the golden west volume 14 part 3 - 1998 june-july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

27 June Friday early evening. The music! War. I'm away working at the Publab from early. I work until I can't. I come home. I want my house, I want my green chair. Tom's dream last night. He's with unspecified people he loves, his people. Something very bad is happening. Aliens are sucking all the oxygen out of the world. People with heart problems or other weaknesses have already died. Aliens take over their bodies and animate them. You can't tell they have been taken over. If you touch the bodies the aliens explode them and jump onto you and kill you. The aliens are like bacteria. Tom is trying to get his people to one safe place there might be, but he's getting weaker. His people have all died. He can't move any more and the aliens are coming at him. He doesn't want to die without fighting. He screams. He wakes himself screaming. 28 It's his core nightmare     YES He dreamed it because his brain is more coherent     Very coherent     His fear of contact is that the nightmare will spring out of people     It's the dream he's been running away from     no, the feeling When he's manic is it fear of contact     YES The mistake in feeling is that the feeling will kill him     YES Woke thinking about color. The way we see it there and want to say theoretically that it isn't there, is nowhere. The skin of yellow paint on the door - is on the door - is ordering light reflected - is made to order light reflected - but it's not the light I'm seeing. I'm seeing by means of it. I can see yellow without seeing a thing - pale yellow of ruby laser flashes on the eyelids. Color and pleasure. We elaborate color the way we elaborate tonality. Music and color construction because of that pleasure. Color and detailed form - every leaf on the ficus. Every thread in the plaid. Is the where a kind of what?     a room is, a place is Now I'm going to tackle vision     YES Is the magno primarily for action/motion     Is the parvo primarily for love     YES Face recognition     YES The magno isn't really vision     YES When a bat senses the dots on a wing that's parvo     Color is really a form of texture perception     Which is part of object recognition     YES It's not accidental that the parvo is near hearing     When we see a room as a whole is that parvo     But magno prepares it     Magno is geometrical     YES Do you want to say this     change drives stable configuration What Gibson talks about     YES So the magno participates in form perception too     Do the magno and parvo work in the same way     YES Will bat audition help with this     YES Is it mainly a difference of scale     YES 30 "It no longer made sense for me to try to own Harrison. It only made sense to practice love for every living thing." [Shearer] 1st July With Joyce this morning. Judgment, I say. Defending myself against their stupidity, conventionality, laziness. Whose macho qualities damaged you? she says. I feel childish rage. I know the answer. Silent judgment was my only defense. But now I do it everywhere. Breathe, she says, close your eyes and let everything go, soften everything. My forehead stays tight. This happens, sensation without meaning. It was quite a hard session, I guess, unclear. I feel I said what I already knew and had to lead her to things that should have been obvious. She was ducking. I had to hold responsibility for knowledge of the worse, where she should have been willing to hold it for me. Her mother called her Ugly, she said. In Japan they have a museum of beautiful things which have to have a defect, she said. In Japan, if a woman has a deformity no one will marry her, I said. I'm angry now. It's the guilty weak people who deny. I need someone who is strong enough to face the worst with me, so I won't have to hold it by myself, so I won't have to hold sanity by myself. My judgment is holding sanity. Am I willing to give it up? she asks. I am willing to be willing to give it up, I say. I know there is something stupid and defensive about it. I will give it up for what is truer, oh very gladly. I will not give it up for what is untrue, which is the untruth other people have tried to give me out of guilt, and I have wanted to accept. And which if I accepted would deform me in understanding too. I believe this and yet I see that I am deformed in my understanding anyway. I see their deformity and mine, I don't live in dreamland; but I am deformed in the way I'm locked into holding onto just that part of what's true. Do you want to lead me     passage from difficulties Will you carry me across     no You're saying make the passage     YES I need a stronger container than she is     no I need my mother to tell me what it is my father feels     YES I need her to be honest but