the golden west volume 2 part 1 - 1994-95 december-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 14th December 1994 I noticed him at one of the other CISR parties. Why did I think he was French? His suit, his forehead? He looks like Chretien. He was prowling. Something about his eyes. We stood in one spot talking and the party thinned out beyond us. A few people against the walls when I laced up my boots. I came home already reprocessing, woke at night, and am still there. What to find. Terms - reverse programmed. My software was boxed in a canyon. Code-cutter. Vertical market. Bio chip. Was he trying to flirt? At moments, irrelevantly. "We could walk in that forest" - knobby spires video-projected. About his mind machines: "You'd have to lie down on a bed and relax." "Sure," ignoring it. What came about was something else, a couple of moments where we were sitting together with open grins. Try again. A couple of moments where we stopped talking and sat looking at each other and he looked the way I felt - it was that - a sunny pleasure mirrored building back and forth. Hewlett-Packard in the 60s. His father said get into computers. He did it without university. Locked up in suburbs in the South Pacific. Australia? And New Zealand. North of Auckland, two thousand acres of paddock with sheep and horses, a strip of forest and black sand beach. What he wants to do is make a memory on CD-ROM, fifty-five thousand drawings, complete memory, virtual reality background. Nanocomputer infiltrates the brain and replaces it gradually. Four years ago he saw that hardware and software are the same thing and it scared him because it can't be copied. Do you want to live forever? Not forever, five hundred years, a thousand years. He looked into the irises of horses. He thinks consciousness has to do with an angle of exit. What do you mean, exit? I can't make sense of that. He means equilibrium. What is he mythically. System says a drinker. Mind machine junkie. Entrepreneur - he takes it on. Gambler, that's the look he has, stranger in town. A grey suit double-breasted gaping in what is probably a well-cut way over a drinker's paunch. Wide flash tie. What do I know. Nothing about the context of the suit. About the face enough so I picked him. I want to say I am noticing what it takes to interest me and what it's like to be interested. How comfortable I can be. I fought to learn. The moments smiling - that was a boy's face - were when the wrestlers rested. Why do you want to do it with machines? Because the machines are there already and they'll go on without us if we don't go with them. I want to do it without machines, I say, I don't understand why you want to do it with machines. I have to get used to it, he says. You mean, for when you are a machine? The machine afterlife? Yes. Alright that was fun. - 30th The kitchen has a new floor [sanded, varethaned]. There has been light these two days. In two weeks I'll have to have written a long paper on the history of the philosophy of imagining. Nothing much is happening, as if I live on a sandbar and the tide is way, way out. I've bought flowers and am burning candles. The excitement of the work is not here either. All I'm wanting is to paint my house and buy things. I like the clean order in the pantry and the knobs on the chest of drawers. Wishing for the big chair to come home recovered and stand by the window on the new floor. Is it for the next decade? 31st Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swingtime. He's playing the part of a man, but he's something else. Physically very slight and bright, unserious, sexless. She has the same quality. They are like elementals. Their sexes are whited out. They have precision without the pelvic surge precision could work against - what am I seeing - the precision of small muscle control could have the look of setting rocks into a stream, immovably shaping a force that no one could dream of containing. With them it's not containment, it's innocence. They are perfect phenomena. A fine ro - mance / With no / ki - sses / A fine ro - mance / My friend / this is. I kept singing that as I fell asleep and woke. January 3rd 1995 A black space with some of the white lines of perspective and motion through - a fictional space. Bare use of the schemata as stage with feelings a different size in relation to the space, large. A feeling and then draw it, a flare of color in the black. 5th Evening. At the desk. Some dream I keep feeling without recovering it, as if it is relevant to what I'm working on but I know I'm not going to remember it. Does a dream set up a computational landscape that can allow the answer of a question asked the previous day? I have been waking sometimes thinking something like this - it's hard to bring back though it is banal - that the historical or common or real world is what matters, and that I don't have much time left to work with it. That I've spent the middle of my life, I mean before the garden, believing consciousness has qualities and can work in itself; have poured my life into dreaming, and am doing it now, because the journal is not work though I have taken it as work. And that seen in this way I have been almost completely disabled by - what should I call it - mating problems, which have brought me to give my lifetime to fantasy elaboration. I am wondering whether this vision is an implication of understanding imagining as simulation. I mean that the belief in 'worlds of imagination', which I hate, is a way of pretending there are worlds other than this one world. This vision says that humans, by their ability to simulate, are able to foresee and organize, but become vulnerable to self-managed evasion and social drugging. Sanity is the issue. Sanity is presence and such simulation [foreseeing and organizing] belongs to presence. Am I heading toward a Puritanism like Grandpa Konrad's? Die Kunst wirt alles nur zerschtraft. That can't be right, but the mis-leading of lives into stupors where satisfactions can be simulated means those lives are absent from the world. - Rowen was in Vancouver, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We thought we'd have tonight together. He phoned from Richmond crying. 6th [looking out the window] There's Koo in my car. It's killing. He's racing the engine. It's hobbling into the shop. This was the day Jim phoned the department. I don't know whether to wait. What is wrong with me - the paper. I've spent the term so miscellaneously, undirected, and I'm rusty. I look at former papers with wonder - that sophistication isn't here. What is here? A headache. A pretty kitchen with insidious fumes and wonderful sun. Glass throwing light on the wall in shapes like beautiful beings. The green of a plant against the light. The surface of my eyeballs stinging. I'm afraid of the paper. I don't know what to write about. I have my themes, but I don't feel I have support. What would I say to someone wise and well-intentioned? Larger self     hi You know I'm worried now about two things at once    three That's one thing taken care of though I was scared: Slippery Jim says am I available and do I want a computer     breathe Is there anything that I didn't notice as it went by     you noticed you didn't like his voice It's the voice of a minor character not the voice of a love interest     you'll have fun again Is this a comic episode     Eight on a Friday night. Saturday and Sunday. Monday morning I have to be at school. Registrar's, accounting. Monday afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday for retyping. "I am available. That's a short answer and a long story I won't bore you with." The extraordinary mass of strangeness I run into when I meet a new man. The bumpiness of the contact. I mean the way there's contact here and there, gaps and valleys of sheer noncontact between. I am available, I say with irony I know he doesn't hear. He says his things, I was thinking of you. I supposed you were, I didn't say. Are you mad, and if you are mad how do you make your living, I didn't say. You don't know I'm lame, I didn't say. You took longer than I expected, I didn't say. I know you're not the one, I didn't say. I'd be wasted on you as a woman. I'll do what I can with you, I'll hear your adventures, I'll launch myself valiantly into the foreign waters you are, but you are not the man I think of every day. You're not the man I want: you are some other man. And with men at all, what is there but sightseeing? "Do you remember me?" It was another voice he asked that in. "Yes I remember you. Of course I remember you." Joe Slovo has died. It's on the news tonight. "I had decided long ago that there is only one aim in my life." 10th [dream not transcribed] Writing this para I was thinking of something I have lost, which is a sense I had when I was younger, of still loving everyone I'd ever loved. 11th When I was really working the other night I was feeling how I'm doing this work because I so much need a right account of how a person works, what a person is. I might not need a theory if I wasn't already indoctrinated with a theory that is false and has nothing to say about many things I'm indecisive about or interested in. 12th It's 2:30 Thursday morning. By tonight I must have a long paper written. I have not been able to sleep. There is a headache dawning, the kind I've been working with for weeks and have been learning to keep off with vitamin C. I am not rested and am afraid I won't be strong enough to get into and then sustain the shift into writing overmind. I am worried that my process with the cards has disturbed what might be a fragile ability of the brain - and don't know why I'm hesitating to call it that - to structure itself in the way it has at other times, so that after the struggle with the first page, a struggle that can take half the total writing time, the paper goes on to write itself, with a confidence and deftness that makes phrases, remembers where quotations are, sees what to drop, sees how to organize transitions, and comes through into a second shift up out of the body of the work into a higher order gel that's beyond me. Writing that paragraph I've been aware that I know how to begin the paper. I think I know what it is I want to learn to talk about. I want the writing process this time to tell me about itself and about what it is that makes it possible. Socrates said he had a daimon who spoke in his ear and told him what he should do and what he should avoid. The process of beginning to write a paper is like trying to evoke such a daimon, so that after a struggle with the first page, a struggle that can take half the total writing time, the paper begins to know what it is doing - phrases begin to deliver themselves, quotations remember themselves, transitions shift deftly into their necessary places, irrelevancies fall away, pages accumulate, and sometimes, by the end, there is a sense of having come through into a second shift up out of the body of the material into a synthesis that was not foreseen, and could not have been foreseen because it is the viewpoint of a capability that was not present when the writing began. Talk about the presence of an expanded capability is not much more informative than talk about a companion spirit; what these modes of talk have in common is an acknowledgment of an autonomy about the orderedness experienced in our own doings. If we are willing to use a mentalist idiom, we might want to say we experience 'the mind' as self organizing. 