the golden west volume 13 part 3 - 1998 march-april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

8 March Cheryl citified, Toronto society, maroon lipstick, dull pink-orange hair, red leather jacket, handbag. We have a rumble about Char Davies. Cheryl fights for depression, is my sense. Char Davies moved men to tears with her virtual landscape. Tinkerbell graphics, sez C. A lot of money from selling SoftImage, a boyfriend who helps with the technics. Blond. Cute. Anglo. I said there has to be a countermovement, it has to come from women, it is going to be slow, it has to do with capacities of body. Everybody sees it differently, everyone is right, she was saying. No, there are ways that don't work, I was saying. I heard myself dogmatic, optimistic, not a bit East Coast, not a bit art community. Marion said Sandra's symposium was terrible, the only good thing was Rod Slemmons, Cheryl says. - There is this in Cheryl, she will not run against the community, and her community is built on a paranoid narrowing against heart and simplicity. We are animal and spirit, she says, the toy worlds of the cut-off guys are necessary defense against unbearable truth. I say, No, life isn't unbearable, there is what we need to come through if we are willing to know. Dear you Tom, this is why I'm with you, you haven't consented to mistrust life or yourself. - Sunday night - drinking water - peaceful - hardly hurting - plum branches - orange and dark red tulips - candles - it is a good night - we've come through. sadistic defense "Men must not be seen to be concerned about their relation with women; they speak about it, to each other, in redirected forms. Women must not be seen to be concerned with sex and power; they speak about it, to each other, in texture and color." The woman in mink who is saying she's expensive pussy, very superior pussy. Space is real     NO Time is real?     no What we sense as real is real     Abstractions aren't real     Abstractions are abstractions from the real     The mathematicians who say math is real do so because they give up the real of the body     Is idealist intuition based on separated use of some part of the brain     Is Cheryl magno-isolated     Space is real in the sense that it is perceived       Mathematicians build a common imagination in the magno     YES The intuition that it is out there comes from the fact that the magno is concerned with perception of out there     The aspect of math that is spatial imagining     Can you tell me why this intuition is deist     it's a delusion Outsideness?     YES Intercourse before birth     It's really that?!       Why don't I have it     you've been outside I've understood about birth     YES That was the first step     A lot of experiment with perceiving       I have been on one road from the beginning     It has always been about understanding intuition     I have never understood how intelligent I am     no you sort of have I've given myself the proper scale of question     But I haven't understood myself socially in that way     YES I haven't behaved as what I am     Should I apply intelligence to doing that now     Is it true I've worked through the infatuated and addicted parts     In the sense that I'm glad       One of the things wrong with drugs is that you lose time range     It is about citing and honoring whatever you can use in someone's work     Support the useful     Is that the whole of it     no What else     help them come through Opposition doesn't do that     it can Should I think of myself as entering a community     no, as being already in one I have been very interested in the nature of intuition. 13 Introducing the mind-body section of the course yesterday - the second tutorial, the smart one - seeing the semicircle of faces listening very close. Haven't talked about Joyce on Wednesday. I showed her my early love protests that I'm very wonderful and he should want to tell me all about himself and ask me all about myself, and if he doesn't write me letters it means he doesn't love me. She said, No it doesn't mean that. He hasn't taken care of his creative part as well as you have taken care of yours. He likes that flame in you but he's afraid of it. When he likes himself better he'll want to write you. I said, He's doing it, he's on the road, it's very beautiful to see. She said, That - what you're feeling now - that's love. 14 Yesterday after dinner - he ate the whole pot of stew - saying to Luke quite gently that I've been surprised to notice he doesn't seem to have realized how unusual Roy is. I also heard myself saying I'm not mad at Roy any more. It's evening, nearly nine. A lot of hours thinking about what I'm doing. Write it tomorrow. Tom on the phone, overloaded, not from working 16 hour days, but from finding Mathew on