the golden west volume 21 part 4 - 2000 november-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

14 November During the lecture I had a sharp pain at the heart and had to go out and walk up and down breathing. It's panic at Kathleen saying she would flunk me. She has done me physical harm. Should I give up     no Why not     skill with loss will give you strength to succeed Went to the computers and put chs 1-4 onto the web. Felt better having done it though it's rough. 15 About the broken pencil     mother, man, partial loss of, responsibility Something that looked after me     They interfered with     Did they actually succeed in blocking me for two years     YES Did they make Phil go off me     YES Did they make me not get the post-doc     YES And they made me not able to write coherently this summer     Can I win everything back     YES They did it out of envy     YES Do you want to comment     their child gained recovery and completion A self-mending     By overpowering me     Can you explain how they can do that     temper anger to shatter the structure of overview Did they only have to do it once     Did they do it deliberately     That moment was the tip-off     Do they think maybe it didn't work     no Did it cost them anything     no Did they think I had harmed them     no They just needed to sacrifice someone     Did my own anger ?     no Definitely a sending     Does it matter when I do it     better sooner Jan says: Sod Akins, she's just jealous that you're so bloody brilliant. Making image html pages - staggeringly beautiful, some - depends on how the images are set - mythnight 2 - black and white with a white border, two of them, against a different purplish black - also jump, unicorn runner, bird gods - and then the whole parcel of pink-brown pages that I set up for the site. The original graphics are looking - how - simple-minded, especially one after another, compared to that suite. What looks best is folders with variations, maybe. 18 I have to talk about shame, a sick feeling. Something happened, it just happened, I didn't see it coming, and my natural response in it shamed me. I showed wrongness. I've screwed up two of my five tutorial groups. The one I'd lost after Peter's inspection I got back after the first midterm. The second Thursday one I lost after the time I sat talking to Lei Shi while I let the rest of them work on their homework. The second Friday one has Lia insubordinate, a feeling of contempt from the beginning, a conspiracy of smiles. Yesterday I was making mistakes and they were catching them. Simon Poon caught one. He put up his hand and said, Isn't it ...? I said, Yes it is. He put up his hand again, But didn't you say ...? Yes, you were right. He put up his hand again, So, it is ...? Yes, it is. He put up his hand again. What you said before was ... . At that point I quietly exploded. YES I WAS WRONG, I WAS WRONG, I WAS WRONG, I WAS WRONG, I'm going to go home afterwards and kill myself. At that point Lia got up and left, and Jayna a moment later. We did exercises I had prepared and I didn't make more mistakes, but twenty four hours later I am still cringing. I want to know a couple of things. What I do know already is that I've had to work around the fact that I'm not good at symbolic logic and some of them are. I'm also working around the loss of sharpness that has to do with being 55. I know Lia has controlled the room. I know Simon was pushing me with the room's permission. I know I'm sensitive and inexperienced with that sort of attack. I have been generous in making them socially comfortable. I haven't taken the challenge seriously. My weakness was that I was trying to bluff and they caught me. What don't I know. It will blow over more or less. The term will be over. I won't read my evaluations. What I don't know is, is there something I can do honestly and honorably to feel better. It says no. Does it mean I am less than I have believed? No. Was there any way I could have done that better? No. Is there anything I should learn from it? No. When self estimate is lost does it stay lost? No. Is there anything to be gained from being up against raw shame? Yes, it says, persistence. You mean it has cost me a lot to stay out of situations where I might feel it? Yes. Effective people do it often? Yes. Am I going to have to feel it often? Yes. Will you tell me what is the reward of the risk? Flow. Okay, enough, now I have the harder thing to deal with. 19 "Union in silence with all being, and action flowing from that silence in enlightened joy." The soul is a child. What I feel reading this book is - that structure - I'm less than I was. When I read it first in 1995 I was more than I am now. I was in love with Tom. I was better looking, I was in adventure, I was feeling the waves, I was meeting beauty. Now it is as if I am on the wrong path, dogged, grim and grey. I don't want to face the neuroscience sections, I don't want to face any of it. I don't want to go on and be a professor. I want beauty, I want to be beautiful and be dissolved in beauty and transcending myself in love. Am I on the wrong path     no And yet it's famine for this one of me     I am being sacrificed for something I don't believe in     I am almost completely gone     YES Do you want me to be gone     no I feel I'm being sacrificed for Tom but really I am being sacrificed for a dry stick of work woman     You want this task to continue     Will you tell me how to live     anger, processing, hope, and illusion You want me to live in anger     Not bliss and love     no Was that a list     Find the anger at being stopped     YES Hope to be able to live     Am I still illusion     It is I who am stopping myself     YES I am obeying those who stop me     I am consenting to teach logic     no absenting yourself Because I don't want to feel shame     I kill myself because I don't want to feel shame    That was me, exploding     This is a key in my life     Will you tell me my illusion     losses, betrayals, shared