on my side     YES I need her to be effective, is that what it is about Joe     YES I need her to not be frightened of our rapprochement     YES I have to put a lot of effort into maintaining the negative     YES I'm still confused     YES She put a lot of effort into obliterating it     YES I just want some grown-ups around me who tell the truth     YES So I can relax     YES Is there a particular truth I need them to tell     YES that they understand that you're angry and in crisis in the relation of feeling and understanding I don't like what I understand     YES That's what I need them to know     YES Because I don't like what I understand, it is an effort to maintain knowing it     YES Is there a solution     come through, balance, partial loss, brilliance and courage Do you mean every deformity is a gift     there is a gift AND a deformity The deformity is not itself the gift     YES   Cynthia Shearer had balance     no her book does She saw the balance of loss and brilliance in people     There's a reason why I can't     YES (crying) Will you help me     YES, come through I see them alternate     no I see nothing but loss and then I see nothing but brilliance     YES Please help me     YES, perfection Okay     unconscious Unconscious belief that people are either perfect or not     YES Is there something I should give up     YES being mothered I ask of everyone, can you be my mother     YES The answer is no and then I turn away     YES Is it as simple as that     YES I should give this up     YES Will something valuable be given up with it     could be Can you explain how to give it up     in the midst of change Always, everywhere     YES All my anger at Tom is that he's not my mother     YES All my judgment     no Anger and judgment aren't the same thing     Judgment without anger is alright     no I'm discouraged     no Depressed?     something about losses I feel I'm not going to understand     What about     losses (As) I'm not understanding     YES Is this because I'm tired     no Is it real work     YES   2nd That session yesterday isn't finished. I don't know how to resolve it. 1. There is true sight which has been maintained against much resistance against the right-thinkers. 2. There is defense against other people's judgment of me 3. There's silent resistance to oppression. 4. There's the childish moment that says of anyone "it isn't her" and is angry. 5. There's the discomfort of intelligence with stupid speech. 6. Is there something like a relation of myself-before to myself-after, where myself-before maintains itself whole by denouncing myself-after? 7. Maybe there is invasion by their judgment of me. 8. There's regret for their damage. - All of these are correct, so it's complex. 9. There's the way their damage is oppressive because I'm empathic - it's like bad air. 10. There's retarded growth. Is there a solution to all of these at once? Deep change of unconscious structure, it says. There could be an organization that's still smart and works better. Integrated. Compassion?     Noticing the compassion that's there already     Don't give something up, add something     Being artificial worries me     judgment worries you - Sittin' here on a fine evening, hours before bedtime. Nothing to do. Nothing driving me. Nothing pulling. 3 A little sensation of responsibility - if I don't have to be ready to lose you any moment I could look around for things to do with you, ways to please you. You're struggling with desires to buy things, and telling on yourself. It's exciting. Why am I reluctant to say or feel this: last time Joyce said at the end of the hour that it's a privilege to work with me. 5 Tom at the end of a [phone] conversation loosens and tells a story about the Afrikaans preacher at the mission. We're laughing. He's feeling relief: Yes I am enjoying this, he thinks. 6 I'm lonely at the end of the day. 7 Zelazny imagines a dolphin philosopher/musician. The woman who teaches him, that is to say, who transmits the music to him, is a dark woman who's a telepathic photographer of dolphins, who has two withered legs. "something like music ... some development of a proposition ... a sufficiency of being in that sea that was neither dark nor light." Roger Zelazny 1987 My Name Is Legion Sphere - It's months since I've heard music I like. I think I must have lost whatever it takes to love music, and then I come across something that takes me completely. Sunday night the end of an orchestral piece that has what I like visually too - air quivering with sustained pattern, broad slowly moving bands. Arvo Part 1980 Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten Vienna Philharmonia Young people are sitting on roofs to see the shining sky. What am I doing all day. Yesterday nine hours in Photoshop. It's working with a tool - acting, looking