the golden west volume 19 part 2 - 2000 january-february

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver 13 January 2000 TA evaluations. "I would have dropped this course in a week without her - she should be the lecturer." Another four students said something similar. Martin didn't say hello in the corridor. Gillian - round fat in fine-grained skin - an awkward, breaking laugh - brown candid eyes. I guess I see her as a gopher sort of animal. I trust her. She says she gets fond of her students' little faces, they are like ducklings. She's responsive and judicious. 14 Nora phoned to say she likes Leo and he's almost done. 15 Where did such a dream come from. It ends with Louie saying Do you want to see it all over again? A room full of Europeans at a party. There are many women around a table. One of them is a singer. They are all experienced emotional people with beautiful ravaged faces. The sensation watching these people is that they're comfortable in the highest culture, they are the highest culture. Three men, two playing the same piano, one I see later standing watching. The music is wonderful. The man on the far side of the piano is playing very fast but carefully, as if he is cupping his hands around groups of notes. The man on this side of the keyboard is flashing his hands forward again and again. They are playing together very aware of each other, enjoying the way they are barely making it at that tempo. They are playing a difficult piece perfectly. I notice the third man after a while. I'm breathless with pleasure in the way the music is being made. That's when Louie appears next to me. What I'm thinking about as I remember this dream. My best papers, how well they are written. Damasio getting the company of musicians and poets. Duras intercepted at the entrance to a theatre by a man who said "I've known you for a long time. I want you to know you are more beautiful now, so ravaged." The longing for company of my own kind that made me try to be with Cheryl, Trudy, Rhoda and Jam, who still weren't my own kind enough so they could like me. - Look how the handwriting changed in this paragraph. Distress. My failures to belong in accomplished company, for instance most recently Fauconnier's seminar. Louie's good company. The way writing more than any other art lends us the skilful motion of another mind to try for ourselves and learn if we want. What's called a voice is an entire organization of a brain. Music is that too, in a manner I know less about, although I bore readily in music, meaning I'm as instant to know when it is only doing what I don't like to be. That's a dream about work     Am I all those people     But there is something I need to do     I am not an elitist but I am an elite     A sophisticated party without cynicism     Sentence?     think of success as being integrated with the world Let the world integrate me     Will you tell me what that means     search for gain that comes from action in early love   That's the instruction     That's what all those people do     YES The way that little girl was     That's honest coming through     YES Are Tom and I at the stage where we can consolidate in work     YES Oh thank you       Does that mean I'm supposed to act from early love     YES My papers do     NO Early love is integrated with the world     Is it a matter of allowing     Will you tell me how     YES the hawk of the left hand Meaning the overview?     no, the motion Right hem still moves in early love     Living socially without defense     Does not mean being hurt     no Is there more you want to say     it means not lying It means not lying     YES If I don't lie I'll be connected to right hem       Is that the most important instruction     NO there are many Are there people who don't lie     YES The people in the dream don't lie     YES Deeply and generally     YES Lying is what separates from early love     no Disconnects     Anything else     gains won by aggression make you indecisive about happiness Thinking I need to win by aggression     Some people can do it that way but I can't     My anger     YES - I'm ashamed of myself today because I avoided. I worked on an irrelevant book, went downtown, read newspapers, hung out with Louie, slept. What I avoided is the table. I feel sleazy. 