construction, hopelessness That other people are collaborating in losses, betrayals     That other people are suppressing me     YES And that it's hopeless     Should I just start writing Tom     YES The beauty in this house is me     The beauty in those images is me     The utter beauty of my relation to Tom     My writing when it's beautiful     If my heart were open would I have to be unfaithful     no I can never be a success     no I have to choose between success and realness     no People hate bliss and beauty     no But they act as if they do     Whenever I feel ugly is it because I'm not there     I could always be there     But the price would be high     NO To be myself when I'm not in love is an act of will and constant bravery     Do it for beauty     Should I get religious     no But pray to the universe     20 Driving with someone, a woman friend, past the edge of the city on a side I haven't seen. I'm looking at the farmland which at first I think is unusual, interesting. I begin to see it is desolate. A farmyard set on a little hill so steep the ruined sheds look as if they will slide. A church tower. The towers of an oil refinery in the distance. We are driving east. This country is north of the road. It's a grey country. I don't see trees. I see the road will end just ahead. I have heard of what's happening here. The land is sinking into the water. There is a flat treeless shabby sort of village. Just a few streets. And there is the airport, one smooth-skinned building rising high above the road. I see it is like an airplane, spreading back in a triangle from a rounded prow. My friend and I are on the ground level of the building. It's like an auto mechanic shop. My friend is asking directions. She is taking me to lunch. Upstairs, we're standing in a partitioned steel and glass space that is the restaurant. I open a door and see three young Asian men in a cubicle which seems to have windows on all sides though it is in the center of the building. My friend wants to take me somewhere else. I just want to see what it's like, I say. It's a dream about technology. The land has died and is sinking. It has been mined for the sake of this sleek seamless structure more airplane than airport, a sort of office building for Asian men. Is there any more you want to say about that     you are balancing in the midst of change I see the end of the road     yes Another dream from a few nights ago I just want to note for one moment in it. I am traveling across water. I see a place on the bank where the rocks are shaped so I could climb up to a spot that lets onto the street. It wouldn't be an easy climb but it could be done. I realize, as it closes against granite on the shore, that I have been traveling on a floating rock. As I step off it I see the marks where it has grated against the shore boulder. Having touched down, my floating rock is rebounding into open water. I see its dark back moving rapidly away. - I should finish the video. And begin putting up Work and days. And go on through limbo in confidence. Aiming at the land and mind foundation. 23 What is there tonight. That tutorial tomorrow. I'll repair what I can. Now I can, I'm balanced. What else. An uncomfortable edge last night talking to Tom. Why. He was trying to be helpful about my meeting with Ray, but he mangled it the way he easily can. Thinking to 'support' or 'encourage' me, he comes at me with loud tense assertion: I've moved the ball to the fifty yard line, he has a good feeling about Ray, Ray won't let me down when he has said what he said, etc. I'm irritated when someone who knows nothing about my situation tells me how to understand it, and in that hectoring bullying tone. He means well, I felt, but I don't need to stay around for more of this. 24 And then the next time we talk he's calm though hoarse and tells me what happens at the hotel. My tutorials this week are good. In the 11:30 tutorial today bad seed Lia is not there, I explain eating crow to all Chinese students (except for Ryan) and apologize to Simon Poon with ease and grace publicly. We have a warm sweet class together. Ryan kids me about calling him Sean, and when I get Allan's name wrong too he says the count is zero to two. 25 I've zoomed through three books on deep ecology, philosophy of place, and pragmatism and environmentalism, and seen a community of men blathering in all the same voice, a charmless dead voice without love, humor, outrage, perception, but with much mention of other men and their 'positions'. That's not land and mind. Land and mind by example. Someone said what I was thinking yesterday: that what is important is (for instance Gordon Smith or Ursula Le Guin) showing us what it's like to be someone who is formed in relation to land or nature. No, what I was actually thinking was that the value of a work of art could be understood as its evidence of a formed person, a person formed in relation to nature. The forming of persons is the specifically human part of environmental value. An epistemology for art, an epistemology for deep ecology, an epistemology for therapy, all have to be cognitive and contact-based. This is my intuitive theory of art enfolded in organism-environment contact theory. I'm not interested in art that doesn't demonstrate a person in developed contact. 