at the result, acting to undo or go on. It is deliberation and accident. I work all day, sometimes, with one scan. There's one little picture that is the farthest I've got, very small, 13k maybe. Talismanic. It's in the orphic file. Then there are those weeds in mist panels. They're nice but they and the rest are this side of the line. Often I have a sense of isolating what it was I saw in the original photo, I mean what I liked, as if I liked it at some particular depth in the nervous system and ignored the rest. Yesterday finding the head in the skein of the graph of a chaotic attractor. Trying to figure out how to strengthen the sense of it. I don't have a sense of any of these pictures being related. Or related to writing. They're just what I find to do in that medium, starting with scans that mostly spoil the pictures I start from. One thing I have seen, the other/under world isn't dark - it's neither dark nor light. 8 A golden evening. Tom [on the phone] was an engine shooting down the track. There he goes. I'm just a stranger waiting for this one to pass. Maybe another time there'll be a man who can sit down quietly and look around. 9 I woke and read neuroscience for two hours. Got to the lab before it opened, took a hint from Jim's email, found neuroscience journals online, slowly figured out how to find the papers with pictures (search by the names of stains or microscopy techniques), pulled the largest versions of a half dozen of them onto a new zip disk, remembered I could use the Get info box to note source citations - and there I have what I have been years wanting to get. But I'm not tempted to play with them. They are perfect. Rode home on the bike, took the car to do the laundry, bought and ate $4 organic cherries at Circling Dawn, filled the tank. Tanya's making the front of the house unlivable. I sit in the armchair on the back balcony reading the journal from 1984: John Guri and then Michael. When it gets dark I thump on the kitchen floor so I can move to the center room. I hear the car: Tanya's leaving, though it's just after ten. I woke this morning with my abdomen stiff like a plate, because of the music and having to phone her last night. Oh and stopped at Hastings Clinic on the way downtown this morning to pick up Premarin cream for next week. - In the process of looking at the site Jim told me about, saw how academic jump-off sites can be organized. 11 Since yesterday a sad something is waiting for me when I stop working - a lonely scared little thing. Hello sweetie, are you lonely?     no Do you want to talk to me     yes Okay I'll listen     something about coming through You want to come through     YES You want to join me     yes I would like you to     YES Do you have an owie     yes Will you tell me what it is     loss, shared, unconscious, Ellie Because I'm telling people what happened to you?     yes It's making you remember it     YES I think people will like us better if they understand     YES But you're feeling the soreness of it     YES Oh sweetie I am so sorry that happened to you     YES I am so sorry you still have to feel it     YES "I'm alone, I'm sad, I'm scared"     yes "I don't know how to look after myself"'     yes I'm just hanging on moment to moment     yes I'm so alone     YES The feeling is very sore     YES I'm afraid it will go on forever     YES I'm afraid it will kill me     YES   Larger one, are you there     yes Will you help me     this is the Work I don't know how to go on     don't go on, just feel it 15 Tired. Why didn't I sleep for two nights [in Bellingham]. Lying next to a man sleeping with energy, taking deep rapid breaths like an engine of health repairing itself vigorously. On Monday evening the lovely silence of your spot on the bay. The minute sparkling suck off a crust of barnacles on the rock - is that what it is - and sometimes the slow tolling of the buoy bell. Small birds. Chuckling and giggling of water on three sides. It was six o'clock but the sun was very sharp on my knees. What's the truth about that visit. Disaster. I had talked myself out of being judgmental so I was passive as the moon. I suffered in misery that knew nothing. It had been three weeks and I was lonely. Really I don't like being faithful. I hate sacrificing touch. And then there was the border. Two hours with smoke from the engine rolling out from under the car, which was hot. Tom looked alright, he looked nice. He wasn't manic but he was something he never is, he was indifferent. He wasn't chasing me. Afraid of the dentist. Or something else too. We went home to 111 at the Evergreen and flipped through channels of junk. He said he wasn't going to poke but he tried - banging away - and that was the last try. I was lying awake all night. Next day we waited to go to the dentist at 1:30. I sat in a tight