the golden west volume 18 part 4 - 1999 november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

1 November An accident on the scanner this aft. Something happened when I said rotate 180 and then scan. The result looked like spatial filtering, which I don't understand. I'd zoom to x1600, crop, resize, zoom x1600, etc. (Took the greyscale into RGB, changed high, middle and low values separately into three pale colors.) 2 It's Tuesday. I have the outlines set up again - roughly. 6 weeks to write it. Excited. Now I'm going to see the directions come up. - What I did later. Went to the Family Justice Institute office and told the story. Then carried home four bags of groceries on the bus. Those sentences tell so little. It was a day. I worked here until noon - the day starts with the beautiful lamp on the beautiful table - the warm blue room - coffee - pens in three colors - half sheets of squared paper. I finished sorting the IPL this morning and got out the vision notes. At noon when I'd done what I could I took the bus to the courthouse on Robson. Going downtown in daytime, breasting the flow on the streets of what I immediately feel as another kind of people. Business clothes. Business hair. A young business man, baby fat, rocking slowly heel to toe to heel to toe in thin-soled loafers with his hands in his suit pants pockets. I was walking behind a Russian woman in a pumpkin yellow coat that was an unfeatured expanse between heels a centimeter across and hair blonded strand by strand. When she turned the side of her face to speak to the young man with the earring I saw a face like bread dough, white, puffed and Slavic-ly sullen. Into the underground corridors of the law courts. A young lawyer in starched collar sitting with a man in an overcoat. What am I wanting to say - there was a feeling of newness as if I haven't been going downtown in this city for twenty-five years. 3 What I did today. Martin [Hahn] half an hour before the lecture at 2:30 comes to tell me he has to go, Kathleen's been rushed to an ultrasound. He's going to cancel. I say I'll take the class. I've already taught Locke twice today, I can do what I do in tutorial. It's strange how I lose my flow. I cover the points but I'm slow. I hesitate. The room is huge. Distant ranks like a stadium it seems to me. I have to turn my head artificially to seem to look at people. I'm having to hold the mike in my left hand because it's not loud enough with the volume at the point where it doesn't feed back. There's no blackboard to write on so I just talk. Leave pauses for them to write things down. What does Descartes mean by 'ideas'? What does Locke mean by 'ideas'? And so on. I finished at three and had to take questions for 20 minutes. There were questions all over the room - some of them from my students, some, though, from young men I haven't seen before. An older woman just at the end asked a question because she thought I needed one more to make it to time. Afterwards Christina Fullerton came up and said, Were you nervous? You got better for the questions, which is what you're best at. That was a lovely moment. It was the birds coming home - or what is that saying. I've given Christina permission to say what she feels in tutorial and now she was giving me something she could only give from the confidence of that permission. Was that good     no Were my tutorial groups embarrassed for me     no So it was bad only in your terms     YES Will you explain with a sentence     it has to do with fear of and anger at men I haven't completed that     I'm inhibited by trying not to show it     YES Is there something I can do     YES When I was a child inhibition was just fear     NO It was of anger then too     YES   Alright what can I do     excluded child, illusion There can be a light inhibition     Which is just     prudent Are you hesitating at the 'just'     And there can be a heavy inhibition     Which is primal     I can tell it's primal because it's out of my control     YES It's unconscious     YES   Can I work with it without Joyce     My motivation in philosophy is anger     YES Which is why I'm inhibited     YES That is people's true objection     Should I uninhibit the anger     And just rage     But that would mean I can't make a living at it     Find the truth about men by constructing through processing     Give up being mad at them and see them     YES Like seeing Bill with pity     YES See Locke and Descartes and God with pity     YES   I gave up my aggression by a misunderstanding     YES That it would cause me to be cast out utterly     YES I'm wanting them to give me something I took away from myself     YES So with the lecture could I have bitten into the wave     YES And said, I'm going to have trouble with this     YES   I'm complaisant     no I went unconscious     YES I should have prepared myself     YES Thought how to relax that inhibition     YES Processed it     YES Is there more you want to say now     come through unconscious anger and mourning I'm willing     YES Is unconscious anger and mourning involved in what I'm doing with Rowen     no He is truly being abused and neglected     YES 4 Hello you. I had such a good tutorial this evening. 