the golden west volume 19 part 4 - 2000 march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

4 March Kinderwater's garden. The way it went was that I read about it first. A monastery had bought it. The monk interviewed (I'm not sure it was exactly that) said they wanted to grow flowers to give as gifts. Then I was driving past it and saw leaves had been spread against the woods, and then that manure was dumped the length of the garden strip. What about Kinderwater's actual garden. It was a rectangle enclosed in a windbreak sequence of different heights of trees thickened at the bottom with carragana. Its enclosure was a subliminal pleasure of unknown significance, along with other things about the Kinderwater place - the windmill, the large real barn, the two-story house. A young monk beginning to make a garden in it was talking about apple trees - those for juice to sell, these old orchard Macs for the monks themselves. Something about the way he said it. I mean that I in the dream was interested in how he spoke. My structure invented the words and I was interested in them. It is often that way, dreaming invents and the I of the dream responds as it would in life. It's true what Joyce said, that I am in love with the question what am I and want to live near it on and on. What is there in this dream. A passing excellence of language, a fictional use of something I liked forty-five years ago, a moment of natural conversation between a fictional person and the actual I, a moment when the instability of vision there is in dreams saw granite pavers in the earth of a flower pot that was small a moment ago, and now when I come over to talk about them sees two broken concrete blocks. What the brain stuff I've read suggests about dreaming: there are elements that vary separately: the I is stable; the twoness lasted while the objects changed; and my sense of what they were followed what I saw. When there is moving toward objects to do something with them is when they shift, often. I went from seeing leaves spread on a little slope and thinking for potatoes, maybe, to being by the house with the monk. Meantime I was thinking I'd like to stay as a monk. Not a convent, never. He said I could be a monk for the purpose of working in the garden. Thinking this was stable across the shift of position and object - I think - the way thinking something does not hold across changes in action. Kinderwater's place is part of the early world. Gardening it in the place prepared is a good idea. What did I garden yesterday. I put my chaotic pages with their few good spots into the computer. Chaotic but it can be cleaned up. I don't know why it needed to be so hacked out, repeated, random, unordered. Over the past days I've had in a narrow shot glass of water by the beautiful lamp a twig off the New Dawn bush downstairs, that has been growing in the light of the lamp and is balancing its hard bright little round leaves in a lovely spreading shape. Is it a fact that a part of childhood is being gardened     Which part     integration. Cortex is later life Thalamus is childhood     yes, thalamus/LGN is gardened before birth, cortex after. The patch with leaves, the patch with manure Do you want to say something about the monk     temperance teaching Ellie to come through, responsible valiant control and judgment Does it need to go on indefinitely     no Is that it?     no. You are coming through delay of energy by betrayal Did Janeen die because she didn't do this work     YES Menopause is a chance to start again     Are there many     no Am I writing chaotically because it isn't finished     Gardening is the self-organizing by new energy     Any more?     write, now Why is this first section such a struggle. Is it all going to be such a struggle? To so little effect. I can make an outline but then I can't write to it. I look at it with loathing. This morning I wrote three paragraphs straight off and since then am milling. I hate how long this is taking. I can still rip through three books in a day picking what I need. What is it about this writing process. The slog. I can't bear the slog. I've done it [at other times] without slogging, in hyper bursts. This is hideous unending slog. I hate writing expository biology, I loathe it. I'm doing it hideously. I 'have ideas' and when I start to write them I no longer have any sense of structure. I won't quit but I feel I no longer have it for this work. I'm panicking. When I'm writing I keep discovering how half-baked I've been. And yet what I don't like in working from outlines is also their already-bakedness. What would help? Dear larger self - will you talk to me - I'm frightened - I'm not succeeding - I'm spending my days and I don't have a clear brain in the work - what's wrong with me - am I too old for the work - have I damaged my brain somehow - did I trade in my talent to get love - did I take on too much - I could do other things but I don't want to quit, I have something started I've be worked on for ten years - I really did get to the bottom of things - I'm very shrewd in the field, I've become myself in a more visible way but it's like I don't have my unconscious half working next to me in the same way - that felt power - is that