| Volume 16 of Aphrodite's Garden: 1992-1993 December-May | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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This is the volume in which I write the MA thesis and defend it. Book sessions with Louie throughout. Part 2 Christmas break I take care of Rowen's cat and start to get into writing trim. End of part 3 I finish The analog/digital distinction in the philosophy of mind. Part 4 begin to learn to use a computer. Rowen who is now 7 and in grade 1 moves to Read Island with Mike and Lise. At the end of part 4 an actual date with Dave. Part 6 the MA defense and then video editing. Notes: Robert Rosen Life itself, analog and digital systems, Newell's summary of analog computation, Frege misquoted in Wilden, Donna Williams Nobody nowhere, Courage of Lassie, introduction to my thesis, Coetzee The age of iron, recap of bookwork with Louie, David Waggoner's poem Lost, recap of bright and dark notes, Rilke, Tim Stephens' Mystic Stars column on lust. Mentioned: Luke, Rowen, Louie L, Ray Jennings, Paul Epp, Judie Bopp, Rob Mills, Art Pape and Maxine, Jada Pape, Mike Voskamp, Lise Batchelor, David Rimmer, Jan-Marie Martell, Martin Hahn, Kim Sterelney, Dave Carter, Helmer Dolemo, Phil Hanson, Andrew Irvine, Jam Ismail, Maxine Gadd, Roy Miki, Roy Kiyooka, Laiwan, Peter Konrad, Paul Kinsella, Mary Epp, Al Neil, Bill Jeffries, Chris Mills, Pat Mills, Greg Morrison, Sara Chisholm, Roy Chisholm, Elisabeth Grey, Rudy Epp, Trudy Rubenfeld, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Larry Resnick, Joyce Frazee, Muggs Siggurgeirson, Judith Stapleton, Babby Tiong, Diana Tu, Sean Seah, Michael Yee, Steven Davis, Josie Cook, Robert MacLean , Stuart McCall, Barry Truax, Janeen Postman Vanden Berg, Francie Duran, Tony Nesbit, Dave Sturdee, John Tietz, Norman Schwartz, Don Todd, John Jones, Madelaine Murray, Michael Dar, Emile Esteves, Paul Wong, Rudy Voth, Leah Rosling, Bob Hadley, Dr Steven Clark, Mrs Hsu, Monty Jones. Trinh T Minh-Ha's lecture in Vancouver and Living is round, Tarthang Tulku, Susan Sontag on Eleanor Wachtel's Writers and company, Prince Charles, Tillie Oleson Tell me a riddle, Nietszche, Alice Walker, Ursula Le Guin, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Yasunari Kawabata, Ondaatje, Turing, Chomsky, Hume, Hegel, Eckankar, connectionism, Halliday's functional grammar, Mozart, Anne Murray, RG Brown jeans, Nelson Goodman, Lewis, Fodor, Block, Pylyshyn, Demopoulos, Bobrow, Sloman, Boden, Kosslyn, Rollins, Gibson, Hinton, Sejnowsku, Cussins, Paul Chruchland A neurocomputational perspective, Pat Churchland Neurophilosophy, Gleick Chaos, Nureyev, Johnson-Laird, National Geographic, Doris Lessing, Rose English, Co-op Radio, Maturana and Varela, Michaels and Carrello, Mary Tiles, Karl Pribram, Evelyn Fox Keller, Margaret Whitford. Korzybsky, Vygotsky, Hebb, David Marr, Wittgenstein, Hallett on Cantor, David Whyte, Sartre, notes in origin, current, Virago Press, Foucault, the play of the weather, Emma Kirkby, BC Cultural Fund, Environmental Youth Alliance, Kate and Allie, Kauffman on Nietszche, We made this. 824 E Pender St, Strathcona neighbourhood, Ping's Café, Roy's Restaurant on Burrard, Pannekook on Main, Polson's Office Products, Woodwards Department Store on Hastings, Army & Navy Department Store, Starbucks on Robson, Circling Dawn Organic Food on Commercial Avenue, the Ukrainian Hall, Church's Chicken, the PNE site, Gold Pavilion Cafe, Golden Horse Cafe, Mount Ranier, Denver Airport, Silverton in the Kootenays, Blackcomb Mountain, RayCam housing project, Venables Avenue, False Creek, Princess Café, Read Island, SFU philosophy department, Kingston, San Diego, SFU faculty club, SFU Students' Union, San Francisco, the Ridge Theatre, the Mac room at Harbour Center, Coal Harbour, Jericho Beach, the Avalon Hotel, UBC philosophy department. |
Friday 4th December 1992 In Ping's Café. She says it's easier for the book if she comes and sits on my side. She puts her chin on my shoulder, closes her eyes and goes far forward to the place over the water. From there she is speaking to both of us about the center. (We'd eaten. She's drinking coffee, three cups. She's fretting still. Does she have to break up etc. I say it's such a scare word. She finds something with that. Such a word to live with for a week. I say suddenly, Can I talk to the book? Dear book, I'm going away for a while. You know that already, but. Long silence while I feel various things I shouldn't say.) Then how does it get to the road into the water. Her voice comes slowly and with a slight drag. "Have you seen a wooden road going into the water, with some birds at the end?" "I'm seeing it now." "It's where you are walking," it says. I'm frightened. Is Louie hypnotizing me with an image that says die? To walk into the water. I ask. It says, "No one can tell you to die, no one can tell you to live, do you know that?" I