13th Hello. A Friday night. If the tales this man tells me are true, then I have run into an adventurer's life, a doer - this quality of some men and not many women, blazing idiosyncrasy - tracklessness. Invented a way of encrypting, he says, that was like video compression, you subtract the difference between disk contents then and now, and just send the difference. It worked too well. The company he used it for was Mafia, the American government didn't like ... etc. Read his way through the Sydney library nine books at a time. Caused the death of a horse, a French-Arab, a flea-bit grey. What an exercise he is of my general knowledge. But/and he is not an insidious man - I mean he hasn't spent his time like Ken, learning to hurt women. Though he has hurt them, but it hasn't been his study. 14 What else, now I've woken at three and made cocoa. I forgot I'd have to process him - he is exciting though not alluring - that boy's straight-ahead simple confidence men have, some men have, when they are first attracted. It's disarming though it is disingenuous. Tim explained it: it's the revival in them of the magic of the place where their mother's legs forked. What else do I know. He likes it best he says when he doesn't feel his body at all. Transparent, I said. He hesitated. He shies at my metaphors in a way that interests me. What about it. Maybe he doesn't see them. It interests me because he's smart and supple, mobile, and madly unorthodox, and then a small unconventionality of my language throws him. I don't know what it means, maybe that he hasn't had much to do with literature. He is science fiction, a man who found his mind in the rat-runs of code. A culture he entered simply, out of school, which carried him in its rush - what am I seeing - a process like fusion, a large possibility that opened suddenly, like a gold rush, a culture being elaborated moment to moment. I'm seeing molecules passing heat, a spread of the creation of terms and substances. This difference from innovation in art or philosophy, that it is grounded in properties of materials, as if the burden of innovation, I mean the psychological burden, is carried by the material and that leaves the men free to rush forward with it at the speed they do. Something about it is anomalous. The men are not carrying the burden of guarantor the way I do in art, they are carried in a stampede through a gate, and maybe I am also trying to say it is a particular release of something men's brains are, a particular moment in the history of men's brains, where a certain kind of immaterial ability suddenly has exactly the instrument, the prosthesis, the task, that lets it loose. I have more to say about him, something about my own relation to this phenomenon. We were two hours on the phone. I've barely touched computers but I'm at home with him; I say alright you run and I'll follow, and then I do follow. I'm right there with him not as if I know his context, which may be most of what he is, but as if I know the structure of his intuition, something about it, enough to have taken from Omni magazine and my thesis work just the notions I need to know him. He is very different from Ken, who's nearly his age (and he is Phil's age) but living in another century. Ken is the furry man, the man of the clan, Icelandic seaman whose tale is briefly told (though I have told it at length, but that is my tale). Slippery Jim calls himself the stainless steel rat. I was startled when he said something about women and included me in the category. I am so much not that with him. I'm an invisible companion, neutral, a point moving in state space next to another point moving in state space. Not one of his comrades, not at all, they are people part salesman part shaman. I am a comrade I suppose in another way, not a comrade of the work but of the life - that's what it is. I'm there to see his story. He is not there to see mine. I'm yawning. I'll go back to sleep. I can hear that it's raining. Buzzing with imprints, some her, mostly him. The her is Louie indulging jealousy and anxiety, an hour of abusive tedium. Then he calls "to see if you got back alright." I'm still in the tub. I'll talk some more, sure I will. He's telling me why he's letting his body run down. Why can't you do the work you like and still go see a chiropractor, I say. I'm well, I'm happy, he says. If you feel your body, its dissatisfactions would be your dissatisfactions, I say. That's it, he says. The man whose face at the door was so wrecked bloated rumpled - no I'm not awake enough to tell this. - I went back to sleep and dreamed I was telling my father some straight truths about what he's done to miss a relation with his children. I'm not yelling, I'm not angry, but I am going to say it all. I've come to sit next to him. He suddenly leans his face on my shoulder. He's crying. He and my mother fall to the floor in a sort of embrace. Judy is there but she is not really included. I am in the hospital in Edmonton again, walking through the corridors at night. I know to look for the little swimming pool in the basement. I see children being worked on in it. They're doing physiotherapy at night? I find myself at the door. I'll walk out, why not. I stand on the sidewalk and see the city, the beautiful dome of a public building, maybe a church. 16 Monday evening. I'm saying to myself that I'm afraid of myself now. That makes me want to cry. I am crying: my eyes are stinging. I noticed a sensation at the heart and that was what I was afraid of. This is what I have learned to say about it: I am afraid of my own structure, that I will not be able to look after myself. What was the sensation, something like compassion. Her - where it is not safe for her to be, where it is unwise for her to be. It is like a philosophical problem. There is no solution in the terms the problem is taken in. It says it isn't falling if there is confidence. Here's the work, it says: love's fragility. If it isn't a falling, what is it? A non-withdrawing. I don't want the obsession. I want to get enough days downstream from a contact so that I'll be free again. The phenomenon of imprinting. Does it mean I wasn't there the first time, or does it mean there's consequence, or does it mean there's some particular chemical. Does it mean I have listened too much and not talked enough. I want to know why so much fantasy is roused. I said once that what it is, is taking someone into my imagination. That means: you begin to work to know them, you work at knowing them. But it is worse than that. It's the other thing, that huge fantasy matrix, that starts to grind with them entered in the slot for the independent variable. The fantasies are forms it computes. But it is a mad machine. Young, it says, a young machine. I'm panicking. What if I'm going to do it again, it looks like I am going to do it again, this time with an even worse pick, an even more humiliating less relevant pick. 17 It is heartache. Yesterday I was floating, I was dreaming, I was pleased. There came a moment when I said: if you go on like this, he is going to be able to hurt you. As soon as he is able, he will want to. And he is not worth it, he isn't worth it. I look in my folders and find fantasy love, pictures and stories. Oh - I could go there. That's my temptation. The phone rings. Louie. I am in so much pain I want her to fix me but I can see she can't. She is not big enough to contain me. She wants to hold me: that means, she wants to exploit my pain to get her hands on me. She is useless. If she were not useless she would know that her uselessness is the pass key into the pain I felt about to crash open just that one moment last night. She doesn't understand, she isn't oriented, she doesn't understand, after so many years of having it shown and told. She has vested interests. She does not want to know what I am. Now I have shut it down. My solar is hurting with the stress of containing it again. Here is something to notice: I was suddenly imagining being able to give up my intellectual work to a man: there, you're already doing it, you're doing it better than I can, you do it and I'll be simple and love you and grow roses. This is my dilemma: I need a work of personal love, I need a task of personal love. I think this must be the next thought (which I had walking to the store): I should accept that I am like that, I should let myself wander into happy obsession with no matter who. 18 And then notice who I am that wanders, it said. Notice what I am, after so many years of being shown and told. That wandering will be followed by a crash that is a crash into reactivation. If you allow it, it will open you into what you are, original terrified helpless love that knows what you forbid yourself to know - knows who it loves. 19 Is it that in my work I need to be talking to someone? I was going to say talking to a man, because it has been that in academic work, but I'm remembering trying to talk to women - in those days back then. He is somewhere wanting to talk to me too. "I have a lot to tell you," he said. And then he said something about the [MA] thesis I liked - "I was trying to see what was your own and what you had compiled from other people. There was some of you, little bursts of eagerness." I liked that he wasn't unacquainted with the word 'you.' "It tells me what you know." 20 A dull pencil the waiter brought me. I go to the trouble, the pleasure, of writing sentences I may read again once, five times, and that will be all. A dry cold morning on Robson. There I am in my black and cream and blue plaid jacket. There's a plait with a long loose end that goes halfway down my back. She - the dark woman. I bought a vest yesterday, so beautiful, black sheer viscose, embroidered, cut short so the waist shows under it. I'm saying it to go on marking the moments of love woman's wardrobe, love woman who was there before I taught and not since. No - she is here today in a small way - waiting to come back. Or is this her before she crashes, saying call him today, though you're sick. 21st He thought he heard me say I wanted the afterlife. We're walking out of the garden in the dark. I know there's no point showing him anything. I've stopped talking. "Why did you change your mind? Or were you just saying a wish?" "I was just saying a wish. I'm sorry you misunderstood." I walk him to Hastings. "The bus is coming," he says. "No, you're going the other way." Oh poor Jim. I start to back away. "'Bye." He is grinning, holding up his thumb, heartbreakingly. What is it I want this story to tell me. Something like this: is everyone crazy? My heart aches. I'm not sure it isn't for him, though not only for him. Computer business is like a brushfire he said, burning on the edges, completely burnt out in the center. It eats up newcomers. "If you've been there, there's no way you can get back." He has brought an Eccles cake and some sort of Turkish pastry in a bag. I put them on a plate. They look old. By the end of the afternoon he has eaten them both. He is spending his money on megabytes of memory to enter his lifetime's accumulation of numbers. Eighteen months will do it. In the meantime he doesn't want to pay a doctor. He wants to take the government to court, sue them for the right of individuals