the golden west volume 21 part 3 - 2000 october-november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

21st October Paul Almond last night at the Cinemateque. Seeing Isabel with Louie. What must have amazed me the first time, the way he shot the house, the yard. Real storms. Real country people. When I was young the psychological plot was newer to me. The film has held, I think. The underside of rotten ice, the cellar, the attic. Sex and death. Ghosts of father and brother in the man she wants. The film has badly directed dialogue at times but it's a whole. (Sensationalistic, says the book.) Isabel 1968 dir Paul Almond, starring Genevieve Bujold Louie on my bed afterwards with her feet propped on the wall. I said I find absolutely no desire in me to be married these days. Been there, done that, she said. We laughed. But take a caution from what happened to Paul Almond. The later film he showed last night was weak and indulgent, his introductory remarks pathetically aggrandizing. He is corrupt. The audience full of old cronies. Is that accurate? I mean the freezing into safe removal so no one tells you when your work is bad. Do I need to be where I want to be married, to stay out of that? The book will tell me when my work is bad. It's Saturday morning. This day and two more before the logic begins again. Maybe make it three - don't go up, Tuesday. Write the math section pages, start thinking about the panel in two weeks. Revision and web. References. Contacts. Do you have things you want to say about the mind and land project   slow growth, of honesty, action, improvement My honesty   My improvement   Its improvement   The project's   My sense of it   Will you say what needs improving   writing, graduation, art, balance. The way art and writing can graduate to balance in the midst of change Am I right in my sense that minds need real contact   What I've been noticing sideways in this week of scurrying is instances everywhere of work or comment about landscape or nature. What do I have that's different. That isn't the question, it says. Can I do it better is the question - can I? If I'm honest and fearless, it says. I tried to do it in notes in origin the show, do I need to start there? No. Have I learned anything that would make sense of notes in origin? Yes something about childhood. I was helpless in that work. Was the real story abandonment? No. The real story is the place? Yes. But abandonment was queering it. Yes. Do I need to go through my work and find clues? Yes. Will you tell me what Rowen needs   strength in reserve and growth in relation to loss and illusion Will you tell me what his illusion is   ego, judgment, power, anguish In respect of what   anguish Other people's   his own His overestimating anguish   underestimating Ego misjudges the power of anguish   His own anguish in relation to her   no other things The separation of Michael and me   Does he need to talk about that   Do you want to talk to me about that   he is asking whether he should regret his own creation He was born because he was very strongly desired by something that was larger than me   Should I be candid   Is it true   YES Ask Mary to show him the photo albums   Will you tell me what wanted him born   writing Writing?!   Something between Jamila and me   My desire to write   Is there anything about his provenance that would be unbearable to him   no To me   no Should I talk to him about the advantages of division   He is in anguish about our separation   no, some part of him He wants to know why his mother didn't hold onto him   Two cards   quest and balance Cop to craziness   Can I make it up to him   no Will he be able to make it up to himself   Something missing that sets the quest   Is that a gift   no, it is better to be well-founded Are his school difficulties because of it   YES Is there anything I can do   no Should I find him a therapist   no With Nathalie: Is it true that living this intellectual passion one gives up being a woman   Is it a good thing to give up   no Is there a situation needed to balance it   for love woman to graduate from heartbreak and withdrawal Then the question is, in what way is she really running away from it   early love's anger and irresponsibility toward feeling, love woman What it means basically is that one starts to lie   22 What's the heart of it - that work should be built - ah, now I have to dig - I begin to say, that work should be built, in skill, in virtuosity, in daring, in bravest honesty, and still in love for the natural world, the world that has created itself and us. Preservation of what we haven't touched is important to mind, why? Because what's made is often made by the wrong kind of mind. Is the self-making of the world and human making a true dichotomy? Yes and deeply at issue in the present. And yet humans are made by nature. The world remade will be remade by men to be their own image - men who are the devil, in the sense that control is what they care about. This is where true loss of soul occurs and it's where the present shaman works. If the brain is made in contexts of male action, it will be made top down rather than bottom up, and that means incoherent, incommensurable. The quest is to recover soul in a culture. Is sending people to work on farms the only way? No. Is there a short answer to how? It says understand how to make men graduate as children. Understand how to make men grow up without cutting off   Is there a short answer about how make them able to come through   partial loss of success with balance Instruction specific to men   Le Guin was intervening to that end in The farthest shore   And in The dispossessed   And Left hand of darkness   The child's brain is a country brain   Is that the point   Is there something I can do to