line. Emotional responsibility. I felt my way, named it, named how I felt with it, said I'd keep going and did. There's a very flat reluctant uncertain feeling when he's saying mm-hm and I feel he's suppressing impatience. To keep talking at such a moment is lonely and valiant. More than that, it's paralyzed. I have to keep wading upstream against molasses, force it. And then, this time, by naming it, naming it twice, the second time more accurately, it was as if I sprang free into real interest and he settled into the fact that he was with me. And then we were okay. 15 I've often dreamed something like a Victorian water works, large underground room with complicated mechanical parts. Last night it was vaulted brick. There was a door from the street, stairs down, and I knew there was an exit on the far side of the room that would come up on the other side of the road. I was showing it to Louie, finding a way through doors and passages. 19 Leaving Harbour Centre yesterday, turning the bike, I put my hand on the seat without looking and was stung by a yellow jacket, out of place, out of season. I wasn't allergic. Wondered whether it was a marker for the end of a time, I got allergies after Jam. What else. Drinking water, eating powdered green algae stuff. My thighs after two weeks are bright and sleek. I got up this morning frisking with health, singing I'm thinner I'm thinner I'm thinner. But in the night, waking with dark pressure at the solar, holding back pain at the heart. Went through the list of worries, there were no sighs. But I'll guess - I'm inscribing myself into a plan. I'm going to write a book, I'm saying. People like Kantian stories; Sheila this morning. I'm onto something. I'm saying I'm going to find a place to step into an institution where I am driven by responsibilities and have to deal with people. I'm saying I'm going to live with a man, so that for this difficult trick I won't have this kind of slow sorting-out time. I'll be invaded in public and at home. But this is the next move, this is where the wall is. Are there two walls? Maybe not. To do this I need to be my original self. That's why telling myself this fearful story I am tickled with excitement in the solar. Is that what it is? Running-ahead girl. Why does my heart hurt, saying that. Someone is afraid she'll die. Someone will die. - Michael Benedikt 1991 Cyberspace MIT cyberspace as a functional metaphor "consistent imaginary environments" Also, he says, a Neoplatonic valuing I should say, object systems understood symbolically the computational expense of symbol interpretation is borne by the experienced and educated individual mind in a living social context; in all, a perfect model of 'distributed processing' with free hardware 191 clarifying, by sheer contrast, the value of unmediated realities - such as the natural and built environment, and such as the human body - as the source of older truths, silence of a sort, and perhaps sanity noosphere emergence, proliferation and complexification of consciousness must surely be this universe's project what makes them spaces is value-laden lefts/rights, ups/downs, ins/outs, objects/voids, these positional value-assignments from the body and the earth orchestrated flow of electrons and photons through stable grids of decision mechanisms The design of cyberspace is, after all, the design of another life-world, a parallel universe, offering the intoxicating prospect of actually fulfilling - with a technology very nearly achieved - a dream thousands of years old: the dream of transcending the physical world, fully alive, at will, to dwell in some Beyond - to be empowered or enlightened there, alone or with others, and to return. 131 Every step that moves towards realizing this essential, if unstated, vision is greeted with such unreasonable enthusiasm the entire computer industry, it can be argued, is drawn along at maximal velocity by the fantasy of virtual realities even as it is currently sustained by the enormous profits to be made in processing business and scientific data and computerizing the second and third worlds. 