to associate. Why? So they will have legal rights after they have left their bodies and gone into cyberspace. "I used to be a cyberpunk. Now I'm the Cyberian ambassador." "Can I tell you all the jobs I've done?" He and his brother scrounging parts from broken organs. Repairing bicycles. Assistant manager of an Odeon. Fixing motorcycles. Working in sales for a company selling adding machines when they first came out. It was a machine so simple it couldn't make decisions, but he figured out a way to get it to crash by asking it to divide by zero. When it crashed, there would be the answer on display, wire numbers that lit up. I'm not following but I'm trying. Hewlett-Packard. They weren't looking after their customers. At night he'd try to fix their software for them. Then he went to Wang, selling, but moonlighting as a programmer. He was getting programs to do things no one else could get them to do. Big customers who liked him grubstaked him to develop software for them. His lawyer wanted to sell for him in Australia. He got rich. He lost control of the software. He'd had a way of programming four or five layers down, so the program could check itself. They were writing on the surface. "Then the software started to be not so good," I said. "The software started to be not so good." A wonderful afternoon. He is at the table. I'm in the green chair with the window open, plants on the sill. My Kleenex box. Air like early spring. Blue light. We've been talking about the brain. He says awareness is convergence. (The tower of Babel - I'm seeing - the tower jerry-built up from true contact in childhood, towers built so idiosyncratically that we cannot, by this age, understand anything like the same thing by the words we use - that's his programming layers down). I don't understand that. I'm trying to see how his picture is different from mine. He says it isn't, but I know it is: his picture is of convergences of numbers. That's a way of speaking. I suspect awareness is a biological function, I say. But I have a doubt. Biology is here, pistis, the level of faith. Plants on the sill. The body I am feeling and myself with. But maybe it is a child's world, a woman's world. Maybe the men have found their way truly into an uncolored world that is the foundation of this one, and, though I know it is not made of numbers, maybe that is just their manner of speaking, maybe there is a way a machine could set up a configuration of energies in the way his brain does, and be what he is. "Do you accept a collect call from Jim Briggs?" That's my joke. Cyberspace, we know, is reachable by phone. But I'm not making sense of what he's saying, and I'm starting to crash. I have been moving around, positing my body. My body has been positing me, I have been trying to say I'm here. But I'm starting to give up. I've squatted in the red chair looking at the red light on the telephone pole. My thesis is on the table, the CISR application. Something else I wanted to show him. He hasn't said anything about anything of mine - not my house, not my work, not my person. He wrote my thesis into his list of lifetime reading and gave it, and Dewdney, three out of five. I am wanting to go to sleep. I'm not listening but I'm hearing his voice. It's loud, it's automatic. How long is it going to take him to notice I am not listening? I am going to fight. I cut across what he's saying. Do you have any idea how much servicing you require in a conversation? Attacking, I feel better. Forgive me, he says. I sit down on the other side of the table. I laugh. I might, I say. Here is a part I can't quite remember and don't want to say. I've made it personal, I'm in his face, I'm nose to nose across the table. He is saying 'you' at last. But what he's saying is I'm numbers in his head. "I am not numbers in your head." But it turns out I am. What numbers are they? "You're nice, you have a pretty face, kind," he says. You're not numbers in my head, I say, but I'm faltering, what can I say he is? "You're a face that is changing all the time. You're a story I don't know very much about." I can't reach the true thing I know I should be able to say, you're a spirit. You're a spirit so isolated I'm aching for you. Why can't I reach that true thing to say. Because I haven't earned passage to it. I have cheated too much, on this afternoon too. I haven't kept oriented. "I picked you out at CISR. I noticed you right away." But this is wrong, I am doubting even as I'm feeling the satisfaction of the 'you' in it. What's wrong is that this is flirtation too, it's what I want but it's a delusion like his delusion that I will emigrate to the land of death with him and be his helper there. When he begins again I sit down on the floor. Away. He shifts into the armchair. I get under the table and look at him through the slot in its side that used to have a ma-jong drawer in it. If I shift my head position I see him without the bare rise of his forehead. There are his round eyes looking back. I like his face. You're a dead ringer for my first wife, he says. That's what he noticed. I'm even the same age. Irish Gypsy look. I don't give up yet. I'm trying to say I'm here, I'm here, come out of your repetitions, your virtual home. He is misunderstanding. I see he has to hear it from inside his system. He's saying I'm rejecting his afterlife because I'm afraid. "You have to go through the fear and then you'll be alright." I stand by the window, holding onto the frame as if this outside is what I'm declaring my loyalty to. I say No, I want this world. I'm willing to die. But it's true that I am too childishly hurt to be able to say what I should be able to say next: I like you, I'll be ordinary friends with you. I say, Let's go out. He's wanting to leave his hat on the table. I say, which bus do you want? He takes the book i'm lending him and his hat. When we are passing Koo's he says "I popped a button. I was going to ask you for needle and thread." It's a button over his pot belly. I go back for needle and thread. He comes with me. I've stopped speaking by then, it's over, but the maternal kindness of needle and thread seems worth giving him. I find a little hotel kit in my sewing basket and give it to him. We go back into the dark. He talks. I am going through a motion for some reason I haven't grasped: I walk him fast through the garden. I suppose because he said he'd see it and this will close the account. Stand in the herb garden and break off a bay leaf. Give it to him to smell. That is the whole tour. What finished it, I guess, is when he said he didn't want to dilute himself by listening to me too. I intended to say what I had to say: this keeps happening. Just because I can listen to someone, because I like to. I know I said that but I can hardly remember what else I said. I was stammering. I knew I was speaking without common ground. I was speaking for my own sake. There's more to say about this, that I'm not reaching. How I couldn't speak, knowing he wasn't hearing. What he said when I said that I can listen and I like to was that this is what I am, I should accept it. Something like that. It's as if I blurred what he said, I didn't want to hear that he had actually said that: you are of the kind made to support my kind. It might be true, because he is not of the kind to support my kind. He is of the kind to like to understand machinery and to have no structure in his brain for seeing another human. I'm as invisible as a fairy, to him. And if women won't look at him, if I don't, he'll go away alone grinning and showing his terrible thumbs-up. Not a large man, my height. The valiant way he answered his phone, "Briggs here." Business. Trying to get back into the game. There is no one who'll tell me what any of this means. I went away alone too, sore in a particular way that isn't afraid on its own behalf, though it has reason to be. He's so crazy I have to wonder whether I should feel it more when I say I am. Twenty years ago he was such a buoyant boy, finding his way. It is as if the life span might be much shorter than we think. Forty-six might be past the moment when the tower is too far off center. Alright, and beyond that I'm sorry I did not have the steadiness of nerve that could have got me further into his head. What he is. That's what I was there for. He was a window and I remembered-forgot my father didn't want to dilute himself to know his little girl. A harder person is saying so. I crashed. I didn't pay attention to when it was time to stop. "You're exhausted." He said that too. This erasing is where I started to quote Gibson on cyberspace. Cyberspace is culture. The Critique of Pure Reason is science fiction. Any reading is jacking in. We jack in more often than not. When Jim wanted to know whether he could live there he lay on a bed and listened to the radio for six hundred hours, he said. Write more than you read, Ray said, who spends his lifetime on the logical kinds of or. It is an extraordinary metaphor being unfolded as a culture. I am in its pay. The picture of computing is that it is a mind like their minds are imagined to be, immaterial space that can be entered from physical space. Cyberspace is the soul. Kyber-netes the steersman. A navigator, a tracker, someone who can find his way. It is a conversation I haven't finished. He has a sister in a nunnery. When he wondered whether he had the courage to give up his body he thought of her. If she could do it, he could. Personality matrix, a construct. He thinks he can be that and live. "Wind in my hair, I'll have that again." I was grieving that he was wanting to die, a man I liked. The crowds at Comdex looking as if they have died already. Grey plastic. I could make nothing of it. Jim doesn't look as if he's dead already. He's there. Curiously innocent, not mean, hopeful. Not bored, sometimes not boring. Boring on his topics, but fun, sometimes. 22nd Sunday in fog, very fine drift of specks of water I can see if I focus close into the air. I forgot this: one of the jobs he had was blood sweeper at an abattoir. He stood under old bulls with slit throats trying to sweep blood down a hatch before it congealed. His broom had a piece of foam a foot high. It had to be that high because it could happen that the blood would suddenly solidify in a pile. When I hear that I ache at his being over there having to be himself alone. I need to tell Louie, I still need it, as if it's more than I know how to bear. She says what she can't help saying, why don't you love me, why don't you love me like you used to. The country western song I have been hearing these days, When love finds you. 23rd I wake at night thinking about cyberspace, morosely. All the forms of exit. Drugs. The marvel of separated being, that it is possible and coherent. On my table are my three romantic stories I wrote and forgot. The way I write and forget here and in the exercise book. What I am learning says that is as it should be. My ability is one thing: it is structure. And my picture of myself is another. It is not the picture that writes. The picture can't keep up. "On these higher levels one cannot know but must act." I keep thinking it was horrible with Louie yesterday. I needed to talk about Jim. She tries, but she collapses. I only want to see her because I need her to listen to me talk about men. She wants me to want to see her. I don't have any urgency about seeing her - I've seen her. She does not want to see the me I am, because it is wanting to see something other than her. We are equally unpresent, though she more righteously. It comes to that. And why do I want to see something other than her. He said: I don't want to dilute myself. It means: I want to be myself, not you. I wanted to be him not her. She has wanted to be me, though not when I am wanting to be him. The being him is an enterprise, I'll say, of building simulation structure. I am still hankering to phone him and say I want to be friends on his terms. I want more of his story, I want more of him in me. I want a man's life in me. Why. Because I want to understand the man I already am - my father. I want to be able to see how he is not me although I am him. Start there, it says. First father, because it is he who caps the rest. Then mother, because she is the blanking and freezing. Then the child, who is fear and was fearless. Is this paragraph him? No. Order isn't him. False order is. It's night. I'm lonely. 