26 Six on a Sunday morning, black at the glass but I hear the little rattle of rain when the heater fan stops. My feet are on the table. I'm writing with a corner of the book on my lap. Louie last night took me to the Ukrainian restaurant on Main and sat opposite in a light I didn't like. There were women with faces like pirogis, white sacs full of soft paste. The pickled herring on dark bread was good and so were the blinis - VW never talked about food [no, she does] - and Louie as always ate with pleasure and looked at everyone with interest. I was depressed by the food, the room, and the dullness of our contact. There is Louie with her hair dyed, middle-aged, but it's not that, it's what kind of middle-aged, serviceable middle age, middle age in harness, plodding along making money, living in a low-ceilinged basement room for the sake of money, driving an orange Toyota for the sake of money, having no lover for the sake of money, her shelves full of books that are there because someone gave them to her. Yes she's a yoga expert but what is the use of yoga when it does not make the body bright. I dreamed I was talking to a woman friend and at the same time found myself lying in the arms of a man who was her relative, who was stroking my bare skin with his big warm hand as we spoke. I was thinking how much I liked his touch and his voice. Next week I go into the pit of the year. The black month, the deep work month, Ramadan, fast and pray month. 27 Talking to Tom about men and football. Testosterone surge. The men in a city whose team is winning have better health. And a run on the women's shelters in Superbowl season, I say. At that the warthog turned and dashed into a brush pile. It had been having a nice little trot in the leaves, Tom said. He said it better than that. I saw the little thing's dash for cover and its happy trot in the sun. Let me think about Tom's little animal stories. They're swift, vivid, charming and disarming. They seize me into simple affection. They seize him too. They're a plunge into innocence. Are they meant to manage him or to manage me? They do manage me, I see the piggy and feel what he's said to be feeling, skeptically always, but I laugh. But as for Tom, his alarm and guilt are a little animal but his brutality is not. His brutality is full size, heavy. I've wanted to underestimate the demon. But I've seen him, he's the big fat man who slammed the car door. He's a developed demon, that's what booze was for, it gave the demon years of life, not raping and pillaging but fighting and fucking. The demon isn't intelligent and Tom is. Intelligence overrides the demon easily. But ego can lose intelligence. Intelligence lost by the ego is given to the demon, and then the demon has to be given time. Slobodan Milosovic. Demons are loosed because intelligence has been lost. Intelligence is lost in ways that include being deceived and any of the sins. How could it be said in terms of brains. The demon starting out is just instinct, which is organized self- and species-behavior. When the behavior is suppressed the structure is still evoked but it is isolated and sustained without release. It acts indirectly, from the dark. Mine is anger and aggression (it says). 28 Dr Sylvia phoned yesterday to say my pap last March showed mild displasia and they want me to do another before a year is up. In the dream that woke me I was crying with fear. I was in a motel and there was a baby I forgot I had. In the morning I remembered he was with the motel owner. Strange she'd had him all night. I go looking for her. She isn't up yet though many people are about. When I find her room there are many children but not my little boy. Something about him, is he retarded? I find the big fat woman. I have to pursue her through many rooms. She doesn't want to deal with me. Finally she takes me to a piece of ground in the garden. She digs at some brass letters, a word set in loose black earth. A small entrance opens. Joey is down there. I start to cry. She's going to bury me. At the same time I see far below, very small, a room with many small children around a table with a man who is like a daycare worker. What do I think about that. The betrayals. The buried betrayals of babies. My parents' betrayals of me, my betrayals of Luke and Rowen. 29 Something I'm noticing about house daydreaming. I'm more modernist than I was. That's in web design too, and clothes. Chino Nordstrom jacket instead of plaid jacket, very loose grey cargos that have knee-pocket vertical zips and are noisy when I walk. I like the walking feel of them, straight and light. House: the house has its bedrooms finally. They're small, right and left. The left side room is a guest room. I had to figure out how to make them private, related to the garden, how to have them open to the sound of leaves and still safe-feeling at night. Now they each have stairs onto their roof. The way I placed them makes a more interesting apron between the center and the garden. A way to have an outside fireplace that shows fire into the house. The bedrooms for when it's cold; when it's warm a mat at the level that lets it float among the rustling eucalyptus leaves. Black-trunked pink-flower gums. There can be tea and toast brought up by the housekeeper when the east starts to color. The fireplace would be laid with a wood - is it juniper? - that would scent the neighbourhood. All the doors would be without sills, flat out onto the ground. Desert sand and fitted sandstone. Agave collection. Manzanita collection. Olives and grass with California poppies. Tumbled collection of every possible salvia. Guavas. The long tank reflecting the guavas. Big laundry room with closets. The utility section lined with cupboards, so many cupboards the rest of the house doesn't need any. In the living room the housekeeper has a desk so she's in the middle of everything during the day. Phoning. The long reach of pink terrazzo corridor. Beautiful glass doors. 