211 26 Thursday 6:30. There's color in the clouds. I'm happy. Why you happy, dear? Cos the long-stopped thing is coming loose. Tom and I are adventuring, once again we didn't get stopped. I'm through coursework and can live anywhere if I have the money, and maybe I have the money. I'm thinner and younger and yesterday I did double-digging for two hours and my legs didn't hurt at night. What shd I tell about the visit. Monday I was waiting at Northwest Industries after work. There he was. Oh I'm in trouble, this time I like how he looks immediately. Very good haircut and he's clearer. Why is that trouble. Because if he normalizes he'll be worth more on the market than I am. Why is that. Because I'm a specialty item. And he was holding back. Went on holding back until he'd told his temptations and how he talks himself through them. And then I understood and said, Come here and kiss me. And then we were through. Tuesday night watching Entertainment Tonight's Oscar coverage with him feeling his contentment as a clean live warmth in his chest. I went along with his plans this time, Oscar party, bus ride. It's easy and lovely to make you happy. My identity wasn't at stake. We'd sorted something in these six weeks. Bus ride twice around your daily circuit looking at houses in their gardens. At WWU fighting over the mouse looking for Mike Mathews' email address. Coming home in the dark to the Evergreen Motel sign. You put on a white teeshirt Tuesday and walked around looking beautiful. Loose pants, leather jacket, shoes all that same auburn color. But what I liked best is talking about having a project together. Small pond logo a ripple in a monitor screen. Web publishing. I saw I could publish my journal. 28th Did everyone think it was incoherent     no, people liked it but it wasn't up to your standards What happens socially is that I freeze     YES I get to the edge of dealing with this and then I freeze     no you've never been to the edge My fears are accurate     If I do it wrong I'll lose distinction       Do you want to comment     something about oppression Okay     there's an illusion I'm oppressed by an illusion     YES Will you tell me what it is     in every instance of tyranny the truth was competition Big men competing with a speck of a girl     YES They were competing with my giftedness     Was it visible     Was my giftedness more important than my lameness     YES What was my gift     wholeness Was there some reason I had it     because you lost your mother My loss made my gift     YES   Could I tell the story     YES Would you help me     What are other people that isn't that     it has to do with honesty I saw     YES What other people didn't see because they were afraid of losing their mother     Is that it?     YES - Saying to Cheryl yesterday that art theory is theological in the sense that it uses trigger terms so vague they can evoke whatever, and constitute a community that never realizes no one is imagining the same. 31st Today a hungry feeling, craving. What is it for. Food, kisses, talk, a very good book, a trip, something unusual. David Braddon-Mitchell yapping and barking about externalism and knowledge justification was unbearable this morning. Creation, maybe. Once when I felt like this it said feeling. - "Even when we get angry it's like a common project." Tom is happy. 1st April David Birch driving away with the London wicker trunk I bought for my last big jump twenty-three years ago. I'm wanting to clean, paint, fix. Holding back, I shouldn't be fixing if I'm about to leave. But I want furniture, color. I want clean. I miss you. It's simpler than it was. Almost nothing to say. I cleaned the workroom. Last tutorials tomorrow, last marking this weekend. The land talk to rewrite. Rowen in a week. Sore. It's a slow vacant time. It's alright, I think. Stabilize everything. Let the next move come to me. How to shift to living with Tom. How to shift from being a student to being the right kind of employed. Both of those. Not leaving out images. 7 "I feel as if I must sum up my ego state at the time and to do that I must give you a little more biography. The thought of doing so makes me want to puke. I am mortified in retrospect by my chauvinism. I am amazed at the adventure your mother and I undertook." - "The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth" - Constable, Gombrich doesn't say which letter. 1824: "I hold the genuine pastoral feeling of landscape to be very rare ... it is by far the most lovely department of painting ..." "too much timidity, too much conformity in the higher ranks of art and society" as the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends, so with the objects of our thinking - they hang to each other by associated links, but the original source in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed. Wm James 1899 Talks to Teachers "sparkle with repose is my struggle just now" "the whole object and difficulty of art (indeed of all the fine arts) is to unite imagination with nature" Leslie 179 Leonardo sfumato, veiled form "hovering between seen and unseen" [Gombrich may have been citing CR Leslie 1949 Memoirs of the life of John Constable J. Lehmann] 12 What's different. Tom was here Friday and yesterday and I'm not needing to tell about it. I am needing to ask why I don't need to write. This happened with Louie after a while. I became like other people just living and not having a lot inscribed that needed to be seen again later. But