me talking about something she just heard on the radio. I think it was my piece. I start to tell her so but she's not listening, etc. - One of the deep pleasures of this rounding-off work is that I get to re-touch the books that gave me joy two years ago, four years ago. I mention them, find a place for them. Maturana and Varela from ten years ago. Chaos. Michaels and Carrello today. Neurophilosophy and A neurocomputational perspective. Rosen. Tiles. Pribram. Keller. Whitford. Korzybsky. Vygotsky. Hebb from twenty-five years ago and again two years ago. Wilden. Halliday. Marr. Newell. Wittgenstein. Hegel, even. Are there more? The great excitments and absorptions of their times. The satisfaction of filling-in. I've felt how this student life has at least given me books - a capacity to read in a new domain, books like Hallett on Cantor. Tiles on set theory was the most satisfying for stretch and shape. So good. Good in its setting-together and teasing apart. Wonderfully good in its overall spread. My paper on it was a collaboration. The beautiful structure was hers. But I set it beautifully into eleven pages. I wrote twenty-two pages today! 50 since Thursday. And it is quite a beautiful structure I think, starting threads and working with them and leaving them and taking them up again. Oh, but. In three years I could have written a novel. But yes I will certainly go on writing about hard books I don't understand 'til the last moment. And there is much more to say about what's good in Tiles or Patricia Churchland. And what it's like to write a thesis. Last chapter tomorrow. Lines converge. I've been converging them here and there on the way so maybe there's not much to do. Or maybe it will be the moment when something blooms up out of the level, the silent helper's comment on the work. 7 There is a new flight path in the last days, something big and invisible passes overhead, a sound that takes up a broad swath of the sky, dark, coarsely granular, clumpy, massively strong like thunder. I've been liking and wondering at it without noticing. A voice. 8th
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