| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 6 - 1993 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th April 1993 It's the day, five in the morning. Excited. - Four hours later, something else - is it frightened? A darkness in the upper chest and throat. [Defense introduction: One of the things that interests me a lot in my other work and in a general way is the relation between nonlanguage and language in a person. I have never been able to make any sense of the notion that we should think of everything that goes on in our minds as some form of language, because to me it is a fact of experience that thinking and feeling and dreaming and working involve some sort of interplay between language and something that isn't linguistic. So I was interested in the analog/digital distinction in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind because it has been a forum in which a version of this question has been discussed. Language of thought theorists like Fodor and Pylyshyn claim that cognitive psychology should take its explanatory kinds from the language of language, that we should talk about beliefs and goals as attitudes to propositions, and that we should posit cognitive processing as rule-governed computation defined over symbols. Code-processing in a digital computer is successfully understood in these terms, and the working hypothesis of most computational psychologists is that the animal brain is a sort of meat version of a digital computer. Language of thought theory is a functionalist psychology, which defines its explanatory kinds over causal relations, and independently of what are usually unknown details about how these functions could be realized in the brain. I have argued that what I have called linguistic functionalism - the functionalist psychology whose causal kinds are symbols and rules - is compatible with two possible understandings of what we might mean by these linguistic kinds as realized in brains. One is what I would call the generous construal - we could think of symbols as physical patterns of neural activation which have causal relations with other physical patterns. We could think of rules as descriptions of processing regularities. The generous construal of symbols and rules would thing of brain events as rule-describable but not a rule-using. When we simulate sequences of psychological causation on a digital compute, we would think of our program as a description of a physical event and not as a description of a linguistic event. We could say the brain is thought of as realizing a function but not as realizing a formula. The other sort of understanding we might have of the relation of linguistic functionalism to brain function, is what I could call the hard construal, which is based on a similar construal of code-processing in digital computers. This construal, which I take to be Fodor and Pylyshyn's, says that the brain should be seen as realizing the formula as well as the function given in programs modeling psychological events. In other words, the hard construal takes brains as rule-using as well as rule-describable. Processing would depend on rules being present in the brain as program strings - as prescriptive inscriptions. Analog computation has provided a computational alternative to this hard construal, because it is a kind of processing that, at the same time, cannot be seen as instantiating symbols or rules - because it is a continuous function computer and thus does not have disjoint, finitely differentiable tokens - and is seen as providing computational results. So analog computation provides an existence proof for a kind of computation that is rule-describable and does realize functions, but cannot be seen as rule-using or as realizing formulas. I have argued that connectionist computation takes this sense of a cognitive alternative one step further by showing us how creature computation could be non-rule-using in this same way and still give us the sorts of intelligent capabilities that Fodor and Pylyshyn have attributed to rule-governed operations defined over symbols. Connectionism suggests a picture of such capabilities as categorization, inheritance of properties, induction, and abstraction as following from the physical organization of the brain, and thus not requiring a separate symbol-level of description. Elementary productivity and systematicity can be explained as normal features of most social and sensory-motor behavior. The more advanced sorts of recursion can be attributed to internalization of external codes and prostheses. Connectionism also gives us a hint of how the physical organization of the brain might be seen as allowing an animal's representational states to have intrinsic content - a relation to the world that is not mediated by third-party descriptions. I have defined intrinsic content as being the sort of content a cat's brain states would have as a consequence of their functioning in and for the cat. I'm expecting to have to give some kind of an account of what I take to be the relation between intrinsic content and code so I will try to deal with the question now. What makes non-symbolic computation possible in an analog computer is the physical organization of the machine. Intrinsic content is also possible because of the physical organization of the brain, but with the further condition that this organization is produced in and by the animal in concert with a structured environment. Given intrinsic content, positing an inner code will be redundant, because there will be no separability of the structure of the brain and its content. No code-mediation will be necessary. But can we posit code none-the-less? We may want to in certain instances - those instances where a person is obviously being programmed by linguistic strings. For instance when we say to a person "Give me the product of your telephone number and your age" and they do. Or when we 'hear ourselves think', in other words when our processing is making use of perceptual simulations of linguistic situations. Or we can posit code if we are clear that we intend what I've called the generous construal. But I think there are good reasons to avoid the use of even this softer construal. I'll list them briefly: 1. Talk about an inner code in the brain seems a temptation to conflate description and the dynamic process described. I think a case could be made for calling it a category error, or a violation of logical grammar in Wittgenstein's sense. It does seem to lead to puzzlement that sometimes feels like a kind of feedback howl. 2. Describing intelligence in terms of a formal language imports a political bias in favor of the sorts of intelligence that is skill with formal language activities. It leads us to leave out of account large areas of crucially important and very interesting cognitive skills. 