intervene   get angry At someone   the aggressors to land and mind 23rd I'm not angry, I don't know how to become angry, is that really what you want me to do   Will it help to know why   to not withdraw from exclusion fighting and defeat Is this about personal exclusion   no Will you tell me what is excluded   growth Am I drugged   Will you tell me by what   anger completed by processing instead of creation The journal drugs me   Stop with the journal   no Should I have been angry at those people saying no to me   no The defeat of nature   What happened on Saturna   no Do you mean in some other sense   competition, triumph, research, withdrawal You mean what's happening in science   What Fox Keller talks about   Competition with nature   I feel unusually undirected, is it temporary   Nature is god   It is better to be like young children with god   no It is better to be equal partners with god   Loving intimates   Which is the use of marriage   God sends its sons and daughters in the sense that they are born of nature   The marriage of humans and nature   If we're part of nature can we be married to nature   The Sufi sense of nature making us to be its companion   Aboutness is the means   So the anger you mean is like anger at a man who won't be intimate   no Is it like anger at a person   But is it at a person   no Anger on behalf of humans   no On behalf of nature   Mediator between high culture and environmentalists   How am I - scared, stressed - trying to get the student loan money through - have to write the last pages today - film sections to Scott Gallery - panel in 2 weeks. What's stressing me most. The large plan. Look there's my shadow on the wall, a good shape of a head, the cheek bone and the slope under it. Well held. It's eleven on a Monday - sun on the side of my head - the rest of the house is cold - trees half bare, flocks of leaves yellow on the ground - large drifts of crows. Rowen arrived just now at Clearbrook Road. How is it with Tom. He'll go on being faithful, he says. Thank you I say, but I am having to disregard him to be able to discover what to do next. Is that the simple truth? So I can't take comfort there. The notion of a land and mind foundation is so vague at the moment I don't find any direction in it. Hearsay. I will need conviction to do any such thing. Remember having had conviction but it's in a faint - is that it? Frightened at the ocean unknown. Just write, leave that for now. 24 I sort of finished yesterday. I stopped. Didn't know what to do with token scale. It's too speculative. Then spread the notes for structured persons. 25 Ray is willing to be senior supe, and Kathleen said yes to the committee. I'm caught up in the logic. Not stressed with Rowen. Tom is looking after himself. Money still in limbo but $8000 approved in principle. The notes for ch 12 bring it to what I can do next. There's lots. 25 Leah in the Portuguese store says, "Your friend is so beautiful! He has such a presence about him. When I saw him I thought, Oh my goodness, no wonder Ellie is so taken with him." (I said I wasn't so taken with him.) Last phone call he was like a spring of joy welling up in a clear pool. He's working with the cards and so interested he doesn't watch TV. He dreamed we were on a beach where we have been before. There was a notch cut in the cliff, and when we followed it we came to a house we were moving into again. There were Mexicans all over it, cleaning. I was sitting on the bed and he was across the room. I said, Oh my god! I had in my hand a yellow legal pad that had been hidden under the bed for years. It was Vic's final opinion of Tom. Tom came and looked and it was in fact Vic's handwriting, vehement, capital letters, underlined. Tom was so frightened he bolted up out of sleep. It's 6:30 on a Thursday, meaning that when I go to school in two hours I will have my long day. Say something about Ray and Kathleen. Ray is older, more square in shape both in his head and in his body. Being with him is a criss-crossed flummoxed sensation. He says things I don't get and I say things he doesn't get. And yet there's good will and liking. Being with Kathleen is like standing in a well of air that's alive independently of anything either of us say. It is as if she is wide open and responding in many places at the same time, visibly, taking hits and spreading ripples. She's not solid. She's paranoid, a queen bee and a backstabber, and interests me. I feel I can exist with her. I like to look at her. She's very tall and since she had her babies she's very broad in the hips. She has a long sharp nose and is plain-faced but it's as if one can feel a sheet of quivering rippling response that's invisibly superimposed over her whole head, or even, it seems, extended into the room. Here's my double couple, the artist pair - Colin being womanly response and Barry being uncaring assertion - and the philosophy pair - Ray being logic, autonomy, humor, and in his own kindly way blind assertion, and Kathleen being, what - unblind assertion - currency - success - love woman successful. Should I think of myself as including it all? I'm eager to have them help me. - So are the holes in the floor of the house of the work repaired? It says yes. Chapter 2? Yes. Start making the website now? Yes. Want to think about what's up with Rowen's D&D education, what is he learning? [Dungeons and dragons] - Do you know what Vic's note would have said   that he has come through to balancing in remorse and change for the better Something he did with the cards   YES Did I find it   no 27 Cheryl in a gallery where she's sitting in the front row waiting for an event. I sit next to her. In a while it's as if we're naked in a bed together, so intimate. Say something about Rowen in his lovely moment. After he