17 Am I married to my talent     Should I be     YES I have been faithful to it through better and worse     Does it mean I have to be alone     no Would you say it's a philosophic talent     no An artistic talent     no A theoretic talent     no An integrative talent       Would you like to hint at it     you regret the death of order I'm on the side of best function     Would I have been like that without polio     So my talent is a kind of advocacy     So the question is how best to do that work     Joyce does it in her way     I mean something different Do you mean like what I did in the garden     no You mean something to do with writing     Something to do with teaching       Should I be teaching in a film department     crisis has taught you how to improve after deception A talent for understanding order     YES A talent for being integrated     YES Does anything follow about how to make my living     no My real work is integrating     Is there something I'm supposed to do for the rest of the world     integrate it   Should I teach integration     YES Can only the best people do it     YES Dune and From the legend of Biel are both about that, an early crisis that forces unusual integration Is this true     YES Does it happen to everyone at birth     A sudden flood     What's unusual about me is that it happened again       It's January and I feel lovingly connected       Can I stop now     no Will you lead me     something about female Integrating women's sense into public world     Giving theoretical support     So keep doing what I'm doing     no Do it in a different way     YES Do it in teaching     YES So you want me to teach     no   I don't understand     Will you lead me     gain Something gained     YES Lead again     decision I'm looking for the idea that will carry me with utter confidence     Will I find it     You are asking me what I have to gain?     Action YES Influence     Access to tools     Money security     Living with Tom     Being able to go full tilt       Is there more     YES Something I want the world to gain     YES I don't believe I can change it     YES Is that the decision you mean     YES I want public life to gain integration     What do I want to give the world?     YES Is the answer implicit in everything I do     Do you know the answer     YES I'm convinced the world doesn't want it     YES I've persisted with Tom     Can I persist with the world?       Is there still something I want to give the world     YES Right here is the crux of it     The clue was in my misery     But not in a straightforward way     I wanted to give my letters     But what I really wanted to give was my love     Is there a profession in that     Intelligence and love     And faithfulness to both     YES Connected intelligence     Discerning love     Not everybody wants to give that, but I want to give it     It's what my heroes give       So my question is, what professional format     Will you tell me     activism Like I did with the garden     But in the realm of neurophilosophy     YES   Does the world always want it when the intent is clear     YES Okay can I stop now     Make an appointment with Joyce     - West coast swing class. I wake anxious and turned on. Should I look into what it's like in that hour. I don't have the basic step, so I meet each person in the rotation unprepared. The men are too anxious about leading to be ready to help. There's the moment of looking at who I'm in front of, assessing and feeling myself being assessed, but only in the shallowest shy-est way. A hand, warm or cold, strong or weak. No chance to look intelligent. I'm choosing to jump in where I have no possibility of looking good. And here are lots of other people looking exactly like themselves, telling so much with their motion. I can't see them when I'm dancing with them and so know them much less. The exercise is social more than I realized. It's wonderfully real. I mean there'll be more to meet as I become able to meet it. Get composure in the suddenness of meeting. Get composure in the unavoided sexuality of the meeting. Let it be the beat not the feet. Go on till there's style. Don't fake. Don't fake. Like a social stage I skipped, that lets people learn how to meet each other. It touches exactly the spot of my lack. Evasion. How strongly but secretly I feel the physical presence of people. Leading and following are sheer contact. You immediately feel poor contact or good contact, presence or fright. There were a couple of women I loved to watch. A girl learning to lead, who had the compact motion I like in men, what is it, concentration. She was staying on her own axis and moving her partner like a - like what? - a yoyo - a counterweight. Mainly it was the hips kept over the feet and clicking sideways. Somehow it suggests something at the forehead. The other woman was a girl with a long neck and very short hair dyed yellow. She had a beautiful shape of head and was, Graeme said, an advanced follower. Her name was Grace. She had on a black sweater and khaki cargo pants. Loose clothes over a loose undefined body. She was beautiful to see dancing, the way she held her head, a light chaste softness, a carriage. Graeme himself, with his sideburns and technical terms, professional kindness, interesting to watch in his comfortable ownership of the event. Sugar push, right pass, left pass, sugar tuck. There are people who know the moves but aren't good dancers. I don't want to watch them. There are people who are good dancers but their motion is locked into a style. I don't know exactly what that means. Some of the advanced students and the woman instructor. I was meeting people in a lot of confusion. 