3. Describing cognition as rule-governed supports a hierarchical picture of personal and social order, instead of connectionism's image of bottom-up cumulative self-organization. 4. A logic-based description of cognition tends to idealize/misdescribe human cognition as organized solely in relation to the principle of noncontradiction. A connectionist picture makes it easier to see human cognition as simultaneously multidimensional, variable and context-dependent, possibly contradictory, multifunctional, and inherently biological. 5. I suspect that Pylyshyn's sort of boundary between cognitive and noncognitive functions and functional architecture is unworkable. We cannot hold the line between synaptic changes caused by recency of use and synaptic changes caused by the utterance of sentence S of experimenter instructions. These events are the same event. The effect of neurotransmitter concentrations at synaptic junctions is immediately cognitive. It influences what one thinks as well as how one thinks it.] 6th Night not sleeping next to Louie. What else to say. All the men. And Louie. And later the fat rabbits and bare patterns at Jericho Beach. The sea. I haven't the right to mention it, barely saw it, but was there squatting looking toward the wet weather islands where Michael and Rowen live. Bob Hadley cold and self important and obtuse and threatened. Phil smiling away but grandstanding on and on looking at the ceiling. Ray and Reznick asleep. Louie staring diagonally at Dave. Barbara, Paul, Dave Sturdee lighting up when I said why should there be arguments in a paper. And oh Andrew [Irvine] in his pink party sweater asking the generous questions that brought me out. And putty-colored Tietz in his corner who understood too little to ask anything à propos, dredged up a question. "You handled him just right" said Phil later, and I like to hear it again. And none of them took it away from me at any point, though, says Louie, Phil opened his mouth to several times. And there was one moment, one, when I got to speak across to my image sitting serious at the far end of the row - and Leah - another image - harrowed - the image of old female suffering - sitting opposite where I would see myself concerned. Dennis, invisible, did I look at him more than once, and what was he doing there. Martin not well enough at ease to launch us emotionally, Ray would have been able to. Bjorn, Bjorn after, eyes like bare turquoise, debriefing, immediately responsible. "They came at you quite hard, that's a good sign. You didn't fight every point, it was a good mix." And after. Walking through bushes, squatting in front of small waves, the moments I could hear your voice, the moments at night when I wouldn't talk anymore and could be in grey space unconcealed. 7th Erotic love and work are my life. I don't care about support, security, 'growth.' I have loved companionship but when it forbids me erotic love I will do without it. But whether to do the video. And the ways I haven't been careful not to be indebted. I think we have to do the video and I think I have to get the money. And then Louie and I have to break up, whether or not I find myself in a room with him. Maybe it can be timed so there's less damage but there will be damage - physical - get ready. It says: he will leave it at that and I should think of it as finished. A sad summer. But a summer, and then it will be over. And then I will start again. And then I will start again. 8th Dreamed I kissed Laiwan, said I'd always loved her. Today in sorting papers her beautiful piece. It doesn't mean I want to sleep with you it just means if you wished it I would too. Admit it and things will clear love has never been love. I do lust you and I'm proud of it. Filing cabinet, four drawers:
Mary phoned yesterday when I was near to phoning her. Rowen on the phone. We didn't know what to say 'til I said I missed him. "I miss you too. Every week I think of coming to see you." O beautiful one I always have to stop caring before you'll come. Thursday night - began to throw out Berkeley stuff and then didn't. Grain pile last night. the play of the weather with Jam's little notes like a long-delayed gift. Luke says he'll help with the video. 9th Dear larger one, I forgot you.
I loved your voice more than anything I read, it spoke to me.
I thought of claustrophobia, I was talking to D, I scatter away into this and that.
I'm seeming to want to get rid of Louie.
As if I have to give her what she wants because I owe her 'support,' during the thesis and with money. Is it true that I owe her?
Where does that leave me.
If I break up with her will I lose a chance of learning.
I am so angry I want to erase her. I want never to have that scene again. I want an end of her stubborn dwarf demands and indirections and helpless manipulating tears and self ignorance. I suspect you are going to say it is my own dwarf I want to cross off.
I was mad at myself for being humiliated with Dave.
I don't like that I couldn't speak to him on Monday for fear of her reaction and then mine, that I was forced to be frightened in his presence, that she and not he was my friend at the show, because she had 'supported' me, although it was his image that was in me in the work.