0.15 was slow, but with 0.16 I came in and talked about what it was like to lecture and then they started to talk. I showed them the picture of the whole perceptual situation just in the course of the conversation. There are primary qualities all over this scene, it's a sea of primary qualities, and here's the observer seeing a particular shade of green, and all these parameters have something to do with what color it is. Meantime Josh Devins was sulking. He hadn't liked his grade and didn't know I knew he'd taken it to Martin. About half an hour in he started to look up and smile. He got hooked by Clint Enns hanging on to a mistake. When we stopped I saw we hadn't turned on the lights, I'd spoken from the front of the room looking at rosy light on the strip of curtain across the darkening room. Here's a question nobody talks about, I said: Why does color give us pleasure? I came to that because Seth said, Can you define green? I asked Adam personally, What do you think about why color gives us pleasure? It's joy, he said. 5 After the tutorial I phoned Surge School again and got Bruce, and then talked to Rowen. I told him I might have to go for guardianship but he should understand I'm doing it to force them to take his situation more seriously. He went home and told Michael, and guess what, Michael phoned. Michael was angry I'd talked to Lise's parents. Etc. What they are saying to each other is that Ellie is powertripping, Ellie is meddling. Ah - wish I had a cup of tea. No tea, no coffee, no car to go get some. After an hour, Michael cold on his phoning hill, me cold in the bathroom, we got the start of a deal. He agreed a tutor/supervisor is what it needs. I agreed I'd turn wheels to get one. He agreed that if there's a tutor they'll send Rowen to school. Here it is 5:30 in the morning and I have to mark. If I mark all day I still won't be able to work tomorrow. And then there'll be three days. - It was payday. Rent will have gone through. Took the bike to fix the brake. Bought tea and coffee. The joy I feel about web creation, which Sylvie showed me is also CD creation. On my site I've thought the brain diagrams can have handwriting on them in red, green, blue, the way the actual xeroxes do. I need to be able to go on constructing the site - fund myself to have time to make sites - go on having Publab. "The age of betrayal, deceit and denial will be at an end" said somebody on Art Bell. I wanted to phone Tom tonight. He didn't want to stop. He had more and more to say. He was eager and real, deep in his own doing, work, reading, daily order. Listening to my eager stories without seeming to try, a lovely friend, a lovely voice, not speeding, centered. He's relaxed into it, I said, and so have I. 6 This night I dreamed the primitives of vision in a series of scenes each with a kind of element on white card. The only one I remember is vertical stripes. About listening to my lecture on tape. My quality wasn't there in my voice - any more - the self-tasting beauty of phrase - I sounded thin, a bit nasal, much more ordinary - not immersed - not like a beautiful woman. Is it the cost of mastering? Whatever I've done to my uncon with the book? Have I spoiled my voice     no Less unconscious     YES Can it go back to being beautiful     no Is it integrating that's done it     Is what happened to my voice the same thing that happened to Judith     no She's lost a kind of realness     I've lost something different     For a different reason     Will you tell me what I've lost     intemperance My beautiful voice will never come back     no John Bonk's paper. He said the cogito was the point of an inverted pyramid reflected in a mirror surface. A point he pulled into the mirror after him, I said. When I read it I understood what Martin meant when he said Descartes never did get the world back. Six o'clock. I'll mark now. 7 Breakfast with Louie at Dutch Pannekoek. The full full life of that connection. It is falling dark at quarter to five. I have just been looking at The age of analysis, the section on Spinosa. He says nature and god are the same self-creating substance understood in two aspects, thought and nature. People free themselves from control by immediate circumstance to contemplate the larger universe and its order, which contemplation is love of god/nature. And then I find my handwriting in pencil in the first page, February 24 1963. I was seventeen and it was my first philosophy book. The way I wrote my name, that curly E, gives me myself differently than the plain E now. It's Ed Epp's E. It gives me a girl proud of herself. 