what I am wondering is what is it that's different in the time I'm with him. I see him less. I guess I was hyperalert - or else 'open' - and what did that have to do with being either frightened or sexual. I know that after he missed the bus and we came back and lay down I could see the beauty of the sky's evening colors, which seemed of a kind of beauty I have never seen before. The way, in fact, this spring's touches of first color - new leaf's greens and bronzes and khakis and browns hung together in misted bits in the trees - have seemed to belong to a fairyland of a new kind. The sky last night was pink and blue vapour, shaped vapour and smudged vapour, dark grey-blue and strong greyish-rose with pale green-blue in the few patches of open sky. (I know these color descriptions don't read.) Alright, what about Tom. I woke Rowen in first wet daylight and we were on Knight Street just after six-thirty. The left side wiper is squeaking and doesn't clear the glass properly. I peer through blur. Rowen was in the back with a pillow. Already a line at the border. I'm hospitably showing Rowen the sights, and therefore not seeing. Stepping through the flower bed to Tom's window. He looks like someone off the Enterprise in his long-sleeved teeshirt. I'm not seeing him well. He takes us to breakfast at the Bagelry. Rowen naps on the way home. I don't want to talk. Tom is tapping his finger on the dash and I'm irritated. The cottonwood fields are coming into leaf, each field a different stage of leaf, sorted by age. The most mature stand a quite beautiful field of columns. The air in the country is full of fresh scent. Tom is happy Rowen has his jacket over his legs. When we get home I take Rowen to Kian's. When I get back Tom is in the green chair with his legs stretched out in front of him. He hasn't stirred. He likes that room. We try poking. I can't get there. He's trying the daddy thing and it is leaving me cold. I get flaxseed oil and stroke him, but he wants to come inside me. I'm too unready and get abraded as if I'd been raped. His plan is to take us to a movie. There's nothing we want to see but we go to Grease which is a remarkably lewd stupid cartoon. Tom spends money. Twenty-four dollars to get us in, at least another twenty on a hot dog, the biggest size of popcorn and two huge drinks. We come home, I make Rowen cocoa, we go to bed. I'm still detached. The book sez talk about his teeth, his driver's license, and money. I don't want to but I do. It means, it turns out, talk about his fear of other people's opinion. He does not get mad but I'm still not with him. We go to sleep. In the morning he wakes up and tells me he loves me. He is pushing me off the bed. Rowen runs to Jim's to watch cartoons. I make crepes. I talk about whether Rowen could live with us to go to school. It's a large negotiation suggested to me by Rowen's manner with Tom. Tom says he would help support him. I hope that's more than I was asking, but it's not implausible, since other men have supported his kids. Rowen, sitting on the other side of me in the theatre, suddenly called Tom his father. His city father, he later said he meant. Here Louie phones. We'll go for lunch. What else. Tom changing his mind about leaving the mission. I feel two things: I'm off the hook, and I'm delayed once again. He's doing what he did at the Golden West. It's okay. He's learning to plan. He's rocking to find his point of balance. I said there's a way we're both in our early twenties, just starting out, no money, no security, no furniture, no careers, but pointed toward those things. - It's Easter Sunday. Louie and Rowen and I eating fabulously at Earl's in North Van. A hawthorn in the parking lot, leaf smell, bitty blossom. Tasters of Riesling and Zinfandel. I gave Rowen sips. He was so instantly altered by those sips that he seized both our glasses and swallowed the rest, and then cracked up at my story of Luke one year old accidentally knocking back wine in a country field and stumbling puzzled with little x's over his head. 13 Do you want to talk to me     about what he called reserve Is it true that he stops me     YES What he said is accurate, he's trying to protect me     YES If I adore him will he need to leave     YES But also he needs the unrestraint     Does he know he's going to leave me     YES Is it true     He's both saying he's going to leave me and that he's never going to leave me     Will you comment     you're not withdrawn I was blank and restless because I was withdrawn from that     The one who says he isn't going to leave is compulsive     Please talk to me     the Work Will you lead me     childishness We don't know whether he is going to leave     NO, he is going to leave 14 Tom dreamed he was walking along a road through a landscape that opened up as he went. He was at a place where he could see the land ahead. A dog rushed toward him. They had a meeting full of love, a full exchange. Then the dog went back into the bushes on the side of the road. Last week I dreamed I sawed off my right hand at the wrist. I told people to come help in case there was a lot of blood. There wasn't. The flesh on the stump swelled some. I was asking people to saw off the left hand, since I now could not do it myself. I was cutting off my hands for religious reasons. People were trying to talk me out of it. As I woke I was beginning to realize what I wouldn't be able to do - write, garden. 