Yes.
Yes. And for the sense that she had 'supported' me through the work.
Sometimes, but I don't think it was 'support' I needed. I'm not certain. Was it true support?
Where does that leave me?
What about him.
He's somewhere in a room and I want to be with him and feel I must not want to be with him and as long as I want it he won't and it is all over and I should just forget it and I'm not really feeling him just wanting to and maybe he will phone this weekend but he won't if I want him to, and even if he does his intention is different than mine and it is too confused to work and thinking of it, a sexual ache and when I feel him it is sweet joy and I'm dubious he won't bore me and he is too implicated with other women and I am too contradicted to deserve to attract him. Is he in this confusion too?
What should we do?
I can't have both, can I.
I've been celibate for nearly eight months.
It seems perverse to give up close company in so many things for sex without close company.
I keep feeling that even if we worked ourselves through to the best I would feel how she is too small for me, I'd always be lost, feeling her arms too small, her hands too small. Could that ever change?
For that she would have to be entirely an other and she isn't, she is like a flattering child.
Do I love him only because I can't afford to love her and must love somewhere?
I want you to say, You would have loved him anywhere.
How would I know if I was.
Is there anyone I am meant for?
If I could choose Louie I would be choosing what I can have and will never be satisfied with? And then I'd always be jealous she has what she's satisfied with?
Am I being asked to be lucid among only hard choices?
I don't see how I can choose her but I am worried there will be no more personal learning.
Sore. Sore.
- It's night. I can't move. It's Friday night. What I want is either to be with you or to be stoned or to be with Rob making love or to be gone, asleep. What's it like. Like waiting. Easter Sunday 11th Cancer in the right hip and a crystallized moth in the left foot. Don't ever eat meat or sugar for the rest of your life it said. Luke and Angela at Mary's, expedition on the bus. Rob at his mom's. Safe from Louie, maybe. I've invited and am afraid to say. Here's weak sun, Emma Kirkby. Sometime later. - I was flirting into the wind, it's unpleasant to remember. Right, enough, I'm saying. It means I won this one and am something like free 'til I lose one. Maybe. He was fat 'til puberty, what a story. 12th Early. One thing: two days working in the garden, a smell in the wild edge, must be the bird cherry. Looking at my plot, raring. There have been wet mornings that open toward noon, yesterday enough sun to be sitting on the leaf pile with Dave Carter, who showed up in silly shorts, unshaven. What I mean is, not loving me and not wanting to touch me, not taking up any of my little femininities, so I'd hear myself cynical, throwing the moment away. "Eternal recurrence, what kind of grandiosity is that?" Has he ever said a single direct, liking thing to me? (Yes.) (But not yesterday.) - Such an impatience for emotional experience. Tues 13th
- Something did happen to me when she seduced Michael - I lost my balance and am terrorized. The bravado without which I cannot bear her. Oh Joyce you do not understand the bitterness of the floor of rivalry between women. Appalling unbearable rivalry of the nearest and only. She is no more a lesbian than I am. I'm having to feel it in so bare a form. Appalling and unbearable betrayal of the nearest and only. I don't want to be nice I want to open it to the root. There is no one else who can know me, men cannot, but the one who knows me will kill me if she can. And this one knows so little of herself. I don't want to talk to her in Joyce's presence. I want to speak about her to a larger mind and have it judged and seen and told and clear and fair and done. And as for you - I want to stop being in secret, I want to stop being unclean, I want to stop trying to coerce you in secret. I want to stop feeling I'm trying and failing. A hard day. 14 Awake at 3:30 frightened. 15 Garden video [completion] application. Dear larger one, I'm very sore.
Is it nothing? Is it something?
I could bring it back by loving something.
I was very speedy.
Love having gone out of me. Is that why I want to get away from her, so I can love quietly to myself?
She is nothing to me today but a worry, he is nothing to me but a worry. I am nothing but a worry.
If I started again I would have two good years. If I stay with this it will get worse.
Is there such a thing? Does anyone ever get through?
Where do they think they are?
What are they through, then?