30 Here is a problem: I'm saying it's the whole body and I'm saying it's a wide net in the cortex. How do I say it's a wide net and not become representationalist, correspondentist? Do the central means have something extra? No. The difficulty that everything needs to be revised at once, but I can only do it part by part, and so what I've done already gets out of fit. Write more about what impresses me about art process     Write more about the resources of the organic     Am I supposed to be defending the organic     Women's intellectual problem is how to keep men from destroying everything out of envy     YES Here is Alva Noë involved with Lakoff in a project that relates my kind of art to cog sci writers - 1999 - "Consciousness art: attending to the quality of experience." Lawrence Rinder and George Lakoff 2000 Consciousness art: attending to the quality of experience - "It's all about feeling, feeling and recognition." About Agnes Martin b.1912 Maklin, Sask, March 22. Father dies when she is two. When she's 55 drives around for a year and a half. Cuba, New Mexico, later Galisteo NM. She writes against nature. I suspect her of courting the men by this means. She means by nature something I don't mean: ego, pride, unhappiness. "Sequences of illusions of textures that change as viewing distance changes" 1960-67 Moving back - a mist - the lines dematerialize the canvas, making it hazy, velvet. They talk about it in terms of the object's dependence on the viewer. The objective conditions for the purely subjective phenomenon of vision itself. This is Rosalind Krauss. The grid and objective conditions of vision before figure/ground. Buddhist/Taoist teaching/constructing the viewer. Something about nature that isn't what it looks like. "Evoking the subtlest feelings that everyone has." "We have certain feelings when birds descend." "the space of the stars" Her notion of process as waiting for inspiration, "it would come to you." Inner mind, not outer mind, "thinking." A way of talking about perfection, beauty, happiness, joy, rest, classicism, transcendence, eternity. Platonic. As if it's both a state and a presence. "Available at every moment to everyone." Geometry as means of getting to a state of mind. "They discovered their interest and inclination was in the perfection of circles and lines." Tantric grids and stacks, the over-all. Simultaneous stillness and movement. There's something wrong with Agnes Martin     Comes from her father dying     She stayed away from sex     Nature killed her father     She discovered abstraction could take her out of pain     She built herself on denying the simple source of her pain     YES So she is impressive but not reliable     Her denial gave her great power     no, their denial Pride is her very foundation     And ego     And at the same time the work is good     Can a healthy person be a good artist     She is what I used to be     She built a viable life     no 3rd December A dancer at the solo show last night. What was it about him that went straight to the groin. He was my type - tall, dark-haired, Scottish - wearing a white shirt rolled at the sleeves, pants with pleats at the waist. He had chosen to dance to Bach. He danced slowly, he'd stand and then move. The dancing was like going into a brief series of stretched poses. He carried himself with young seriousness. He looked to me as if he were dancing the process of working. I mean my process of working - thinking - the pause and then the act, again and again. It was the clear seriousness of the intelligent boy, presented with a sobriety that made everyone else seem to be trying too hard. He was moving in an air of entitlement they didn't have, meaning that he could seem to be alone. The entitlement was just a freedom from the need to convince. He was immediately and continuously sexual, I felt, and the little sexy firebird gay boy was vulnerable but not sexual. What's the difference. Containment. What I felt in Mexico with Tom. What I felt when I was being Dave Carter in Joyce's office, centered flow. He was demonstrating a state. Edmund Kilpatrick Man at the Firehall Theatre Dec 3 2000 - About this project. I am feeling how ragged it is but that it can be fixed. It isn't clear. It's far from clear. But the vision is firm. And yet quite ineffable. I have understood something about the metaphoric structure of thinking. I notice the metaphors, I notice the fantasy, and yet that noticing is a texture in my encounter with their theory, I can't say it as a fact. I know something about this kind of thinking, that it is a sort of all-over groping, it feels like all-over groping. A field is groping in its parts. I'm interested in the feel of thinking. Could I just say how far I've got - and leave it at that. Maybe a clearer discussion can only come from people who didn't begin confused in the old way. A sense of the intelligence and stability of perception, the phantasmagorical frailty of theory. An understanding, sort of, of male motive spoiling men's theory often. The relation of whole body aboutness and neural wide nets - if the whole body is related to things - in contexts - then the relevant brain structure will be distributed and connected not isolated. Does sentient relatedness happen by means of brain structure, as opposed to non-brain neural systems - and non-neural body systems? But it builds on all of that - a sense that the necessary conditions of sentient aboutness include the whole body and the environment too. This is the nub. And then, within that complex the immediate and local means - I want to understand them as distributed because understanding them that way gives me a way to think about questions that really interest me - gives me a theory, a way to imagine myself. Here's the question - if aboutness is relatedness - if relatedness occurs by deep co-occurrent means - if sentient relatedness requires subnet organization - if (partial) sentient relatedness can occur without immediate presence of entire environmental means - how should we think of the subnet? It is specifically and particularly the means of what? I want to say the moment's phenomenology - the moment's sentient relatedness - but don't talk in terms of correlation between subnet structure and phenomenology - don't imagine phenomenology as a picture or thing. Specifically and particularly the means of sentient relatedness - the phenomenology does not have parts that are correlated with parts of the subnet - the particular form of the subnet is responsible for the particularity of relatedness. Are parts of the subnet responsible for parts of the relatedness? No, because relatedness does not have parts. One is related in different ways to different things, which are parts of the environmental/situational whole. And