little welfare waiting room looking at National Geographics. Then for the rest of our time he obsessed about the dentist. Why did he neglect his teeth. Why is he 52 years old and working in a mission. It was raining on Tuesday, cold. So there we were shut up in the motel room watching a long history of Twentieth Century Fox. I wasn't being judgmental for a second. I was just lonely. A second night where he slept and I lay alone, alone, alone, dim and stupid. My heart hurt until he fell asleep. In the morning I had a moment of energy nagging him about evasion. If he really wants to know why he is 52 years old and working in a mission, there is a reason to find, I say. It is that he evades pain. Then it was time to take him to work and drive back in the rain, stunned with exhaustion, a hundred dollars gone, no heart found, no help for the next stretch. I am complaining here because I wasn't complaining there, and should have been. Then I check it through and this is what I think. Dear soul, you are lying about your blood pressure. It has to be that. I paid for the unconsciousness of your fear. [Later - it was lying about headache.] Do you have anything to say about that visit     you were angry That he didn't want to poke me     YES Or listen to me     So the question is why am I depressed rather than angry     YES I'm depressed just thinking about it     YES Will you comment     heartbreak Mine?     no, his Feeling sorry for him     YES I felt like I was dead     YES And that was compassion     YES Did he really experience it as intimate and lovely     YES I didn't really have any heart for him     YES So it wasn't really compassion     YES My notion of compassion is just blanking out on my own needs     YES That's completely wrong     YES Judgment has in it desire for intimacy, joy     YES There is a lot of love in judgment     YES I'm afraid of the deadness of compassion as I practice it     Real compassion is like that moment of kissing him     YES   Do you want to add anything     you feel excluded By Tom     YES Because he's lying     YES Do you want to comment     you feel betrayed Should I feel something different     YES that he's improving Very slowly     Do you have more to say about his lying     no Advice about my relation to it     YES, graduate Don't take it personally     YES It limits him but it needn't limit me     It has made me suffer     YES It is a cost     Is that a reason to separate from him     no Explain     you can take it Why should I     for brilliance and courage 17 I look out the bathroom window for some reason and there are Rhoda and Trudy with a small Asian man who is Jamila with her hair cut. Tight grey pants - the old tight grey pants - and a yellow plastic jacket, standing in her stolid way with her hands in her pockets. Trudy, who is dressed up with vest and necklace, is the one of the three who feels me looking. They look alright. They're in good shape for their ages. They don't have anything I want. Was Trudy thinking I could see they were preying on her     YES Will you tell me what preying on means     abuse of early love Did I prey on Jam     Did I deserve what she did to me     YES Did I deserve what they did to me     YES Did I try to do it to them     YES So I have no grievance     YES It's my responsibility to live [consciously] in early love     YES Then I can't be taken prisoner by means of it     YES   Do you have anything more you want to say about Jam     inspiration went indecisive and lost imagining I had confidence before that     YES They intended to kill that confidence     YES I did not attack their work     no you did Will you explain     something about four Is this esoteric     YES   I was correct to stone them     NO But effective     If not correct, what     brutal It was very satisfying to me     the Work What about it     incomplete Did it mark the end of a kind of power YES Should I be worried by this     YES Will you explain in what sense     reversal, of shared pleasure, happiness, relation of feeling and thinking They were invading     YES But they were invading the place of integration     YES They would take Louie if I were friendly with them     It would be wrong to allow that (heart pressure)     no Why isn't it wrong     balance in the midst of change 18 A wide view on beautiful land. There was a small house somehow related to my family. We pulled back two layers of curtains. Some confusion because each set divided in the middle but had got bunched on one side. There was an expanse of land shaped into fields and woods, all burgeoning and green. Each of us was feeling we wanted to live there. I was immediately thinking about cleaning and painting. Paul was talking about a woman who had wanted him there. It seemed we couldn't all be there together - a house with only one room. But the