the golden west volume 20 part 3 - 2000 june

work & days: a lifetime journal project

1st June A hard night, that hard rectangle in the abdomen, whatever it is. How am I. Coming to. It's 7:30. Sun. Squeaky birds. Heater fan. Relax. Alright, aboutness. Think of the whole organism directed at something in space. Perceiving something will be perceiving many things, it, its place, other things, the body directed toward it, the internal state of the body, other people directed toward it and speaking. Experienced sentient directedness will be complex and integrated. A person referring to an object is a person directed toward it. Linguistic reference is people being directed to refer to it by linguistic means. What language evokes will be the complex directedness I described. I woke at night saying use and mention are structurally not much different, because mention must evoke the same feel; naming evokes, so naming a word evokes too. 2nd What Janet said: You are the most powerful writer I know. You have the honesty (she meant clarity) and lyricism too. When you find your audience they are going to be hungry. You should go somewhere and just write. You're in a different place than the rest of us. Finding an audience. The world is big and scattered throughout it are the grains of turquoise that are my readers. How do they get found? What Janet said was true     Will you teach me how to find my readers     Is there one big plan that would work     no Many small plans     Will it be arduous finding them     In a certain number of years will they be found     How many     four By 2004     It means do what's necessary     Will I be translated     Is there anything you want to say     shared pleasure, of honest, power, of process This process?     That's what I'm supposed to write about     But not in a trashy way     But the philosophy too     Do you have anything to do with the enteric brain     Is the enteric brain what I've called the solar plexus     There can be integrated function     YES Which is what opening the heart has to do with     Do you want to say more about finding audience     improve, overview, by quest, for shared construction My overview?     no, theirs Improve their overview of what shared construction is, of what they can make     The work about representation?     YES Constructing persons as knowledge     More?     change, losses, by persisting, in coming through How they can     YES Repairing persons as knowledge     YES I notice a little disappointment     no Repairing persons is repairing world     YES More     lies, don't inspire, research, into process Thank you for bringing me through     How to find my order. I'm noticing a kind of fear of death. I'm afraid of heart attack, which I never have been. A fear of exertion, pressure at the heart. Do I need to deal with that to get through     Will you lead me     tyranny It's a fear that the powers will kill me     Childhood     My father     YES For knowing     For knowing more     YES Just brazen through     YES Don't be afraid of a heart attack     YES Think of it as winning life     Space to work     YES Do I need to feel it more     YES, act to feel it more Right now?     Invite it     Great fear of being killed for knowing, I am willing to feel you, I am willing to feel you     (energy in left side of upper body) Fear of showing that I know     Is that the block in the belly     graduate by processing by means of early love Early love wishes to give knowing as a gift     YES It is refused     YES It is punished     YES Hated     The way I wished to give knowing to Tom     And my mother     And many other people     I am not feeling the fear but I'm feeling a release     Leave it for now       Anything you want to talk about     the secret (list): organization, processing, decisiveness, writing This sort of simple writer's life     Of increasing prominence     YES Will you say more     about decisiveness in relation to conflict and isolation, action rather than evasion Something else     beginning, of deep change, in relation to partial loss of action For me     YES Louie's letter to Francois: "an open heart, a cynical mind, and simplicity." 4 Wondering how to set up talking about segregation. Nets within nets - the sentient subnet - functional subnets. How they get turned on. How they dynamically form maybe. Say it's not a module, for sure. 'Features' are always by means of contextual response. - Should I do a quick look at color now? What do I need segregation for. Segregated simulation in rep function. Segregated sim from perception plus language, language the great innovator for being able to set up precise subnets. It's about integration and segregation. When segregation, still integration. Internal control networks. Most of this goes in the rep chapter. 