talks to Zoelia on the phone he comes into my room and lies next to me on the bed. He wishes he didn't feel the way he does, heartache-y. He feels that way about any girl he meets, he says. When he's excited he jerks up and down the kitchen floor. His hands are long and rubbery, not like mine and Luke's, that have the bone solid and articulated. He's graceful in his cargo pants and eagle teeshirt and well balanced haircut and blue black and white runners. His manner is rapid, direct, cooperative, confident, and something else I'm trying to see, something in the eyes that is like Ed, a neutral eye above a sharp cheekbone, an eye for advantage, do I mean? He has wonderful autonomy and energy in social things, phones people and sets things up, doesn't have social fear. Has work passion, chases what he likes to do. Reads long after I go to sleep, sitting with his thin chest bare under the reading lamp. - A book on cog semiotics of film that mentions deixis and Lakoff. Post structuralism has been dropped in favor of something with a scent of cog sci - nothing as simple and radical as what I do, but here's another confirmation. Michal today all-over happy because he's having a breakthrough. He's having it, he says, because he took my suggestion to look more exactly at what an experiment he describes actually does. 28 "Willow of the streams, hazel of the rocks, alder of the marshes, birch of the waterfalls, ash of the shadows, yew of the plain, elm of the glens, rowan of the mountains, oak of the sun." - The effect of the names, the power of the trees, the two together. Reading a Celtic fantasy I took out of the library for Rowen. What I knew about otherworld: beauty of land - sometimes Tom and being with Tom - being beautiful when it happens - the power of plants - the images of the cards - child's feeling of the bush - child's feeling of pagan ceremony - recognition in stories, the land under the hill - a lot of research in my years out of the world - Yeats - kinds of light in my country - Neal Gunn - Le Guin in some of her books. I don't think of it as twilight but enameled brightness of primary color - there is my name - there is the name I gave Rowen - there are animal encounters. Do you want to comment on the Celtic otherworld   I have an affinity for it   That most of the people I know don't have   Cultural affinity contrary to upbringing   Can you explain it   Something to do with the right hemisphere   Connection   Otherworld the right hemisphere   More connection because I missed indoctrination   no Because pain gave me connection   Mount as gateway has to do with birth   Fairyland is how right hemisphere sees world   Franchise graphics are victory of L hem   Minimal perception   Addressed to minimal perception     Is the way he looked (Peter) shyness   no Physical distaste   Because of my oldness   The students dislike me physically   They see death at work   Will you recommend an attitude   excluded child, action, decision, in relation to loss Notice it's like the feeling of excluded child   no Let the excluded child take action and make decisions in relation to loss   Ask her now     Are you there little one   yes You notice people don't like you   yes They don't like how you look   yes Are you ugly   yes Are they right not to like you   yes You're very stoic   yes I have not been paying attention to the other side   yes I've been too much on the L side   yes Is there something you want to say   yes, I want to come through to improving my power by means of early love You want to compel people to like you   YES   Is it possible   no She wants to force people to like her   Larger one do you want to comment   direct feeling in conflict with constructive cooperation When I'm helpful to the students I feel I am not able to charm them   It's true   It's true my evaluations will be bad   no Is this deep   I know people won't like me unless I compel them   But I have many reasons for not wanting to compel them   So I give up being liked   But I rue giving it up   Am I doing the best with it I can   no Do you want to recommend something   writing, growth, search, child I'm scared of something here   your writing, is used for, search for growth of the child Has it succeeded   no Does that mean it is useless   no I'm afraid of despair here     Little one do you despair that I don't act to make them like you   yes Are there things you think I should do   YES Will you tell me one   change completely   My students would find me ugly even if I lost weight and dressed better   They aren't going to like me no matter what I do   no There is something I could do ?   no I could be?   balance in the midst of change Better balanced   no Do you mean something else   processed Further in the work   Am I stuck   Will you lead me   you're shattering the structure Should I stop   no Next step   question Is there something I should stop   something practical, stop being outside Is there something I should be inside   magic, creation Making the garden, was I inside   no Then I don't know what you mean   Will you tell me what you mean   be inside the child The child who wants to compel people   Louie's child compels her   Like that   no Feel that I want them to like me   Feel the despair   Could I teach if I were feeling that   no I'm stuck   Can I stop   no   You want me to compel them to like you   yes I don't, so you don't like me   yes When I do compel somebody you do like me   yes Which was why you drove me into romance   yes So you'd be with me   yes But now I'm seducing no one   yes And you don't like me   yes And I feel you not liking me   yes ¦ Is that what I feel with the students, my youngness     At the Golden West you were with me because it was easy to compel them   yes   I really want people to like me and when