what's wrong - an instinct - maybe I've wrecked it, trying to make it - I don't want to be noted - I do want to have some money and scope - I do have an intent. Will you lead me     withdrawal, balance, male, death I don't understand     no This is a waste of time, I should be writing     NO I've lost my flow     NO Living in flow is the most important thing     NO Will you tell me what     learning Is that what I'm doing     Am I supposed to write this thing     (crying) But I'm not able to     YES It's just going on so long     YES I don't have much clarity     There's so much still to do     And nothing is really done yet     NO I know I've done a lot but I can't finish     NO (crying) It's so endless     YES Please will you help me     no   That sobered me     YES You want me to feel you having withdrawn     I came to a halt     YES Is that why I can't write     A kind of watchful paralysis     Are you ready to lead me again     judgment Do you want me to take a step in judgment     I'll keep going but now I'm wiped out     YES Do you want a sentence     no (lovers) In some internal way     YES That's the state I need     YES It's all I want     YES I'll give up anything for it     YES Is that what's needed     no It's male interests, female interests and an integrating overmind     YES Is that what your original sentence was about     The male death     When I did the MA there was Dave Carter     YES Now I don't love a man because of Tom     YES I don't have a muse     YES And yet you said temperance is good     So I'm stuck     YES   Is it that I need an actual male     no It's why I started dreaming about Edelman     I can't write because I'm not crashing     Is there a solution     Is it harsh     no, something in the work Is it about the left hand man     YES Have I been trying to write with only one hemisphere     YES Talk to him     Tom spoiled my relation to my uncon by not letting me project     NO 6 It's the 6th, I'm 55. A bright day. Frost on the roofs. Where am I in the whole project. In my thirties I mined for a kind of poetics. I looked for structures with a particular feel of resonance. I tried to use them in writing and photos. I looked for principles. That work was unsuccessful, in the sense that it wasn't taken up. I still want it to be taken up. In my forties I gave up and made the garden and went back to school. The garden saved my life probably but it doesn't amount to anything. It was intensely successful. There are two parts to being in school. One is getting the basics sorted. I got to the bottom of philosophy of mind, to my own satisfaction. I made my ground in philosophy, rewrote it. The second was getting an acquaintance with brain science, how to think it. What I've learned confirms the poetics. Tells me what the intuition was. But academically I am unsuccessful. 7 David [Beech] came and got me yesterday and took me to the booming grounds near the mouth of the river. We walked a trail under grand fir, cedar, Douglas fir, alder, big-leaf maple, down the side of a creek gorge to a place on the mud, under bare willows, beyond cattails and edged with driftwood. Logs and bits. There was a white-headed eagle a long time motionless on a Doug fir snag on the cliff. Crows against depth of very blue. A light on alder haze different shades of orange and pink curving like clouds stacked against each other. There was March's cold light when we drove through Shaughnessy, but when we'd eaten bread and cheese I saw that the bluff directly behind us had gone a very rarefied gold, as the sun was lower, I think. Pilings upriver had stripes of light running slowly down them, tactile. It was warm. There was David with his thin nose rosy, the well-dressed skeleton he is, traumatized at the hip, thoughtfully equipped with Japanese folding spoon, pruners, a rope in case I needed it coming down the hill, linen towel for tablecloth. There was for a while a dumb big gallumping dog and from beyond the cattails a pleasant, very pleasant, smell of cigarette. The creek was opening onto the river at its last rocky ripple, lovely soft curved shells of sound. David kept his mouth shut but on the way back up through the trees he taught me how to recognize grand fir from below, by a silvery flatness of branch. I kept being stopped by the cedars - the trunks with their long strips of bark in vertical lines that draw the flow of the tree both up and down. The round limbs of the roots. I don't think it can be said. The cedar has a quality of another order. It's a quality of surface and of form. The dry live skin of the boughs that are not needles but knitted, a sensory surface maybe, like a monkey's palm. Looking at cedars is like seeing an aristocratic bloodline. The bark on a Douglas fir was like scab diagramming confused milling in the tree. Luke emailed today. I said, You! I was growing old waiting to hear from you. Tonight I did not want an hour of listening to Tom talk about McCain in the primaries. 