5 What I want from the wide net section. I've said the whole body is about. Nerve systems evolve to facilitate the aboutness of bodies, to coordinate what it's doing, so it's correctly contextual in relation to more of the world state and more of the body state. Part of that has to do with structural modification - muscles grow in response to nerves. Changes in body also set up changes in nerves. A change in body is a kind of memory. What happens on one occasion or many, registers in changed structure/function. It's cumulative memory. Brain included in that process. But more concentrated. Complex dependencies: when body is one way rather than another, when world is one way rather than another, responsible structure is one way rather than another. It correlates body and world. Body and world both are materials that retain some but not all structural changes. Retention of structural change is memory. Much of what we think of as memory is just the brain being contextual. It's up to date with present structure. But sometimes it is not up to date - in some operating states it lapses into structure formed when it was fresher, maybe. Is there structural modification that's anticipatory - obviously yes. It would be dynamic settling. The brain being a wide net must be always working overall and so when it has givens it would settle into configurations of likelihood. They would be the configurations that fill in across blanks and disregard errors, come to conclusions, meaning stabilities, in those areas. Set up a simulation and find out what happens. - That sense of simulation as a constrained experiment. What was my question. Is there structural change in the brain that is not responsive to structural conditions elsewhere? Dynamic shortcuts. Malfunctions. Simulations. Out of date structure. So the brain is a contextual organ, it is the way it is because of the way it was built, and because of where it is - because there are through lines crossing from every which way, so that behavior resulting is thoroughly considered - constellated. What I need to say is that in evolution the brain kept getting more contextual - the result is a wide net in the cortex, which segregates the sentient subnet maybe as a way of overriding contextualization. YES. Split the chapter about imagining it. Say why it's hard to imagine. Then say how I imagine it. - A person from Cineworks phoned to say come to the reception tomorrow, your film is on at 9:15. Is it in the water section? No the air section. It's bright and dark. I won't go. It's too buzzy, even the evening with Gillian put my solar into a spasm. Mary phoned on Sunday. I pick up the phone, Hello, and hear the frightened in-take of her breath. Hello Ellie. I feel a pang at her frailty. Did I do that. 6 Yesterday terrible moments getting upstairs from the parking floor under Harbour Centre. Narrow concrete corridors, boxes of stairwells, bare concrete steps, locked doors, very blank fluorescent lighting, and a sense of the mass of the building above and around. Doors clacking shut behind me. I'm slow, slow today. Can I get moving. It's raining. I have the heater on though it's June. Unsayable roses for Louie, all pink, in an antique clay pot. - Got going by green food and ginko biloba drops. Tom tells the story of sitting with Pilgrim at the new cheap Italian café when Joe Flores came by. They invited him to eat with them. He was dignified and charming in a green anorak and burgundy sweat pants and wool hat. I phoned back and said we met at the Golden West and let's make sure that when we rise in the world we stay in touch with the street. I was thinking of the early Garden people. Yarrow, Eric, Tony Gordon-Wilson, Michael. What I wanted to tell Tom is that when I think of him I feel a squirt of delight. Joy. 7 It's 4:30. I woke explaining the aboutness of animals to someone, maybe Janeen. It's her birthday. Something I forgot to tell was the moment of wonder when I was typing the note to Mary Tiles. Just as I had written the sentence with my web address I saw the url light up in pink, underlined. When I moved the cursor over it, it became a hand. I clicked and there was my work site page, the real hand. - Lying down for a half hour in the aft. The wonderful deliberate process of sinking into the ether. I always have to begin with tight and sore places. Shoulders. The anxious arch of the back of the neck. I glom into the tight places and feel them with all my sentient might. Then there's a second where I realize I've settled. I'm in a denser but less personal zone. It's not a place but a texture. In that density there are clearings where I see or remember or feel something. A woman today: I saw her head and thought it was like an intimation of contact. She was a middle aged woman with a French look, dyed light-auburn hair. I also was thinking that Edelman's idea of the sentient subnet explains the way I am living - what it means to say the ego is a front or interface. And what it means to discover a larger self that can communicate with the interface as well as through it. What integration means - something like global mapping being joined with dynamic core. The way this finding so much later is the reward of taking on the painful struggle when I was 32, of accepting that there is nonconscious control. And so much search to find what it might mean. Now this larger self who is my loving teacher. That sinking is a kind of joining, diffusion     It is done by concentrating in body sensation     Does that woman exist     no She's like a little dream     Does it need to be the sore and tight places     Because they get sore in the process of focalizing     Was the wider self always loving     no It became so in being cleared     The dark woman     YES Do you want to tell me anything about the dark part     some of it had to be recovered I am sorry Janeen did not live to discover any of this     YES There is no short cut to this     8 A beautiful person came and installed my printer. He had the Chinese youngness that made him