19 My car again. I'm startled, with Gillian, how much she seems to enjoy me. 21 How is it with Tom these days - look at this little handwriting, it's time to work - a dwelling-on of peaceful love and gratitude. He buys 80-minute phone cards for five dollars. He has the livest, malest, street-smartest voice in the world. He laughs, he listens, he asks, he takes turns. He doesn't rant, or not often. He doesn't swear. He doesn't threaten to kill people. He comes home to his room and it's two ways different, he says, it's more home because I was there, it's less home because I'm not there now. He's going on thinking about his room, he's going on watching his plants and feeding them jump-juice, he's feeling his responsibilities to his kids, he's earning his connections. He's racing around Shelter Island on his bike timing himself. He's measuring his middle with the tape I gave him. - And I, and I, I'm here and my solar does not hurt. I have my task, my tasks. Teach logic. Write thesis. Revise total theory of mind. Learn to dance. Somehow get Rowen schooled. Get livelihood for summer. Find out what to do next. You are not an elitist but you are an elite, a sophisticated party without cynicism. Think of success as being integrated with the world. Let the world integrate you. Act from early love: early love is already integrated with the world. It means not lying. Gains won in other ways make you indecisive about happiness. Your talent is an integrative talent. You regret the death of order. So your talent is a kind of advocacy. Crisis has taught you how to improve after deception. What you are supposed to do for the rest of the world is integrate it. What you should sell is integration and segregation. You are looking for the task that will carry you with confidence. Ask what it is you want the world to gain - what you want to give it. You do not believe the world wants what you want to give it. Love and intelligence: connected intelligence, discerning love. Not everybody wants to give that, but you do. It's what your heroes give. It's what you have been miserable not giving. The world will want it when your intent is clearer. Reading Lakoff checking off my own decisions about the philosophy being done around me. Some of those decisions I found in him, and some I won by labouring example by example where something felt wrong. There are points I have clearer than he does. I'm subtler but he's wider. 600 pages about what's wrong with philosophy, well-organized, written simply though gracelessly. He has my way of seeing through. Lakoff G, M Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought Basic Books - I worked and worked and stopped and drove to Il Mercado and came home with shopping bags of food, a rush of happiness at having earned carrots, apples, figs, liverwurst, Ecco il Pane bread, salmon, toilet paper and more and more. Would work longer if I could, I'm interested now, I'm onto it now. 22 Working at the table these days, I'm spinning off, spinning off. Making notes about method at the same time as I'm making notes about responsive structure, percept, rep, sentience vs noncon function. 23 Having to reorganize the beginning again to integrate what I got in SD - talk about intentionality as the primary category - organic aboutness - and the rest of mind as kinds within that. It's clarifying everything that follows but means I'm still not writing. 24 I'm not quick with explicit logic     (twirls) I'm not interested in explicit logic     Is there a good reason     illusion of complete organization about the world It leaves out the thinker     Anything you want me to say to them     it's about control, power struggle Inherently political     YES People who are good at it are in ascendancy     YES Computational hegemony     YES A certain kind of man     YES It's not how people learn     YES Browbeating     Use logic when they should be using another capability     It is mainly an art of war     YES Power struggles in an open forum     It misrepresents how we actually understand     Is that mainly why I don't like it     no Because it's on the side of power     mmm Because it does not discern in relation to power     YES Feeling is more accurate     It's a male weapon     It robotizes people     YES People persuaded of nonsense because the argument seems to be good     YES It alienates people from their good sense     This course is entry-level indoctrination     YES The best part of the course is organization     It's useful to learn the fallacies     YES Anything else     opposites Anything else     address their exclusion Because they feel it's wrong     YES - "But it seems that Ellie is now disinclined to subject herself any further to such constraints. She wants to just