8 A recorded message says I'm approved for eight thousand dollars this semester and next. That means I can pay my personal debts, defer my bank debts to low interest payments eventually, have money for car, teeth, San Diego, and for finishing next summer. Maybe I'll have to spend thousands on Rowen. Come out owing the banks $5000, which is not much more than the total I owe now. If I don't graduate next year I could do it again. Janet looks like a scholar, glasses, earrings, hair frosted at the tips, eyeliner, mascara, foundation, lipstick, a tailored brown jacket, knotted scarf, brown tassel loafers. Ellie does not. Greying long hair in a queue, widelegged black and brown striped cuffed pants, docs, a black high-necked tee. Janet has published many papers at Tucson, Ottawa, Amherst, etc, has been asked as a postdoc to the U of Arizona. Ellie made a thesis front page this morning that's classically classy, Spatial imagining and the brain, lights in a fawn-colored mist. It's two boobs, Jan said. Lights in warm space, imagined. 9 I've worked since 7 this morning. It's 4. Somehow the key is understanding the optic array as an array of stabilized standing waves jointly created by the reflective geometries of the scene, emission characteristics, reflective characteristics of sources and surfaces, transparency and diffusion characteristics of the intervening medium. If I understand the optic array I am going to understand the intuition in my visual work. I am arriving where I have been before. 11 It's 8, I've worked since 5 this morning. An hour reading papers at lunch, an hour walking in the garden as it began to get dark. It's the kind of energy I used to have. I sometimes wonder whether I've had mono these last years and whether Louie gave it to me with that kiss on the mouth I was so conscious of, when she came back from her year in Africa infected. She would have done it on purpose, to get even with me for her stress when I wouldn't comply. Or maybe it was menopause. Maybe it's power. But I've had concentration thirteen hours today, and don't ache though it's raining. I as if hear a kind of singing of energy, high pitched like a sine tone. What did I do. Tried to recover holography sense from Pribram, read Gibson's pieces on picture perception, flew through the 3D orientation and the parietal book. Now I want to phone Tom and he isn't home. Still not. I've never phoned him at 9 at night and not found him home. Nora made a million last year - sez not to phone Mo - wants to do the front garden - offered a place to stay. 12 Here it is daylight in the warm room, raining. I want some love life, some life, some walking around in San Diego in the sun. I want to think about Nora's gardens, the front one and the back one. 14 I'd like to go out. No money 'til Friday - 5 days. No car. 15 What is happening in work - Imagining the intervening air as full of structure summing the presence of all the surfaces at all the distances. Imagining vision - this is hard to think - seeing is response, and it's staged and segregated and integrated response - staged in the sense that one discriminative response is required for the next - but branching too, so that response can be used in different ways in different further areas. What is meant by structure in the electromagnetic array is hard to imagine because what we think of as structure would have to be integrated at some spatiotemporal scale. In relation to vision, there are such scales, probably quite a few of them. There are also different weightings given different scales. I keep coming against my inability to think these multidimensional responses, though I know other people, with more skill and training in spatial imagining and more logical/mechanical/mathematical non-imagined intuitive spatial calculus, can think further into it than I can. What was I going to say next - I'm an opacity in the electromagnetic field. The back of my head cuts off arrival of waves from the directions behind me. So the field in contact with my eyes excludes that structure. The fovea subtends a cone of x degrees, which when I'm looking 15' across the room is an area y' wide, but looking at close work in the hand is only z". Holograms because they demonstrate how seeing is by means of electromagnetic structure. Sonar because it is a sort of holographic process, wave modulation. The pictures I'm working with - especially the light in cocoa mist ones - chill, sundog, flag, drift - are glows in spaces. 16 What part of all this vision work do I need in relation to spatial imagining. It's not so much a thesis as a suggestion and a guess. Here is a way this sort of news can be fitted into a larger - a larger what? I don't want to say picture. It's a landscape. Here is a way we can think this news so it fits at many scales and in different directions. Volumes not planes. So it integrates. Working with the electromagnetic integration a metaphor is built - in someone like Jim Briggs the metaphor has been building and is technical - Pribram imagined the inside of the brain like what was outside it - and that was probably right. The representation metaphor they are using is 17th century theory of ideas - Pribram worked off Gibson who I want to say understood Wittgenstein. His holographic theory isn't a rep theory, it's a wave interference theory - Pribram, Lashley, Gestalt - which makes it a volumetric theory, 4D space-time field