they don't I withdraw   YES My childishness withdraws   It withdraws   YES Is there a solution   no Just notice it   YES Would it be possible for my liveliness to be with me even when I'm not liked   YES Will you say how   something about honesty Being honest about wanting to be liked   Can I leave it for now   29 I worked today, chapter 12. I don't have to drag myself to this chapter. I'm close to my motive. It's only half-writing, sketching-in. I can work all day. Finding myself in my notes: here's what I think. The delay in getting money, delays with the thesis. These days I wake thinking about teaching logic because I had to get into it to be able to do it. What's here tonight. Romantic restlessness, like a hunger. There was a new moon in the deep clear darkening sky with its solid islands of cloud. Do you mean my theoretical writing is used for search for growth for the child   YES That means it's valueless as theory   no Because it has found true principles   What the child needs is to be liked   no For me to understand her   She just needs me to understand her   YES Do I understand Rowen   no Could I   Would it be the same   For instance that she wants to be liked   Will you tell me what I need to understand about Rowen   his delays Writing   no Immaturity   no, delayed aspects Something emotional   A disconnection   That is making him prefer fantasy   A kind of lying   no A disconnection because something isn't seen   What change   for the better Will you point that   deception He's deceived about what improvement is   YES 30 Money stress is dragging on, the bank and the federal loans office disagreeing and sending me back and forth. Food is dwindling. There's supper for Rowen, milk for tea in the morning, but no money to park tomorrow, no bus fare to get down the hill. I'll have to beg from Louie again. Rent the day after tomorrow. Meantime Mercury retrograde did spit out Rowen's game software, Rowen came home from the library and found it on the top step of the stairs. Sat with the sun shining sideways into his pointed tea-colored eyes, popping bubble wrap, happy, happy, hugging his package. I've spent two days piecing what I think about art, intuition, sci vis, Langer, Gendlin, on and on. I need to do it but I'm wondering about the deadness of the style. It's what the right hemisphere has to say but said in the left hemisphere's bland philosophy style. Can that be fixed? I feel I need to get it down, I feel I can't say it in the doc's context, I wonder if saying it this way is corrupt. It says no. It says it can be fixed. It wants me to talk more about integrating early love. That that's what is the real cutting edge in a technological culture. I keep feeling there's so much I have made and stored and shaped in all these years of work. Will I be able to give it. Will anyone want it, will anyone be able to use it. What I know is so foreign in philosophy. I keep feeling I can say it and feeling it can't be heard. It's 5:30, as black and chill as ten o'clock at night. We set back the clocks yesterday. In the unheated parts of the house the black windows are dewed over. Is Tom alright   no Is there anything you'd like to say to him   you are balancing in the child's losses and death The season of his mum's death   He really feels the death season   Is he doing a good job of balancing   31st I'm full of people this night, for some reason. When I woke at three I had been dreaming Barry Truax, Louie, Jean Chretien. I thought of the evening Ken Sallett was at my kitchen table and I set bacon and eggs in front of him and put my arms around him from behind, with golden light in the room. I thought of Ingrid Harris in the cubicle in the old philosophy department, her company in the place that doesn't welcome, her beautiful husband, the explanation I still owe her. November 1 Where I was last night and with whom - at Emily Carr with a lot of old artists - Marion Penner Bancroft a sailing matron; Jeannie Kamins a little hopping crone; Jan-Marie a Buddhist elder. I was there on a bench thinking of Jan-Marie's description of meditation, something she was learning to do with anger, turn it into bliss. I was thinking it in relation to the discomfort of seeing an art opening population, people's hysterical effort to present as - what is it - coherent, contemporary. One of the things I feel with people who look like that is that they wouldn't like me. Another is that I don't know what people who present themselves that way can have to do with art. It must be the idea of art they want to be with. The idea of art is the idea of a full self, a good state. [Opening for CH Scott Gallery Image and Light: History and Influence: Film and Photographic Works, Ann Pollock curator, Nov 2000, later a panel at Emily Carr College of Art with Colin Browne, David Rimmer, Peg Campbell, Anne-Marie Fleming.] The mind and land idea: I'm not feeling anything for it. Early love, come through. Contact in early love. Early love is brave, it says. Find my love for the world, and its bravery. Something is blocking. 