25th Wednesday. Going to work soon. I had a good moment at the work table yesterday when I found myself saying that the concept of imagining has something to do with the intersection of concepts of sentience and concepts of cognitive structure, and that that's why it is said to mediate between perceiving and thinking. There have begun to be blackbirds. 26 The day after Wednesday [teaching day] is licensed for anything. No. Not this week. I didn't do enough last week. CISR after work last night. Jim in the lobby. Suit and tie. I sit on the magazine table next to him. He has Pribram with him. Says there's nothing new in it, he figured it out years ago. "Hi Ellie," says Justine. Sean and Frannie are carrying out a very large sign they want to hang from the picture rail. Jim is tending to take charge though Sean is resisting. Frannie uses Jim's name. I'm noticing that I'm noticing both of these namings: that we were sitting in public together and other people named us, knew us. I was watching to know whether he is taken seriously - the way I study his face to know whether he's brilliant or a fool. His face tells two stories. Head on, he's a boy: round eyes, big forehead, small nose, fine thin flop of hair. In profile he's an old man, remarkable, someone who has pursued something. It is a profile like a vertical line. His forehead goes straight up, his nose is flat, only his lower lip juts forward in a thin tenacious ridge. In that roomful of the miscellaneous, in his suit, he looks substantial. I was looking at the suit too - the phenomenon a suit is on a body like that. I said he was at odds with it. He misunderstood. He looks nice in it but he is too real for it. The shoulder pads imitate muscle for the sake of a threatening profile, while real muscle is bunching below in his back. 27th Working into the evening because I have nothing else to do. Now when I stop I find I'm frightened. I mind that there's no one. 28th Saw Ken three days in a row. Commercial street, then Hugh and Cari's opening of The washing of tears (I was standing against the wall in my beautiful clothes, with Luke next to me), then yesterday on Commercial again. He is looking for me but he is not going to make a move. He's hungry. I can easily hold out though my feeling is a crow that flies to him the moment and whenever I stop working. He has my word. He knows I have nothing more to say unless he can meet it. And he can't. He hasn't done the work. He can't want to do the work. He can't want anything until he wants his father. But when we are lying in our separate beds it happens that a train whistles at the crossing on Prior, and he and I are hearing it, he to the west and I to the east, one voice between us, the ache's voice. But I have been taught to say it this way: when I find myself longing for him I can know I have flown like a crow to the child I was. One voice I am as her, a lonely cry that's dissolved in the public air. Even it is away, there, not beside me. 29 The bathroom is this black little room behind a curtain. There isn't even a proper door. I have to squeeze between a couch and the wall. Where do people shit. Anywhere on the floor. I can't see where other people have left their piles. It is unpleasant. Afterward I go back. I want to get rid of my shit. I turn on the light. Now I can see all the little heaps, their different colors. I don't know which is mine. I'll pick them all up. Some are stuck to the floor. I am scraping them up with my fingernails. I should have tools or gloves. 31st Drops on the window, rain falling in silver light coming sidelong through almost transparent cloud in the west. There. It lies on the page strongly enough to show a shadow. Melts away. Do I imagine a pulse in the rain. I get my tea. The rain is finer, so fine the puddles on Koo's asphalt roof are not jumping. Drops winking on plum twigs. Birds coasting into the tree set it quivering. Small birds the colors of the bark. The tree to them is many positions in a net. They perch. They jump. They shake their wing. Starlings on the wire are stabbing at their breasts. The shortest way to the next wire in the next alley is a dip in the shape of the dip in the lines themselves, a dip like a dive with wings held close. It isn't raining. The silver light is on the wall where the straight edges of the shape of the window melt and recover, melt, the strong silver oblong faded onto a grey wall skinned over with dull orange from the ceiling bulb. Gulls fly singly in lines crossing each other. They are not standing around. The steady way they fly makes them seem to have an errand. It is midafternoon on the last day of January. It is as if I am expecting to hear from you. Why is that. Where am I on this long closing-off of my feeling for you, that has its own shape I want to be patient and impatient in. A silver light at the heart. Explanation doesn't touch it. I want it to win. I want it to amount to something, know what it's doing. It is so quiet in this afternoon with its noises, the oven's hiss, the colored twist of a siren. I mean there is so much air, such a depth of the open. One small person walking alongside the park with a loosely closed umbrella. Now the light is more black than silver. What are the branches absorbing or intercepting. Their relation to the sky is so eager and active. They are tugging at it. There are small areas of unexpected color in the sky, pure strong blue, pure creamy turquoise, and one harder to see, a radiant lavender grey. Ragged shelves at different heights are moved east so evenly it seems the sky is turning as a mass. Now the air is blacker still, as if we're in a valley. A car on the gravel. The timelessness of living in this house. Something else. Something unreal built into me in it. I am the sum of the time in a way that can't be addition. What is unreal is the picture of a past that's like a place. There's no past. But there is an amazing stability of some materials that can be marked. And relations of materials so they can be marked reciprocally. I and the journal where I wrote about lying in bed with Rob. If the record were not in me too the writing could not be a record. As it is I am joy again. I hope I haven't scarred you, said Jim. A structure isn't a scar. A scar is an inability to structure. Are you that, in me? Not at all. I was walking south on Commercial being you, feeling your face. It's night. I'm going to blow out the candle. The window is propped open with a book. I'm going to lie in the dark with night sounds. I wanted to say something more about what this is like, something I didn't know - that it is like living in two worlds at once, I mean two versions of this world: one where I am a sharp heart and this pace I don't know how to describe, and am something like certain of you, excited, speaking to you, meeting you with the simplicity I have around this center at the heart, being met by the same simplicity in you; and the other where I see a sharp unhappy man I know to describe as passive-aggressive, who can't help wanting to spite me, and has said he doesn't want me. I am saying: should I get used to finding myself in both, should I stop struggling either way? It is as if I am in such a hunger for touch that it is spoiling my relation to some fine people, like Fiona yesterday on the street. Even liking to speak to her I feel the edge of irrelevance: there is something (else) I have to find. February 2nd With Leah at the Calabria being wicked - very wicked - and observing the result. She pled for the sacredness of "the faculty of imagination." Her hand shook, she was so distressed that I said imagining is pathological. I pushed it. I could see she had some particular fantasy she was guarding, and there it was, her cyberspace, that she said was a real place, another vibrational level, "the Plateau of Reunion," so beautiful a name, where she meets people she has known on this place, and their tragic lives are not tragic. She knows them there, she knows things about them. It is her son Sky that place is for, and he goes there too - he is an addict. Oh I do not feel like protecting people's fairylands. What I think I see is that Sky would not be an addict if Leah were not guarding her mad wishes, and that is evil like my mother's love for literature and my father's guarded purple room. These people are absences out of the world, they are like shapes cut out of the fabric of the world. And I know it is fantasy to say it. She also told me a dream that was a beautiful picture, but I am not going to write it down though I said I would. Oh what am I angry about - is it love woman's delusion? Yes it said. 3 Then I dreamed the hospital. I am there as sometimes looking for the wing I was in when I was a child. So many sections have been added at different times. A middle section, one that was being built when I was here one of the previous times, that now is being demolished. People are standing looking out of sections of wall where windows have been removed. I am in a section on the north end, where the veterans' hospital used to be, looking for old brick, that is the material my section will be made of. I was over there in a wing in the south but maybe there will be places in this wing that I will recognize. I walk toward the end of the section. Is it a chapel? There is what sounds like Catholic singing. One very strong child's voice like a bright line in the dutiful sludge. I stick my head in the door. People are spread around a sort of common room. It is an informal service. The child I hear is a boy of ten or twelve sitting at the end of the room nearest me looking toward the corner of the room where some leader must be. I'm going outside to look across at the other wings. This lobby is amazing. The area between the two sets of doors is very stylish and polished, very period, thirties, forties, and there is something else I notice. There is so much reflection standing in the air, that the lobby is an ambiguous zone. It is ambiguous as time and ambiguous as place. Crossing through it I wonder whether lobbies are designed to be really interspaces, nowheres. When I walk across toward the older sections at the south end I see that the people in the open-window sections of the wing being demolished are cheering. - What is it I have been finding in work. I am frightened there is nothing. I'm frightened my psychological