don't know that. "The road is a road you are building. You" (swim out with a plank and push it back - something like that). "It is not meant to go to the other side, it is to go to the center where there is water and sky in the water and water in the sky, and light. The birds are light small spirits. When you get there you never want to come back." "But do you look like a corpse to other people?" I still have to check whether this is a trick. "You are doing what you always do, riding your bike, talking to people. But you are yourself. You aren't worrying about how people see you." I'm in the familiar puzzlement of being near something I know, tantalized, not knowing how I'm supposed to act. I know what it is to be myself and not stopped by other people. After sesshin, that drive; on acid looking at Josie. The afternoon after I conceived Luke. That's the center. "It's telling me that I could be there all the time?" "Yes." "Would I do what's necessary?" "Yes. There's no store there, no storage." The night at Rumsey. The time I spoke to my father, other times around it. I'm remembering now how it began. "You were brave defending your joy this morning. There is danger. Joy is like you, it doesn't want to be married, it doesn't want you to say You're mine, it wants to go away from you and visit other people. You shouldn't call it I. You should speak to it, you should say, How are you doing? What do you want to do? Let's go, and See you later. See you later." "Is Ellie bad for me?" asks Louie. Silence. "Why don't you answer that?" "You used a censored word." "Does Ellie want to get rid of me?" "She wants to get rid of herself." "Which self?" "The anxious one," I say. It corrects me, "No the one that doesn't feel. The anxious one feels." "Is it the one who doesn't feel who wants this break?" "It's both. Here is a model you can use: there are two people and they both want the same thing but for different reasons, with different outcomes. This makes confusion." "Should I have a baby?" sez Louie. "Yes." "Will it be able to go there?" "How should I know!" After I asked whether Luke can go there, long hesitation. "He might, but he has obstacles." "Doesn't everyone have obstacles?" "Not obstacles." "It isn't a state, it isn't esoteric." "What are these café people thinking?" "That someone has died who you didn't like." Two people in dark clothes huddled somberly and bursting out laughing. 14 Now it's daylight, train whistle at the crossing, seagulls' bright high lines. An open sky. I'm sitting at the desk with my hand inside the neck of the sweater holding my right breast. I've never seen anyone say that. The quiet of the house before school traffic begins in the alley. I haven't said Michael's working his way toward living on Read or another island. This will be the last of my life with Rowen. Going to the corner for milk. A light, a light on the side of the cherry trunk, on the boles, on the moss. On the grass. A chopper high and far in the northeast swaying on a slow cycle so its light appears and disappears. The mountains white in their whiskers and airs. All so soft and live. And now I disappear out of it into the relational theory of machines. Tuesday 15th It's morning again, frost on the shingles, crows in signifying constellation crossing a blue more translucent than air. A wind contained in the box of the heating duct. Creaks in the floor, a change in the light. The skin over my nose feeling itself, how - bright and easy. Imagine a small cloud in itself. Not a thing with round edges, a mark in few well-organized colors, not held, not set, a shape. So much I can love, so much I can do, day, with you, bright and dark. With you, words and pictures, color and sound. It means beloved. And what is lameness in it. To be beaten, to run away, to run away to a place like this. To run away and be unable to find you. To be in despair that you will not want to touch me. But you do touch me. You don't stay, you are a friend whose time has to be honored. It is not my lameness but my carelessness you mind. My lameness is the shape of a cloud, something you can see and I can feel, another companion. My cold foot. How are you doing? Are you a child left standing in the snow? A girl who'll come with me to the end, who'll follow after if she can't walk beside. My particular. And you, image, what do you say. You're listening, in yourself, in your warm clear usual self. You're smiling. Later in our bed your touch will talk. For now you take notice. And get up and go to work. - There's an area of this discussion that's dead metal for me - Turing computability, decidability, effectiveness, Chomsky's language hierarchy, recursion - all that stuff. What's the metal I'm seeing - aluminum - white ash of - but as soon as I get into nonlinear dynamics I'm caught up in an eager wind, hungry and joyful - this is what I'm doing here, this is what I need, this brings me to where