15 Phone call last night. If we take away what's false we're both people who just want to love, he says. That's the way we're on the same wavelength. Yes. 18 Rowen was here a week and I hardly saw him. There was the morning I showed him how to blow-dry his hair at the oven door and he like the way he looked, came back joyful from the mirror. There was Easter lunch at Earl's and Rowen next to Louie seizing the wine glasses. There was looking through our house file, the decisive way he said he liked the Frank Lloyd Wright house. Showing him the James Turrell book and then looking at all the colors in the sides and corners of the blue velvet paint in this room. Long, long ago last Thursday there he was coming into the Arrivals Hall in his dirty green ski jacket, still a little boy, maybe for the last time still a little boy, hair badly cut by Michael, backpack full of dirty clothes. Less upright than he was, still bright-faced. The moment when he said he had a lot of adult friends and I said, yes because he is friendly and confident with them. Not afraid of them. He lit up, something he does transparently. So long ago Saturday morning Tom in this bed rubbing his back, needing to touch a child. At the Golden Horse with Louie for breakfast wanting us to play with the quiz in his loved puzzle book. He knew Pegasus was born from Medusa's blood, Atalanta's silver apples and other things I didn't expect him to know. Yesterday before breakfast we were squashed together in the green chair looking at Metropolitan Homes. Ruth Voskamp at the train station. I saw her with a flash of gratitude that I could like to look at her. It has been that way for her all her life. People have relaxed in the cleanness of the way she is pretty, the Dutch pink of her skin, the tilt of her nose, the human perfectness of her mouth, precise and soft, the natural silveriness of her blond hair. No makeup, glasses, a red plaid jacket, beauty so structural there is nothing she needs to do. Married at twenty to someone she met at eighteen. Chicken farmers. Three children in six years. Her husband wept on the phone, You are so far away. There's a man she wants, a high school teacher who's forty-one and never married, "a wonderful man," European. She has been making money painting murals in small towns in Ontario, eighteen dollars a square foot. She isn't intelligent. She tends to nearly miss her plane. She has left her kids for two weeks and come to Michael's island. Michael her wild hero very tame now, she will find, with his fat lazy wife hogging what wildness there can be in the circumstances. Fourteen years later. Six o'clock Saturday morning, raining. The last days have been sunshine carnival days, the way the streets are full of puffs of color, pink, white, yellow, down the alleys, up the avenues, like Michael's paintings used to be, more than natural, city unnatural fantasy spring. Scented air. Tom crying in the mission office because Jim White, Whiteman, is shooting up. He made it all the way off, got his MA, eleven years sober, working with street kids. But he couldn't get it together with a woman. It was Pilgrim, Whiteman and the Warthog, since before Rebecca. You thought it was a risk to tell me. No, I said, we should both remember the thread men hang by, how much depends on your willingness to be in good with a woman. 19 Last night sweeping the dial in the dark, Dark end of the street and Desperado, songs I feel as yours, as you. I'm instantly deep in love, lying with you on your single bed in the dark, feeling your loneliness the way I hardly feel my own. I don't think I can say this. The songs with which you told me you, the love with which I feel it as a man's life and honour you for your willingness to be it, for having brought it to me raw. "Keep our hands on the wheel and our hearts on fire" said a song I wanted to sing in chapel at the Lighthouse Mission. Among the student's listening to Jan-Marie's Rinpoche, tuning him out, I was feeling, alright, emptiness, don't be afraid of emptiness, which these days have been offering. I phone in unbridled joy. You said manic but it said it's not that. It frightens you not