the golden west volume 16 part 2 - 1999 january

work & days: a lifetime journal project

2nd January 1999 At six there was a band of hot yellow in the east, that shaded up through turquoise to purplish dark blue where a streak of high contrail was blazing white as a moon. When yellow was fading to pale orange there began to be birds, first a few gulls, then ferrying groups of more gulls and then smaller birds zipping across their paths. At seven-thirty the day-haze has whited out the hills, and the birds on the billboard rim are pigeons in profile. The bit of water I can see at the west foot of the Coronado Bridge is an innocent silver blue. We got through that one. I said I was feeling panic, a knife in the heart, and I was going to the Gas Haus for an hour and would come back. - Two pigeons and three doves, they're sunning themselves. - It took us both less than that to realize he was in a dry drunk. He said if I came upstairs we could just go to sleep, no TV. We were hearing the crowds at 5th and F, and at midnight got up to see the fireworks, which were wonderful. And went back to bed holding each other sweetly, in contact, he said. The kind of firework I like is the one that rises invisibly, comes on as small white points popping into view, and drizzles slowly faintly down. The way one can't remember fireworks exactly. They're not enough like other things we're made to see. And yet just enough alike. Spinoza identified good with what leads us to understand truly and evil with what occludes. 3rd What was it today. Driving with Tom to Leucadia, I couldn't bear it when he didn't take the most direct route. It was anguish I was suppressing all the way. It was the kind of stress I used to feel when Louie drove my car. Was it because I should have been working     no, but it's a set you get into when you're working Is there any more I should know about it     family illusion that ego is the way to save strength Efficiency     YES My dad     YES It's triggered by driving     Our voyage last night into featureless vapour. We were on the Coronado ferry, standing on the upper deck. The simple planes and points of light on our side had rotated past us, fallen behind and simultaneously dissolved away. The bridge was showing only a blue-green running light. There was a little ripple sounding below the dim light from the lower deck. We could see the large American flag standing vertical as a rudder. The water was flat and the motor running very smoothly. There it is, someone said in the bridge, a small blue-green light riding almost unseeable in a greenish smudge, the twin ferry on its return trip. It's a ten minute trip, we weren't nowhere very long. A gold blur on the right, that became a row of lights and then the Coronado wharf. It was beautiful and interesting and so visual it can't be said, especially the wharf that juts out beyond the ferry landing, a parking lot with powerful lights on high poles. Something about the constant change of shape of that flat lit polygon and the related shifting points of the eight stars floating above it. A simple powerful logic visible on a stage above the water. Shades of greyish gold. Can I say I felt all that. I felt something at the time - just, this is wonderful. Then later I felt it was what I wanted to think about. But if I hadn't written this paragraph I would never have known even this much. And if I had known it at the time I would have been able to know much more about the actual change of shape of the polygon and its relation to the way the lights lined up and the way the stage dissolved at its ends. "Ramanujan claimed that his theorems were written on his tongue during the night by the goddess Namagiri." Idiot savants in calculation also interested in money, clocks, calendars and maps. "a sensibility to what I shall call the personality of numbers" "contours and structure of a world" Sacks on autistic twins: They summon up, they dwell among, strange scenes of numbers; they wander freely in great landscapes of numbers; they create, dramaturgically, a whole world made of numbers. They have, I believe, a most singular imagination - and not the least of its singularity is that it can imagine only numbers. They do not seem to 'operate' with numbers non-iconically, like a calculator, they 'see' them directly, as a vast natural scene. Man who mistook his wife for a hat, 1985, 196 What a where area might mean     Different aspects of where     Decomposition of where     Does hemispheric specialization mean language capabilities are analogs of spatial capabilities     YES A relation of perceiving and moving     Does wireframe animation give a sense of what a bare where sense works with     YES Surfaces defined by edges moving in relation to each other     What sonar would yield     Collect illustrations     YES An outfielder and a chess player - they're both male specializations - are they variations of the same ability     War as a game of spatial strategy     YES Single combat, barroom brawl     What I'm talking about is R hem parietal     no, L too A specifically linguistic sense of space     Does architecture/decorating show preferences between temporal and parietal     Shakers and parietal     Parietal is more asexual     Love woman is temporal-occipital     YES Talk about aspects of mathematics that are parietal     YES Diagrams, system models     YES - Enhancement of color vision, and of eidetic visual perception and memory with "sensory-limbic hyperconnection" D Bear, 1979, Cortex 15:357-84.... "I saw everything, as if projected on the paper, and just drew the outlines I saw." "with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia. I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognized, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had