intuition can learn to talk, this is the far fairyland where my gift joins me. The tactile mind, oh the one I made and found that visited me this morning. I looked longer at the way frost rippled down the roof over its lath support, a motion independent of the lapped asphalt wavelets. And at the nonlinearities in the er words around erotic. The mathematical generators of the streak on the lip of an iris, of the streaks on the many kinds of iris. Imagining a film in which there are dictionaries of these beautiful structures made in ways that change as the making proceeds. Linked parameters. Some ways to say what it is about them. What is it we can see in them. 16th Your voice on the phone. What was the very fast sorting I went through alone at my end. "Is this Ellie?" Who's this, it might be -. It isn't until he says his name that I hear what's particular in his voice. (It's two things, a near-American-border accent, and some underlayer in the vowels.) - And immediately also that he's frightened or nervous. This is a good sign. Let's do this in a fast friendly way, then. And then: not so composed. A knock before I thought. I tumble down in my singlet - that's true but also contrived - open the door and have to find him around the corner, hiding the way I do when I knock at strange houses for the first time. Looks cold, wooly half gloves and red fingers and red nose. "Come in." He's offering me the thing to sign. "Go up." A tone strangely definite. I won't let him get away at the door like a courier. He likes the courtyard. I'm putting on my shirt that was ready on the banister post. "Do you want to see the house?" Turning on the light and standing there in my bedroom, he standing carefully on the threshold. Realizing I don't know what to say. I'm stunned. At a loss. Dredge up something about the green wood. "Everywhere there's wood, the plaster was falling down." I'm standing on the rug turning around going on valiantly not minding that my fright is showing. There's little space and time in that state, only time for the intention to push forward. My sense of it is he's stunned too. I don't mind because it's a tribute. This is the moment when this is happening, whatever it comes to mean or doesn't. "Two windows, they don't make houses that way now." I'm too rattled to pick it up. "When it isn't raining the mountains are there." We're side by side looking at the neighbour house, at the corner of the Ukrainian Hall. It has been an extraordinary three minutes of confusion, rapid like being hit by a car but not injured. By the time we're together at the window looking north we've sorted it out. Then there's the rest of the house. My grandfather's bench. Pink houses, a park. "You have to sign that thing." Does it mean he's leaving. Get it at the work table in the warm light room. Sit on the chair staring at it. He sits on his heels in the doorframe. Faculty meeting. What they're like. Hume and Hegel. "Hume's punctuation has to be re-indicated and then he's a beautiful clear writer. Hegel" - I get my chair out of the way and sit on the floor too - "is a grand intuitive, he's feeling around back here, you can't read him head-on." When he talks about Hume I get to see him a bit, he's less cold. I gape at his face like something I thought I knew but am completely startled by. Is this him? This is him? Really it's the confusion of a whole given before it parts, a connection way ahead of its constituting contacts. I hang balanced. I care and want to care and will do what I can carefully and won't resign any speck of what I want and will do nothing to coerce gods other than my own. "Have fun on the plane and get a window seat." And yes I didn't miss the haw-haw grin at drinking on the plane. "Is there another way to get back to the street?" "You came over the fence?! No one's ever done that before." Alright, now am I calm? An hour and a half getting this story down. Hi Louie are you reading over my shoulder? 24 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. 26th 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. 28 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. [Luke] "It's very happy to hear from you!" 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. 3rd January 1993 Oh Scratchy at the window rattling her mouth at a bird - have I ever heard that? He sees a gull white turning through white. In falling white the neighbourhood houses: blue, green, pink, grey. The fences: red, brown, an old red greened over with moss. 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 eye - 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. 8th 5:50 AM 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. 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. 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. - 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." - 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. 24 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. 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. - 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. 31st 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. 2nd February, 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 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. It feeds me with pleasure. 4th Was it ovulation? 6 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