4th Is it too late today to work on the panel   no Michael Benedikt's papers on the web; If we drew a line representing the history of the universe from the big bang until today, say, 100 feet long, then the first inch would represent the time it took to establish all the subatomic particles, their interactions and the laws of physics still obtaining today. On this same 100 foot scale, the creation of the earth occurs in the last inch. ... zoom in on that inch of earth time until that final inch looks like 100 feet ... the first living organisms appear about halfway, and the first mammals in the last 5 feet in the last inch, precursors to [humans] .... zoom in on this last inch until it looks like 100' once more ... Moses walked on the earth only in the last inch-and-a-half ... in the last eighth of an inch printing and looms movies, computers. The essential elements of advantage accorded by shelter construction and site selection were already a part of all living and surviving ... one cannot help but be awed at how much of what we take to be specifically modern in human feelings and problems emerge from this unimaginably long history of perception, consciousness, hunger, mobility, sexual desire and fear ... in the world the meanings of these places, far from "culturally assigned" or free for the invention, are givens, for all intents and purposes, no less reliable than gravity itself. Getting to these origins of meaning, understanding them, and using them to give realness and depth to their buildings architecture as human geography negotiated relationship between dwelling, dwelling-construction, and the elements of geography: climate, topography, geology, and natural resources. Work - like my own - is based on a search for the realness of things and for their depth. From their realness comes this call to our serious attention, from their depth comes a kind of meaningfulness that will last, as architecture lasts. The felt imperative to be deep, to seek and show realness and depth in one's work, in one's life, in one's art, is indeed religiously and ethically based. Why? Because if one believes in the beauty of the whole world and that much of that beauty, complexity, and truth is hidden, or forgotten, or lies beyond normal ken, then "showing forth" depth is a triumph, a proof and reproof, an act of showing or making come about to break out into a place where one might glimpse a whole landscape stretching into the distance, the Work in the making. Stonehenge stands not as a representation or symbol of the cosmos, but as a structure that participated, registered, and came to life in the light of the cosmos. the evident participation of the building in a far more vast context Only when s/he brings consciousness of true and tender origins to bear upon the experience of [her] work now, can the artist achieve the necessary counterpart of stimulation to orientation and wonder to understanding ... shows forth, bears witness reveals Order and brings new levels and manifestations of Order into physical being. Benedikt's sense that the phone, religion, philosophy, are all cyberworlds, ie collaborative phantasias, simulation systems that have real consequences. The real is only rewarding if one has control, an economy of initiative, action, lived capability. Fantasy and thwarted initiative. The construction of fantasy instead of construction in the real. There is much in the real to do. Why don't we want to do it? Michael Benedikt "Stanley Saitowitz' Transvaal House", "On Adding to the Salk" , "The work of Rob Quigley" - The deeper unrealized consequences/inferences of cog sci and digital composition that is deep and principled - cognitive aesthetics cognitive ecology experimental film - Io magazine - Duncan, Snyder, Daphne, Brakhage Cosmic, scientific (eg physics of transmission media), embodiment (birth films) - rural connections - Buddhist connections. Where has that impulse kept itself going - digital composition that is deep and principled - sci vis tapes - synthesizing sound New epistemology - cognitive ecology Ways of talking about perceiving - keeping the value of contact - mutuality of world and person in structural response - small changes in wording - change of structural metaphor - Colin, David, Peg, Anne-Marie. There will be some sort of small, scattered audience. David and Colin know about and want to talk about history of film in Vancouver. They listed names of men. Peg wants to talk about institutional support, working for film co-ops. Anne-Marie wants to be fetching, is it fair to say? What if anything do I really want to talk about? Influences - Ursula Le Guin, LM Montgomery, Bridget Riley, Babette Mongolte, Dorothy Richardson, Marguerite Duras, yoga, women's movement, the camera, NFB film The Rink, Hotel Monterrey, Nathalie Granger, Alberta. Hotel Monterrey 1971 directed by Chantale Ackerman, shot by Babette Mongolte. Natalie Granger 1972 written and directed by Marguerite Duras, starring Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bosé and Gérard Depardieu An international community of work. They provide the context in which what you do can make sense. People who have been able to teach you. What do I look for in any kind of work: recognition, strenuous attention, physical world, natural motion, a kind of abstract recognition. What it is about - Gordon Smith - evokes landscape at very high order of complexity, evokes painting. Do you have things you want to say about this panel   Should I think about how to present myself   no Is there anything I should think about   no Is there a way I should prepare   How   think how to begin, brilliance and courage, tempered, by deep change, and generosity. Do I have it in me   no Could I have it   Think of it as speaking to the others on the panel   Talk about Gordon Smith's painting   Cognitive artifacts - cognitive ecology - make a community for intelligent love. What it takes to be able to stay alive as a mind in the world. Cultural action against preference for virtuality, keep renewing the cognitive resources of contact. Work that makes you aware of something about the world, something about the transmission medium, the art medium and its history, and your own presence as a mind. I am not in a sincere enough state   Is feeling fear a way to it   I have to be willing to be frightened in public   Trying to speak from who I am when I am who I am when I work   Intuition is culturally unsupported knowing   Should I ask what I'm afraid of   Afraid of being alone   YES