8 Near waking something about a way of using a mind - some few people - who work with a fine grid - which I saw. I was trying to peer into the little squares to see what it was they were looking at. A feeling when I woke of the work I've done - the way it was finding space to work in, that has not been used up - as if the space within the space we have - it was an intimation of what it would be like to have mental energy again. In the inmost. Something else, coming up a street hovering - I mean what I can do in dreams, stand or lie in the air maybe four feet off the ground and move forward. I was moving by thrashing my legs strongly. Someone next to me who was doing it too, was not thrashing and was moving more slowly. I was watching to see whether I should instruct her. But what else was happening was that as I came up the street to a rail crossing I was seeing schoolgirls in pairs crossing the path, some of them practicing a lovely motion like something from swing classes. Can I see it. They had their arms wide and were using the palms to rotate past each other somehow. I saw two of them doing it while they were stepping along a rail. What I'd do if I had money - go back to my pagan studies and make films - I would make films for the far future - immaculate states of beauty - I'd have a big light workroom and fine equipment and helpers - a tech pagan - I'd go to New York and stay in a hotel - work would be all I'd need. Is that where I'm bound     YES Can I fund it     YES Is this a return of spirit     Does it show     YES   Is it bad to fantasize that     no It's what I really want     YES I have no means to get it     If I had, I'd handle it well     YES Scope     Should I live as if I had it     To the extent of my means     no, beyond them Do I understand what you mean     no, the world, father, gain, men Do you mean the fantasy is code     The world of male success     YES It's my male wanting     YES Which he's supposed to do     YES Wanting it is a sign that he's on     YES Does he only come on when I'm disaffected with Tom     NO So now that he wants there's a possibility of doing     He wants to be a high-flying artist     No bottom of the line stuff     YES   Are he and love woman alternates     no Is this multiple personality     no States of one person     Is the next step to get him interested in actual possibilities     He has the ability to do large things but the means only to do small     But partly he has the means only to do small because he has done only the small     We're 55, is there time to get to the large by means of the small     Go on with the house dream       Is that Darko's jacket     no Is it mine     9 [*house diagram] The house with the big garden - which I see as if I'd been there - now has a big clean studio - with a rented flatbed editor, 35mm, and video suite that come and go - projection booth - Siggraph tapes - blackout that's a screen - a warm floor - at the window the desert garden blazes, the quail scratch - there's part-time staff - up on the platform is the sunset table by the fireplace - for night music - a cellist or a sitar player on the terrace. Simple food always. Lots of business expenses to offset investment income. I'd buy sages.com from the guy in San Francisco and have a worksite with beauty bare. Quadraphonic in the studio. I'd dress not very different than I do now but better quality. Someone to transcribe and edit the journals. An agent to get stuff published. After a day doing nothing but dream that dream I feel glutted. What else. I'm still mad at Tom. Why? Because (phone rings) 10 The way it was on the phone last night. I wanted it to stop. The way it's been when I read his emails, I was saying there's nothing here for me. As if there's something I need and there's no hope of it. I want the way it is when somebody gives me a surface spread under me, that lifts me into myself, like a mother would, if there were one who knew me and wanted to see me glorying in myself. David gives that, Louie used to, Michael when he wasn't loathing me for being intellectual. It's a restoration. Tom is wanting the same thing. Today I'm going into chapter 2, Wide nets, how to imagine the brain. Imagine it as a wide net with a bright net overlaid inside it. Imagine the bright net dancing over into an area, segregation and integration. Chapter 1 said the whole body is about the world and itself. A nervous system, a brain, facilitates and coordinates the aboutness of the whole body. In a brain, structures are one way rather than another when the world is one way rather than another and when the body itself is one way rather than another. There's a lot of cross-balancing, dynamics global and local. Downstream consequences. Somehow the brighter net within the wide net is the means of sentient aboutness - not just being structurally codetermined, not just acting effectively, but the sort of being with this is. I'm with the table and the lamp by being about them structurally. And that's as much as we know. Is that as much as I need to know? Yes, it says. What I want from this chapter is to set up a vision of the wide net, so I can evoke it in the next chapters. Perceiving is the net set up from outside, in context of body. Simulation can be central only, or else central by means of peripheral. Language can use sketchy simulation. Pictures use narrow perception simulational in effect. Math uses narrow simulation highly elaborated. Spatial illusion in computer music uses visual somatosensory space