20th Sleeping next to Louie on a Saturday night, Sunday morning, I dreamed the phone rang and I got up and answered it. "It's Dave." I can barely hear him, but he's confused, crying. "What are you doing to me? I feel as if you've put a spell on me, you've been enchanting me." I say carefully, in a hoarse or sleeping voice, that maybe I have been overdoing it, I have been trying to seduce him but maybe I've done too much. Lying in bed in the morning I risk telling Louie this dream. We talk to the book. It takes me seriously in so kindly a way that I feel myself in the midst of an extraordinary presence of feeling. It is completely real to me. I'm saying "I'm really terribly in love with this man." An anguish that feels like a soul. I say "My soul is here." The book says, "Where?" I say "here," rubbing my chest. I don't think I could find it now - as if his spirit, one of his spirits maybe, was there, and the whole of the blaze of my being taken with it. 21 The intensity of soul was an intensity of conflict. Desire so real and strong, wanting to knock on his door. Hesitation so real and strong, this is nothing to do with him, my own dream, don't mistake it. Don't implicate someone who has his own real life to find. I said I feel such impatience, I want to eject from it. I'm impatient of the fear. It said but you have been patient, you have been beautiful with it. I love what - the life of finding in this immaterial. 22 There is a knock. He's standing at the door. This time I don't fly over the moment. I look at him. I take a step forward and touch. And touch. Somewhere. In brave fear. And then. Come upstairs. Turn off the light. Sit in the kitchen. And then. You sit here. I'll sit here. We'll be voices. We'll hear space. I'll sit quite nearby. I'll feel the shape of the sound of what you say. I'll know where I feel it. The hour will be black open air lying quiet around us in all directions. We'll be at anchor in it, wavelets of invisible light will be running through our chests. Do you know the magnetic sensation? Sitting next to her, a current across a foot of space between our flanks. Lying with him in sun after looking at roses, body full of a slightly pulsing white light that is desire satisfied to be desire. The way a hand on an arm is a contact that allows a flow so bright, so soft it must be fluid love. Oh tonight I'm charged with it. It's like summer heat. What's the mind slow and strong like this - what else can it do - it can wait - it can listen - behind a waterfall, 26 It's panic - what's panic - forehead and throat - I'm so panicked I'm not knowing how to write - this is an anxiety that comes with the realm of the fathers - I am talented, the fathers will take me up, but among them I am sad and frightened and expect to be unseen. 1st March We sit in the cold on the steps and it's so dull I don't know why he isn't impatient. And this is his dream. In front of him an old woman, big and strong, like a peasant woman, who is wearing something low-cut that shows the yellow skin of her chest. Behind her a yellow wall. There is a tattoo on her chest, maybe a sailing ship, with an inscription arced above it. Skin becomes wall becomes the chest of an old man. The inscription on the tattoo reads "Thank you for letting me wear your breasts all my life." He likes the two of them very much, they're so strong and lively. Sunday 7th There haven't been times like these, it's pain, it's crashing, hot forehead, cold hand, a dependency that kept me all day at L's though I have a lecture to prepare, wanting her to say something that would crack me or satisfy me, impatient, saying Come on, oh please fix me. Tell me what's happening. The book said, When you went away from everyone you didn't feel it but you felt it afterward, you're feeling it now, about Rowen and Dave and Luke and Rob and Louie, that you lost them before and you'll lose them again. It's a path in your brain. That was last night. This morning it said, What is it to you that I love you? I said, If you were part of me so that you couldn't go away, it would be something, but as it is you can't stop me getting paralyzed, you weren't there all those years when I needed you, why did you take so long? Bitter weeping. "I come when people want to know." "I have always wanted to know, there was a time it was all I wanted." I was thinking of the child who decided her mother's love was useless and still thinks so. Weds 10th What Joyce said was: the panic makes sense, the