look fifteen though he's in fourth year at SFU. A slight birdy boy with coarse short hair and a fine scar on his cheek. Laiwan's star hands. A person without masculinity, who can't be imagined ever having it, who is living in himself bright as a bird in a bush. He came into the back room and said, This is great. An artist. (Oh shouldn't I live with such people.) He said, The theme of your house is tables. This is the way to live, dedicated and close to myself. Roses in the house. Good food of many colors easily made. The gym. Established friends. Memory forming. Large change ahead but great quiet now. Ease with money. Thinking of Tom like the flare when a match lights. Tea. The difference the beautiful lamp makes any time I turn it on. Porch washed, overwintered nasturtiums blooming on it. Months more. Finished the transition section of Aboutness finally, into Wide nets today. I'm a week behind, but the evolution and development stuff is slow to write, I am so new at it. 10 Where am I - Building the cortex 2. Somatic time, the hardest part of Ch 3. So slow. I've lost three pounds since starting at the gym. It doesn't show. 11 Bin back a month. It's slow. I don't think the writing is good except in patches. It doesn't spring from an outline in the right way. I'm not used to not knowing what I'm doing the way it is in chs 2 and 3. I'll rewrite them when I've got to the end. But Ch 4 Perception is coming up. I'll know more when I get there. Anything you want to talk about     feeling, is in conflict, with subtle, secret knowledge The way I want to feel     no, the way you do feel This has to do with why 2 and 3 aren't clear     YES Will you tell me what the subtle secret knowledge is     men, have graduated, and have shattered the structure of, withdrawal My subtle and secret knowledge is that men are right?     no Men's social ability     no, intellectual Men's opinion on mind     no Are you saying something good about men     Some way they are better than me     You're saying there's something defensive in my work     NO But I do feel defensive     Is that the feeling that's in conflict     no Will you tell me which feeling is in conflict     act, to come through, by processing, Tom My desire to is in conflict with subtle secret knowledge?     Is my desire wrong     no It's in conflict with what I know about them     They are not withdrawn in the way I am     I am missing the point so far, is this important     no Is my subtle secret knowledge right     no Will you lead me     opposite Look at the opposite of what I've been thinking     My good faith with Tom is in conflict with my bad faith about intellectual men     Should I believe they want to learn     YES Phil didn't     But some do     I need to feel I can persuade     Is that the point     YES I'm not fighting with a man in this writing, should I?     12th It's June, cold, raining. The heater is on. Monday morning, 6:30. Louie was here last night lying on the yellow rug talking to the book about her workshop with Olga Broumas this week. Her hands - her small fingers - strong, small and pink. Where am I = still slogging through Wide nets. I get amazingly little done in a day. Move stuff around. Write little bits. - But working longer hours and don't want to stop for breaks. More floors, more minutes. - Was Millikan's paper better than I thought     Do I commit that error     YES It's subtle isn't it     She's right about the way they say the means has the characteristics of what's seen or thought     Is she right about time?     We have to perform a sequence by means of a sequence     Events structure us in the order they happen     To the extent that thinking is a sequence, I enact it by means of a sequence     And yet - and yet I can compare times by means of one structure and not two     YES It is a structure that has comparing in it as a metaphor     YES There are not two things and yet there is some of the structure of dealing with two things     Anything else you want to talk about    success How to?     no It is succeeding     I'm over the hump     YES The writing is getting better     YES Keep to short breaks     Write longhand when I have a stretch     14 Nothing in me this morning. Here's the day. It's grey but it doesn't matter, I won't see it anyway. Tea is my friend. Big hot cup and then another. People from anywhere in my life pop into the field, as if there's a scan operating in a leisurely way. It casts up the result of its mulling. Mulling is what happens in the back room. Should I be writing the last chapter as I go. What the envisioning has been good for. The real last chapter is journal. Write a parallel book. The childhood of the philosopher. It's a journal. It has future in it. It's a novel. It's a woman coming through. What will philosophy be like when women do it with all their might. Is this it? Is a lot of it written already? This book is its reference volume. 