plus auditory perception to simulational effect. Wide net allows us to imagine these interactions of modes. Sci vis uses spatial vision to metaphoric effect. What I want to say specifically about spatial perception and sim, also in its rep uses which include metaphoric, is that it is integrated and segregated and can be integrated and segregated in different ways. The vision of the wide net makes it possible to think (not blends but) coexistent interactive structure. The wide net vision is itself a spatial metaphor. I am thinking about my whole brain by using that part of my brain. It is a very comprehensive vision. It is high creation. Can I carry it off? Will they accept it? - There are so many beautiful things I wish I could share with you and can't. I can ask you to try but you don't take the trouble. You are afraid to be taught. When I consent to share what you want to show me you are well but I start to die. I fall silent. I lose hope. When I write email or speak on the phone it isn't going to matter what I say. There won't be a response. Yes I am lonely. I have moments of hope. I could show you the interview with the astronaut whose name is Story Musgrave. You wouldn't read it. So it isn't for you. And Smalley's piece on the listening imagination. Smalley D 1992 The listening imagination, in The companion to contemporary musical thought, vol 1, J Paynter et al ed, 514-554 Routledge Nina Diamond Story Musgrave - Interview Omni August 1994 11 I've been binging. For instance cleaning house, doing the laundry. Staying away from the table. Guilty. Also eating and eating. Buying and reading newspapers. I like the clean room and the clean bed but I'm squirming and queasy. Since Wednesday, it's Saturday now, I've written a page and a half. I've read magazines and daydreamed and stuffed my mouth and been unfriendly to Tom and look ugly in reflections. Evading what, exactly? Because what I feel in the evading is not pleasant. Would writing be worse? Is it a physical stress that should be evaded? Will you tell me what it is that I evade     preparation The austerity     Would I really have to give up everything     YES No movies, no visits     Brief phone calls     No bread, no allergens     No radio in the morning     I could do it gladly for a month     But it's indefinite     YES I'm afraid of not being able to sleep     YES 12 I have to give up evading. I normally do evade, is what it is. I have to be myself as I'm frightened to be, but then love to be. This morning it seems wonderful Last evening I went from that conversation to the table and wrote two pages of basic exposition, and know where to pick it up this morning. - Sunday night. I worked all day. Got farther into neural science than I have been. Combing the detail from Bullock. Here's how to imagine the brain as a volume. When I thought I was ready to stop I'd ask the string and it would say no. At noon shopped for fridge full of food, out on Commercial in weak sun with the unstrong souls of the neighbourhood. Betweentimes I'd go on making up the house, its glass doors, the sconces in the corridor, especially the pink terrazzo floor with brass strips. The small couch with worn green leather seat across from the kitchen. Green armchairs at the south windows. The service corridor behind the studio. The studio windows. Its equipment. The woman who renews library books and takes phone messages. The food, arrangements for food. Talking to Tom oddly flat. I pushed myself to talk about the struggle with work, feeling he doesn't want me to. Pushed myself to talk about myself. The realest offer I made him was trying to talk about making up the house. Uneasy silence. Then he started talking about Golden Hill as if I had challenged him to provide for me. He often does not notice when intimacy is being risked. I suppose I'm like that with his offers. He used to read Omni, he said. His buoyancy has gone away for some reason. Maybe it's work grind, maybe it's an occasional joint, maybe it's too long since we were together, maybe he has a bad conscience about something small or large and it's interfering. Maybe he's downcycling to his birthday. Maybe he's forgetting me in the way he does. It says he doesn't realize he's less intimate. It's a jag in the stabilization process. Just keep going and it will come back. He doesn't know he's less happy. He feels I'm not pressing to see him. He's worried I'm disengaging, which I am for the sake of work. Anything else?     yes, ask him questions 15 Then he's happy again. When I read him his horoscope he says, as if a bird flew in, I love you so much. 16 Thursday, rain, bits and edges of the teaching week, which was a medical week too, dentist and Sylvia. I wore the turquoise necklace with black clothes and my new chino jacket. Hitchhiked up and down the hill - looked nice and felt lithe - it's spring in the bushes, Indian plum starting to show white with its green. A brightness in the salmonberry, and the completely even long-lasting floating pink of the alders, which on the coast were many colors presumably because pollen drifts across from other populations? Hitchhiking and elsewhere, these days, I am very light and free. Will make remarks in elevators. Tom and I ran out of conversation last night but we agreed we can do what we're doing because we stay interested. There's lots more to get to. When he says it's the first time he has been interested I believe him. For me, I've been interested - for instance Jam - but there was the other way of not being convinced. So I'm both interested and convinced, oddly in spite of being dubious, often. What's the convinced. It's in the backbone maybe. Forehead. A yes. Power-matchedness. Stalling, wanting a little day before the table. 