crush on the young man was saving you from - what? - I've forgotten what she said. What I have to do is just feel the pain of all the times there was no support. So will I have to feel the pain for a long time, or will I just have to feel it very intensely for a short time? I ask. She giggles, "I do not know, I do not know." I say last time I got attached to somebody it ended in poverty and sickness and incapability. She says, and this was the relief, it isn't about attachment, it is about love so full that it isn't afraid, it's completely self-balancing. And that that is my task altogether, not just in this episode. We seem to be done but the time isn't over. I sit glancing at the harbour and mountains, seagulls, behind her. It is very quiet. She's gazing at me. I'm feeling I could go out of focus and see lights. After, she asks what was the quality of the energy for me. I say peaceful and nervous. She says it reminded her of, she was on the edge of, a time with ayahuasca and datura. What? A shamanistic other universe. 14th Unexpected. Saturday night, I'm in the bath, phone rings. I'm in so good a balance I seize bold opportunity and tell him I know he likes being beautiful. He says he's red. Will I come out either tonight or tomorrow? In a room packed with people, close to a candle at the bar. A horribly amplified singer cutting into my left ear. White wine. We're closer than any other space would let us be. yelling in warm candlelight. Physically in love, I mean simmering in magnetic touch. I'm facing his face and fully in heaven. Not frightened. He says he wants advice. He wanted that from the first. A woman in Toronto. "I never stopped being in love with her I believe in true love and being happy together." She's a filmmaker. Break-ups and running away. A network of fear. Of being alone and - what was the other one? - inadequate. I say, "If that's what you want, go after it but do it altogether ... Did you like hearing that?" "Yes" he says, "but that isn't the whole of it. Sartre says ask advice of someone who will tell you what you want to hear." I have an imprudent rush and say "and I hope you know how disinterested it is." I say that with a rush of something like mischievous delight. I am telling him I want him. The joy is the joy it is and the joy it is to have a way to tell him. Oh see me loving to love you and no longer angry and not at the moment frightened and happy not to be frightened. And does he see it? I don't know. I'm not sure he knows what disinterested means, he looks as if I've said I don't want him. We're confused. I do what I sometimes know to do, which is take charge of him with a gesture. I ask him to tell me what it means. He does know. So why is he looking hurt. It does hurt when somebody loves you. Alright, I understand that. But I didn't then. I was impatient, "Do you want me to spell it out?!" Indignant. But thinking it's a good tack to show an indignant moment. Monday, SFU There he is at the door. There is something to say about how it is, and it's this. As soon as he comes toward me at all I'm full of natural gestures, the way when we stepped into the elevator together we stood leaning back against opposite walls to see each other on the way down. I like the way he sits during the seminar, like this for instance [drawing] with his parade ground boots that won't pass muster up on the white couch. I like the way he concentrates on the person of the speaker, he sees to them personally, tonight smiling at Lou but it would be so for anyone. I like how he's quick and bold and warm. He's instantly there and perceptive and true, something about the way he positions himself physically is those things. The way that moment when I turned away to the counter collapsed into shame he was instantly there next to me, like something borne on the wash of my turning away. The way it was in the elevator. The way I have those instants where I don't say, but act, like taking his sweater from him and putting it onto the back of the chair, I mean the moments when, for all my diffidence, I just take hold of him.He does it too. "The color in the dream wasn't really yellow, I realized it was the color of your skin." "What are you thinking about?" "I'm still with 'disinterested' I guess." 