a smell-face." He could smell their emotions. "A world overwhelming in immediate significance." - [Eliz comes home after being away for Christmas.] What's happening today - I'm milling - I don't want to sit down at the table. It was a deep bright day, clean blue, winter ivory in the light, bare trees and yet it's hot. It's a transition day. More beings in the rebalance than I knew about, a woman, a man, two dogs, two little boys. Territorial nervousness. A house so presented I know I'll offend by very small disorders. I'm living in the artist zone where realer life takes place, the dog zone too, and that's not easy though it is correct I think. I should defend that, but not occupy it. But that's her story. Mine is that I need what I had last week, the crystalline aloneness I could work in. As if, when I work, the zone I occupy has to expand or I can't move properly. 5 Oh drugs - I'm looking through a book of art reproductions and this is what I find - I don't like the solid objects - I like vision very suggested. In contemporaries there's one by Frank Auerbach, 1988, Gorky, 1943, Judd, 1993, Merz, 1968, Pollack, 1948, Riley, 1967, Tobey, 1956, Gabo, 1958. There are moderns I wouldn't have liked ten years ago, Balla's swallows, 1913, Bellmer, 1937, Boccioni, 1912, Bonnard, 1921, Cezanne, 1885, Feininger, 1929, Gwen John, 1920, Lewis, 1919, Lissitzky, 1920, Piper, 1939. Bonington's Rouen from the quais, 1821, Friedrich's Wreck of the Hope, 1824, a Constable of the 1820s, a Grimshaw, 1880. A Della Quercia statue, 1425, da Messina's St Jerome, 1476. Rachel Ruysch, 1689, a Baroque bust of Algardi, 1630, Bernini's St Teresa, 1625, a Van Goyen of 1642. Canaletto of the mid 1700s. Often it's the architecture. In the Baroque statues a perfect abstract coherence in the draperies. Strong dislike for the narrative and social; they are too easy to see, and the human beings morally - meaning in every way - too visibly wrong. 6th Facial and tonal posture - it's the way beauty can be a true sign of intelligence, the natural but created carriage of oneself. It's natural because it's neural. It's better organized than the norm, and it's created the way a writing style is created, by moving and feeling the result and moving again in a corrected way. So the circuits are built more complex, with stronger loops through the kinds of self-perception. I'm thinking this while reading Sacks on the woman without proprioception. One of the things I'm thinking is that intelligence built my face and voice but I don't perceive them. But there had to be perception of some kind in the building. Presumably it's proprioceptive in some way. Could I be beautiful if I felt myself to be so     YES Do you mean proprioception is unconscious     YES More unconscious in the presence of people     So I was beautiful last week because I'd been alone     no because you'd been coherent More unconscious with people because I'm conscious of them     Do you want to say anything about this     you're in conflict about giving it So I give it unconsciously     YES Animus has to do with the giving of it     For instance a father who says yes, be beautiful     But is that the whole of what you mean     NO To be aware of it I have to be aware of its effects     That's the giving of it     no the receiving I don't give it because then I'll have to feel both parts of the response     YES Anything else you want to say     looking for unconscious strength will make it depart Leave it alone     YES It means I'll go on projecting that there's something wrong     YES I have a phantom limb     YES Is its existence helpful to my moving     8 Is adoration the right way to get into sex     no Is there a right way     YES Do you mean truth     YES Adoration is what I feel when sex is cut off     YES I am cutting it off myself     no he is That adoring state has always happened when he was cutting people off sex     YES He's cutting it off because he wants that adoring state     YES But he hates it     YES So when I get into it it's like he's got me     What do you advise     see how love woman is a child Getting her feelings hurt     YES Should I just be hard and independent with him     no Will you advise me     you're missing drugs Now I'm going to find out what I think about all that. Aggrieved. I was alright until I saw him and then I was acting nervous. He was full of homoaggressive feeling for Jorge. I thought maybe it's that, now that he's vented maybe it's over. Grabbing his bicep and growling, looking at him with a glad eye. We watch two videos. He's exhausted. I don't fall asleep, take a melatonin, still wake up all night. When I read him my journal in the morning I'm liking what I read. He says, You never stop. He means I'm neurotic to work at thinking everything through. My feelings are hurt. But I'm fancying him. I'm in a gummy mood, romantic but helpless in a way I remember from somewhere. I'm feeling lust of the eyes. You're such a sexy thing, I say. He freezes. He hates the mood I'm in. He hates being adored. I am crushed. I was trying to get into sex in that young way. He couldn't take it. And I am sexually started, it's painful. I talk about it. He complains that I talk about sex. I pick myself up and come home. Can't work. Am a poor pitiful rag. The book says don't touch yourself, don't give up. I know I'm not in a good state when I go back at six. He's been watching the adultery trial avidly. I ache at the fork. When I gather myself to go home he says, Come here. He begins to touch me. I start to cry. He freezes. Then I have to stop myself and explain to him why