follow her own inner voice. She put it to me recently that she did not want to write her thesis in the style of 'analytic philosophy'. News to me!" What should I think of that. Stephen's reply [associate dean] thanked him very much and looked forward to the completion of my degree requirements. I think what matters is that I handled this passage. When Phil and I ran into each other in the upstairs xerox room we both stood and stared but I was first to speak. I said, How are you doing? He rightly ignored it, but I knew I was the grown-up now. I was ready. How was it lecturing. I started by saying logic is a martial art. People who aren't allowed to force you will try to persuade you. Saying that first relaxed me. My misgiving about logic, which has been used to talk undergraduates out of their common sense. Phil played into my hands with this letter     YES The lecture went better because of what I said at the beginning     More?     your father, creativity, come through, betrayal 25 Do you mean with my father creativity came in spite of betrayal     Is that the condition I need     YES Do you want to say more     you are using the institution to process anger Is Lakoff right about analytic philosophy     So my quest is right but the feeling in it is off     The edge of spite     And revenge     Which brings up fear     You're saying process it     feel it I bluffed with my dad     YES You're saying don't bluff     Cry in front of the boss men     no Then what     deep change, ego death Okay I'm willing       Anything else you want to talk about     coming through One card?     catastrophe Boss men have been my catastrophe     Doctors, preachers, fathers     YES Genuine catastrophe     YES Do I need Joyce for this     YES I need it for the sake of my work     no For the sake of my spirit     26 Hello. Wednesday morning, dim, damp, the kind of day that stresses my cells. Little aches and unwellnesses show up again after two days of sun had brought back my inner sparkle. Oh and I'm a logic teacher, have to take the lecture again today, which means I couldn't write. Rowen yesterday. There he actually was when I phoned the school after three. Rowen! I'm so happy I finally got you. His firm dignified voice. 27 The flat look of a day like this. Everything is there and it's light of a kind, but as color it's not worth mentioning. Yesterday at the end of the day the sun broke out for half an hour. It was on the aspen brush like a spotlight - this at school. I saw the buds were red. The beginning of the pink haze. Behind the ranks of trees and deep beyond them there was the huge vitality of the blue mountains exhaling white in their clefts and slopes. Walking the ramparts later, looking south after sunset, I could see a tanker in the strait at Tsawassen, and the south arm of the Fraser gleaming pink through the dark miles of land. You - I have a core sense of you - it's my sense of who you are and it's a feeling - I wonder if I can say it - I was lying in bed before I'd turned the light on, thinking of you standing on the road when you'd left the hospital after Vic died. For one thing, there was the way you told the story. Standing on the road. You stand on the road in yourself feeling how your terrible losses free you into the adventure. The feeling of you is a squeezed heart in an innocent eagerness. 28 "Reparative therapy," Laura [Schlessinger] recommending for homosexuals. And she says lie to kids. Why do I listen to her. She's lively company, as if. I wake talking to myself. I don't know I'm lonely. I don't feel lonely. The heater fan starts up. There's light frost on the shingles. Real daylight, it's bright behind the chimney. There is the fateful table. Is there anything you want to add     balance in the midst of change I'm doing that     I'm able to do that     Anything else     you're not withdrawn Anything else     you're responsible More?     but you're still a fool I'm still a fool     YES   Will you tell me in respect to what     pleasure, balance, persistence, partial loss Is this a list     YES Too fond of pleasure     not fond enough Pleasure in the sense of fun     Something left out of balance     death Ego death     YES Not balancing deeply enough     YES Persistence in focused intent     I don't persist in the tasks you give me     It's about feeling loss     no Accepting losses I shouldn't accept       Will you give me an example     social position Because they go with access and influence     no For their own sake     I think it's a crime to have them     YES Is it     YES But nonetheless I shouldn't accept the loss     It's complex     I haven't separated having it taken away from me from giving it up     I have to have it before I can give it up     YES Meantime it is still being taken away from me     YES Taken away from me by people like Phil     no Entire institution     That doesn't value my kind of gifts       You want