theory - yeah a field theory - thermodynamic settling. But my question is, given the sense of global, physical but sub-material, self-organizing activity, what is there comprehensively to say about spatial imagining, the brain and representational culture / simulation-supporting artifacts? Segregation/specialization and regions, the parietal - don't call them modules - call them volumes - don't call them maps, call them matrices. Regional action globally integrated. I'm talking about spatial metaphor used in thinking about spatial and non-spatial things, and I'm building and revising such metaphors, and also using pictures to suggest them. And also using pictures to be in intuition again - where I started - knowledge as being what you are, not imagining it. My first worksite now is seeming crude and miscellaneous though it has powerful bursts like the hand and the mouth and the brain. This one is going to be color-integrated and elegant - make a palette for variations on first screen - tables with text to limit width - black and white and shades of taupe - cocoa pinkish purplish greyish light brown, that elusive color I can't remember when I don't have it in front of me. 18 The Wednesday neurophilosophy group last night. I talked and was, and it helped. The speed of light, Michal said - (Putnam is saying metaphysics is all nonsense) - must be why it matters the direction we're looking. In the time it takes for retinal cells to respond the amount of wave action that's had time to happen is really something, M said x number of miles. This inchoate constellation of stuff, holography, sonar, strobe, e-m wave interference, the mind machine's yellows and blues, Pribram's way of thinking the brain another puddle behind the bottleneck of the eye - 19 There's been $20 for the last week, bus fares two days, $6 for milk, a dollar each for copycard and computer printing, about $7 for food. Today there's money in the bank and a certificate for five thousand. I'm going to buy my ticket. Ask Koo to start on the car. Make supper tomorrow for Luke. A jacket? Pay bills. I'm sitting here full of the pulls and pushes of the social week - Sam's insult, Phil's egotism, Nathalie's hug, Judith's jealousy of my website, Rob Boss's real smile, Martin not saying anything about my lecture - and thoughts about living in one room with Tom - and a kind of emotional hungry blankness. Phil is worse than I thought     Self absorbed     He lost interest when I started to take it in my own direction     I want to fire him     YES Is it true I don't need a senior supervisor     Get another person on my committee     He won't understand     Should I tell him     Tell him when the penny dropped     "A feeling of being exactly as you should be, at home in yourself - a feeling that your brain was operating correctly, efficiently, clearly. My body was no longer heavy, but very light, full of energy. The feeling was one of openness, clarity." - Then I went out in the rain. I bought my ticket. My bike got a flat so I had to walk, pushing it. Cold water on my head. Scotia Bank didn't want me. Tony Gordon-Wilson said Hey you from the Main Street bus stop and told three wonderful stories in ten minutes. We have everything, he said. I didn't say "I have to go now," I just said 'Bye. The Royal Bank not only wanted me but wanted me right away. I had to go home and get a void check, though, slogging, pushing the bike. Got home, got the check, took the bus down to Main. Daytime bus on Hastings a freak pen. Got to the bank, found I'd forgotten my documents. Had to wait for the bus, go home, get them, wait for the bus again. But then it was easily done. Took the 20 Victoria to Commercial. On the bus was a young man with coarse thick hair, curly and uncombed, in a ponytail held by an elastic. I was considering him, thinking he's French-Canadian, yes, when he reached his hand to the back of his head and took out a mouse. It crouched on his lap while he stripped off his elastic, bunched up his hair, re-elasticked it, set the mouse on the back of his neck. It climbed into the nest of hair above his elastic. An old Chinese pair were gawking in the seat across from him. I said he was like a magician producing a mouse from his hair. He said he found it yesterday on the steps of the First United Church. Then I bought $60 worth of groceries on Commercial and struggled home with them on the bus and sat reading the paper eating an Ecco il pane baguette with paté and brie. Louie phoned to invite me to her party on Sunday. I told her many stories though she was in a hurry. She said she was like my mother hearing stories bubbling up. I said, My next story is about meeting someone who told me stories. Now I am going to have the rest of the bread on a blue plate with garlic butter. It's been two weeks I haven't had toilet paper. 