Will you lead me   afraid of the men Afraid to show the men I'm more brilliant than they are   Can you release me from it here and now   Will you lead me   you want to shatter the structure I have hostile intent   YES Should I think of it as liberational intent   YES Can I liberate the men   Are you sure   YES As if I'm with Tom   I need to feel I can liberate my father   That's the key   Do you want to say more   about art Think of art as that   Am I larger than all of those men   Metta meditation   That person steeped in beauty is afraid   Is it always hostile intent that makes social fear   YES I have somehow attached beauty to hostility   I do want to destroy their power   no Calm them down so they can love me   But I'm in danger from them if they love me   no Do you want to say more   excluded child, betrayal, slow growth, occult knowledge That child is the source of knowledge   She picks it up   She's a terminal   Is it she who has hostile intent   YES Little one are you there   yes Are you still mad at men   yes Will you let go being mad at them and let me try to help them be nicer   YES I want to go out in the world and help them be nicer, and I need you to help me   YES Thank you so much   yes 6 I woke at 5 with a stressed middle and thought the panel must have been hard, enduring Colin and David each taking half an hour of the hour and a half while the women and the queer sat silent. When it was time for me to take it away, I did. I disagree with McLuhan, I said, the media are not nature. The eye altering alters all, Colin said. No, the eye altering alters eyes. There's more all that isn't altered, I said. Silence of 6:30. I've lit a candle. It's winter now. Light candles, have flowers in the house. From the west window I see two white columns of vapor rising from office towers into a common cloud shining and spreading in an open sky. Do I want to say anything about the panel, do I want to step into the next thing, which is getting myself to the defense and beyond, into an institution in California. I want to finish We made this. I want to be able to get a Canada Council senior artists' grant. I want to be a center radiating support for the real and right. I want to work with beauty bare. I want to walk around seeing and feeling the day and night. Benedikt on Kahn: "a particular spirit and seriousness about the making of a building and an optimism about how science, creativity, and good work in all its forms can fashion one, generous, world in which the numinous and the ordinary are identical." On adding to the Salk, 93 Is there anything you want to say about Rowen   work, to decide, to act, to process Do you mean come to terms   Face the hard things   Okay I'm ready   Rowen's mind is already ruined   no Is being ruined   There is nothing I can do   He is not interested in anything I can give him now   He uses everyone to fund his projects   He's interested in nothing but fantasy games   Will you lead me   something about liberation Mine   no, his Is there anything I can do about that   YES come through, decision, to wait, to love Stop conditional love   My love is conditional on his being like me   He's boring to me if he's not   Is there something I can do about that   What   excluded, child, responsibility, action, Rowen Something about my excluded child in relation to him   Focus on exclusion not education   Something unconscious in him   no, unaccepted Something they don't accept   no, you His banality   YES I don't know how to accept that   Will you tell me how   something about withdrawal Deal with my withdrawal   It's unbearable to the withdrawn state   I am withdrawn   Will you lead me   work woman Is there something I should do   Crash   no, allow love It's true I'm loveless   Will you lead me   shatter the structure I don't know how, can I do that now   Will you lead me   delay Should I stop now   no Shatter a structure of delay   I don't understand   I'm holding something off?   In relation to work   no Rowen   no Tom   Knowledge that it's over   YES Is it over   no Is it over because he wants it to be   no Because I do   Is this the delay you mean   no, it's a structure Will you tell me this plainly with a sentence   temper enslavement with integration of female nature I was enslaved   I'm not now   Go back to being enslaved   And keep tempering it   I thought I was done   Let myself be hooked   no, but risk it Am I shut down with Rowen because I'm shut down with Tom   no shut down with both of them because of work woman Because I'm teaching   Can I stop   no Lead?   judgment I'm stuck   Dull and dead   What if I thought I had a lover, is that what you mean   If I thought I had a lover I would be disappointed again and again   Is that how you want me to live   You tried to talk me out of it   So much energy   He prefers me this way   no Is there any other way to do this   no Alright now can I stop   no A different lover   no Open up sex and heart and all   All for nothing?!   YES Will you lead me   art Okay   act to defend it I have to stop   no This is not coming through   no I feel stuck   YES, anger At Tom   no at love This isn't working   no 7th American election day. I'm here in a welter of projects. Opening the visual notes. Work and days, the journal. - Could that be a way of showing the philosophy? The fullness of the world in this work. I could make an environment of the materials. Childhood of the philosopher. Tell the story of the real project Was that intelligence always there   So the story is about building an ability to make conscious contact with it   And now the story is about showing it forth   If it is an Orpheus story it is now about what happens when he brings her out, how he works with her now that she is the wisdom of Hades. She's not the girl he lost, she is a massive queen showing transparent to a full black sky. She doesn't need him. She thinks him ignorant. 