me to feel that more acutely     YES The way Virginia Woolf fought for her carpets     YES Would she have committed suicide if she had Premarin     no I should think of what undeserving people have     no I should think of what I want     Take on the stress of this more     YES Really do it     YES - About vision Darwin said photosynthesis in plants, phototropisms in plants, tissue that changes in response to light - pigments, chemicals that change in response to light - is precondition for eyes. From the other end, this end, I want to say, visual ability, visual attention, visual memory, being built by experience with cultural artifacts - visible things but also speech and literacy. They meet in gardening, which is the great feast of vision. The many plants that are artifacts. They meet in landscape I could say too. - What it is, I don't know where to start, I guess it's with an essay on primary organic aboutness. It's where I left off with the MA. Just write it. Give myself a deadline? Two weeks, Tuesday Feb 8. Gee it's so big. 29 What's the organizational trouble I'm having. I'm not keeping a stable sense of the whole. I've never been able to. I keep remembering I've got outlines already for what I'm setting up now. I go fetch them and try to fold them in. I don't remember where they fit in when I had them set up last April. I hadn't completely resolved them even then. When I come back after the several days of logic I find I'm redoing what I already did last week. This morning I did maybe two hours work but now my head is thick. I'm three weeks back from California and I'm physically almost back where I was before I went, less energy, less concentration, food sensitivities, worse sleep. My skin looks older. "Carrying around in our skulls a mute prisoner with a personality, ambition and self-awareness quite distinct from...." - Yesterday Tom's note, read at a computer upstairs in the Publab. I was replying and had it in front of me. rowen's note was full of inarticulate heartspeech and some other kind of reserved brightness that uniquely is his, he said, and there was excitement walking here just now in cobalt-true night. I was stopped short by inarticulate heartspeech, a sharp pang. You're here. You have come true. I was really stopped. I signed off. - I'm reading so much bad stuff. But then look at this, Raymond Williams: I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside, on the border between England and Wales. Within twenty miles, indeed at the end of a bus route, was in one direction an old cathedral city, in the other an old frontier market town. And since the relation of country and city has been and still is for many millions of people a direct and intense preoccupation and experience, I feel no need to justify, though it is well to mention, this personal cause. Williams Raymond 1973 The country and the city Oxford 30 Is the adaptation idea the one that's going to tie it together     That it's not a 'rep', it's a whole constellation     That tells me what to emphasize     Here's how it is - my difficulty with this chapter is my task of this period. I need to put as much into it as I put into getting through with Tom. It is another kind of struggle. It's a struggle of a kind I don't know. But I am further than I was in Borrego when I stopped. My teaching last term was well-founded, I could feel the difference. This is also to say I'm engaged in an adventure whose scope I'm not realizing. What does this adventure need. Patience. Bravery. An extraordinary stamina in meeting and reworking other people's formulation, so I can use what's correct in it without being mis-organized in the way they are mis-organized. Long long willingness to lie low and be unacknowledged while I work it out. Strategy in managing mental ability as it starts to fail. What does it need that I'm not giving it yet? A mother, it says. I need a mother? Yes. Okay what do you mean it needs a mother - it needs me to be a mother     no It needs an outside mother     It needs a mother in the sense of loving energy     I can't finish it because it isn't true yet     YES Is it deeply untrue     YES Do I know what's untrue about it     no I'm panicked       Do you want to give me a sentence about this     it's foolish to improve the prosperity of love woman I want to shift into another person before I improve my prosperity     Is that correctly felt     Further integration     YES Will you tell me who I need to shift into     (the star) I take the PhD as actual initiation     YES And I'm not ready     you feel you're not I'm afraid to cross the line     I should stop there     - Dance class. A jive lesson tonight. I couldn't do it. Slow, slow, rock-step. It's the rocking back I can't do. I can rock back but I can't push off fast enough from the right foot to be there on the beat with one. They learned a cuddle tonight, which is when he turns her on two so