20 I'm going to have to act on removing Phil. The question is how to do it. I have to talk about both reasons. He used me in what he did to Kathy. It's true I've lost respect. I'd like to be able to tell her I fired him. I'd like to be able to tell her I told him why. But also I have to be plain about how much it has to do with his indifference. He won't back me. I can see that I've been opportunistic, I should have fired him when I knew he'd deceived Kathy, but I was still hoping he'd back me, and had no other option particularly. He liked my MA thesis. He doesn't like the direction my work has taken. Why? I've been doing better work, deeper work. He has liked nothing about it. It embarrasses him to be asked to support it. You say he's right to be embarrassed     YES Will you explain why     he sees you as too direct and aggressive Impolitic     YES I'll have to find a battler to support me     YES This is the crux     I should put it in those terms     YES That's why he doesn't support me publishing     I'm fearless     It would make him enemies to support me     YES Did he screw up my post-doc     YES Saying that is adequate     Okay, this is the firm ground     YES He needs representationalist allies     YES   Here I am at the point of starting again - the piles are organized - I'm scared - of breaking down again. Am I going to be able to do this     In spite of going to SD     In spite of breaking up with Phil     YES Am I going to be able to do this honestly at my deepest level     YES Cleanest and clearest     1. Perception as a wide net, 2. simulation as a wide net, 3. representational uses of wide nets. Am I going to be able to get this done by June     I'm afraid of it     YES Do you have anything you want to say     death of the relation with Phil will improve your withdrawal in relation to men If I handle it honestly     YES And that will help my fear     21 One story from making supper with Luke last night in his place on the 11th floor. I realized the pale wall-to-wall and ranks of windows were St Albans Road. Roy and Catherine sitting on the carpet drinking whiskey. Luke and I were side by side on the carpet looking across at the light sent up from one small lamp with a red shade. He told me that when he was writing his English O levels he sat petrified with fear that a standard he couldn't attain was being expected of him. He was seized with wanting to write about his family. He wrote a story about a boy. He wrote very fast, trying to get finished by the time limit. When he laid down his pen it was done. He got up feeling how strange it was to have done that work and walk away from it. He got a merit on the exam but has no idea what he wrote. After I left - he put on his big vinyl raincoat and walked me downstairs to the bus - he was going to phone Cheryl and tell her he is not going to come to South Africa. He said [on making commitments to women] "Men are like the Americans, who need to go to the moon even though they aren't sure they have the means to get back." The blue and yellow plates, cups, bowls in his kitchen all say Luke (heart) from Cheryl on the bottom. But she didn't like his mother's jars. This isn't going to work, he said. It is his first apartment on his own. He can come home and close the door. From the street he can look up and see one pink rectangle, one blue one. What he'd like on New Year's Eve is to be in Trafalgar Square with his brothers and sister. Oh Luke. The house is clean. Shall I go to Louie's today and start writing tomorrow? - Mary's timid voice says Ed is gentler than she's known him to be. He's weak. What can I say about Louie's day. There was her mother honored by everyone, gracious in the same way to everyone, nothing personal. Louie back and forth from kitchen to table while the beings she has assembled made what they could of each other. In the afternoon two people of another kind arrived, both tall thin-legged women in black tights, one like a very tall quirk-mouthed little girl and the other a pale person very grey around the eyes, with hair like a vinyl wig, who made me think of Lestat the vampire. It was Gioia, who last year was like Mary, a ballet girl very graceful and womanly. Gioia looked as if she had crossed out of gender and out of grace into something ashy, ashen at the eyes. Mary was beautiful. Gioia was like her pale adolescent brother. I was there quiet mostly, felt faded and dumpy, conversations were failing in ways I didn't understand, there was that dimness, why don't I shine. Louie didn't love me best anymore. Doesn't. Now she loves yoga best. Louie was not liking her own party much. It was something that needed doing, she thought. She likes providing bodies to honor her mother, something like marshalling reserves: if you were ever to need them these people are yours because they're mine, I've earned them. When she makes social jokes, to my ear they're very stiff, but they're successful. She goes away and lives among these people and doesn't scare them. Is Louie's mum as blank as she seems     Did she do that to herself     no Is there something you want to talk about     withdrawal In general?     