for the reason I thought, but because it invites you to let go too. Neither of us have let go mutually. We don't know what would happen. Just when you're taking fright at my joy a fire alarm goes off on your end. The fire department arrives. The director is on his way from home. Look what you did, you telekinetic one. There is a mad edge to it     no just unrestrained But is there something wrong with it     no He really did learn something about holding a space open - curtains in his forehead - that's reason to be overjoyed     Is there any good reason to be frightened by it     YES releases control, which undoes power Making people contain their joy establishes power     YES Are there good reasons to restrain joy     YES to bring someone through What did I do. I said I was crazy about him. I said I was beside myself. He doesn't know how to respond. The question is, how does he respond. The answer was, with alarm. I can greet that fear joyfully. Ah fear you are so workable. What is fear saying? This joy is infecting me, I'll go too far. Fear of joy because it's primal. I imagine escalating joy until it's wordless shining. Will you tell me what's his proper response     YES his actual response - Bratty Tanya has come home and is pounding me with her robot music. At the garden I get into a rumble with carpenter Bryan when he wants a table height cozy for him and much too high for a kid. A woman with a fat ass grubbing in what used to be my plot. Arguing with absent Nicole. Carole Itter conspiring with Keith on the corner, both people I've had garden rumbles with. Now ask, did I win those rumbles? Generally yes. Were the issues worth fighting? Absolutely. Alright, but it's that feeling of passage through a community that doesn't like me for reasons that are unjust. All I'm doing is caring about things I should care about. 20th I woke at night, or was it as I was falling asleep, and imagined a novel about my mother at the time shortly before I was conceived, standing on the yard, calm, clear and young. It was a book that would be beautiful not sensationalistic, quiet quality, a young woman's natural private loveliness. - Does he trust me more because I found Joey     YES Is there more you want to say to him about this     his discernment about addiction used to fight for inner lovers Will you name the inner lovers     aggression and intelligence Their happy marriage     YES It's a different pair than in me     YES Will you name them in me     balanced force and research Will you explain balanced force     crisis, delay, loss of, mother Research is my true nature, the other is what I have to deal with     YES   Can you explain Van Limbeek to me     YES Is what he does a kind of visualization     YES Is it possible to genuinely prophecy     YES Could I do what he does     YES Can you explain discarnate entities     YES, persist Spirits of people who have died     Are they conscious     YES Is there consciousness without life     YES When he sees them it's visualization     In the sense of seeing something invisible     Which he is perceiving though not seeing     YES Something triggers perceptual centers     YES There are a lot of mysteries in this     not really How there can be discarnate entities - how they can be conscious tho' dead - how they can know the future - how the psychic picks particular moments to see   Stop there?     no it has to do with action That's the answer to all the questions     YES Does the psychic cause the events     no Action at a distance     By action do you mean something like effect     YES Dead people's energetic effects     YES Their energetic organization continues to exist     And it is sensitive to other energetic organization     YES So the medium basically uses a medium       Disturbed children are energetically disturbed     YES Am I sensitive because of trauma     no heredity It helped me when I was abandoned     YES My imaginary sisters     YES Were there seven     YES Are they still with me       The events that are seen have a moment of a kind of action     YES Like a blurt of organization     YES It travels in time     no, communicates Can you tell me what or who communicates     fright Is a bleat of structure?     