crying would have worked. It's over for today. Now I am going home. I go off the handle before I do. You really hate me today, I'm too rational, I'm too emotional. What I mean is, you hardly ever want to fuck me these days, and when you do, you do it wickedly, you scrape my face with your wire brush jaw because you've too uncivil to shave and too unconscious to realize what you're doing. Or you're careless and infect me so I'm in pain for ten days after. You cross your knees tight and watch TV to keep yourself blitzed. I've done what I can. I've struggled, explained. You say no woman before me, of all 200, ever talked to you about sex. You want me to handle your dick cold, as if I were a hooker. I've done it for you, I've saved you, go your way and let me find someone who wants me. 9 I'm not in a good state sexually. It's his fault in the sense that I can't trust him with the baby I need to be to get real there. But it's not his fault that I need to be a baby. I am not willing to look after his sex baby either, the cold limpness of it. It IS his fault that I'm having to feel the thwartedness of both the babies while he zones out. I don't need to do that. What else. A hot clear Saturday. I'm tired. I'm not in pain particularly. He doesn't want a woman's desire     What he wants is a woman's compliance     YES People are mostly like that     YES Is there more you want to say     bondage What about it     tyranny Do you mean internal     YES It's control I'm in bondage to     Will you tell me what I can do about control     come through How     by dealing with Rowen Will you explain     mourning his exclusion, deception and lack of teaching Mourning what he has lost on my account     YES I've been pouring energy into Tom in a vain chase after sex     YES So it is sex that has tyrannized me     YES And responsibility is the cure     YES But sex gives physical life     no, the illusion of It gives beauty     no   Do you have me in your hand     He crushed my breasts last night with hatred. He never strokes my skin. In three years he hasn't learned not to infect me. He knows how to get me there but he's too lazy to do it. He wants me to thrash. He's never stopped being scandalized I want something different than he does - that elementary social fact. He resents desire as demand. He hangs a crucifix across from his bed and does not see why that might be wrong. - That's a story I tell to feel put upon. He got what he wanted and I didn't. I don't love him if I don't get sex, so much for unconditional love. I haven't really loved him. And now I want to leave him in thwarted rage. And yet I can't make myself love him. I have treated him lovingly as best I could. Why does that make me cry? Because you didn't learn. I can see I was greedy and my greed caught up with me. I think I fixed him but nothing I did without love fixed him. He fixed himself by acting correctly. Do you want to comment? You are understanding. He was correct to object. The times I found my way into real love fixed me. And that's the simplicity of it. Lately I have not been finding my way into real love. I haven't been clear. I have come from blame into repentance. But I think that's how I am. I'm not going to improve. But at least now I'm sorrowing for the right thing, which is that love is possible but not to me. I've demanded a handsome lover. That demand has closed his heart. Is it my fault that transcendent love doesn't come to me anymore? No. (Crying.) Is it anyone's fault? No. It is never going to come any more. No. What is wrong with me? Slow growth. Is there anything you want to say to me? Something about sharing pleasure. Do you want a sentence? Sex with Tom will grow slowly by shattering the structure. Do you mean we are going to go on? Yes. But am I going to be able to put Rowen first. Yes. 10 Ask what makes truth, energy and balance depart, it says. Louie in her new business arrangement will be making five thousand a month. She has got there in three years, and she has taken care of all her connections. She owns an apartment and a car. She has been using every moment every day. She has truth energy and balance by discipline, I think. I cried to think that in those years I have been working for someone else. I zone out. I blame instead of organizing. I run out of energy. I go into tunnels where I haven't got a speck of memory of the rest of my circumstance. I don't maintain connections. The central thing, ungreedy love, I'm nowhere near. ~ Will you help me find the work I could really go all out in     YES I haven't found it yet     no Do you mean writing     YES But I haven't found the context for it     YES Truth energy and balance are there     YES But no one wants to read it     Which means I can't make a living from it     no   I feel cast down in despair     I'm frightened     (tizzy) I would have to support my writing with business     But I don't     I keep getting stopped at this point     YES I've written so much and so well and almost none of it is published     And what's published is received in silence     There is no community for it     This is the panic that keeps me from thinking about it     no   Please help me!     you haven't been writing the truth I haven't succeeded because I haven't been writing the truth     YES I try to tell the truth     But nothing's happening     conflict Between the suppressed truth and the truth I try to tell     Will you tell me what the suppressed truth is     no   Are the truths I'm not telling truths about crimes     YES Are they my crimes     everyone's And if I tell the truth about those crimes will I be successful     NO So I must write for no one     YES   Please lead me     you are