Worry and fear. 16th Last night the fine melty buzz again, all through the trunk and palms and mouth and soles of the feet - wanting to hold her fitted into me - and then the other way it was at the end with Jam, an electrical discomfort in the marrow of especially the shin bones. 18 What I dreamed. Looking in a book and seeing his picture. He's saying what graduate school is like, flirting all the time. A story by him. What he wrote instead of a paper. A minute catalog of little candies, squares with their trademark. Squares the size of stamps. So many kinds, like licorice allsorts each with their names. I go out to the Jansen house and find it clean. A table and chairs. Old things hanging from the walls. The house of sex and old things. I thought I would like to take him there, he'd like the old things. What else. The dwarf who gets at starling new life is not Louie. There is a state that dreads she will end it, and I do, in shame and helplessness to get what I want. 19th It is a dark cold April, I'm still waiting for the year to open so I can see it. Working with Youth Alliance kids yesterday, schools beds. The herb garden still rank, plastered down, unbearable to see. Rob hours sitting on the greenhouse bench grafting. Looking at his face across fifteen feet of space, beautiful I thought. A moment when I must have been looking at him with longing. Was there a similar moment, more hidden, talking to Louie on a path and seeing under her thin black teeshirt the balanced roundness of her breasts with their sideways nipples. I see a Volkswagon bus drive up the steps into the building. There is a meeting going on. I position myself among the business men on the left, toward the front, and take hold of the tips of branches I have in my hand, bend them so the top inch, the terminal buds, are all at the same height. Look around for a wire, find a yellow one on the floor, tie them around. The business men are taking notice. Outside, three black men who are leaders. I'm speaking to one, two others come by. One of them gives me half a sandwich, thin ham on brown. On the street, it's a town in California and I am wanting to travel south. I see a van drive by and think of hitching but let it past. It stops at a lane. An Indian man with a large suitcase gets out. I cross the road to look down the branch of road that's running diagonally back southeast. That's the one I want. I set out on it and come to train tracks, quite a few. The San Francisco train system comes all this way out. -
20 I'm with someone walking above a river. I notice how those little poplar trees look with those single balsam poplar leaves. Something beyond them, maybe four rows of kinds. A sheep pen. Climbing a gate out of it, a clump of color, a door in the ground. Look into it expecting a shaft, but it's an engine. They must have used it to pump water all the way up from the river to sluice gold. Walking on the river bed, water rising from the side very quickly [left side]. We are a long way inland. Where is this sudden rise coming from. Run toward a high rocky outcrop. On top of it seeing the river filling. We may be here all night. Then see a sandbar not covered yet. We can run across. Up on the rim, very high above the riverbed, looking out the window of our cottage. There's no bank to be seen, the cabin is hung over water, the entire canyon is full. It's going to flood over the rim. We'll need a boat. I run from cabin to cabin looking for a bathtub with a plug. Tear one out. It has holes. Further along I find a shallow fibreglass bath. My friend and I get in one at either end. It is warmly lined with down bags. We wrap them around our legs and are blissfully cozy floating in our shell on shallow floodwater. We have a space for an oar tucked in beside my legs. Drifting slowly eastward. There's a man in another shallow bathtub also floating tucked into blankets. We realize suddenly that the water is accelerating. We're coming to the lip of a falls. By now I'm calmly certain that for every emergency there will be a solution. We find ourselves up against a mesh fence that was an inactive edge of the U-shaped old concrete dam we now can see. The mesh keeps us from going over and there is no pressure of water just there. Part of the old dam breaks out as we watch. A huge mass of black water breaks over. The dam may break more, but it will break over there, and the more it breaks the more the water will be gone. As we floated, sensing another of the floaters had slipped sideways off a sort of raised waterway. The cottages though lower are still dry, there must be a wall. Seeing three pink cottages without doors or windows. Thinking what two women should play us if it were a movie. Not Kate and Allie. - That was in a night where I woke aching after the two days' work. Joints, hands, soles of the feet. The sound of bathwater a bit ominous when I woke. - Steven Clark says carpal tunnel, but ... [neurologist - about hands going to sleep] 21st Dear you, it is a tangle and very hard to be true. Such a worry. What is it like. Like being in school worried that the kids are shunning me. Being in high school with my thin leg showing. I've learned so many ways to say I don't really want to be with you. Do I know a way at all to say I want to be with you. I want to be with you. In what way. I want to be brave and true with you. I want to desire and adore you in the open, unconcealed. I want to be visible scared and sore so you can see. I want to look at you with so fearless an interest that I could speak