15 I'm tired     no This is something else?     betrayal, of child, by honest, passage through difficulties Child feels betrayed     By the routine     Do you want to comment     you are processing loss by improving persistence 16 My discipline broke. I ate a pound and a half of cherries and lay reading In our time, Brownmiller's history of the women's movement, until midnight. Didn't go to the gym. Appalled, dismayed in the Value Village dressing room to see my belly bulge, my grizzled wisps. I did work until three, have all of Perception on my desk and Spatial perception on the long table. Perception's almost sorted, but Spatial perception's a tangle. The belly is horrible. I don't eat much, I exercise, and it's getting worse. I need to fast but can't do it while I'm writing. Fast when I'm done and put up with it now. It's a virgin morning, clean air over the mountains, birds' chips and cheeps. I did buy a moss green short-sleeved shirt in heavy silk, beautiful. Dress well in the meantime. Susan Brownmiller 2000 In our time: memoir of a revolution The Dial Press 17 Tom says if he starts to imagine he's got some disease he looks into himself and finds the core of white hot energy. He also says my hands (but not when I'm trying) do something to him, they fix him. Last night Gillian and her flat-coated retriever at Iona Park. It's like the place on the rez in Washington, open, mountains at a distance all around, Baker in murk. A reed bed in sky reflection - how to say this - pointing in both directions. It's the fine lines, it's the way it's unrooted, suspended like a cloud, it's the shape it makes, especially it's the way it's a three-dimensional comb with no spine. I work at night too. Last night I felt my heart working on and on. There is a lot on the table now - the crossed piles of the what-where notes which I had not finished sorting. [chapter outline] 18 Evening light in the house a sublime beauty. It's beauty of color, the color of the day blue, green and white, sublimely alive, and tonight steeped richer. I'm on the back porch in the chair for the first time this year. Rhoda's beautiful eyes. Stunning. Unnerving. Where have they been. Tom's tape in my room. I want to burst open somehow. There are clouds no longer white - what color would I say - livid beige. A painter says, what skill of touch. The sun is going down in a dissolve, in air dissolved. That woman. She sits on the back balcony smoking, complaining that he said. Her voice has that carrying sound of female relationship plaint. The blue is fading overhead. Such wisps and scraps and tatters, we have no need to see them but we do. I've moved to the west window. Looking into a cloud that's nothing, that's no color, that's rapture as painting. Every color means something as space. It's as precise as color can possibly be. The flamingo pink means it's lower and lined up with the sun that's behind the horizon. The much darker brushes of the same color mean underside of the mass. The luminous blue greys mean inner surfaces facing away from the sun. They're shadow but lit from above. The even dull greys mean shadowed but out in the open and too thin to have volume. There's one of Tom's achy pang-of-life songs. Followed with Sarah, Will we burn / In heaven / Like we do down here. Those touches of pink - there's a reason we say touches. 19 Will you talk to me about what happens with people     When I like people, after a while they can't stand me     With a few exceptions     YES It's that I'm somehow too unlike them     I'm too much myself     no Will you explain     deception, exclusion, withdrawal, disillusionment Heavy cards     Do you mean mine     no, theirs I evoke that     I represent that     It's my lameness     NO They feel too seen     I'm afraid to know this but I also want to know it     It's how it's always going to be with me     Is it correct of them     no I seem dark to them     Do I harm them     no Are they afraid of me     no Repelled     They see me as outcast     So it IS my lameness     NO The social effect of it     NO But it has to do with how I look     Is it because I'm smart     no Beautiful     no Heavy     YES Because of what my uncon is     YES Does it have more to do with power than lack     Will you tell me what should be my attitude to it     completion (9p) That already is my attitude     YES Composed with my hawk     Take me or leave me     YES I should not try to correct my vibes     I should not try to be more charming     no Is there more you want to say about this     no What have I learned these few days I didn't know before. About SPL - little region Mountcastle described - think of it as a broad band - think of it as many through-lines with possibilities of contextualization/contacts with others. It took me this while to get used to spatial function really as wide net. The way there's shading or gradient, they say, between ins and outs. What does this have to do with IPL. IPL lateralized because it's simulation - token space uses, toy uses - of object handling for counters - of locomotion for perspective - just major edges - which is a different function from outline drawings which are temporal pole. Deixis is gaze/focus attention switching. Computer music is landscape distances. Cultural uses of different scales of spatial function, different subnets of SPL-frontal-occipital. The heart of the book is getting here. So now I know I'm looking for four classes of parietal function, I need details, and details of simulation. [spatial function notes] 20 Don't say 'perception of space' although it feels like that. Account for why it feels like that (because we don't see air). Perception in space and spatial function. Theory of evolution is what fixes Kant. We see and think in spatial terms because we live and die by spatial relations. By bringing food to our mouth. Mountcastle's tractable monkeys, cells in their SPL going into action when and only when they have their eye on something eatable that is within reach. No - not quite that. The cells start to work but quickly stop when the object is not eatable. If an object is covered but still there they'll keep firing. - I was at Harbour Center showing Judith how to make a web page when I saw I had a note from Mary Tiles. Judith is going to Hawaii in three weeks because I told her about The philosophy of set theory and she followed it up. We were in the green armchairs at Blenz and she said she remembered the moment when she realized they were wrong about everything. That was after I told her the outline of the thesis and she said they got it wrong at each of the sections. 