withdrawn You mean the way I don't try     This is the whole axis of failure in my life     YES It is the failure of my father to support my doing     For reasons of his own failure       But it is still true that nobody wants my truth     no So I have to rebuild myself in this matter     As if I had a wise father     But I have failed for nearly forty years     You think I can come through now     Here I sit frightened at heart. I'm up against it. I don't know how to go on. The day looks long and empty and lonely. There won't be any love in it. There won't be any touch or sweetness. It is Sunday but I won't take pleasure in sea, sky, air or any other thing. I am utterly barren. I'm trembling in the lovelessness of my way of work. I don't want to enter these hours. I will come out of them empty. I don't want the day this will be. I will work, I will come to the end of my ability to work, and then there will be nothing, because the work takes without giving. Day after day it is eating me without giving me life or means or human company. Nothing ever comes of my writing. I have lived this life for ten years and it isn't over yet. I want to die. I want to lie down and pass out. I want to give it up and stand free, but that has been unthinkable, so I want to die in my cage. There are small birds in the bit-leafed oak. The dogs are crying. In relation to you, these are the facts: Because of the kind of work I do, I come to you with need. Because I made a promise to you, I can't look after it with other people. You need me to love you without needing anything from you, although you also want me to need something so I won't go away. The fact of my need is preventing its satisfaction. The only solution is for me to find ways to satisfy my need alone. I'd be tempted to do it in an angry way, because I'm angry that you don't satisfy me, but if I satisfy myself I won't be angry. I have to make real sexual independence. 11th When I had written what I wrote yesterday I was sitting with pain trying whether I could shift it by naming it. Are you lonely, are you frightened, and so on. That went on for a while. Are you crying to god? YES, a gasp of a sigh. I meant (sigh) a feeling of reaching from the top of the head, up, up. So I held the reach and begged for help. Pain at the heart and what felt like (or I imagined as) a thin pointed shape three or four feet high reaching upward from the top of my head. Pain did dissolve some. I set out to drive to UCSD in a small anguish of fear but when I'd eaten a torta and begun to find the special issues of Cerebral Cortex on both object vision and the parietal, I found I was very well. Worked with wonderful concentration until five and came down the hill at Scripps to bands of flamingo and gold above the sunset point. Is that reaching a physical transaction in the brain     Can you tell me how it works     comes through to the truth of the feeling of loss But is the reach somehow part of it     YES Is the calling to god a child's feeling     Does a child reach with the top of the head     Something to do with energy body     Would it always work when I'm in pain     Opens a constriction     - They found that landmark recognition is done at the base of the brain just where face recognition is done. Women are said to navigate by landmark, and men by a faceless sense of direction and distance, which is all that is needed to intercept a target you intend to kill. In the bat as in other mammals the direction-distance sense is higher in the brain, more opposite the flying, running, throwing body below the head. The what sense maybe is opposite the eyes and ears, given a child's point of view. A principle of oppositeness of the cortex - forebrain is opposite the sensory cortices. Is it as if the inside of the skull is a reflective surface, like a parabolic microphone? The implication would be that it focuses, imposes one pattern on another. Is Pribram right? Perception happens around the nerves, not in them. Don't talk about code, talk about energy: intensity and frequency. Talk about how vision is touch the way audition is. 13 About sex - I woke this morning thinking I've named the anger and dependent thwartedness but I haven't dealt with them. I was saying to you, Let's undo the Irish back bedrooms and the minimal Mennonites and walk into a land where we are gods of sex with electric bodies and no fear. Let's bring our bravest wishes as gifts to that land. Let's bring our weaknesses to be undone there. Let's do whatever will get us really hot. Let's bring every unfaithful desire and every best remembered fuck. Let's feed and exercise ourselves to the end of joy there. Let's be willing to deal with whatever monsters are in the way. Let's entirely stop being afraid of ourselves. Let's take Viagra if we have to, or other drugs - Or else let's be as if nuns and priests and really give it up. But let's not be what our ancestors were, giving it the least that will quiet the dogs - 14 Alright, where am I. I've worked hard this week. Now I need to stop for a day. I came into the week real but I used the energy to tunnel into the parietal and now I'm up against the days when I might see Tom, without the feeling realness I'd need to do it. He won't have done the work we need to have done after the crash, so it's for me to do. And anyway, it's for me to do, seems to be the conclusion. I have to make myself sexually independent, so I will be real enough to be with him harmoniously. But if I have to work and work on my own why bother to be with him at all, is my grouchy question this morning, since he is so reluctant to work himself. Tom is good to do new things with. The doing and the new. I had