to the thought behind your thought. I want not to be afraid of my fear of your beauty. I want all of this to be so when I'm not with you, too. I want also to be interested in my boredom and dislike and judgment. I'd like to see you naked. Oh and not to be frightened of you seeing me that way. Wanting you is soul, it's radical, it's loss, it means I have to change, I have to have a harder life, I have to be lonely and unsafe and sad. - Then a phone call from Rob, who comes and sits on the chair. I look at his arms and his mouth and his hard-on, find him beautiful and am hard with him. Blue eyes with red rims. 22nd Then a phone call from Louie who was with Joyce sobbing about her father. We lie in bed and I hold her close on and on. The book says I'm hovering and have to land. I am frightened. She tries to get me to say what would be the best that could happen and I cannot. As if the wish has so great a ring of fear around it that I cannot approach it. The best I say finally would be if I felt this for someone more suitable. 25th On another day I imagine it differently. Lying in bed feeling the strain thinking, it is just the strain of holding off, holding off is what I'm doing. I want a discipline again, discere to learn. For him, garden game. Hemispheres. Centering. 28 The misery with Louie, that quality of being beaten down, flattened, silenced, ground to dust, greyed. Her unhappiness is energetic and righteous, big wonders of suffering. I huddle down waiting for her to go away. As if she convinces me I have no right to protest, since I am the villain. We were looking at beautiful video, seeing it similarly - perfectly and naturally harmonious in our judgment of the material - and shocked, stressed, heart-strained, sick, in our personal story. I wonder whether I will look back at my time with her as a nightmare, which it seems in these times. How she can think she has a right to hate my childish loves. 29 Josie on the streetcorner. I got a crush on a young man, I say. I wanted him for life and Moira knew it so she didn't want to stay around, she says. A shock. 30 It says true love is a state not a person. 3 May L and I in a transport truck. I'm looking for a man who wrote the garden a letter asking about some little creature I'm going to tell him is a nematode. It's 4 o'clock, too late to have it delivered, but I may be able to deliver it myself. Looking in the phone book, he's the rich, older man and there was a younger man too, DeBere? Not quite that. driving the transport in difficult places. The outside edge of a railway bridge, but we come against two boys who aren't moving aside, and then see they are standing against a pillar. Looking for a phone box. The transport can't be reversed. Some people lift it over the rail, etc. Louie is driving now. Up a narrow cobbled path. Into a room. Just open a door in the corridor. She isn't looking in the mirror to see whether the box is fitting through the door. I say she must look. It seems unlikely we'll get the long box through. It occurs to me to check through the rooms ahead, no point getting into this one if we can't go on. A dining room? And then I'm in a little bed alcove and see down the stairs. It's at the top of the house, under the roof, and the house falls many floors. There's a boy in a messy bed. Plump with white-yellow hair. He sits up and seems to have blowsy breasts. His name is Sapientia. A window looking west over a landscape with a lake, a broad holding. Going downstairs stopping at other landings, closer to the ground. From the third floor, a wing with single rooms on the second floor, on each balcony an identical arrangement of table set for a meal, and a chair facing the rail. 4 These are dull heavy days, like the April in the Avalon Hotel, rain. Working with Louie with machines. Pent frenzies. In tension she stops the ends of her words in a way that makes me want to run. I sit hating the littleness of her body. The windowless rooms make my neck ache. When we go for lunch I notice the ingratiating way she has of inviting people to talk about their topics. (Is it that that makes me long for her to go away for a month - the way the topics she leads me into are my housekeeping topics, not the ones that give me joy. And I don't have the silence that would give me after a while something new.) And that all these years she has contrived to be to people in that way. - There's brightness at the window, not sun but nearly, as if it wasn't really cloud but mist this morning. And every day in her presence and not, I think of the man, his face and form. I'm absent. He is not calling me, he gave me up for one of his reasons. He's there a mile away in his room. As long as I hold myself away I am dejected. I'm hung on his wish. If he came inviting me I would flash into another color. That's a fact. He will go away and I will be freer. But even now if I imagine him and imagine speaking to him I will be freer. Singing begins. (The other day with Luke I said, Hold a note. Sang intervals against it. It was thrilling. Family voice.) 