she's tucked into his arm and they rock back together. It's lovely. But say more about what it feels like in the room. I'm not the oldest woman. I bravely do what I can to put any of the men at ease. There's one who stands in front of me looking fixedly down the room. He's a vain guy with a weak hand. There was the one who dodged sideways when he saw me opposite him. He saw he was boxed in. The women either side of me were taken, so he said, Oh well. The connection when there is one, is in the motion. Hitting the beat together after something hard to do, making it through sugar tuck, left pass, twirl. Often the men seem to me small and weak, insubstantial even when they're normal sized. The sizes of people are nonstandard up and down the room. The tiny Chinese man. The ponytail girl who's a baby-fat 6'1". The lethargic thirteen year old with a head like a column, who gets thicker as he nears the floor, has plump thighs in too-long pants folded over huge running shoes. 31 One of the difficulties of organization is that I have to say things in the intro that I'll say again later. I haven't got that figured out. 4 February Oh how is Joyce - so little, so old, a squeezed look in her face as if she's in pain. I felt I should stop and find out how she really is. I felt I'd be imposing on her to want to work. I wondered if she can still work. Because I learned to trust someone, I learned to trust myself, she said: that's what I'm feeling when I'm moved when I read the line that says I find her standing beside me. I wanted to tell her the dream before she dies - I wanted to thank her before she dies - I wanted to tell her she reached Rowen and Luke and Tom too, and other people. She said if I could do anything I want to do, what would I do. I said working with color is so much fun, but I've got a talent in the work I'm doing. I can go in and say, If you thought about it this way it would work better. She said two things, she said it's important not just for me - that made me cry - yes it is - and she said she could see I'm in love with the work and don't want it to end. Is that true? She said it's the question Who am I, and it doesn't end. When I had read her the dream, the last line squeezed in feeling, I saw her in the same state but more so, holding her hand on her chest. She doesn't cut it short. She stays with it. But I didn't know whether it was her own feeling or mine. 5 "very loose but very clear way of playing the piano" What do I want now. I've worked. I sorted at the table this morning, found and read and combed and noted a lovely recent paper, Edelman and Tononi on dynamic core, something I needed for where I'm working. I'm still not sorted. There was the pile of neural configuration notes I had to fold in, either go through them all or leave them out, because this is where they need to be, in or somewhere near the argument for structural aboutness. Perception needs to be both before and after the neural imagining. These new books on mind-brain topics, last few years, are like trees grown for pulp, very loose of grain, a cash crop. I wouldn't want to write like that. Real books are very condensed of grain. Edelman, Dennett, earlier Churchland, Tiles. That's what my organizing and reorganizing is for. I'm better this time through, I'm noticing. It's more differentiated. But not yet better integrated. I'm still finding the same points repeated in different sections, as if I hadn't set them out before. I haven't got last year's version seen in terms of this year's version. Tononi G, G Edelman 1998 "Consciousness and complexity", Science 282:1846-1851 6 When I woke at 4:30 - it's 5 now and I'm at the table - I was thinking of the ways my work has been resisted - is that the word? - the films, the writing, the photos, most recently the Perception without representation paper - and the ways I've been stymied - halted - the ways I'm still young and baffled when that happens - and the ways I resist honor when it's given. Except for the films, I feel the work is all ungiven. I'm not wrong in that. I'm not wrong to think I feel the ungiven- and untaken-ness of it as I do new work. It's as if the website is my retrospective. I want to stand in a room with my life's work, so I'll know how to think of myself when I go on. Just now, looking at what I'd worked out about the notion of linguistic structure, I wondered suddenly whether I'd misunderstood Phil, whether he really did want to help me defend what I was doing, and was hectoring me because he was eager to see it. I liked what I felt at heart when I thought that. There's evidence against it, though. He kept refusing to help me. Was wanting to help me defend it, wanting to help me hide it? I did sometimes misunderstand his crits when he was telling me how it would be judged. He didn't want to help me, he didn't want it to succeed, and yet - as if - according to this arrival of a soft spot at heart - there was something like love involved, which somehow parallels my dad. NO, it says, the soft spot is in my dad not in him. Is that it? YES. It's a soft spot for my dad? Yes. He did want me to succeed, he did help me. Are those true? YES. - One - two - three and four - five and six. On six I'm at the point I like best, stretched back. At one I snap forward. I've had my anchor steps wrong. When I fixed where my left foot was on 6 I had the snap. That was today's pleasure. Lovely Sean is Sara's sweetie, and Sara is Colette's daughter: Makara, about 1974, when she would have been five. Sara was wearing black tights, black and white dancing shoes and the perfect dancing skirt, a straight flat A-line with discrete vents both sides so her legs show past the knee only when she moves. She and Sean were doing the cakewalk. She's a thin small thing and he is a fair nice-looking boy who is radiant about her. It's a dance where he has his right hand on her back and is using his left hand to pivot her by her right. They were kicking sideways - that's all I know - I don't have memory for motion. I cannot at all say how they were dancing. I go silent when I see it. Something about two people synchronized but twisting oppositely from a shared pivot point, or more like clicking oppositely, it's very light. 7 "Allow you to live the moment again and again." Ad for a wedding videographer. What about it. It's not the moment over again, it is assisted memory, which is this moment thinking of that one. Moments can't be repeated, but when I read my journal I feel I am repeating something. Not the time, because I'm feeling in thirty seconds what I may have been feeling for hours. It is an act of summary, whether accurate cannot be known. I believe it's that I partly reconfigure. What's repeated is physical structure, but there has to be new structure too, because just repeating structure would be re-experience but not memory. There has to be the added structure that is the sensation of remembering. Not necessarily that. When I remember in order to write I'm much besides the remembering. Here's the question. Am I setting up object-handling structure in relation to the structure that is reconstruction? Am I simulating handling? Simulating looking at, studying - that pouring of activation into sensory structure. What I'm onto is functional metaphor. Imagining the brain makes it possible to think what that could mean. Set up action circuits when I'm not acting. That's action simulation. Set up sensing circuits. Connect them, probably indirectly. It would be as if there's a handling of inner objects. It would account for people's feeling of handling objects innerly. 'Indirectly' means forebrain, probably, the deliberateness of the - what I imagine is lines from forebrain back - taut - tension of holding sensing or simulating sensing while delaying, or trying out variants of, action. Theoretical imagining, meaning take what neuroscientists say and use it to build an ability to imagine something. - Here's what I thought suddenly in the bath. I was thinking of Cherry Ames, student nurse. When I read it I was twelve or ten. Cherry on the day she's going to the training hospital for the first time, her kindly father driving her. She's wearing a cherry red suit. What I remember is the suit and the father, the street and the house, and the sense of leaving something and going somewhere. Starting something. I was meandering from thinking of reading it again, to remembering when I read Nancy Drew again, in my thirties, and analyzed it. The way I excerpted it in my journal. From there to putting my journal on the web. I suddenly saw I could put photos on the web with it. I could put the whole thing up. I'd need money to have it typed so I could edit it. It would be a project, have the sound of a project, forty-some years of journals. 1957-. Do you want to comment?     prosperity That's what I want to give the world?     YES Am I wide enough now to do it     Love and honesty     Do you have a name for it     the search What Rosalind said, write about freedom     It can have links to the work     Would a book publisher take it     Do you promise me there will be money     YES Is this what you want me to do     The search was for a way to live at capacity     Do it a year at a time     But don't start at the beginning     9 Senses and specification. Here's a paper suddenly saying it's the brain and the global array, both integrating. What is it with me today, weak and low. I woke too early. Didn't get up and work because I'm teaching today. It's dark and wet. Melancholy at the garden meeting because I'm not doing the work, detail by detail it's losing beauty and distinction because I'm not fighting and watching. I'm larding up after a month back here, and it's only February. part 3 the golden west volume 19: 1999-2000 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project