17 This month since I saw Joyce last - when I read it over it seems wayward - undecided - many-minded - all over the place - I work with the book but don't follow through, which makes it only entertainment - I am happy or not happy with Tom - but that's in bounds - there was Janeen - birthday - there's too much journal - but nothing is made. I freeze in fear and sadness when I say that. I was fine, buoyant, and then looking at this month I'm frightened again. - Awash in grey rain today, streets, sky. The din, driving in it - wipers, tires, other cars' tires, the heater. Visual din, water on the windshield, reflections on the road. Oh tiny old frightened-looking Joyce. A tiny granny. When I hug her she's a little skeleton, the muscles of her back very thin and tight. It was a confused session. I was saying many things I need to say about work, I was crying, I was glad to be showing the grief and pleasure about work. But nothing was resolving. She said I should feel the grief of not being seen by my father. I didn't like what she was saying because to me it seems worth grieving that the beautiful work is not seen. Manifestation: that's what it was about the garden, she said. Ideas are like trying to nail egg white to a wall. No, papers can be very clear, I say. I have written beautiful papers. No one will read them. That was one of the moments where I burst into tears. I said I was willing to see that it's grief at not being seen by my parents, but I don't know how to come to it. Joyce is dying, I think. She hopes she may be cured. Whatever that was - her firmness in work - is going. She wandered out after me and said, My son is a filmmaker, you know, like an old woman losing her wits. But here is what makes me think maybe she's right: the quality of the grief. I sounded childish. I loved it when she seemed to be finding the idea of the work wonderful. I liked telling her about research in my 30s that was a way of feeling what I know differently now. Wanting to share it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. When I said it I had my hand to the side of my head, my right hand, like a little cap is how it felt. She said at the end, I've seen you, and I think other people have seen you. Who is the person who would satisfy you? You should take it to that person. 18 I said, I have to write it first. It's true that not all of me sees it. It's true I don't act in a sense of its value. Another thing that's true is that my working relation with myself is, should I say harmed? I don't know whether it's harmed or at its limit because what I'm doing is so big. I am unstable about its value. The person in me who feels its value is the working person. Who is in grief? A child. I do have grief about not being seen by my parents. And everybody else. But grief about the work being seen is something else. It really is the work. I've set the outline for chapter 2, it says. Could I enjoy writing     This project     Is there something simple I could do to enjoy it     YES something about losses: maternal improvement, child undominated I would enjoy writing if I had a better mother     The mother I have now distracts me, wants to get away from me     YES Is it the child who writes     YES I enjoyed that writing [in the early 80s], I had a mother then?     Nature - it was my relation to my days     To have a mother again I need to move     YES That beautiful house would be my mother     YES   Will you tell me why I dread writing now     crisis It puts me into crisis     Conflict     about anger I'm not understanding     people will be angry People will be angry at what I write     no Something in me feels it's forbidden     YES I'm afraid of anger     YES This is historical     The church     YES I was programmed in childhood     THAT is what's keeping me from writing     YES A better mother would support me against the patriarchs     YES [notes from interview by Harriet Rubin of Fernando Flores, Fast Company January 1999, 142] Speak with intention Tell me what you think of me: this is how you develop trust I promise I will answer you: thank you for your assessment When trust improves, everyone feels more confident One thing we need to do here is to produce despair - because despair produces reality I want you to build your sense of curiosity The compassion of the story is in waking people up to their blindness. For that, you need to be a warrior. I am tough and sweet. Know this. We aren't aware of the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. I'm fighting for freedom, for breadth of being. I have unlimited patience. Get them to engage. What you know you know What you don't know, the realm of anxiety and boredom What you don't know you don't know, another realm, whose