one is related by means of states of a body which has parts. But the relatedness does not have parts. And yet the brain does have specialized parts. And yet phenomenology is not a mosaic. Phenomenology is by means of parts but it is not a collection of parts. But is there a relation between parts of the subnet and parts of what one is related to? Is it possible to say this part of the subnet is the means of my relatedness to the face I am seeing? No, because any part of the subnet is constructed as a dynamic result of the whole? Yes. The whole subnet is the means of my relatedness to the face. And yet a local part of the brain is specialized for differentiating faces. Can I figure out how to think this? Nunez: local networks do what they do, physiological segregation. Differences in connections, gain, activity in, so there are waveforms specific to that area; and there are also global waveforms, set up by what - by local dynamics, by long-range axon delays. Over-all, somehow I think the means are not mosaic, 'phenomenology' is not mosaic, the proximal medial field is not mosaic, relatedness cannot be mosaic, and yet the specifics of every part of the subnet matter to the sentient relatedness of the moment. That's as far as I get. It seems muddled still. Can you take me farther?     no 4th Where am I. Monday of the first holiday week. There's sun. It's ten and I'm eating pollock soup ("a gadoid fish of the north Atlantic"). Two hours talking to Tom last night. The first half hour he talked about going to Coyote Canyon with Oscar, serving summons and blue-skyin' about business plans. He talked and I said mm but then I said mischievously that my card was about to run out and he ran down willingly to get a card to call me back. He had written me a letter and was guiltless. I told about the dancer in all confidence. I've been working since 5:30 and want to go - out. I'll go to Harbour Center and print copies of papers. - What Judith says about the introduction. Too personal. Few readers interested. Dense and descriptive language. Signpost the summaries. "You need the authoritative voice of the MA." Too tentative. Is it too personal     no Will there be too few readers interested     no Is it dense     NO Tentative     no Do I need the voice of the MA     Not because it's authoritative     Because it's clear     It's inchoate not tentative     Is she too trained to be a good reader     no Is she afraid for me     no Should I take out those nine pages     no - Mark Rowlands 1999 says "cognitive processes" by which he means mechanisms that produce behaviour - by which he means what he says Millikan means - proper functions by which organisms are understood. Cognitive processes include action inherently, and action inherently involves world stuff. Field composition in writing - all the ideas the slant of - what I wanted to know about writing - I was working out of an inchoate state - I wanted to understand how that works - I wanted to know whether anyone could read it - not about but from - I was constructing a field by writing many phrases, telling many small stories, and all of them over time would set up a state that understood. In Trapline the water is a visualization of it. Judith's response wasn't useful     no An irritant     Phil's opinion     The MA is good     But what I was doing there was easier     I was catering to Phil     Successfully     What I do now has to be grandly subversive     It has to make contact with where I was before I came into philosophy     Can I do this grand integration     Judith showed me her gutlessness     There's village shrewdness and then there is vision     5 Tom answered the phone at work and a pleasant voice said, This is Paul Epp. I guess I like the convergence. Paul the way Tom sees him, a fine gentleman, courteous and ironic, crossing through the lobby of the Maryland Hotel with his exquisite daughter. And there is Tom in carefully considered clothes, feeling many things. Feeling them strongly, struggling with feeling them. Wanting to make a good impression, wanting it like a teenager, wanting it mainly because he always does, but also in this instance because it would indicate that he has recovered ground. He has, and it isn't over yet. And me, will Paul think I've married down? No, it says. Does Tom think Paul will wonder why he's with a cripple? Does he think Paul could read his motives better than I can? Is there something he thinks he needs to hide? (Yes, his poverty.) 6 Here is something I need to get clearer. Noë is right that aboutness has to do with relation and is inherently whole-person. It doesn't make sense to say a neural structure is about something in particular. Also because the whole network participates in any formation. Aboutness includes directedness of the body and interactional contact. But given that, cortical structure, which integrates the seeing in all its sensory and motor multimodal action, is still and also the means of sentient engagement. What's meant by consciousness is relational. Its means are both internal and external. And yet the exact form of the wide net determines - is that the word? - something. What? Determines that moment's contact, contact meaning both action and self-talk, and - call it what? - felt judgment. Detailed felt judgment. What I like in the wide net image is that it is a sort of image of the all-togetherness of those aspects. It has to be thought in a way that doesn't make it a mosaic. That's why the parietal is interesting. Think of it as an aspect of the means. Don't talk about it as a representation, because it is not about. And yet it - together with world and rest of body - centrally integrates the aboutness of a sentient agent. And if/when we want to talk about what it's like to be a sentient agent, talking about the wide net can help with thinking the integratedness of that aboutness. Is that the main thing?     