yes, child's revenge at partial loss of happiness Louie's mum's withdrawal     YES She withdrew when her mother died     Child's revenge on life     Tom didn't do that     But if he hadn't drunk he would have     YES That's why Joyce said integrity     YES   Anything else you want to talk about     their aggression: complete, childhood, directness, aggression Imagine what she was like as a child       Is there anything I can do for my dad     yes, ask, what delayed him, and made him withdraw, from intimacy Ask what happened to him     YES Will you tell me     a woman, came through, completeness, crisis I don't understand this, will you point it     an injustice There was an injustice that made him withdraw     Who perpetuated it     a dark-haired woman Someone when he was a child     YES Someone he doesn't talk about     What happened was that bad?     YES Will you tell me what she did     established strength, turn for the better, suspicion, balanced force I have no clue what this means     no The woman he named me after     YES He saw the injustice of his life     YES He saw he was not going to have the life he wanted     YES Because of his family's position     YES Because he couldn't continue at school     YES A deep bitterness about life     YES The injustice of his exclusion     YES She represented the life of fine people     YES He couldn't get to     YES   Did I get there     NO It was about social class     YES He was driven by class resentment     YES He felt that if he wasn't a prince he was a peasant     I'm a much better person than he is     In the sense that I'm willing to be loyal to what I am     He was not     Is this it     He declined to live the life he had because he thought it wasn't good enough     YES A better spirit would have made the life he wanted with love and patience     Will he be able to say this       I'm not going to be able to write tonight     Is there something else I should do     have a crisis Okay, will you lead me     something that needs to be processed In relation to work     no In relation to my dad     Is there something I'm feeling I don't know about     Relief       Is that what I've been singing about     I feel it as the end of an age of oppression     YES And I also feel guilty about that     no But uncertain     He doesn't deserve a horrible death     But I am relieved     YES Does that mean he was affecting me badly     YES His malevolence     YES Does this have anything to do with his real self     no What he built in me     YES   Fear, anguish, poverty, hiding, immaturity, irresponsibility, conflict, sex at odds with my welfare If he dies a conflict dies     YES Is it a conflict I should keep alive     YES A conflict I was in relation to him     YES What I said in that poem     I should thank him for the conflict     YES That's the answer to what I should say at his funeral     YES More?     deep change, by means of the work, to come through, evasion Write about him     YES   I'm still evading the conflict     YES Evading parts of me     YES Does this have to do with being sent away     no Will you tell me what I'm evading     a decision A decision I want to make     YES I feel some kind of stirring of joy     But I have no idea what decision it is     NO A decision not to withdraw     YES A decision to fight in the open     YES That's where the conflict is     YES   It's a conflict with the structure he built     YES For instance what I'm doing with Phil     YES Will the conflict be there as long as I live     NO Should it be     NO You're saying don't fight the old dying man, fight what he made in you     YES He is dying worn out after a hard life     But I did teach him respect     And that was good     You are saying the standoff is over YES I won     And did he lose     no What is the conflict between     balance and delay   Do you want to say more     departure, shared, directness, of honesty It has departed     no It should depart     (laughs) no It hasn't departed     YES I could think of that as having been built too     YES Am I stronger because he was horrible     YES Any more     established strength, from the decision, to come through, vain regret   You're instructing me to come through feeling sorry for myself     no Sorry for him     YES Feel sorry for his pain     But don't feel sorry for the life he lived     YES Because he chose it     no Because I profited by it     YES Does that make sense     YES If I am alright, it wasn't a bad life     YES Because I am able to make it good     YES Is that the way to see it     YES Should I see that     YES Have I already made it good     no But I can     YES See what needs to be good in it     YES Can I make it good for him     YES That would be the way of miracle     YES Being what he has prevented me from being     But it would take more than that     NO   More?     what is lacking and needs to be completed is shame and anguish That's what he prevented me from being     YES That's what he prevented me from being?!     