YES Enables help to find you     YES Whenever I feel afraid I can be tracked     YES   Are all emotions signals     no Emanations     But that's only part of the story     YES 2 Cream and punishment. A Belgian guy who pushed a pie into Marguerite Duras' face. Godard knew what to say. There was also a philosopher. In the [Harbour Centre] food basement eating noodles at A&W there's a monitor with a wonderful guy leaping into a song called Leap of faith. Springsteen. I can't hear the song but he's in democratic joy, I can see. Throws himself into the audience and they pass him back on stage. He's so physical. He's so beautiful. He's so believably energized. There are women playing electric guitar around him. He's kidding with them, he's bumping hips with a rangy black girl. An old man in a booth is staring at me. This evening when the sky is pale orange behind darkening fluffed-up branches of the white street cherry, I phone Tom, who is admitting someone at the desk. Frissons of fear when he thinks forever. He invites the fear to speak. It does. Yieee. But then he thinks, that isn't right. And then he says I am so wise. 23 Somewhere midaft he had thought we could watch Springsteen videos together. What happened in the last hours of the last visit, when he'd missed his bus and we were in bed cuddling, was that he said I was reserved and I said I'm only reserved because he wants me to be. He stops me if I start to adore. When I felt invited I went into primal love again. And then we negotiated on the phone. I said I was so in love I was beside myself. That was when the fire alarm went off in the mission. But we came back to it and I said manic is not what it is. It's young. I say let's just let ourselves love each other as much as we can, over the top. That's what I want. Let's see what happens if we do that. - Talking to Nathalie on a sofa in the coffee house in the basement on Hastings that used to be - when I was first in Vancouver, walking in the black pea jacket - a white-bread restaurant, dinner for $2.99. Anyway, that place very up-to-date, panini, old sofas, rusty metal. Marveling at our speed and ease, she like a little skateboarder in unorganic orange plastic jacket, close cap, baggy pants and her twelve-year-old's white little face. Nose ring. We just talk. She's the one place where I'm welcome to talk about how it's going with Tom, she's the one person who knows the context of my work. She's got swift grasp I never expect, something like my own, except she gets it all without slog. Can't write it, because that's what the slog prepares. Fine company. Flexy. Hip. She wanted to talk about permutations. She says it feels mechanical, something the brain does, abcd, adbc, etc. I have no idea what that means but I see what I can do with it. - Here's your music, Thursday night, I have on because I was at the end of Cahill's book and suddenly I was needing you. It is of its time, as I'm hearing. There's what I felt hearing it before, but also the technical blur. Heart with blur, which you were. I'm imagining the lightness of your voice in its present balances, its contented coming-through balances. What should I do with this end-of-day lonely wish. Ah, sit with it. Okay. 24 Rowing all day long - you don't mind - there's going to be a snug harbour. Here's my present problem about location. I'm anomalous where I am, eagerly discovering what is commonplace somewhere, I don't know where. If I go to that somewhere I'll be less than commonplace, I'll be behind. Say it another way. I keep finding evidence that I'm set up right, I've got the basics right, I'm not stopped where the institutional people are stopped. I'm in the circuit just by being able to spot and integrate and extrapolate. I'm highly, highly viable. Now I need to find a place where I can do what I do and make enough money. Here's my worry: I'm so timely I must be out of date. What else do I know. I want an anonymous personal neighbourhood, a very intense specific lovenest, an exciting busy generous nonpersonal work community, a project-related immediate circle. I want all intensity taken out of money, just casual friendly access to whatever I need. I want best physical care with the same simple efficiency. I want a different kind of clothes - not agricultural - soft, well-cut, well-made, a little futuristic. I don't want dry cleaning but I want to look expensive - I'm saying that uneasily. Stewart Brand 1987 The media lab: inventing the future at MIT Viking Military experiments with pilots' helmets that display a computer-enhanced real-time landscape on the visor, with the pilot, in real or simulated flight, issuing voice commands like 'select', 'zoom', 'god's-eye', 'fire'. The pilot points with his eyes. The Media Lab is more interested in a perceiving computer, as the AI lab is more interested in a thinking computer. You can look at a silicon chip and see the two halves of the room there. There's the vacuum tubes over on the right, which is the processor section, and there's the memory section on the left, doing almost nothing, spitting out something once in a while, while the processors are keeping very busy ... a neuron is basically a memory/processing element, and the information, as near as we can tell, is in the connectivity. 184 volume 14 the golden west volume 13: 1998 february - april work & days: a lifetime journal project