23rd The piles are off the desk, start at the beginning. A filtered morning. Seven. The house is clean, the bed is clean. If there is dust in the room it's as if my cells start to crumble. Remember this, vacuum if you get a sore throat. I was feeble yesterday in the gym, after almost a week away. Reading Faludi in the evenings. She spent years in the confidence of men, gang boys in LA, Stallone in Rambo, Promise Keepers, a My Lai veteran. She's saying men are unfathered, they're lost without communities. She feels sorry for them. That's not quite right. Men are unfathered because they were unfathered, to a regress. Mennonite men had community roles and were arrogant. A father who can figure it out would make a difference, but what makes a father who can figure it out? In philosophy what is it that's wrong with them? They are not brave. They stick to what they can do better than women, which is that technical turn so useless at orienting in a real question. They lack honesty and courage and honour: they lack it. If they had it they would be willing to figure it out. They are not willing to look the facts in the face, for instance the fact that their father competes with them, wants them to lose. It is not that the men lack community. If they had integrity they would be able to make community. The women need to hold their feet in the fire, not feel sorry for them: any woman who can. Women need to be fathers to them. In the meantime. Susan Faludi 2000 Stiffed: the betrayal of the American man Harper Alright, where to start this morning. Spatial function. What do I know about it. Geez. What hearsay is there to propagate. What I know about it is the doing of it all the time. They put pins in monkey cells, they put young men into PET scanners, they find cells firing bursts in complex circumstances they've tried to make simple. I've spent almost two years reading the science and I'm not bewildered the way I was. I know a little. I think I've got to principles no one explained. I pieced them together. I know there's not 'a representation' 'of space.' There's vision and action and the feeling of the body. Mainly those. The doing is not calculated on the basis of the seeing. The doing is contexted with the seeing among other things. There are primary areas and gradients between them. In the gradients there seem to be all degrees of mix. In the posterior parietal, Mountcastle's cells - something like contexted intentions being formed - intending to reach for what I want, which I'm looking at. Intending and wanting are not separate from the reaching, they are a manner of reaching. When I reach, the network that's active, the width of the doing - that's a beautiful vision. How confident should I be, speaking in a little knowledge. There's enough to see how it's going to go - yes. Theory of mind as it will go for the next five hundred years. I've seen the lay of it; I have no doubt. What to do with the fact that no one will believe I've seen it. Tell small parts of it at a time. But this project is to tell all of it at once. Understand that it won't be seen, but do it and keep adding to it. Ask people to contribute to it. Especially that. But keep ownership of it. For the examples of rep uses, do I have enough of the brain science? For counters, reach and grasp, the sentient foveas of touch and vision together just there. Intention and rehearsal. For electronic music, the way it's done with sound. For perspective drawings - there's the way I keep forgetting how little of a visual situation is given with a line drawing. How to say it. True focus is at the page, there is no binocularity at focus, and whatever there is elsewhere is counter-simulational. It matters, though, how much of what would be countersimulational isn't there. Remember to notice that. What is there of scene perception. Mass geometry of edges, just that. Perspective drawings is for explaining segregation. I won't be able to say how it's done. Just say look how little it takes to set up something basic level. Computer music is to say something about the invariants, because setting it up is done so mathematically. It is a way of setting up the notion of evocation of simulation without setting off notions of pictures. So it comes before perspective. Deixis in language is first about how language organizes attention in a mutual place. It shades beautifully into organizing simulation, and then to token space. Math notation from counters is token space as reach and grasp function at focus. Focus is hypersentient. It's already rehearsal tissue. The key for this section was understanding all of it is networks. - It said I could take the day off cos I was so feeble, but I'm itching to be working. 