8 Driving in Richmond with Rowen, flowing, flowing, lost, Rowen holding the map. Black and bright, wet, slick, the heater blowing, a light sweet companionship I went on feeling after I'd left Row at Azure Rd. 9 What's next. The technical chapters, 3, 5, 6, 10 and the simulation and rep effects chapters, 7 and 9. Ray, Barry and Colin have the first pile. Kathleen still deciding. 10 I need to know more about the kind of trouble I am in, and why I am in it. I am in danger of failing my doctorate if Kathleen is on my committee. If she is not on it I don't have anyone to critique the brain stuff. If Ray says he isn't competent in the area I don't have him. I'd have to take it ahead with a pro forma supervisor. Barry won't take responsibility for it whether he likes it or not. Colin. Colin has no weight in that community. He doesn't have a doc himself. I don't know enough about Kathleen's objections. Does it come down to rivalry? What I am doing was not aimed at her, because her position isn't on the map for me. She's found a niche that's working for her, for whatever reason; that's all. Should I be trying to persuade Ray to take it without her? Getting it on the web and making alliances as fast as possible? Certainly that. She's going to try and block me. She shouldn't be on the committee, she'll vote against it. But I do need someone to vet it. There's more I am not at all clear about. I am in a take-down zone without a protector and with not enough combat savvy. I've done what I had to do but I did not get permission. I'm seen as a flake in both my communities, because I don't pitch what I'm doing to the place where the others are. Now - what do I think of it myself - there are gassy places in the middle - the writing isn't up to my best - the vision is correct - it's comprehensive - it would inspire people - it has already inspired Michal. - Alright, the second mid-term is marked and returned, I have my tutorial for Wednesday. Here is another thing, the Oregon conference Taking nature seriously, Nancy Tuana at U of Oregon in Eugene in Feb. What she says is, ontological realism, epistemological something-like interaction: knowing is not about representations that correspond. Persons and environments interact. In any structured person, material universe and artifacts both are effective, and not in an additive way. I am deeper and clearer, but she provides names and summaries from phil of science and a ref to someone working on an epistemology for the ecological subject. Locally I am so completely out of the loop that I'm in danger of not getting my doc. Internationally I keep finding I've anticipated an aspect that's coming into sight, and I've connected it wider and founded it deeper. That means I am going to have trouble even with the people who agree with me in their aspects. How do I deal with the limitations of the gatekeepers. I have to see them plainly. And then what? Is Laiwan right? She said start where they are. I don't know where they are. If I learned to understand it, would I ruin my organization? It says, you are not processing the anger of the excluded child. That will help you see them. 11th What I'm thinking is, have the defense when Kathleen is out of town. Make sure the external actually is present. Support Ray by finding external authorities willing to read sections and okay them, and not local hacks, they have to have enough stature to be generous with innovation. Take responsibility for making these contacts. Get it onto the web as soon as possible, ship relevant sections to people mentioned, get testimonials, pass them to the committee. - Today in Publab I found a folder of pictures I made - when? - last spring, I think, and forgot. I could weed images now, because these new ones are so good. Myth night. Not in heaven's name. Chill. Diggety. Foam. Running. Bird gods. Is there one that's the title page for Being about? How do I work the design for the site? 12 Chapter 3 Wide nets. What can I do about the organization of this intractable chapter. What is it today, a sickly spirit. It's Sunday. I have only today and tomorrow but after a few hours with chapter 3 I couldn't work. I'd face the page and feel my mind - my something - turn aside, refuse, avert. It's dark, it's chill. If the house isn't cold it is stuffy with gas oven fumes. I'm lonely, faintly yearning though for no one in particular. Dull-witted, achy. The phone rang and it was a native woman slowly, heavily, reading the pitch for a survey: "no more than fifteen minutes of your time" and "an issue of importance to all British Columbians." There are carnations in the celadon pitcher, five dozen in a mass, red cores and pink edges, visibly vividly alive, fresh with life in a room where everything else is dead though pleasing. What am I feeling, am I feeling something, yes, alright, and it's enough to block me maybe: I'm frightened that I'm going to fail. Chapter 3 is not good. It is chaotic, dense, unreadable so far, lost. I feel friendless. Colin did not phone, Barry has said nothing, Ray will presumably think it overreaches wildly, and Kathleen said outright that she would not pass it. I'm terrified. What is the worst that could happen. I could drop out and have to find a job. I'd be shamed and have to stay away from contexts where everyone would have revised me backwards. There is no one who will stick out their neck for me though many who have been passed are much less than I am. Not only that but I have somehow driven myself into this corner. Should I quit so that I do not have to submit to being judged by people who can't see me? Should I take it through to its bitter conclusion and let them fail me? I'm scalded