tinkering will have destroyed a very finely crafted ability to structure myself to write: my elegance in academic prose, which is more than elegance, lucidity too. I'm seeing a heaping together - very condensed and very ordered, an elegance and condensation of structure, physical structure, that then unfolds rapidly and very exactly of itself. I am afraid what I have been doing is not academic and can't be made to seem so. It seems to amount to very little: there are a couple of things I understand now. In fact I feel I understand a whole terrain of discourse about imagining. I feel I could situate anyone in the canon, see what they were intuiting, what they were running together that should be separated. (I am miles ahead of Eva Brann who wrote eight hundred pages on the world of the imagination - her title tells us what a good little girl she is - 'the world,' 'the imagination.' When I say to Leah "there is no faculty of the imagination" she looks as if I am saying there is no god in heaven. But stop gloating about Eva Brann who could read everything and see through nothing at all, and has a marriage to maintain.) What else. I have a broad theory of art that integrates philosophers' use of metaphor and thus says why they go wrong. A metaphor is a temporary computer, a computational landscape. It distributes connections in many directions, it is a switching structure. It uses sentient tissue, when it does, because that tissue already has workable, not-wrong, connections with action, language and feeling. When a feeling/sensing structure is evoked, there are action structures evoked with it, and they are felt as the actions of thought, of the thinker. The ghost - the one whose actions are failures to act. That: 'the mind' is a metaphor. The mentalist sense of mind, which is 'the world of the imagination,' where 'the self' looks at pictures alone in a room, so lonely, so unemployed. There is much more to notice about that computational landscape, a dream the waking are using to contain themselves. I see it as a little net within the global net, a local circuit which is 'inside;' which can feel itself inside. What I know I don't know: all the rest. But specifically, how structural recognition works. Using a metaphor, how is it only this much is simulated, not more. Or when more is simulated, only this much is 'taken', whatever that means. How 'a structure' is recognized when it is seen - there must be something about an interplay of sentience structures and non-sentience structures. I saw a filter. The non-sentience structure is filtering sentience structures. I was seeing I have to go further into Pribram, probably. My conception of structure is too solid. What else I am suspecting, as if out of the corner of my eye, is that the answers to any question could be in plain sight - I mean if I can watch the process. (Then I might know what meditation is for: as if I'd got to the starting point of technical meditation.) I mean that any sentience structure is apparent, and some of the ways it runs off into nonsentience will be felt - yes? - this is a picture - as trailings off to the sides. And then: the way when I ask a question here it is answered with a picture - don't call it a picture, but it is a diagram, something visual along with a feeling of its meaning or a potential for knowing its meaning. Apply the suspicion of the previous paragraph: what was it like to see/feel the trailings off to the sides. They were like neural threads, axons. I was as if in the neuron looking toward little vessels dwindling away. I can't recover more - transient structure. I think that's it - that's my paper. Now write twenty pages, or forty, that Phil will like and consider philosophy. How? I want to suggest a way that we could talk about imagining, a metaphor different from the metaphors that have been implicit in - and I would say have controlled - classical discussions. The metaphor I propose is both a brain metaphor and an animal-environment metaphor. It takes its main bearings from aspects of the work of Gibson, Langer, Pribram, Ryle, Wittgenstein, the connectionists. It hopes to be a thoroughly non-mentalist metaphor which is usable in constructing an account of the historical attractions of standard mentalist stories. 4 Feb Such a hard day. Say it again. Rowen's dentist took me $350 over my VISA limit and that will clear out my paycheque. The car lost a gallon and a half of water going up the hill for the meeting Kathleen insisted on. It looks as though there will be a cold war with Kathleen - if she demands I go up on Mondays it will be the end of friendly cooperation. She will get the letter of the law. I will apply leverage. What else - headaches and the taste of metal, sore tongue. No love no love no love in sight. Louie is pressing me to polish her writing, and is withholding anything worth having until I do. Everyone is irrelevant. The paper is still due and I don't know how I'll ever write it. I want to quit. In a way I want to die. Pain beyond reasons. So often. How am I going to get through this day. How long is it going to be like this. Is it necessary. Is it helping. Is it true. I have been in hell for over a year. You have been burning illusions, it says. They were my structure and so I've burned and am still burning. Will they ever be burned up? I do not see my way through. The concert last night, junk, and then Peter Manning's piece. We were on the stage in sofas, facing and surrounded by eighteen big speakers. I found I was in agony and sat up straight at the edge of the sofa. I really was in a black space of transparent planes. A buzzing. A so beautiful buzzing, like nothing I've heard, like something I could hear gladly on and on. I would not be able to say much about what I was, but it reminded me of the Dollar Brand concert, something happened to the space as if its grain were being polished. I was on my axe-axis, cleft solar to throat with pain, axis pain, right pain, glorious. I was saying - this is better than anything David MacAra would do, this is another level of art, this is opening up knowledge on another scale, where am I, aching with beauty and truth. Way beyond myself. What was it - tissues moving at depths, ethereal they said. No. Not at all ethereal. Transparent but so strong, like sheets of rock seen by a god with X-ray eyes. It was fairyland, yes, but the land of fairy warriors. And then that stretched thread of the sound of a human instrument, like brass, like a bagpipe, but an edge of a shred of the sound, drawn into a bright line, human concentration vanished to a point on the horizon. I was physically so present in that space that I was wanting to turn my face to feel its air, bolt upright at the edge of my seat, cracked from throat to navel, turning my face in an occult north I wanted never to leave. I didn't understand the movement. It was like a tribute to the quality of the place I could honor more because some human had built or found it. In great pain, was it? The other kind of pain that is a joy. Manning Peter 1994 The ghost of Eriboll PODX computer music system 6th Monday evening - it is 7:30 and I'm stopping work. A kind of eagerness, I have a couple of hours to be personal in. Lighting the candle. Racked this morning by taking a stand with Kathleen. It is calmer now. During the day, when I stopped working it was there I went: embroiled as in romantic trouble. Louie visited yesterday. I was very sore when she came - fast vibration thru a sharpness at the heart. Lay in bed with her hand on it. When she was cold she came under the cover too. I had my hand on her head as we talked, looking at her clean brown eye and beautiful translucent teeth. I was better but I could feel the lock at the solar holding it down. Saturday all day and yesterday morning I was in the very hard time again. I won't describe it. I surrender into it. I'm given enough trust. I hang on. I am learning to sustain it for longer than I have. The system talks me through. There is something waiting for me even now. I can feel it stopped at the solar. It is not necessarily pain, more like excitement. I'll turn off the light and be with it. 7th "There is a difference of softness between the wolverine and the wolf; the wolf is soft; the wolverine is not." Something like that. When I woke. - That was fun. Playing with Jim. A clear sky today. Had him sitting at my table eating soup, eating Rowen's cookies. His round eyes. What were you like when you were a little boy? I ask to get him away from conspiracy theories. He says he doesn't want to tell me but he does want to tell me. I say I've seen him. He hid from his mother, who beat him. There are scars that still occasionally open and bleed. Admired his father who was away working and chuckled. He and his brother Bill running the 800 meters (he has this sort of number) to the house after their cement-lined box disintegrated under them and they were dumped in amongst the ice break-up in the lake. As they ran their jeans and mukluks were freezing, cracked off (he says) at the knee, at the groin. Then they were hung by the furnace for a while - as he remembers it. Neighbouring vermin, his word, fourteen kids in a shack, the eldest molested him and his brother. There was a war. His brother shot one of their eyes out with an arrow. Hobo nests along the railway left from the thirties. He wonders whether his dad was a gangster during the six years before he married, when he disappeared supposedly into South America and emerged very gaunt. A man who died recently in his eighties. One time, this was either Napanee or Baie Como, his sister and brother left him alone skating on a lake. He didn't know whether to take his skates off and go home. He left them on and skated down the road. Eight miles and a snowstorm. What happened? The police picked him up about halfway. He'd probably have made it though. He was top of the class in math and bottom of it in English. Before he goes he wants to read me from a book on popular robotics, the section where it says robots could usefully have internal models of the minds of other robots. He knows he lacks that, he says. He knows women have that sort of thing. A woman shouldn't be as smart as a man because she is his back-up, he says. Also he has never asked another woman for her eggs - he has the I've-never-told-another-woman appeal as one of his few techniques. (I said I don't think I have any left. He wants an egg to fertilize so it can be frozen until 2080, then thawed. Jim would be his machine-parent and guide him; and then the biological child would be in a position to look after Jim's interests when he grew up. My journals, he says, could easily be entered in a computer and then there could be someone else in cyberspace, for variety. And he wants the child to know both his parents.) I am for some reason tickled - that is the word - by all this. I am kidding him and being nice to him. It is his child-old man face, his round eyes. His strange unseen clothes. He's like Rowen talking about his gizmos. 