25 Seven on a bright Sunday. I sleep, these nights, but I'm getting fat. There's heft on my backside I hardly believe. What to do. And two months left. This morning go into the SPL chapter. I'm here, me, just me in the quiet, me and Tom, Tom's answering machine message, This is Tom, leave a message after the tone. "I want you to call me back and be the first person to leave me a message." "You know what I'm going to say, I love you a bunch." I'm milling blankly at the gate. Want something else before I go down the chute. I was in bed on the deck of a ship. A wave came over the rail. Another kind of work. That kind. The kind I could feel when I was writing the introduction but not the science. What is it about writing the science. Why is it slog. It's not mine. There is something in it that's mine, find that first. I began with a notion and worked my way through to a different understanding. The way it went was the way it went in other questions too. I began with a manner of speaking that made me expect to find a particular thing. I thought there was somewhere in the brain where we 'perceive space,' and that that place would be the place that also imagines space and so on. I expected that partly because of the way we talk about other things: we 'perceive sound' with auditory cortex, and we 'perceive smells' with olfactory cortex, so we'd perceive space with some patch of cortex that is probably, however, association cortex, since we 'perceive space' by means of all the senses - the same space. The more technical way of talking about it has to do with different spatial frames, egocentric, allocentric, and the notion that there must be a sort of master frame, the world-frame, which is calculated at some particular point. (The way I understand is so compact. Writing it out is the slog.) The notion of space frames comes up in different ways. Some of them have to do with the old idea of the retinal image, how to get 'a representation' of the stable world from the representation which is the retinal image sent to many stations, transforming the coordinate frame of the eye to the coordinate frame of the viewpoint - the way we see the world around us - and the coordinate frame of for instance the arm, which has to move to get to what the eye is looking at, from many possible starting points. It comes up also in linguistics, where it is found that some of our ways of using pronouns assume an observer-centered space, others an object-centered space (the front of the church means different ends of the church depending on whether you're inside or not) - when it's an object it faces us with its front the way a person does, when it's a surround, the front is still what faces it) and others a sort of oriented world frame (which probably comes from aspects of the horizon, north is where the mountains are, east is where the sun rises). These are the three possible ways of conceiving space. It is found that they can be present together in a sentence, people have no trouble maintaining different frames at the same time. They are only imagined to be incompatible if we imagine 'a representation of space' in the space-representation place. Imagine instead a space, the brain, where nets of activity coordinate the doing of many things at the same time. I'm seeing always from a point of view: the optics of vision are such that focus is where the observer is. What my arm does when it reaches for the box on the table is in task frame - there's the box where I'm looking at it, and the arm's movement has to come from the mutual spatial circumstances of eye, body, arm and box. Eye in that angle to box, focus says that distance, arm at that angle to eye, therefore that angle to box. Is that it? because the arm doesn't have an eye of its own, it has to work off the eye's angle. But it can do that because babies spend months building the connections that will succeed in doing that. If eye toward box, arm thus. Object-centered spaces are inherently social. We think that way about things that have eyes, and then other things too. Things face us the way people do. Action emanates from them. They leap forward toward us, the way we leap forward toward them. The reciprocity of Rizzolatti's mirror cells. Absolute spaces are horizon spaces. They aren't viewpoint spaces, they are known spaces. Perceived? Gibson asks. Kept track of, known, perceived in a way that is not the way we imagine perceiving, as momentary. 'A sense of direction.' Is 'space' represented in any of these ways? No. There is spatial function. We are able to function spatially in different ways, by means that are not discrete in the different ways of functioning. Different, partly same. Our 'sense of space' is all of these. There is spatial function of different kinds, the means of function are mixed means. The world is laid out spatially, we are able to move around in it. That's the basic spatial circumstance of a mobile being. 