language is truth, which gives and requires trust People with ambition don't want to listen to positive assessments. You need emotional strength to be able to hear. Negative opinion, positive follow up, thank you, you're welcome. When warriors fight they end by offering each other thanks. One must feel gratitude toward the person who engages you in battle. Make promises Make them publicly. They create solidarity. They make us responsible and give opportunities for freedom. Ask others to assess you Build identity not persona. Identity is about commitments. We need to reach a point where every moment tells us what to do in our body. The body never lies. Be practiced in making assessments so you always see through. Stop producing interpretations that have no power. Your talk does not indicate action, only desire. There is no energy in that story! If you can't put your body into it, there is not truth. Develop a big story - a story of transformed reality. Can you invent a story in which you can be competitive, world-class people? Value is not produced by hard work. Value is produced by a story. You have to be willing to risk your identity for a bigger future than the present that you are living. - Will you be in challenge partnership with me     Will you tell me what you truly think of my work     What do you think of this writing project     it is lacking coming through to competition and giving Do you understand what's keeping me back     YES Ellie's action intelligence is stalling Should I trust it     YES Let myself stall     And do nothing     no, honest struggle to integrate and balance Don't go idle     YES But accept delays     This man spoke straight to the heart     I want to be a warrior of honesty     YES Would you like to make a big story with me     YES Do you see a big story     YES coming through, writing, delay, to adventure Do you see what to do     YES conflict, partial loss, of leadership, in the world Can I speak in the state of truth. That's all that matters. There are things that matter in the rest of my life, but in relation to this project all that matters is telling the truth. If I don't stand there I am lost. Don't think of making it, think of speaking from it. The vision is already there. Let it tell. 20th There are four thousand dollars in my account, the rest of the student loan money. Michael and Rowen are on the Loon somewhere on the way to Powell River. Louie did not pick up anyone in the bar of the Sylvia Hotel last night. I wrote three pages this week. Tom was euphoric at having confessed that he lost the transit number for my delayed birthday present. He forgets to trust me. I have been saying don't think of the brain as a system of wires or pipes, think of it as a volume made of infinitesimal grains of many different colors. Color alterations flow through the volume in threads of streams, diverging, converging, braiding. Spots of only certain colors change, and the color they change to depends (let's say) on both the original color and the directions from which streams are converging. If we look only at spots of one color, and treat all the other colors as background, we will see a standing web, three dimensional, with denser and looser areas, more and less defined shapes. If we then add all spots of one other color, we will see what strikes us as another three dimensional web. The second web will be built in some of the space not occupied by the first. At places the two webs will be enmeshed with each other; at other places they may be easily distinguished. We must imagine both webs changing shape continuously, maybe one is changing more rapidly than the other. Maybe the parts of the webs that are enmeshed with each other are changing more rapidly, or maybe they are more stable while more isolated strands and loops flash into and out of visibility. If we are looking at all the grains of color in an area we will see color changes rippling through the space at different rates. Some very rapid, some very slow. There will be beautiful order at all times, because color change at any grain is a function of - From there I went to the grain image workbook and took out two pages of descriptions I think are of brain-structural change. Every time, the notes in that book shift me into a state of rapture. I'd like to know why. People phoned as I was working: Tom, Nathalie, Rowen at the dock in Squirrel Cove on Cortez, snuggled down in blankets with a candle on the steering wheel, Michael grinning beside him, the lights of the little town rising from the shore. They had cold beans and Oreos. Tomorrow they'll cross to Powell River. I'm writing this for Rowen later. He said he'd phone every night. I've distilled a drug. It's very concentrated, very swift. It's a relation of vision and language. In vision it's motion and color, slight and faint; in language it's brief and exact, precisely rhythmic, aural. I feel I could work out of it forever, joyfully. 