My strong arg against rep is that the central/neural means as structured at any moment are multiple-y covarying. Noë doesn't understand that he can be anti-rep and still be interested in neural form. That is my difficulty too. Simulational states, centrally, are being as if about something. It's as if I'm related to something. Eye movements in dreaming. Use of parietal attention nets in remembering. The means of aboutness include means of action, inherently. How we talk about simulation. Looking at a picture, being about the <picture>, being as if about what it is structuring me to be as if about. When I'm dreaming, I am not about a picture. I am as if about a wave slumping over a hill. I am only very partially as if about it. But what about that partial, as-if aboutness? "I dreamed about"; "I had a dream about". Specifically, how to talk about its central, structural means? The form of the central, structural means will certainly determine what I seem to be about. But only given the organization of a body/nervous system already formed by real engagement. So it's not solely determined. Here Oyama's point that form is codetermined by system's existing structure and <input>, system's existing structure being the same thing as capability. What's the metaphor. Gibson's metaphor. I'm seeing foil that's been compressed uncrinkling slightly when released. Make simulation secondary to contact, not vice versa. Descartes and Kant make fantasy definitional of mind or intelligence. The person who said cyberspace supports a renewed dualism, "a greater appreciation for the self-sufficiency of consciousness as pure witness" [somebody at the Tucson 2000 conference]. A greater appreciation for what, should it be ? The dangers and uses of illusion. It's not witness if it's fantasy. Witness is never self-sufficient. Desiring self-sufficiency is the motive for this valuing of illusion. Assume realism because a real world is the only conceivable circumstance for the creation of witness, or mind of any kind. That's the kernel to use against Descartes and Kant, ie, if you are not a deist, the real world has to be assumed. And yet Kant has a point. What was it. That every kind of human aboutness is determined by human structure, by what humans are, structurally. He talked about structure of "the mind," but it can be understood as structure of body (which includes structure given by social practices). (Neo-Kantians, though, would say it this way: the mind structures the world.) The correction, for instance from Tuana, is that the structure of the real world determines human structure too. Kant and Descartes can make fantasy primary because they are creationists. Pre-evolutionary theory. Okay I've got this sorted now. And further, Kant is more right when we are talking about fantastical activity. Theorizing is deeply structured by mammal priorities. But Kant needs real world contact to explain the nature and origin of the structure he's positing. Ultimately it doesn't make sense to talk about structure in anything but physical terms. What about linguistic structure, kinship structure? Structure is a metaphor. We are talking about those things as if they were spatial, physical. That sort of talk necessarily is thought in spatial ways. Categorical. Kata-agora, against the assembly. To allege, predicate: to <put into> a category. -> There's the shift from a sense of rhetorical speech to a structural fantasy of putting into a container. Aristotle walked around bodily in warm bright air. Kant and Descartes sat imprisoned in over-furnished cold, stuffy rooms, and outside was a social world ruled by discourse police with powers of execution. The discourse police in Aristotle's time were political but not metaphysical. Predicate - to speak in such a way that people are organized to think something in a particular way. To see it as something. (Metaphor and ordinary predication.) "Humans are bipeds." We don't put something into something: we think, imagine, regard, see, humans in terms of their two-leggedness. "The berries are ripe." We're organized to think, imagine, see, regard the berries - ie to be related or as if related to them - and to think (etc) them in terms of ripeness. Wittgenstein's seeing as is primary, but should topic evocation and predication be thought of as separate acts? Do they happen in different places? No. It's a temporal difference? Yes. Object is evoked, then that structure is modified. A picture does both at once. Name-effect is modified by predicates, where name-effect is not as specific as we need. It's the same effect as stem and modifier. Whole paragraphs can be thought of as modifying the effect of an evoked topic-object. Is that correct? Yes. There's a dynamical balance that's the result of the whole sequence. Flights and perchings. This is an answer to why I want to imagine wide nets - because it lets me think linguistic effect, for instance. It's very rich as a paradigm. The rest of the paper demonstrates its richness as a - what should it be called - generating figure. Para has the sense of beside and thus comparing. But I'm thinking this in terms of an embedded form. Is that rep fallacy? No. That form does not represent a network, it is a means of thinking as a network. As a form it is not determinate. It doesn't correspond (or not). Once one understands how rep artifacts/events work, it is easy to see that the inner rep metaphor doesn't work. Inner rep fallacies are built on misunderstanding outer rep. So I don't have to worry that talking about a wide net as a means has to involve me in talking about reps. There is a structure that is part of the sentient engagement, but it is not about anything. It is part of the means by which the person is, or seems to be, about something. I have to keep saying this again and again because it goes against theoretical formation. - Yellow roses, two little candles next to the green glass, always the blue of the wall making every other color more. 7 Pole-axed this morning, stiff and sore. Is it from having my teeth x-rayed yesterday. Stiff at the base of the skull, muscles at the temple, forehead. But having said