5 Nietszche whipping his body, never stops. Will to power. Having no outer work. "Self-overcoming." Kauffman assumes his sickness is given and the work an overcoming, when it's more likely the mind of the work was, and perpetuated, the sickness. "Saw a coachman flog a horse, rushed toward the horse, and collapsed with his arms around it." - The next day I controlled the machines myself and wasn't in a frenzy. But she was. - Today we learned to dub sound onto tape. Again, it was more of the day setting up the machines. Cables. Hopeless with distortion. Ask George. We get a better mixer. Catherine fetching cables. Louie in the midst saying "RCA to a mini," "EMI male" and the like. I'm sitting on a chair looking at her breasts. She looks good in headphones and on hands and knees on the floor. Concentrated. She gets that ingratiating boy look and has a sprung dip in the small of her back. When we get the first shot laid with Max's voice and a miscellaneous industry and bird track off some other video morning, we are in better moods. Spend $25 on supper and then keep working 'til ten. Eating really works. The pleasure of seeing the sound texture the image. Fa fa la sez Mrs Hsu over the dry twists of daylily. I wish we had a cow breathes Max over the rising mist. El sonido de pajaritos sez Estella over the sumac like a parrot tail blowing up. 7 These days I have a few hours in the morning, need to use them to talk to the worry and sadness that is with me these months. Then we go work in the editing suite and it's irritation, affection, excitement, endurance, loose talk and necessary talk, efficient talk, unbearable talk. And as soon as I have a personal moment I am back with the urgency of needing to find a man. That one or another one. If I give up on that one I'm in the world with no prospects. There's Rob. The childish joy and girl happiness of loving his body, and, I wanted to say, the top half of my body still alone, looking around, looking away from his feeble jaw, socially ashamed of his shame. (And my boy who carries himself so well and staunchly.) - Editing - so emotional it was. Laying sound over picture, satisfaction when a sound took in the image. A frog, the flap of a flame at a distance. Sunflower drifting, I feel when to come in. Michael's voice saying "I love the life in my garden" just that clean clear blue/yellow/green. The way focus pulls slowly through fennel to a difficult resolution while Mrs Hsu's voice is being pulled up in volume to get her last mutter clear. The way Monty's voice clears when he says "clear." Microdecisions of sound-image relation. Old Mike's eyes under his cap, blurred eyes, look up when Max is thinking his name. Michael's brain searching, getting set up, over the bees. Ways I'm unorthodox on tape. We are extraordinarily in agreement about the material and extraordinarily tense in the technical work. We take pleasure in each other's decisions and can't bear each other's physical presence. Elbows bumping in the windowless closet. Shooting back on the rolling chair to get farther from her. I think the truth is we're equally frenzied by waiting through each other's working process. I wanted to hit her. It was her tone. Motion, few times a motion sensitive as a touch. Old Mike weeding on his side lies still, I pull back a very little, just to the grey post on the left. He stands getting his squash ready, passes it left to right. Frame drifts right just enough to get the red post, then stops. His puff of smoke exits on the left. Ruby's hair, side of the face. Pulling back. See the velvety texture of her face. Further. The corner of her mouth. An extraordinary face being unveiled quite slowly from below and the side and there she is speaking without being heard, birds speaking through her face as if it's transparent. Louie's shot up at the sunflower head, its motion and the camera's, so the frame floats to its level. Liz's head between dryish leaves comes up slowly and looks at us with a beautiful soft hit. Pause. Her mouth opens, hi. Monty saying he sleeps outside, a 2x4 poking the fire, "It's quite nice eh." The end of what he says, wood thrown on the fire, lies accomplished burning, night sound comes nearer, a frog. Cuts. It's a way of cutting immediate to me - given the materials - that simultaneity of attention not native to daily attention though. 8 Now it's Saturday and free time. Want to write proposal for study. Weed. (Get laid.) Make a black dress. Clean house. Find money. - Yes and then. I'm at the garden weeding. Balanced. Footsteps in the gravel. I'm always hoping. It's her. Familiar motion into endurance. She is here. I can't prevent her. If I protest it will take longer. In fact she has come, without intending it, to spoil my days away from her. And she does. Saturday night boiling with chagrin. We have different interests, it can't be helped I say. And that is true. It is not in her interest to have me balanced while she's gone. She's come to tell me she found him in the bookstore. What to do. It's power, is it. I'm angry with him. Angry with her. Wanting there to be something I can do to be sure he is gone. And then there is no one. And if there is no one? If there's no one, will hunger go on in this way eating me every day? No, if there's no one then there's hunger sometimes but not all the time. 9 What is it I want. To be real. It's pain pain pain. I wanted the access to love in myself but I'm not capable of believing it enough to create it in reality. Listen to who replied to that. A young steady voice said, Maybe he'll ... Then I yell back. 10 At UBC yesterday in a room with windows to three sides - level with new leaves - not green - sometimes steeped in sun - looking at the physical shabbiness of a dozen middle-aged men. Thread-bare old heads, messy remnants of thin dead hair. I didn't want to fasten onto him again but I could see why I choose men who want to be beautiful like women.
aphrodite's garden volume 17
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