run out of that ability and he helped get me alive outside work. 15 Friday night. I came home shut down. This man goes on telling me how much he esteems me and so on but he doesn't WANT me. He wants to sign me up for another six months and he'll promise me anything, he says, but he doesn't stir in his loins for me. And he won't say so because he wants me not to leave. And if he won't say so there's no hope of it changing. So I was feeling. I'm willing to know whether it's so. My body is sad. What would I do if it were true - I don't think it is - that no one will want to touch me now I am the age I am. What if it were a law of nature I were sure of: I'm past the time when people want to touch me but I'm probably never going to be past the time when I want them to want to. What would I do for the body's sadness? - Understanding that there are people who'll be willing to touch me because there's something else they want from me, but if I accepted I'd be unhappy and unclear. 16 The way I feel at the Golden West where a lot of men of it-doesn't-seem-to-matter-what caliber look at me with something like desire - I'm overjoyed. I carry myself like a sex queen. I feel young and frisky. I miss that. Rob gives me that. Tom not at all. I dreamed I was with a lover I'd had deep hard times with and we were caught at the end of the line. There was a powerful flood of water that had cut us off. We were looking around thinking we would likely have to die. Should we just jump into the current and get it over with? My lover was like an old cowpoke, at a little distance from me, old woman as much as old man. While we hesitated in our plan, we saw there was another way. On the other side the water was less deep and less powerful. It was flowing smoothly over a drop we could probably survive. And then not much further on it reached a fence and presumably a shore. We'll risk it on that side and we might make it. I plunge in first, am swept over, and reach the shore easily. The woman with the child comes right behind me and she reaches shore too. We find a community of women who have food and everything we need. I stand on shore and see my lover has come over the brink and is standing in the darkness in water up to his chest. I rush into the water calling to him. I want him to know the shore is near. I see he is liking to be where he is, still lost, still in the adventure. He speaks to me politely. I'm full of remorse that he has made himself unreal for me. He is following me to shore but he has given up the lovely real aloneness I saw him in. - Tom last night as we sat on the floor in his room. I was peering at him in a lonely way, because really I wanted him to just lie down with me and let go. But there he sat oblivious to my little signals and so when he suddenly with a lovely trust lay down facing me and said he'd been thinking it was time to renew our contract I was feeling a hitch of resentment and wouldn't easily say yes. So he sat up straight and became a stranger. There he was, looping, something he's said a hundred times and says to hypnotize himself into doing what will keep me from leaving, and there I was staring at him trying to discover that he's not the man at all for me, so I can leave and find a lover who will stroke my skin and lie with me in a bath of electrical fluid and be huge and hard for me and make me feel like a fine rapt blissy lassie shining in the streets. Am I understanding this dream     It's about me and Tom     no about you and you The lover my sexual body     It's about giving up sex     You really want me to do that     I have come through menopause but my sexual body has not     YES It goes polite when I try to bring it to shore     YES The way it is resisting me sexually     YES It wants what it used to have     YES It is stuck there       I feel I'm being asked to stop wanting     YES And become one of those shut-down old biddies who gardens     YES Sad, sad, sad, sad     That would be killing ourselves in the flood     Will you say what entering the water on the other side is     come through a decision to look for the Work I have but it hasn't     NO you haven't until it has So the question is how to bring the body into the work without having it go polite     YES   Will you tell me     look for unconscious loss and partial loss Will you tell me how to do the looking     YES, letting go of sex will give you the quest Will you lead me     come through changing your idea of creation I don't understand that     YES Do you mean creation in the world     no Creation in the body itself     YES Do you mean creation of bliss and good function     YES Change my idea of how it's done     YES Stop thinking it's sex that does it       Will you tell me what really does it     catastrophe, mutuality, delay, happiness Is this a list     Do you need all of them at once     YES Have I understood this far     no   Bring the body through a decision to look for liberation     YES No need for sex because it has a vivid sensory life     YES Will that really happen     YES Then I go into touching my poor tense little hole and feel what thwartedness feels like. It feels like a baby who is disorganized, thrashing, fretting, whining, tossing, angry maybe, not clear. Doesn't know what she wants. I imagine someone who can take care of organizing me, the man who is competent, with himself and me. He knows how to build simmer with starting and stopping, little transgressions confidently enacted, paternal planning. It seems as if it would take a drug too, to get me there. Eventually, very slowly, I get there, but immediately go tense again. I am confused. - The subtle body book said be aware of groin and heart at the same time. That immediately unlocked the groin and heated the womb, but then I passed out and woke very collapsed, droopy and melancholy, dejected, lonely, forlorn, conscious of wanting sweets, or a novel, so miserably hungry. I shopped. A fork and dot glasses like the one Tom broke. Ate dry chocolate cake and ice cream. Came home and found Eliz had given me flowers in two little bottles. She'd been depressed by my attack on Christians. I said, sorry, I don't have to say what I think. Meantime I was bringing her a blue flowering salvia and a packet of shirley poppies. 