with fear at the heart. What do I say after that. I want there to be someone in the university I could pour out my heart to. I trust none of them. I'm in a position of depending on people I can't trust. It's harrowing. I go on valiantly but I'm not hard. Somewhere I am being harrowed. I took every step in good faith, I made every break-through steadily, I took every crash. I am less championed, much less, than when I was twenty-three at Queen's. Am I less able than I was? Or have I gone out of range? I don't know. Somehow I'm rejected and it's true rejection because I have shown my hand. It feels like January doesn't it. I'm alone. A lion-hearted frightened child inexplicably punished with total exile. There is no one. Please lead me   deception Say more   the child Is deceiving me   Should I talk to her   she should talk to you   Sweetie do you want to talk to me   YES I feel, like balancing, between improvement and defeat The hope that it may yet come right   YES Because that was how it was   no that was how it wasn't Do you mean you were numb   yes This is your way of being alive   yes Is it better to feel you   yes You are that spot of vivid aliveness   yes Do you want to say more   I, am processing, withdrawn, art You're there because I'm processing unconsciously for art   yes Engaging with chapter 3   YES More   the mother, hope, art, process Hoping for the mother inspires the art process   yes The pain is from renewed hope   YES Maybe someone will come for me   yes More?   you are acting responsibly to come through withdrawal Yes I am acting responsibly to come for you   YES I am willing to come for you as often as necessary   yes More   the mother, can complete, the caution, of creation You mean looking after   YES   Oh larger one   YES Are you with me   I'm scared   Will you be my mother   Do you want me to be willing to give it over   The whole academic imbroglio, doubt and stress   Is there some way you want me to be in it   no Is it true I've done my best   With bravery and heart   I cannot do more than that   no What more   there will be a turn for the better 13 I have worked over ch 3 today and it is not bad, though still not completely coherent. Louie said - Louie's book said - think of this time as a white sheet being stretched in all its directions. What I took from that was, think of this as a time that is stretching everyone involved. They are all having to get used to something they have never seen. We don't know how far they will be able to stretch. I think that means, don't take it personally. Janet says: strong, confident yet intimate voice. Chapter 1 was inspirational. Likes "community of the question". Chapter 2 strong until neural aboutness, annoyed by tonal shift. Undefined technicalities proliferate. Slow down to make your point with more patience. What she says strikes fear. It is the deep difficulty about this work. There's my strong personal voice and then there's the technical slog. They don't integrate. And yet my interest and impulse were integral. I loved the way I could think of any kind of moment of cognitive being as if I imagined it as a standing net. Why did I go into technical detail. Because I wanted to build the sort of vision I have. Would pictures help. Should I say something explicit about 'representations.' It matters how we imagine it because the way we imagine it organizes us in thinking it. Philosophical visualization. I do need to say something about the relation of intuition and data. There's a difficulty about audience, should I give up on the philosophy professors as audience. Gladly, but who can use it. The wide net vision is really central but is there a problem saying whole bodies are about while making so much of neural nets? Think of global mappings as extending outside the brain, throughout the body. Think of core dynamics as cerebral and necessary to sentience. What is the real use of the wide net vision. The means of sentient response understood as physically integrated with the means of nonsentient response. Since there can be mixes, we have a way to imagine the means for complex experience. MRI/PET results. The difficulty of imagining correspondences - saying some particular structure is 'a representation' or a correlate of some particular thing - become more apparent when activity in so many places is effective in making some discrimination. Implications of 1) distributed 2) parallel 3) recurrently connected. Edelman because comprehensive, devel, evol, whole system. - Was it the lovelessness that I couldn't bear. Tom's turn to call. I said I was harrowed. He said he was too and told me all about it. When I said five sentences about my crisis he launched into telling me what to do and came at me so relentlessly so righteously with so mean and hard a lack of absorbency that I put the receiver down on the bed and let his hard righteous insistent voice be small and tinny in the earpiece. He can't help it, I said. But he's struck me at the heart. I needed something and he was in contempt of what I needed. Do you see any hope   process I'm very frightened   Is this an irrational fear   Will you tell me what I'm afraid of   unconscious conflict between love woman and improvement Is it love woman who's afraid   She's afraid of what I'd have to do to improve it     Oh frightened love woman will you talk to me   yes Will you tell me what you're afraid of   delay in improvement of honest energy That it will take too long and you'll go on and on having no life   yes Is that it   yes Will you tell me what you need   to get to childish pleasure Being loved and loving   yes Are you suffering of holding back with Tom   NO this is nothing to do with him   part 4 the golden west volume 21: 2000-2001 september-january work & days: a lifetime journal project