23 "It's not the prettiest day but the traffic is doing fine." Left-hand man does not like the opulence of the imagined house. He wants one bare room with nothing that's there for pleasure. But he doesn't do anything. Is there something you'd like to do from your bareness     I want to be responsible for recovery from illusion In your bareness do you feel you have the means to do that     YES You want to be a warrior     YES If I help you with that will you help me to live in beauty     YES You want to free people, that's your mission     YES Mine is to make beauty     Am I keeping you back     YES Will you tell me how     intelligent valor is not improved by your work Do you mean the academic work     YES Could it be used when it's done?     YES So you think it's worth finishing     YES Do you want me to visit you in the bare room     no Will you visit me in the rich house     I love your project     I love that you have hung on to it     We were valiant with the students last semester     YES You want to work on a bigger scale     YES I want what you want     ..? I love your project, you don't love mine     Larger one, is mine valid     We'll go on talking     23 Lying in bed last night I noticed a moment of objective regret about my future death - that so much capability would be snuffed, that had taken so long and so much effort to build. This morning in the studio. The door into the corridor is closed - behind it is sound I don't hear - phone, washing machine, fridge. The high window that's the south wall looks onto olive trees with tufts of silver grass, California poppies, sidelit this time of day, backlit later, all the way to the wall. There's a book shelf, just one, at eye level. Library books from UCSD. There's a rank of file drawers, not deep. A very big video screen. More than one long table. Graphics computer. The room has corner speakers. Side walls have windows high up and white space I can stick pictures onto. All the storage is on the north wall, a lot. The room can be a gallery briefly. 25 I have many long tables set around the studio each with outlines, notes and images. There's a computer with the website being built. I have researchers finding facts, a web tech. A prewrite editor. Someone keeping track of citations and writing to ask permission and make contacts. There's a contact file being kept: these are the people who should know the work, this is what has come of messages, this is the strategy. There are announcements of the project, fliers. Drafts are sent for corrections. There are sidebars prepared beautifully, long quotes. They come up and float next to the text screens. There's a link editor. The web tech has worked out subject headings. It is like the making of a beautiful book. But central to it there has to be the writing. I just get up and go into the studio. There's an armchair. What I have already written has been sent to be published. People are reading it as I write. There will be a fight. I am getting ready. What is the fight. To make people better by making them able to love the world and their own being. Could I do that? If I love the world and my own being is that enough? No. I want to support it in all people. A woman on Art Bell who said, "The way your wrist moves, it's a miracle. God loves you." I'm like that aren't I. The difference always and only is quality. Mary Tiles writing about set theory doesn't have to say, god loves you. Her work says, I love you, in the sense of, I've done what needs to be done to make this good. Quality isn't the only thing that makes people better. Guided access to early love needs quality of attention. Quality of attention encourages me anywhere. 27 Another project - all my journals - someone who types them into the computer - pictures and other stuff that belongs with each segment - they're in file drawers - I'm editing them at the table with the lamp, that late at night stands near the open doors onto the garden. At this point I feel the objection. It would be like vanity publishing. Real writers don't want to preserve their own lives. It's sleazy. I think - that's him, isn't it. I tell him, people write autobiographies. This would show actual changes in writing, I would invite you to help me make it as good as it could be. Does left-hand man need to be handled the way a real man is handled? It says yes. Is this a breakthrough? Yes. He shouldn't set the projects. His job is to help with quality and technicalities. This is why I thrive when I'm dominating a man. I'm overriding my stern idealist. Okay. He also wants me to dump Tom. But he's willing to work with me. Yesterday I was revising on the computer. First chapter. It's going to work. Not yet but after more revisions. I have to find the parts where the writing is good, that clear bold fast style, and use them to prime me. Then I am going to use Brain and imagining and Brain and metaphor as blocks to work off, and then Kantian stories as the last chapter. How to imagine the brain - see it as a volume - ignore the organs - see it as seething with color specks - it is alive with change - there are streams through it and the interaction of streams makes a gauzy net like a nebula - there's a strong dynamic shifting of this net, like the caustic in Trapline - there are stronger nets within the net - think of the specks as cells - the state of the cell can be thought of as a color - think of connections as mutual dependencies.   part 5 the golden west volume 19: 1999-2000 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project