17 What has come of connecting groin and heart. At five in the morning, grumpy, saying to Tom, you have been starving me from the beginning, it has been a battle from the beginning, trying to get you to want to touch me. You have never given it importance. I've had to fight to get you to visit me, to have a place where we can be in a bed. Stop with saying you love me, when you do not let love flood into your body and mine, you don't wait for me to come, you don't bother to shave, you have no bodily empathy in the way you touch me, you infect me repeatedly, you forbid me to desire you, you use sex to dominate me. You are hateful to me in sex, punishing all women through me, for needing that from you without seeing you. You've given it to me just enough to keep me going. You've given it to me enough so I know you know how. That is deliberate and contemptuous. You are insisting on keeping the crucifix. There are two things. This man is contempting me sexually. And using me to look after him because he hasn't done his own work with abandonment. You have let me go on this long with someone who hates me sexually     Why     so you'll graduate Do you have anything you want to say to me     learn the relation of your addiction to your family Sexual kink from my father     Sexually I need that meanness     Will you explain in what sense I'm not supposed to give up on him     integrate anger, temperance and responsibility My justified anger at his sexual contempt     YES Temperance in the sense of refusing addiction     And responsibility in the sense of doing what's right     I have to see him for what he is     YES But then I'm deeply hopeless     YES And free     YES I do not have what I want     But I have the real     I try to go back to sleep. The dog is barking at a skunk. The yard light is shining into the room. I try to touch myself. Etc. Daylight. I'm sobbing. I can't do it with this man. I can't do it with this man. Get up and drive downtown. Tom's still in bed. Slowly I talk. I tell the dream and cry when I come to tell about going back eagerly for my lover and finding him wanting to stay lost. I tell my misery yesterday, being careful not to blame. He's taking it as blame anyway but I listen. He sees it his way. He thinks I'm off the rails. I'm saying to myself, I've done what I can, there's nowhere we can meet, I should go home. I make one more effort. - The next sentence is giving me trouble, why. I kept going instead of going home. He came up with something. He said he'd thought about our project - he went suddenly from saying I'm just a simple guy, I don't want to think about sex, I just want to do it, to saying I was thinking we should have more preliminary, we should talk first. Then the story about him and Maureen Mayor. He'd shine his flashlight into her bedroom window and then shine it on his thing, and she'd show him hers. He was twelve. By now I had my head on his shoulder peacefully, but not sold. He wants me to go home sold. But I'm thinking maybe I've spoken the truth and he has bought time. Or maybe he's willing to shift and I'm looking for excuses. I can't tell. 18 Oh my darling angel sweetie - not that, but oh and angel were in it. I had an impulse to phone him at work just after Eliz knocked to invite me for dinner, to thank him for seeing me through, and found him having been trying to phone me to thank me for bearing his rant of refusal. An overcast Monday 2 PM sitting in bed with the light on still, reading The fountain overflows for the fourth time, or fifth, knowing I'm wasting a work day on a binge, reading interested in many tones of my own life stirred by her (now I see is) egotistically indulgent as well as wonderfully vivid book. I remember Andy who had it in a box of books when my life at 52 Burghley Road was coming apart. She wrote about the flute solo in Orpheus and Euridice and I thought of Robert McLean walking in his tree planter boots and beautiful Scottish body in Northern Alberta under the poplars stripped to posts by caterpillars [*link]. A windy September day at La Glace - the yellow, grey, blue, and driven white. What I have that's as wonderful as a London childhood with a father who is a writer and a mother who's a musician - children who read Shakespeare and not the Reader's Digest. "It was my father and mother who existed. I could see them as two springs, bursting from a stony cliff, and rushing down a mountainside in torrent, and joining to flow through the world as a great river." Do I remember thinking of my parents with devotion? No. There was a world and they weren't in it. None of their forebears had ever been in it, as far as I knew. I intended to go into the world and find the better way to live, but what can I say was given to us? The congregational singing in church, the encyclopedia they bought. What I like in West is the fullness she gives the children's sense of each other, passing mentions of season and day, everyone's social acuteness, everyone's interests, the spread of curiosity. I don't like the supernatural spicing or whatever her thing is about Richard and Rosamund. She harps