scope - the wideness and distance of the beautiful land we could see. Beth Carruthers phoning last night to say will I be on a songbird panel in September, Beth from the land and community talk. I woke thinking about why I spoke so badly there, and at the open house last year. I used to speak well. I did what always worked, I just found my true position and then made an outline with a few good phrases. At the event I would be frightened but I'd lift off. I would get into a trance. My cheeks would be red after. At both these bad events there was no trance. I floundered. - Louie talking about The wonder book of the air made me happy. She knows how good it is, and she wants to tell someone. How clean the writing is, she said. Not a word that's there because she's showing off. A feminist who doesn't take sides. Ongoing wonderful Louie still loves me after nine years. I am not personally so wonderful to her, but she takes so much pleasure in what I can give her, this book and others, that she doesn't stop. All the violence of competition and invasion - we didn't evade anything, we drove each other through. When we began I was sad and she was afraid she wasn't an artist. Now she sits down anytime and writes a piece, she's publishing in West Coast Line. I have seen myself belonging: the loved safe streaming smile I'm going to put in my film site. 19 A glance at the next paper - spatial art in sound - how sound is imagined spatially. The chapter demonstrates how to sort it, sets up a way to think of vision. 20 Here it is: I've committed myself to be away till the end of April, from around the 11th of Sept. And I have a bike rack. List from 1984: 1) conscious change of state 2) a reframed way of speaking, theory 3) close attention to fluid motion, water, fire, vapour 4) political support for people who perceive well 5) work that leads to better states - comprehensible 6) something about granularity 7) interaction of perception and illusion - Bridget Riley 8) together in the brain - unified theory 9) explicit mathematics - computer generation 10) the notion of self-organization 11) an 'abstract' imagining - 'of space' - geometry - from physics or mathematics - as in optics 12) human enterprise and devotion integrated in a life - Le Guin 13) something about the felt relations of meanings of a word - what it feels like to evoke them all 22nd Hot days of center summer - hot nights - I lie awake - last night in fear of leaving. I felt I'm going on completely alone, as if when I leave in September I will be leaving what has taken me twenty years to make, many kinds of access. The university, a city where the mayor knows me, a house where Luke and Rowen were children, four friends I'm easy with, a bank that thinks me worthy, a therapist who says she's honored to work with me, a good mechanic. I'm convinced it's time to leave. I know it's not for Tom. It's not likely we'll survive. His sober judgment doesn't want it enough. That was hurting me last night, and hurts now. But it's not the point. The point is I'm going into transition years and I have no vision, none, of the other side. I don't know city, I don't know work, I don't know friends or lovers. I know one thing: the core of working ideas, my instinct in work. My accomplished work. And Luke and Rowen. - Tonight Tom says we don't have to live together. It's a childish part of him that wants it, he's been thinking. Better love would be to see each other every day and let me get on with it. With the Publab people still working at eight. I made a hand for my worksite page. Wrangling on Tanya's porch. It's 11:30 at night. She's stapling. I go investigate. That's what she's doing. Not answering the phone. Better for me to go do what she hates than sit and wait. The fights are going better for me since I'm not being nicer than her. Pulling my punches used to tongue-tie me. But it still seems wrong. She's being provocative but I'm still wanting to spare her confidence because I'm smarter than her. 23 Nathalie on the phone asking about the notion of information. It's very corrupt, I say. The whole dynamic state of the brain is a formation. Or you can look at the small causal event that makes it shift. The difference between talking about a function as a whole, or the value of the variable. There's no one else I can have these conversations with. Her intellectual instinct is exact, some small creature landing in perfect accuracy. Then I thought of Yeats' long-legged fly moves upon silence - water-strider's feet sending concentric ripples from several moving pin-points. Silly Hobson does quote amazing Emily's whole poem about brain and god: And they will differ - if they do - / As syllable from Sound - 26 hominids 4 million years bipedal Homo habilis 2 mill enlarged Broca's Homo erectus 1.6 mll tools, fire Homo sapiens 250,000 (Neanderthal 125,000) brain our size, tools, food and flowers in graves Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon European paintings, more rounded cranium expanded to front and sides   6 generations per 100 years, 60,000 generations in a million years - I'm not seeing him because he's working all the time, and the money he's earning he's spilling, so I'm deprived for nothing. He's never going to be able to establish himself financially. We are never going to be able to live together. Is his spilling money a kind of passive aggression     YES Money is going to be what breaks us up     NO, heedlessness about money I don't want to nag, and it doesn't work, so I'm starting to shut down my desire to live with him     The way I've shut down so many kinds of hope     I'm in despair seeing how established their life is, we're never going to be able to have that     NO What do you mean, no     established in a different sense He can work hard, he just can't hold onto long term motivation     YES I see what you mean     no I haven't got it?     fight to be happy With or without him     I need to be famous, financially safe, creative, healthy and beautiful, adventurous, trusted, responsible, challenged, in touch with the natural world, in touch with cultural best     Do you want to add something?     YES, childish Anything else     no It's the child that makes these possible     YES I'm better now     YES 27 Sunday afternoon. She's cranking up her party. I'm in despair. This has been so long so long in deprivation. It will never end, so long as I am faithful. Why aren't I willing to bail out, why do I have this insistence on seeing it through. The music is unbearable. It's only three o'clock. I don't have anywhere to go. It's too hot to be outside. I'm out of money. I have enough left for the rent. That's it till September 9. I'm afraid of the next years. Don't know how to get money. My heart's tight like a fist. Heart, will you talk to me     yes Do you have something you want to tell me     excluded child, turn for the better, delayed, processing A child is improving     YES Delayed processing of yesterday     no of a lifetime This is just processing     YES It's the child's fear alone in a bed     yes The tightness is how it was     YES Then the solar plexus took over     yes And heart was tight because of the forehead     yes Will you explain forehead tightness to me     unconscious thoughts of complete aloneness Do you mean panic     YES Do you have any more you want to say     fight Fight to go home?     YES Fight what     fighting Fight to be able to fight     YES Fight the ban on fighting     YES Fight to not be stuck in despair     YES   Say: I want to be with you! I want to get on with it! I want to establish our life together! I want to fuck and talk and play! I want us to be together at our best! 28 I made an imagemap of the hand, hidden link in the mount of Venus. Very happy. The rest of the day putting sections of field & field and winter interference between <pre> and </pre> on Pagemill pages. - An oceanic bewilderment where he says What am I doing in Bellingham? He struggles. He sorts it out. He remembers me holding him in the Pacific Inn. Oh alright, that's what it's about. A good talk we had tonight. He's borrowed the manager's office, I am sitting in the dark looking west at the moon yellow as cheese. He imagines something coming up: he handles it correctly and he looks over at me and the way I look back is saying, I knew you'd do the right thing. We're getting closer to that, he says. He was working on something simple today and was noticing how much time in a day his child is in control - the one who doesn't want to be responsible for the truck, for instance. Louie's house last night. We had supper on the bench under the pear tree with our feet wet because Mrs Chung had come by in her cotton hat and watered the grass. Then I made my bed on the floor. I was lying in it, she was lying on the floor with her yoga bolster drinking biocoffee before sleep. Louie's simple room, the smell of lilies. A cool cave with gyproc hand-cut along the uneven edges of the floor. Felt carpet over concrete - if you walk fast you fall slightly into the dips. This morning talking about Eve's book about blonds, our best kind of talk, free and proactive. - Looked at the poetry sites. How do they design them. The question is how to get linked with the good sites, there's going to be endless junk. Pulled the short poems into html, page each. Resized. Index. In the back room tonight looking at piles. There's so much writing. There's stuff I didn't think of, the notes in origin text. David Mac. her letters i-iii. thousands of miles east of here. Title pages to make.     volume 15 the golden west volume 14: 1998 april-july work & days: a lifetime journal project