10 Look at the sun thru the furze of the plaid blanket. I smell bacon. The chips and cheeps of birds. Bacon and tea. Imagining taking Jim to Read Island. "He's not my boyfriend." Should I think about that. Hours on the phone. He called to read me the passage about how bush-robots with trillions of terminal sensors could excavate and record the structure and activity of the brain slice by slice, letting the recording make up missing structure as it went, so you wouldn't feel a thing. I said I want him to understand I'm not recruitable. I like him but I just want to be ordinary friends. Pause. "Why do you want to shorten it?" I laugh. The fact is: he's there, he's mobile, he is obstinately himself and quite sweetly personal. He is as other as a bush-robot, but we dance quite well. There is a kind of freedom around him - in the protection of his madness he is quite free. This quality of madmen I know, that I can get right up against them. There is a difference - Eric, Tony Gordon-Wilson, Michael Cleghorn - he's less disqualified than they, but why. Because he made money before he crashed? Frank was the first of this line: it's idiosyncrasy. A tone of voice, with him. What's the other kind of men. Someone like Colin Browne or Phil Hanson, sane family men. Would I want them if I could get them? I go blank when I ask myself that. - Work. Where am I. Frightened. Reading, trying to read, Perceptual acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. I keep shying. My table spread with papers. Is the anxiety from my other work pervasive? What other work, and is it work. Getting through the bottleneck of menopause? Fighting for balance. Fighting for imbalance. Balance for academic work without the balancers I've had. Extreme control and extreme abandon. And yet it isn't that - if I fell miles in love I'd be able to work. If the work would bring me love I'd be able to work. Some I is in despair, in panic, is throwing herself down wailing when she sees the table covered with papers. Oh take me to a small house in California, winter sun, large trees, a blue plate on a table, a man with his own concerns, who loves to touch me. My heart is shocked at having this instead of that. So shocked, so shocked. 14 I am at sea. I am lying in the water and hold a piece of notepaper just above the surface. It is a sail. There is a fog along the shore. I am not sure I am being carried closer until I am touching rocks. I walk up onto land I still haven't seen. Etc. 15 I'm tired. What to say before I sleep. Organic psychosis. I don't remember what that means. "It means it's alive." He laughs. Two weeks in the institution. An injection that put him in zombiland. They said he'd never work again and gave him a disability pension. "Say something nice to me before you go," I say. "I love the sound of your voice. I'm glad you rescinded and called me." He was quick with that and I was quick back. 16 Someone has turned into a bull with sharp horns. I am lying on the floor in a rug. The bull is trying to get me but they are distracting it. This is happening in a small space. The woman tells me I must throw things at the bull, very determinedly. It gives up and lies down. I go over to shake hands with it. It concedes its left front hoof in a good-natured way. Morning. The snow has shrunk on the roof, a skimpy fabric dripping and pulling apart. Wanted to phone him at suppertime yesterday, after my beautiful free day. Sun on the snow, school cancelled. I was in the kitchen reading Hume, feeling the gift not of one day but of several. When I couldn't work any more I wanted to play and feel and hear stories, and he is the one for that. (Meantime Louie is mad at me and I am annoyed at her for pulling the strings on her little mouth. I know I haven't done anything. Let her stew in that nasty chemical she needs to prefer.) He was asleep and slow to start. I can stop him in his tracks very visibly. What? he says when I say something he doesn't expect to hear. "You're my nemesis." He said that in a way I liked. I know I am. I am slowly getting the story of what happened to him between 1991 and now. He cracked, in a place where he was long prepared to crack. He cracked badly, publicly and finally. He is never going to uncrack. Cracking gave him the double condition he has now, free and mad. Delusional ideas, they are called - those topics he spends half of every day on - I'm trying not to underestimate but it may be more. The Gemstone files. Government. Machines taking over the world. Brain in a bottle. Living for a thousand years. The Mental Health Act. All of it fitted together into a plan daily elaborated. I don't know how many of the stories he tells in his innocent confiding tone are true. There are photos to support some, I suppose he has a daughter and had horses. I don't know about the birthmark, a red mark on his forehead, "the size of a dollar bill," with hair growing out of it, removed when he was 13. That gives me a fellow feeling, I said, in the young confiding easiness I find myself in with him. There's such evident liking between us. What should I know about it. He's a gift from anomaly. He needs a mother who tells him he has a wonderful forehead. "Trying to avoid being aborted" he said. "How did she do it?" "What?" "Knitting needle? How did you try to avoid it, were you squirming around?" Something about jacking in. There is something that happens when he reads hard books, he says, pages of formulas. His eyes cross. He goes to sleep and there is a dream he often has. He is dropping into more and more pressure. He's afraid he'll drop through a vortex and come out twisted. But he suddenly shoots up into understanding and lightness. Then he wakes up. He goes on reading. He's fine. "Do you remember the moment when you first realized you could have fun with your mind?" "I think I do. It was when I discovered prime numbers, when I had my first computer. I left it on Friday and came back on Monday to see how many it had got to." "So it wasn't until you started to work with computers, you didn't have fun with your mind at school?" "You know who taught me? Those people that have been in so much trouble. The Christian Brothers." I suppose I do feel it when he says he wants to be with me for five hundred years. "The more I talk to you the more I ..." What? I liked it but I've lost it. This morning I remembered Ken's story about his mum offering him his stepfather's pyjamas after he died. "I don't wear pyjamas, Mummy." I heard it again, in his tone, because I hadn't finished feeling it, what she was offering and how he evaded. It echoes in several ways, he hadn't finished feeling it either, and that is why he told it. "A pillar of strength." She held him by metaphor. He learned it from her. The way he held me on his lap the first evening in my house was a metaphor. "I know how two people can have the same dream" Jim said. He meant the faces in the plaster on the wall. Crinkled tinfoil was his way but he hasn't done it with anyone. He was so hurt that his daughter didn't phone on her birthday. "I had a dire plot to get even with her." "What was your dire plot?" "I thought of her as being happy and well." Valentine daughter. Sally. The way he says "my brother Bill," "my cousin Bill." I said Le Guin was wonderful but I didn't think he'd like her. He said that was an oxymoron. 18 I copied the three stories called Her letters this morning, wanting to send them to Ken. Is that why when Jim phoned I was having to try, and fragile. My feelings got hurt when I told him about polio and he changed the subject to thalidomide because he had a theory about the molecular structure of thalidomide cutting into DNA at both ends. And he was suspicious. He says plaintively that if he could find someone who would support his aim he would not have to hold onto it so single-mindedly himself and could enjoy some of what mortals enjoy. Oh if he could find a woman who supports his wish to survive into the life on the other side. He wants to lend me his old computer, so he can send me pictures when he talks on the phone. Should I say no to that link? The worst was the way he was talking about sex. He used to have wet dreams, he says, where he'd wake with a "huge erection." Don't tell me about it, I'm thinking. But all last week, every night, he's been dreaming about having sex with a woman and he wakes and he's not hard, he's satisfied in the dream without feeling it. This interests him as a new form of sublimation that shows he's separating from his body. I am depressed by that mix of messages and say I will visit him next week. I'll look at the computer. I'll think about what sort of transaction he would take it to be. And she. Lay down depressedly and went away into the kind of sex I easily find these days. Slow sweet and second time complete. On my pillows melted after, half an hour like an opiate, very soft as the lamp brightens and window darkens, the late afternoon exchange passing over me where I am a constant soft dark so well balanced in my skin. When your engine knocks because the pistons are loose, throw a banana in it. "Do you mash it first?" "No the engine will do it." "You peel it?" "Yes and then you take the peel and feed it to a staghorn, do you know what a staghorn is? It's a kind of lichen that grows on tree trunks halfway up. You open the peel and lay it overtop and the staghorn will absorb it." 19 Sorting at my table, when I come to my notes of Constance Garrett on clairvoyance it is like stepping into the air. Hume is locked into a tight little model that thinks itself phenomenological and is something wierder, a logical atomism of pictures, an implicit but bodiless self observing their relative vividness and the forcefulness of their connection. I try to see his model in its own terms. Perceptions are springing together, carried together by inertial motion, sometimes sluggishly, sometimes briskly. I'm seeing I have to try to see his picture. The sense I could make of it is something else. I shouldn't be superimposing the two efforts. 20 On a raft or barge like a marine gas station platform. Other platforms of the same kind, very industrial. Flat satin grey water. The raft is drifting. I am looking at the distance to shore and thinking I could swim. There's someone with me, I don't know who tho' there's a notion of a young boy. Distracted for a moment. I notice suddenly that I have drifted very far out. Now I couldn't possibly swim, it's miles. But then there is another shore and the raft is docking gently as a ferry. I walk off onto a road. It is a place where the women seem to be very tall. I'm looking at a dress. It's in two parts with a long wide skirt, light green, with some sort of light quilting. 