17th Louie had so beautiful a dream. While she told it we were both far gone into the fairyland I feel with this man. She comes to my new place. I'm not there but a light is left burning and the radio is on. It is clean and white, an old-fashioned place. On the table is an open binder, my high school project about love. Images she finds beautiful. On the last page the teacher remarks that I've gone very deeply into the project and next time maybe I can try something that's not so hard. An old man and woman arrive. I'm with them. They are her parents and the landlords. The old people are yellowish, in their eighties. As if her parents had been able to grow old together, as if her father had not died. 19 Dear you. Yesterday I was seeing you all day. Did I like it. In the way that I like to see you, yes. But it is a trouble, like being squeezed in a press. Riding the escalator at Harbour Center racked with change. Inwardly the moment when I stand with my eyes closed putting forward my palms toward you. Today I was elsewhere and maybe you were too. I said we were people with dotted lines down the middle and arrows pointing both ways. I don't mind that you are. I think I could like to be in your company when you are in two truths at once. Do you like to see starlings? The many flecks of color in their black. They are the intimate exquisite birds no one mentions. Sunday 21st This is what I think - my grain work is alternative to his image. I mean that I hang onto him as a way to be in the heaven of loving sight. He is the dot of it in this field of man-mind. I could romanticize that and say I follow him in through, I follow his image. Oh but - my grain work is not alternative to his body. 23rd These weeks working in the Mac room at Harbour Center. Often I see the same faces. We come in, sit down, press the on button. The machine says BINGGG. Light plastic clacking. Good chairs, adjustable. The seat sinks or rushes up, the backrest presses forward or lies back. In the afternoon when the room is full and the machines are slow we'll sometimes all have our screens frozen and then we wake up and look around and see each other. The computer young men who know everything reassure us in almost loving voices. We're like strangers in a big quiet bed together. They are sexy afternoons. Why so. Being physically close to the men and all of us in trance together, and then coming out of silence into an internal room with carpet and low light. Weak thin attendants friendly and available coming quietly to sort us out. Sliding gestures on the screen. The way highlighting magicks up a wanton but finely controllable bar of color. Turquoise. The steady unsystematic learning which has had no ambition in it and has simply relied on help. The really flattering competent obedience of the system, which produces this satisfying visible object as if with no trouble, over top of an invisible depth of complex labour. And also the company of my image, who was there today in the men passing behind my chair, seen in peripheral vision. The rest of the building just there outside the door. Money machine, food floor, library. Smell of cookies baking at the mezzanine door. Mountains in standing clouds, the harbour. Paintings changing from week to week. A flower stall with orchid plants under the escalator. A bathroom mirror that shows me a face I like, thin. Fri 26th Still heart shaken. I haven't been seeing the violence I have ahead of me with the defense. It is like submitting - to Tietz, Schwartz, Todd - and if I carry it off as I know I could, in bravado pretending to be as I would have to be to make it work, then I participate as one of my own oppressors, one of those who say, I will pretend this is not a violent occasion, I will pretend I have not been invisible here. 28th The dream I woke from was a story about the departure of one of the people in a person. A beautiful woman is leaving. A dwarfish engineer sort of man is saying "I will miss her fearfully. I was the one who always looked after her." 29th If the beautiful woman in me who is departing is my feeling for him - if a dwarf engineer, a delayed mechanism, will miss her fearfully - if I love loving him for the beauty I am when I imagine him. That my feeling for him is a woman, I didn't know, but it's true - how much I miss being a woman - wants to be, wants to be, ah, pretty - I want to cry, feeling there is no way to it - at least, though foolishly, oh I did become a woman, wanting you - that's what it meant, the gestures - oh Joyce it isn't being loved I miss, it's the possibility of loving. The gesture of lifting my arms. 31 Working on this deeper level of the thesis, a sense of sophisticated philosophy, ie holding a term's many senses in their sorted net. 7th April 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. 13th Joyce you do not understand the bitterness of the floor of rivalry between women. Appalling unbearable rivalry of the nearest and only. I'm having to feel it in so bare a form. Appalling and unbearable betrayal of the nearest and only. There is no one else who can know me, men cannot, but the one who knows me will kill me if she can. 15 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?
21st Dear you, it is a tangle and very hard to be true. 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. 22nd 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. 7 May 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. It's a way of cutting immediate to me - given the materials - that simultaneity of attention not native to daily attention though. |