YES How did he prevent that     by providing an imaginary enemy Is this central news     YES The shame and anguish of being abandoned     NO Then which     all the shame and anguish that was true The shame and anguish Tom felt     That I felt with T, R, C and Jam     I felt lots of shame and anguish in childhood       You're saying I taught myself not to feel it by being mad at him     YES Holding it     YES Was it shame and anguish he caused in the first place     NO I don't know what to do about this     YES What     act on it How     turn for the better Feel the shame and anguish     NO How is a turn for the better accomplished     by not dominating yourself The way I resolved it by cutting them off     YES So it has to do with honesty     YES A steel door     YES   Is this okay so far     no Warming up     Should I write it alongside you like this     YES More pressure     no Do I have to live a life of utter discipline from now on     no But only do what's necessary     Still make Nora's garden for her     Live in the same room with Tom     Be in touch with the writing every day     22 Can't / You feel / The love / To-night It is where / we are 25 I'm in the seethe of firing Phil - talked to Bjorn - have the orange forms - an appointment with the associate dean - rehearsing my speech to Phil - wondering whether Kathleen will have me and when to ask her. Yesterday Michal was overjoyed. I heard him down the corridor singing in his office. "This is so good, it has to go on." He'd had hours laying out his framework. I'd said we should be cooperating, we graduate students should be supervising each other. He said my bat paper scared him. I'm excited. 26 I've written a beautiful Dear John letter. What else. It's Friday morning, a day with stripes of open sky. The teaching week is over. I have 'til Monday afternoon, four mornings. I am going to dye my bangs royal blue - not yet though. I am going to take jive lessons. I am going to sign up for Joyce next term. My meeting yesterday with the graduate associate dean or whatever he is, a young man with wide blue eyes who, when the meeting was over, pressed my hand between both of his, a practice I suspect has been instrumental in getting him where he is. I came in and sat on my chair with a feeling of being planted with a column straight down my spine. Backbone. I was doing the right thing and knew how to do it. I knew how to pitch it. He knew what he was doing too. It was a meeting alive with subtext, very competent. There was a moment yesterday when I stepped out of an elevator and ran into Phil just rushing to the stairs. We had a split second looking at each other. He'd been alone in some worry and I saw his real anguish before I smiled automatically and the lines of his mouth jerked up. I carried away that look and its jerk into hiding, feeling, I know this man, I have a connection with this man, how can I dump him. 27 Ed was in the Royal Columbian in New Westminster having dialysis for the first time. The knife slipped a bit when they were putting the tube into his vein. He hemorrhaged for 6 hours and was very weakened but didn't die. M asked me to come see him and to ask Luke to. I was talking to Tom about the fear and anguish of starting to write. He said is it fear of failing. I said I think it's more about my father, his forbidding me to speak in public. Tom said, Well I'm your new daddy and I want you to talk because when you do you make old crusts on me break up and fall away. I've been amazingly unsupported in this work     YES Is the crisis about it structural     no it's true I have done amazing work     no It could become amazing     I have made wonderful discoveries     YES It's not amazing because I haven't shown it yet     YES Will you help me     YES It's fighting with my dad     It's as if he forbids me     YES Are they going to push me out again     no   Will you help me     YES I'm afraid     YES I failed last time     YES Do I need to be more frightened     no I don't know how to begin     Emotionally I don't know how to begin     I don't know what I'm doing     NO I do know what I'm doing but I'm frightened     YES Am I right to be frightened of failing     no, gain, organization, turn for the better, revenge I'm afraid of it because there's revenge involved     YES Their revenge can't be worse than what they do to me already     What Phil has done already     YES I have not fully taken account     YES   This is stress     Stress of shifting     Should I just accept it       Is there a reason why I keep singing Can't you see / The love in me     YES Is excluded child singing it     NO Will you tell me who     learning, regret, subtle, rest Does it have to do with work     YES The thesis is full of love     YES Is it being sung to Phil     no to all of them It's the present woman     YES Singing to most of the world     Is it a sign of stress     no of a rhythm Of energy     Am I manic     no Excited to be coming through     Want to say more     processing, honestly, gain, after a delay Honest joy at my gains     YES Social and intellectual and emotional and now practical     YES Which I've worked and suffered for     YES Now go forth and write     YES   part 5 the golden west volume 18: 1999 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project