23rd Where to start. I said I'd visit him after the teaching day. Such a long way, east on Curtis, south on Boundary, east on Loughheed Highway, south on Nanaimo, east on 41st to Oak, north two blocks, east at Van Dusen Gardens, south at the first street, and then drive up and down looking for the house I hope I'll remember. Meanwhile an alarm screaming in a Chinese megahouse in construction and a man on the news discussing male guards cutting the clothes off women prisoners etc. It was dusk when I started down off the mountain and is dark when I arrive. Jim has the door open before I get to it. I'm late. Why am I so cramped at the solar. It was an ordeal. He's growing his beard. He has furred over his face that I liked to look at, so now I don't even have that. There he is in a Greenpeace teeshirt with his belly jutted out. I'm too tired to care, not tired in the sense of feeling it, tired in the sense of almost total dull compliance. He's cooking. I'm not in a position to be disappointed since I asked him to feed me knowing he was likely to be unable to do it. He has forgotten I don't want to eat wheat. The meal is entirely that. Pancakes and spaghetti. Well, the pancakes are warming my hands. His spaghetti sauce is this: supermarket salsa, cream salad dressing, tabouli mix. Slop it onto the spaghetti and reheat in a teflon frying pan. There is the moment when he has dumped the spaghetti into the pan and uses the side of his hand as a spatula. "This is inventor's cooking," I say. "You made this up one day when that was all there was in the house, right? And you have been eating it ever since." He washes the two pans before we eat. I guess this is a system, and it is. Wash without soap, don't dry. There is a spot under the sink where they drain in storage. I understand this kind of system. I have it too. Put dishes in red bucket. Eventually put bucket in tub. Laundry soap. Turn on hot water and fill while doing something else. Leave soaking. Wash later while waiting for tea water to boil. Leave draining in the sink. Put them away next time you wait for tea water to boil. Or sometimes after a phone call when there's nervous agitation to use up. Then what. Not much. His tight little space full of things I am beginning to be able to see are there as friends of other times - they are all saying I've lived, I've been, I've done, I am. And me, what am I doing there - with my hair down - earning an old computer? He has spent the day, he says, preparing it. The shelf of software boxes - all this. Personal lawyer? Yes it's very useful. He shows me on the screen, all these bytes he's entered of his memory. You've put your personal memory on it? Yes so you can see how I do it and enter your journal. He hasn't given up, he's wanting to prepare me to be his backup. And I'm going to accept the loan of the computer not to have a computer but to learn a computer. And I'm going to go on learning him to learn a computer man. But oh the hair down says something else. Be careful. Don't be so lonely you forget what it would mean if you put your arms around this poor soul. There is a moment when I simply begin to tell him about my day teaching. I say the first personal thing I have said all evening. I say I know I'm not very smart because I'm tired. I say it is more than teaching, it is dealing with the persons I have in front of me. And so on. He begins to cut me off with a theory. I smack his knee. "No, I'm talking now, I'm telling you about my day." He catches my hands where they are up in the air gesturing. Holds them for a moment. That is a very strange moment. He keeps talking. I stop him. I say I'm going to talk but then I can't, and then I do, but without the confidence I had for that moment when I began. The moment when he had hold of my hands and held onto them I was like a Victorian girl confounded by a touch. I was stopped in my tracks, and what it was, was that I was suddenly in another mode and saying what is he like in touch? What he was, was alright, warm and definite. It was the way he held onto my hands longer than I would have expected. The susceptibility I have, to being touched. The way that moment was an island in the evening, just that pointed oval like Jupiter's red spot, an eye. There is the Mind Machine still to tell. Pure color in some really virtual space. I'm not sure these are colors I have names for, so pure and strong and near, a space right close to me. This time it hurt my eyes, I think: they're sore today. He put on the tape of The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter seventeen. The old kind of virtuality. We were laughing. Meantime his housemates the pilot and the cousin passing in the corridor. He has left the door open; the housemates more than anything, like Rob's family, are making me feel I'm wrong to be venturing into his life. What I must look like to anyone who looks the way they look to me. Now what? Have I written it away? Am I rebalanced, am I in Thursday now, starlings cheeping, sun standing above the hemlock? He had his accounts up for me to look at - everything - $3 busfare to visit me, $4.31 at the deli on the way, $2049 for a computer, $685 for a disk, $500 Mrs Margaret Briggs. Another list for the books he's read, people he has phoned, appointments. Dinner, Epp. That's his journal. There was his entire financial life, welfare payment $629. I was thinking of Ken's paranoia about financial information. I wanted to say to him you are nuts but you're not neurotic. What I am wanting to know is why I involve myself with weird guys I'm ashamed to be seen with, as if it's a kind of bravado. I can carry my spirit through spirit slums and be safe. Like hitchhiking through Turkey. The men, their deformity of spirit, can't contaminate me. Like walking through Istanbul harassed every moment, I will be in the world, I will take my female timidity and distinction through what for it are hells. Jim's accounts are hell and I endured them. Now, only now, I'm getting to what the solar was quaking with last night when I got home, the hells I traverse. - I am taking the day off. I was on the Drive, I worked in the garden, I'm drinking tea, it's 4:30. Morose. What would I love to do. Look at the light on the wall. It is a light from the west and lies so quietly there. The shadow bar of the window is brownish on one side, purplish above. The light is being sorted against its edges. This is a softness that is saying, alright, I'll die. The way that bird folded its wings and slowly fell - did I see that right? 24 He phones at night when I'm reading through my green books. He wants to tell me he had a fine day at a communications fair, holding the ear of BC Tel officials with a visionary plan for allotting spare capacity to the poor. How am I? Not great. Was it the evening with him that made me sad? Maybe. What can he do. And so on. I say I visit his life, that's how it is. I should take care to do it when I'm strong and not otherwise. He's not easily put off though he hasn't a clue. His willingness gives me something - does it? I lie on the bathroom carpet and let myself be supported by his innocence. But I go away cramped at the solar. And still am. - And now here I go into Friday Saturday Sunday Monday the paper. Do I have any idea what the question is - No. There seems to be no question. I have no question. I'm far from caring about anything but love. And even that: I can only see what's in front of my nose. A stupid state. Where will I find a smarter one. What is the real place. Last night in the writing book, what struck me, and always strikes me, to the core, is the paragraph from The journey to Ladakh. "You will discover a way to work ... You will find a voice that is not your voice only, but the voice of the real ... You don't need to stop writing, you need to build another awareness to write from." In the light of that: building an awareness is building a brain. Imagining - I don't like that word. I like Her letters but my earlier romance writing has died and presumably it will too, when this charge has moved elsewhere. So if fantasy's link to desire is what sustains energy about imagining, then I've discharged it - I'm flat - I'm done - I'm wanting to die - I'm thinking I have cancer - I'm closed in and hopeless. It says: I'm a small child locked in a cage month after month waiting for him to come, and that I must be the small helpless waiting at the same time as I go into the back room and write the paper. - I'll tell what happened this afternoon. Looking at papers I was panicking. I went to the book. Leg was hurting and scaring me. Funny, I can hardly remember. I shook myself, I think, freaking, "let me through," "let me through," "let me through" - hard to endure - rocking - sobbing - not exactly crying, very stretched. I was remembering this and that about being transparent to energy, not remembering it clearly but just enough to have faith that I can keep going. Let it through. When I'd done some of that and wasn't panicking I stopped and spoke to the book again. It sez, that's not the end, keep going, you can't write yet because it's love woman. I am, I realize: the I that says I am her. As her I am afraid of that death of myself into academic writing. I don't know why I am feeling it now, these days, but I am. I think maybe my leg is hurting just because I am feeling it. It's integration. I say must I go into it. It says yes. I lie down with it and feel into the pain. (Somewhere before that there was more - crying, sobbing.) When I lie down I go over the edge into sleep but I remember then that sleep was part of surgery and I should stay awake. I'm very relaxed. Pain moved up into the heart and then forehead, where it was a pressure. I was sunk into sleep but kept surfacing to press against the pressure of my head with a counterpressure of attention. In the end, my forehead, the pressure at the temples, let go, opened up, and there was just a spot, a few spots, at the back of the neck. Then I got up and worked, amazingly relaxed. I wonder if this is a transition I have to make every time before I write. It is amazingly intense. Or whether I must do it whenever the solar clamps. 25 A day on the other side - writing - and when I stopped, marveling that I was in visual pleasure too. The scribbles of dead vines on the heaped bed of earth below the window. My shadow on the far wall in the upper and lower squares of window light, head in the upper square which has a rippled pane, hands at the end of long thin arms almost cut away by the spread of light, wonderful to see moving, fingers like vanes angled to spill a solar stream. A cut of shoulder rib and flank I loved to see - a woman's shape. Will I ever know how this is done. I'm simply writing. Confidently, patiently. The Calabria, 2nd March I sat here on Tuesday the day I finished the paper and wrote Dave Carter a letter that began Hello beautiful Dave C and went on in happiness 'til it signed off Love from E. That afternoon the knock on the door was him. I said come in. We stood and looked at each other in the corridor. I said It's you and rubbed his white teeshirt over his heart, and then we visited for the afternoon. I wasn't shocked, I wasn't deep. I wasn't frightened, I wasn't trying, we talked like girlfriends equally eagerly all aft. His beautiful color kept changing under my eyes. We were frank old friends. (There's the woman walking by with the parrot on the first flange of her forefinger.) Am I happy on account of Jim? That too. I'm bragging around - I'm dating a certified lunatic, I'm saying as if proudly. Proudly. Saying it - see! - I'm laughing joyfully. That joyful laugh of the writing days, what is it? Freedom. (I had no patience with Louie's ill-will. Why didn't you call me? Almost the first thing she said. Annoyed I'd said or done something disloyal with irrelevant David Beech.) I told Jim a vicious sexist joke and he told a worse one back. Why am I overjoyed with a man who is far over the edge into delusion? Oh the freedom in his air. He hews to himself without asking permission, and I can too. I told him love woman and work woman are opposites. He said no that can't be and ran a matrix. Yes they are opposites he said. The light, the light! I've made it thru the winter. 