on the inferiorities of ordinary people in a way I understand because it gets even for their persecution, although long after the case has been closed. Where am I now, I want to know. I had the beginning of an art and not the clarity to make a life with it. Why am I calling it clarity. Because what kept undoing me was confusion in sex and attachment. I didn't have the freedom of mind to go from one thing to another, the way Lis Rhodes or Philip Hoffman did. I'm still drunk, I'm still not attending, I'm still jumping into the cauldron, still pages of roiling, such energy turning no wheels at all. This is frightening to say. Dear journal the lifelong fantasy you are, that speaking to you is something not nothing. But maybe say it this way: I was given a smashing blow to my brain when it was forming, and I've lived as well as I can. I'm sorry I've been too disabled to make much. I wonder what would happen if I saw myself with justice. Dreamed two couples - one filmmaker/musician couple and one philosopher couple - living with their two young girls in a big house with many holes and gaps. Is that the house of this work     YES   I feel like I'm looking at the end of the road     I'm visibly a failure     If I say so I will just stop     YES I'll become even less than I am     I'll freeze in place     Is this a sense of failure that is always there     YES It's a breathless frozenness     YES I started to fall asleep     Is this passing out okay     Is it called relaxing     19 Is that breathless frozenness why I don't do things     Romance is where I get a sense of breath and motion     YES It's an illusion?     it's not an illusion but it's very compact   The dream was talking about my work     YES Sez it's full of holes     no Says there is a house where music and film and philosophy live together     YES With growing girls     YES It's a big house under renovation     YES And there are holes     YES Everyone is successfully skirting     YES Is there a relation between that dream and coming through the flood     YES It's a house with a very high view     YES But oh the holes in the floor     persist Persist in asking?     YES   Can you answer a question as vague as, what about them?     the holes in the floor are places where you've withdrawn from heartache So I must go to the fire in all those places     YES There are holes in the academic work?     YES You're saying I have to do the emotional work to get it right     YES Do you want to say anything before I stop     do the work Just keep doing the work     21st Did this week kind of collapse? I'm supposed to get sexually independent but not drop out of the work of integrating anger and responsibility in that temperance. I notice I'm dubious about Tom. He's not going anywhere, I'm saying. There's nothing doing over there. And a next move that says, set that aside. You're wasting time when you're not sitting square in your own failing. Alright if I sit square in my own failing, what's next. I can see I've been a creature with one wing broken flapping with great energy in small circles. I'm willing to know what's needed for strength, truth and balance. I say that with tears, as if I think what's needed is sacrifice of my dearest. But I have no dearer than that. I am willing. -In a large sense, but in small decisions, not always. Hello     fight Is there a large sense     a decision A decision I haven't made     YES, the decision to balance responsibly in the Work on withdrawnness I'm still withdrawn     Do you mean in the sense of unconscious     Was I terrible in that gathering     YES Because I was lying     YES Just in a general, lazy way     YES Is there anything you want to say     integration is improvement of betrayal structure Unconsciousness is always about betrayal     YES Self betrayal     YES   Am I overwhelmed in this [academic work]     YES Do you want to say anything about it     the overview will come if you process childhood exclusion I'll understand where and the parietal?!     YES Is this processing something I can do quickly     no I'm frightened     24th January I woke in the dark with the kind of thought I have only before I speak - I mean when I'm barely speaking. I saw a small swath of very small plants and took it as something about scale, that what I'm working on has to do with scales of resolution. When I went on and thought about the state of mind before speaking, I felt it as a kind of whole - it was simplicity but I can't say it - I thought of the broad smooth head of a whale. It had that broad round smoothness all participating in feeling what's around it in a broad smooth seamless way - seemless, I wrote, because it's nothing but presence. Now I'm going to ask about vision and the brain but first a note about the weekend. I went to Tom's after planting at Nora's till dark and found him in his carefully clean room with dinner set up. I was keeping a distance. No sex, was my plan. There was sex, Friday morning, and when I saw myself in the mirror of the grand glittering pharmacia in TJ I had the smooth beautiful look of love woman, tho' the sex was not good. And Tom and I were in harmony. We'd been with Eliz digging until we finished the garage bed. Tom played with the dog and got comfortable with Eliz, who was her natural raucous ingenuous self to all our pleasure. I saw Tom being what he likes to be and thought we should be with playful people more. Then we zipped down to Palm Avenue to take the trolley, through powdered opal over South San Diego, gold sky behind the cranes in Barrio Logan. I had one of those conversations with Tom where I back him in small steps from pigheaded prejudice to a state he likes better. It was about