26 The perfection of the morning. Monday before seven, so quiet. Long slant of sun along the blue wall. Birds. A city texture in the air, a thickness of quiet. I'm somewhere on page 4 of Ch 7 which I'm writing before Ch 4. I'm lonely, a little. Want heart before I begin. It says no, just work. 27 Worried about getting fat. It's more from one day to the next. I'm working long days now, an hour at the gym every other day, eat mostly vegetables, One meal a day and salad in the evening, how could I eat less. Dear body, be slim and bright and strong. You don't need to store food, there's lots. 28 The academic heaviness of this writing that makes me dread it when I come to it simple out of the night. It's the brain exposition and it has to be there. I'm in an anxiety - there's something under - in the hours when I couldn't sleep I wasn't liking to be myself. What if it will be again what it has been when I have gone for broke in work. I do something wonderful and it is not seen. Joyce didn't understand that. The wonders she has achieved have been thanked. I'm not withdrawn, it says - I'm going for it - but I'm still failing socially - that's why I minded about Nora and Eliz, they were my sample ordinary people - and I am the way I am when I've been away from Tom, I start to feel ugly - and there's still quite a bit to write - two months more. No one's going to see it     YES Will you lead me     get angry Is it because I'm a woman     no Is it because I'm lame     no Is it because I'm smart     Because of the way I present myself     no More?     crisis, excluded child, persistent, delay Work of my kind would be neglected no matter who did it     The difference is that I haven't fought    Because I haven't been angry     That's what I'll do this time     Will I be like horrible Arthur     Did he get what he wanted     I should think that's what matters     More     regret, withdrawal, observation, improvement I have improved in those ways     YES It's true     29 I'm writing this stuff day after day but I don't want to read it. Have no emotional life with it. A blank plateau outside the nine or ten hours a day I'm processing little sheets. Keep on, keep on. There are fewer little sheets on the table. Do I need to keep in mind why I'm talking about this stuff? The reasons are far away in another chapter. How do people write long factual books with a lot of spring in them? The dead sound of biographies, because people are working off notes, must be. Why am I writing it. Because there's a simple and clear way of understanding mind and I have worked it through. There's a way the best will want to go if they hear it. What does that motive have to do with where I am in this chapter. I'm talking about space and objects. What am I saying about it. Another cup of tea. I'm saying the what system organizes response to the form and then to the form constants of the object in different places. The separation of location, microlocation which is located form, and then the constants of form unlocated. Motion is in there too. I'm saying so because I want to say later that they can be used in dissociated ways. Location for instance. Location and location switching. And bare somethingness. Feeling the slog of it, so much, so much stuff - It's chaotic, am I close to sorting it     Talk about the parts of the network     I'm impatient but I have to be patient     Take off the rest of the day     no Was I wrong to go into this kind of detail     no Is the perception chapter going to be easy after this     Is there anything you want to say about work today     no Will you lead me     finish it and sort it later Are you sure     YES The writing is so bad     no Will it be clear in the end     Have a nap first     no - Fuses blown today. What do I know about that state - not ready? Trying to go too fast? I've got it wrong? There's a breaking through needed? It's more a distaste, I'm sick of brain studies - can't face reading this chapter - jibbing. Was good 'til today. Go back to the beginning of the chapter tomorrow? Go patiently and revise for a day? Or more if I have to - is that it? I'm feeling pressure but it's still June. Maybe it's the hot nights and not sleeping. Maybe it's the chunks of melatonin. Maybe it's Louie's stories and love woman wants to live. Maybe it's trying to eat less. Maybe it's not doing yoga. Maybe it's too much exercise. Maybe it's seven weeks and nearly four chapters. Being afraid I'll run out of time and not be done. Maybe the stars are setting up discomforts like fat and finding tea stains on my teeth and a running leak under the sink. Sprint bill for $120. Oh is there something we can do to help     YES get honest About the limits and confusions     YES Stop trying to write as if I know more than I do     YES You're right     Do that for the whole chapter     Do you promise I can get it done     YES Before the end of August     YES 30 Oh sweetie me what a good day I had. - Just noticing how I'm seeing white words on the page, how can there be what look like exact letters? Exact but nonspecific. Imprinted as a result of so many many words seen white on the screen. They are exact in the sense that they seem to have clear edges. They are bigger if I move the page. What was good today. I began at six, stopped at five thirty and took an hour at one. I started at the beginning of the chapter and found it good. Worked slowly forward until I got to the section that stopped me yesterday. Wrote it. Set up the next section. Having the last section of this chapter on the table means I had the long table free and I spread the perception chapter there. Later thought I wanted the IPL chapter on deck too. Spread it on the bed in the workroom. Got $60 royalty check from CFDC. Had a fast frisky talk with Tom. Going to the gym. Eyes are burnt though. part 4 the golden west volume 20: 2000 april-september work & days: a lifetime journal project