4th So now: first, I'm thinking of calling Louie, for one bad reason, that yesterday when I was waiting for Jim to come to supper, David Beech phoned I could say unexpectedly if I hadn't probably set it up, asking would I like to go out sometime. I am so not attracted to him that I can say anything. Weren't you after my friend Louie? No, she seems to have been interested in me, he says, it was on account of your picture I came to the garden. You aren't mean enough for me, I hope I've said that directly enough and not too directly, I say back. This is illuminating Louie's anger. Now I believe neither of them but I am curious to see what Louie will say. What I hope is that Louie did want him and he said oh no you've misunderstood. Or maybe he is out of control with women, likes to half-seduce and draw back. In which case he has met his match with me - how is it that I knew enough to not get taken in - it wasn't me who knew (thank you). I definitely led him into showing his hand, some dicey moves I was watching at the time, thinking, this is unscrupulous, why am I doing it. Bucket-of-guts came up the stairs last night in a sombrero, drover's raincoat, fuzzy beard and one-inch ponytail. I knew better than to give him the Georgia Strait piece on the Trilateral Commission. He was away for the evening. My going catatonic was love woman wanting sex, some woman thinking that since she'd cooked dinner and shown her breasts in a tight jersey she was going to be lying down with a penis in her. I got spiteful the moment I saw him - no I was spiteful before he arrived - I hate the fuzzy beard - his face was the only physical part I liked - his horrible little shoes, his fat bum, his pointed small hands, a ring on the little finger. The way he crushed the lettuce with his hands, then wiped his fingers on his paunch. One thing I did like: when he cut the red pepper into the salad he cut it round and round in thready strips. He was using his Swiss Army knife to peel a carrot and sat there taking pleasure in using something other than the blade. When I go catatonic he is quite good. He brings in trouble-shooting techniques and tries different approaches. Look into my eyes and just think of what you have to say, he says. Oh, alright. He doesn't know I'm stronger than he is. He's twitching and grinning, going red. Enough of that. I 'spose it means next time I'll like him. Meantime, touring Gulf & Fraser through the gardens with Esther. Funding the club house. Looking at computer graphics books thinking about a course for the film department. Brittle, I guess. It has clouded over today. Saturday afternoon. 5th Yes, brittle. But not through and through. I said to Sylvia, How is your evil boyfriend? Horrible Kenneth, you mean? I didn't ask what he did. She had had a break-in too and looked tight-lipped. She didn't quite want to talk to me, the mix of good- and ill-will on both sides is hardest for whoever isn't winning at the moment. Yesterday I looked fine. I mentioned Marie Marsh and she changed color, got looser. Then we had a second, better conversation. Her story with him isn't over yet and mine isn't either. If he has nobody else it's not because nobody has wanted him, I say. He has taken applications, she says. Laughs. Has interviewed people. Her story with him has some reconciliations and reoffenses to go. Mine doesn't though I would take him if he came. The story isn't over because I am still puzzled - the man is horrible but love woman is wonderful and she adores him. I love to be her. I love her light at the heart, her silver light real and silent. Second event: I gave Dave Carter a copy of Her letters. Fearlessly. They will be useless to him but it is love woman showing herself. It is retroactive and safe, but he will hear her say, I want your lip so much so much. I've given him to know. It is snowing. A few dry large flat flakes down slowly from a white high sky. Tomorrow is my birthday. I am fifty. It takes my breath to say that. Excitement. E for excitement, beautiful E. Gillian Perholt looked at the djinn on her bed. The evening had come, whilst they sat there, telling each other stories. A kind of light played over his green-gold skin, and a kind of glitter, like the glitter from the Byzantine mosaics, where a stone here or there will be set at a slight angle to catch the light. His plumes rose and fell as though they were breathing, silver and crimson, chrysanthemum-bronze and lemon, sapphire-blue and emerald. There was an edge of sulphur to his scent, and sandalwood, she thought, and something bitter - myrrh, she wondered, having never smelt myrrh, but remembering the king in the Christmas carol. The outside of his thighs were greener and the insides softer and more golden. He had pulled down his tunic, not entirely adequately: she could see his sex coiled like a folded snake and stirring. "I wish," said Dr. Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me." "You honour me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do." ... "You give and you bind," said the djinn, "like all lovers. You give yourself, which is brave, and which I think you have never done before - and I find you eminently lovable. Come." And without moving a muscle Dr. Perholt found herself naked on the bed, in the arms of the djinn. Of their love-making she retained a memory at once precise, mapped on to every nerve-ending, and indescribable. There was, in any case, no one to whom she could have wished to describe the love-making of a djinn. All love-making is shape-shifting - the male expands like a tree, like a pillar, the female has intimations of infinity in the spaces which narrow inside her, but the djinn could prolong everything, both in space and in time, so that Gillian seemed to swim across his body forever like a dolphin in an endless green sea, so that she became arching tunnels under mountains, through which he pierced and rushed, or caverns in which he lay curled like dragons. He could become a concentrated point of delight at the pleasure-points of her arched and delighted body; he could travel her like some wonderful butterfly, brushing her here and there with a hot, dry, almost burning kiss, and then become again a folding landscape in which she rested and was lost, lost herself for him to find her again, holding her in the palm of his great hand, contracting himself with a sigh and holding her breast to breast, belly to belly, male to female. His sweat was like a smoke and he murmured like a cloud of bees in many languages - she felt her skin was on fire and was not consumed, and tried once to tell him about Marvell's lovers who had not "world enough and time" but could only murmur one couplet in the green cave of his ear. "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow." Which the djinn smilingly repeated, using the rhythm for a particularly delectable movement of his body. ... And indeed it contained an ape, a very large, glossy, gleaming ape, with, so my friend particularly told me, a most beautiful bottom, a mixture of very bright subtle blue, and a hot rose-color, suffused with poppy-colored veins. [Then story of the diminishing of the ape] There are things in the earth, things made with hands and being not made with hands that live a life different from ours, that live longer than we do, and cross our lives in stories, in dreams, at certain times when we are floating redundant. And Gillian Perholt was happy, for she had moved back into their world, or at least had access to it, as she had had as a child. 'Burn off' was a powerful term, she thought, rhetorically interesting, for water does not burn and yet the sun's heat reduces this water to nothing; I am in the midst of fierce forces, I am nearer the sun than any woman of my kind, any ancestress of mine, can ever have dreamed of being, I can look in his direction and stay steadily here, floating redundant. Byatt AS, The djinn in the nightingale's eye 6th This day long ago began well. This day long ago began. But something now is sad, is sore, Luke and Louie, the end of the day, Louie is holding out, Luke had not forgotten but I spoke to him as if he had, and that was wrong. The long long oppression of Louie telling me I don't love her enough or well enough or at all - I'm sad thinking it - thinking it was a way she held me off - and years of intimacy - and this half year losing threads there still were, clipping them, cutting off eager freedom to talk, both clipping innocence. 7 Coming home at night through a neighbourhood I know is near mine, I take an alley. I see the alley the length of the block. I run. It feels like running on the spot, I'm not sure I have moved. I look into the yard on the right. Water. Does it mean I won't be able to cut through to my own alley? I look into the water. Really it is a tank, deep but clear. I can see leaves on the bottom. I want to leap in and touch that bottom I can see. I do. I leap in feet first with my clothes on. I hope I will have leapt with enough force to touch bottom. I do touch it with my feet and shoot up again. I stand on the edge of the tank and think I'd like to do it again. Now I take my slippers off, leave them as wet lumps on the grass. And go down again. There is again the moment on the way down, wondering whether I will have enough momentum to make it all the way. Again I do. I was reminding myself to keep my eyes open on the way down, since the water is so clear. On the way up I see that the family from the tank's house has come out. I hold my breath under water, looking at them. Older people, a father with glasses. They are looking at the tank but I know they can't see me. There is the moment where the father looks directly at me and I at him, and only one of us can see the other. I wait as long as I can, until all but the father are looking away. I surface slowly, like a seal, just my head. I can't remember what then - I speak to him and to the rest. They've seen my slippers left on the grass. They take me through a door into a garden. I say it is like a Mediterranean garden. There are dry red-brown scaly pines and maybe flowering almonds, something that contrasts by being flowery and tender. The garden is large and has houses as walls, like the inner garden spaces among terraced houses in London. We walk across to one of these houses. They unlock the door in its brown brick wall. It is another of their houses. They are going to let me out through it. I am going to see Joyce this morning. Oh - the sun. Will it stay? David Birch made me laugh - that was outrageous, Dave B, you go after my best friend and then propose we grow old together. That's the second such proposal I've had in half a week. Jim said he'd come sit by the fire with me if he doesn't make it into cyberspace. Do I want to grow old with any old thing? Whatever for, unless it is cranky old you or else somebody really interesting. 9th I have an income probably for 4 years. [SSHRC grant] 11th A Saturday morning. Real light. I'm looking at the strip of sun on the edge of the table and feeling, I'm alive, I don't have much time. If I have twenty years of work, or thirty, what must I do, what is urgent, what do I want - I want to be with the life I've been so far, I'd like to publish my journals, think about them, make something of all the writing so far. Do I want that most? Yes, it's central. Would there be time for anything else? Making a living - loving a man - knowing music - knowing plants - working with the book.   part 2 the golden west volume 2: 1994-1995 december-august work & days: a lifetime journal project