bliss and why he doesn't want it. It's not manly, among other things. But he got it partly: it's undefended. Undefended from what, wasn't answered exactly. That will wait. - Is it by delay lines that we see whole scenes     no Do we see whole scenes the way we see whole objects     YES   There's a question of what the difference between what and where is     YES The basic facts of where are direction and distance     A what is direction and distance encompassed     I have to go back to the facts of wavelength     YES   It's as if I don't believe I can solve it     And at the same time I believe I can     I'm shying off a sense of size     NO, graduating would shatter the structure of Ellie's irresponsibility Like Tom being backed toward bliss     YES Am I being backed toward greatness     YES Which means I will not be me anymore     YES But it's a death to be desired     YES Because it's what Ellie wants to grow into     YES And what is useful     YES Does it go beyond strength truth and balance     NO   I don't have a thesis     Do you have anything you want to say about that     love woman does Is it anything to do with this where and what stuff     YES I'm not going to be able to do this     YES It's too complicated     YES I'm out of my depth     Kantian stories was bullshit     NO I don't know anything about any of that       Will you lead me     research I'm panicked     no Frozen with fear     Of failure     I don't know what those people know     YES I'm not qualified to speak to them     YES I haven't had any guidance     I'm completely on my own     YES I'm making such a brave stand but I'm failing     YES   Will you say more about research     come through control of loss to aggression I'm controlling loss     Loss in this work     YES I've lost confidence     NO Status     YES Will you tell me what I've lost     the pleasure of construction and finishing I'm not able to finish     YES So I should quit     NO   Do you mean there's a block     YES What am I supposed to come through     a structure of understanding I don't understand that stuff     YES There is too much detail     I can't understand it     I don't have time     NO It is too incoherent     YES I have too many notes     YES Now I have too many books     no   By aggression do you mean really tackling it     YES Control of loss is not being frightened enough     YES Do you mean a determination to get it     YES Should I go into the feeling of it     YES Do I have to go more into detail     YES Anything you want to say     something about completion Okay     you're withdrawn I'm withdrawn from completing     YES Holding back     no Unconscious     YES Do I already know how to finish     But I haven't accessed     YES   Kantian stories was basically right     no but it pointed at something Am I talking about the IPL     YES And the SPL     no What where can mean in the IPL     YES Any more you want to say before I go     you'll succeed 28 The color system is a finer version than the light and dark system     Is magno even over the surface     YES Are there two parvo streams     One of them is a dense fine-grained central version of the other     They work on the very same principles     YES To somewhat different purposes     YES It's like bat sonar, where and more where = what     The magno system is the old system made for interception of animal and object in terrain     The parvo is for love     YES Back part of the parietal extended implications of broad-band where     YES   Is there a finer-scale somatosensory     YES Mouth and hand     YES Mainly connected with parvo     YES Magno mainly related to movements of whole bodies     YES Is IPL mainly magno-parvo connection     YES Does IPL have to do with making magno conscious     YES In language IPL has to do with sentence/situation wholes     YES Can parvo be seeing more than one object at a time     By seeing them as a unit     That's subitization     So that's parvo not magno     no   Can you explain this     conflict Magno makes sure they don't extinguish each other     By making them a larger unit     no By holding scene as one thing     no It keeps feeding to both of them     Because it is holding the larger scene     Gibson is right that space is a scientific abstraction     It's world and objects     YES Gerstner - a color solid: white and black at the north and south poles, the color circle at the equator a system of continuous <concepts> which is complete in itself 31-32 "Gradations so small the individual nuances melt into one another. They begin to oscillate, to fluoresce." "Minute inhomogeneities of reflected light which give it a texture or grain." Was that something you want me to notice     YES Colors are b/w at a finer scale     YES [May have been Karl Gerstner 1986 The forms of color: the interaction of visual elements MIT Press] 31st Louie says Eric died in November. Was that why I was feeling my father's death? He died of pouring alcohol onto his herniated ulcers. Or maybe of having killed Monty, of grandiosity and willful inflation. I sang Louie the songs I wanted to sing at my dad's funeral. Tom and I had a good day yesterday. He drove. We sat on a bench at Laguna Beach. He looked at people, I turned the binoculars on wildlife, agaves in the flower bed, a dog moaning with the ambulance siren, a pigeon. He was wearing the rose teeshirt and dockers and loafers. He said I looked beautiful. We ate fish and chips at the small boat marina north of Oceanside, that was his beat on his first newspaper job after Okinawa. We were keeping good company somehow, balanced. part 3 the golden west volume 16: 1998-1999 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project