that neural form shouldn't be thought to be about anything, especially not the way a rep object is about something, how to talk about the autonomy of dreaming? There the central means are the whole means. First, call it seeming to be about whatever, not really being about a picture. That's basic. But then how to talk about the central means of that seeming to be about? Firstly stay away from asking how they are related to 'the experience'. The logical grammar of that way of asking sets us up to think of looking from one thing to another. Secondly, when we describe what we dreamed, we speak the way we do when we talk about being somewhere. We talk about parts of a place: the road, the river, the hill, the person in a cloak. We talk about moving and acting in relation to those parts. The fact that we use separate names for walking and road does not imply that the means by which we seemed to walk and seemed to see a road were distinct subparts of the whole instance of dreaming. The wide net can't be thought of as a mosaic: it is too integrated. If we are not thinking of it as 'a representation,' then we have less reason to want to think of it as a mosaic. But there is still a question - the particular form of the wide net and/or a wide subnet of it - I'm struggling with how to say this - determines? No, because that is like talking about two things at different locations. That makes 'correlates with' wrong too. Is the means of - think of it in terms of doing - is the means of the act of seeming to be about? Is that too odd? Not in context of, for instance, thinking. I am making myself seem to be about in order to do other things. But dreaming isn't acting though it can be seeming to act. It's more like relaxing maybe. So in relation to imagining: 1) It has to be dealt with in terms of autonomy of central means; 2) and as such it belongs to simulation not presence; 3) it should be thought of as a limited autonomy always secondary to the body's formation in real contact. Then, if the wide net of central means is not thought of as a representation, there is less push to think of parts of the net as being the means of seeming to see parts of a scene. I go on trying to think of parts of the wide net - like zones - as accomplishing parts of the seeming presence - and that's one of my main reasons for wanting the wide net picture - so I can talk about the whole of for instance linguistic or musical or even mathematical experience as a sort of constellation - maybe different moving subnets overlaid - color them differently and have colors mix where they are overlaid. One thing we know for sure, the means do not look like what the person is related to. They do not look like anything, because they are electrodynamic. But their spatial and temporal form matters, their temporality is the temporality of relatedness. We can try to visualize them, and must, because we are visualizing them already, very badly, to silly effect. Corrective visualization. This is a huge task. Is there something I should say about it so people could know what I'm doing?     restore, honest, collaboration, with intuitive knowledge Make it possible for people to do it and to acknowledge it. It is in that sense political. Do you mean for instance what I do with you?     no You mean intuitive in the sense of the whole net     It is corrective to a male sense of knowledge     Have I already said it adequately     'Intuitive' means not accounted for in the ways we are thinking of knowing     What I did today. What I've done this week, worked ad hoc here. This afternoon worked on my theory front page. It was too simple. Is it now too complicated, yes. A bit. It's better than it was, but it looks amateur, because it's got color and pictures. What should a theory page look like. It should be frames and mouseover. Maybe this one for now. I need a capsule about each of the papers. 8 "I looked into a bookstore window and realized that, someday, I would write a book filled with points mysteriously connected with arrows." Here is Stuart Kauffman's book, 1993, on self organization and selection in evolution. The preface says, awkwardly, some of the things I have been thinking my preface should say. "It witnesses one mind's sense of mystery ... why this ill-lit path? And why the outrageous confidence to tread it?" "Ideas mature in unforeseen ways." "While the book is finished, it is not a finished book." "One senses that a transformation to deeper understanding is pressing upward in some as yet poorly articulated form," he says of the present period in biology. He has something unclear, because he doesn't have a political analysis, I think. Oyama is clearer; it isn't self-organization vs natural selection, it's how one thinks of natural selection. 1) Whether one is thinking of it in terms of whole organisms, so 'traits' can only appear in the context of whole forms and whole developmental histories; and 2) keeping in mind the self ordering reactive properties of materials rather than thinking in terms of instruction and command. A preacher on the radio last night said that something he describes as paganism worships the creation rather than the creator. The odd thing is that it is the deists who worship the creature, because they understand the creator in terms of themselves. That is, the sense they have of themselves as egos who will and rule and sometimes make. Without asking how making is made. Paganism as I understand it - I am a pagan in this sense - worships nature as its own creator and thereby ours - worships in many ways - for instance by studying - and by mindfully being-in. The complex systems approach says don't think of the creation of individual parts then assembled, think of co-evolution, the evolutionary emergence of a mutually necessary set of processes - a whole, whose parts are mutually necessary to one another. The way everything I'm proposing hangs with other proposals and evokes other proposals. Last night an Ideas show about chimpanzee and orangutan language. Kanzi and Washoe. Fouts and Savage-Rumbagh. Humanly encultured apes who make jewelry and write. Stuart Shankar on his conversion. I'm thinking something about that. We are all encultured apes who can use what we couldn't invent. Culture accumulates inventions of mutant individuals who may or may not reproduce at all. But we can recognize the rightness of what we didn't come to ourselves. Is that somehow the way to begin to look at recognition capability? If we think of organisms in terms of development from some early organization, he says, "true neighbouring morphologies in evolution reflect transformations to neighbouring forms in the family of forms generated by the underlying developmental mechanisms." 15 He says Kant said organisms were not mechanisms but self-organizing wholes. "New conceptual systems such as Darwin's theory emerge as intellectual wholes. Once in place, the logical structure of the system inevitably begets a coherent set of questions." The notion of atoms of heredity - theme of a central directing agency mediated by the germ plasm. Blueprint or program. A nonmechanist and therefore nonmaterial controlling agency. The idea of the effect becomes the condition of the cause. Then material substance reactive to and expressive of. Stuart Kauffman 1995 At home in the universe : the search for laws of self-organization and complexity Oxford [Shankar and Savage-Rumbagh also in Sue Savage-Rumbagh, Stuart Shankar and T Taylor 1998 Apes, language and the human mind Oxford] 9 A man who was talking to someone I was with said to watch the birds to know where someone is hiding in the forest. I asked what they do that lets him know. He said he couldn't say. It was the kind of moment where a third person who steps into a conversation takes it away. I am having trouble saying this. There's something I've forgotten, a line or two. I was trying to discover how he knew, at the same time thinking he was a tracker, that's how he knew about forests. He said, for a man, something something. Tom's kind of claim that manhood doesn't allow this and that. I said that seemed wrong because whatever vulnerability we were talking about was so rewarding. As I said this last sentence I was pulling my thumb along the rippled edge of a sheet of glass, looking at it as I spoke. He agreed immediately. I woke from this dream. It was 4:30, too early. What did I want to find in it. The feeling of latching-on in sudden interest. The feeling of the man himself. There was an earlier part where I was in a group of people taken hostage. We were brought into a hotel room on an upper floor of some high-rise. I saw a bottle of champagne on a coffee table, in a bucket whose ice had melted. The captor said we might not want champagne in our unsettled circumstance, but while other things were going on over there I silently popped the cork. I took a slug and passed the bottle to the next woman. There was a group of women drinking it out of their hands. The woman who was guarding us said did we want to sing. She suggested a song about Rio de Janeiro. A woman across the room turned on the radio. A man's voice. I put my hand to the side of my face and mouthed I CAN'T TAKE THAT. She turned it off. The captor was singing, someone had joined her. Four couples of little girls were dancing. They were wearing black fishnet stockings with garters and little red costumes. I was looking at their expert little legs thinking they looked like French legs. 11 Does it mean anything that I'm dreaming oddities on and on     no Language makes us dream oddities     Is language pathogenic that way     Language in Aristotle's time was cleaner     Oddness in dreams is just the brain relaxing     But it can be a way of seeing what varies independently     Size isn't tied to distance or norm     Would it be worth studying dreams in that way     Should I go for it and be a cog philosopher     This is the moment for it     Should I be putting work and days on the net     And start making land and mind     And make a CD out of notes in origin     And finish we made this     - It's Monday morning. The months and years are standing open. I make a list and find it shorter than it ever has been:   I am strong and healthy and beautiful I am correctly influential I have enough money to live well I live well I look after my teeth Luke and Rowen flourish The parts of my work that are needed are fully given I ask if it wants to add anything. You stop being defeated, it says. And then these other things come true     Will you tell me in what sense I am defeated     in your feelings My feelings are defeated     By me     no Will you say by who or what     family, withdrawal, child, money Will you give an example of a feeling that is defeated     decision Determination     My determination was defeated when they didn't and didn't come     I had that determination in getting scholarships     Have I lost it since then     I lost it on account of my weakness in romance     I had it in relation to the garden     I need to find it in relation to this work     I'm at a point of stop where I have to work with myself     Add to my list: I am fully determined and committed and energized I do what is necessary   I shouldn't be proud of failing to want     Is there a correct way to rebuild determination     strength, come through, acting, processing When I want I'm hit by anguish     Like what happened with Kathleen     Is that the nub of it     I had determination at the cost of shutting down     Act on the basis of wanting and keep processing     So here's more for the list: I get the doc splendidly The thesis is published as a book I establish the land and mind foundation I live in California I look wonderful I'm joyful and generous with people I set up money for old age I make thrilling high-end work My writing is taken up I have enough time to work As well as being engaged Brave real acts of vocational adventure part 5 the golden west volume 21: 2000-2001 september-january work & days: a lifetime journal project