12 December 2000
Began at the beginning of this book and read through the term. What did I find. I was reading in faint surprise at the theme it had - don't like that word but don't know what to call it - a strong sweep of one kind of emotional work, risking and then making my way through the panic fear of defeat. Many times. Was it real work? Will I be more able in the next stage?
This aft I posted the new theory index page - do I like it? Maybe not. Things about it.
14
I came to high over the ocean. A quality of motion, not quite secure. I'm in a helicopter and there's something about its angle to the air. Where are we going? To Iceland. To Iceland? The pilot is an Icelandic woman. And then I look ahead and see we are starting to descend to the close scatter of a city over many bays and inlets of an island.
Yesterday before I woke it was a naked acrobat in a twist too complicated to understand, who unfolded to show two naked boys back to back, the jumeaux/gemini. They were the same color, an oily yellow-brown. As I woke they had stood up and I saw their individual heads and faces.
-
Tom's rage that Paul cancelled the visit. He had a two-room corner suite on the 6th floor booked, and the last night free. Not only that but he'd booked a vegetarian restaurant in Hillcrest. Not only that but there's a Christmas Santa Ana coming and the crests of the waves would have been blowing back. It would have been perfect. And Paul was cavalier.
What am I thinking. Tom overplanned and overcontrolled as usual. He does it because he wants to look good. He goes into a rage because that moment of feeling powerful was snatched away. The panic fear of looking bad is not held at bay.
What am I feeling. Strain at the heart. I ran into what I like least in Tom, his control mania. I don't like Paul to see it.
There was something else. Tom saw himself with a quality connection. He looked forward to it. He's crestfallen with all his might.
I owe him something for having gotten him into it.
-
I really like the wide net vision. I agree with Noë's points about active perception. I agree with Haugeland that we can't understand intelligence without understanding embedded and embodied. I am totally against the notion of inner rep. And yet I want to talk about simulation, and I want to use the notion of the wide net to talk about what it's like in many sorts of complicated simulation using reps.
I can talk about simulational aboutness or relatedness and make it clear that simulation can involve limbs and organs to different degrees. But that still leaves dreaming. I can say means of aboutness, central means, and then wide net figure allows me to think of an electromagnetic structure rather than a theatre.
But there is still a question of whether I can use it the way I want to without thinking of different parts of the net as having to do with parts.
- That would be representationalist no
- It's distributed but not mosaic, is that why no
- The structure can partly structure itself
- I can as if hear and see
- The as if can be very convincing
- Can you tell me how that decoupled structural selforganization is different from 'inner representation' understand how 'representation' is used and say it is not a good metaphor
- Does it make sense to ask what are the central neural means of sentient engagement
- So it makes sense to ask what are the central neural means of simulated or seeming sentient engagement
- Am I right about how reps are used
- They are not sufficient for dreaming, in that they had to be built in contact
- But given existing structure they are sufficient
- That decoupled structural order is different from 'inner reps' in its dynamic character
- The I is always the I of the body
- A self-organizing complex structure
- It cannot be granular
- It's active all over
- There is a question about what the physical difference is with sentient engagement
- If you don't think the question in terms of rep it's okay as a question
- Analytic isomorphism is about reps and correspondence
- About structure, all we can say is that that structure is the means of
- There's quite a lot of rewriting to do
- It's distributed but not mosaic, is that why no
15
Järvilehto 1998, beautiful solid simple description of the nervous system as evolved for swiftly modifiable structural acts, topographically organized in relation to its connections with limbs and so on. I'm proud to have got that. And that mental functions like seeing and thinking are contact/embedded extended-system capabilities.
I have to think through the notions of localization - beyond the active perception and non-rep points, there is still a question about neural form. Am I just hanging onto that - do I have to drop every fantasy I've had about wide net and localization, convergence zones and all?
There is discoupled function, a lot of it. Central neural structure determines how it goes, it is a kind of sentient being. It's also more coupled than we think. I agree with the Thomas paper that action simulation is involved, many kinds. There are kinds of simulational doing.
Jarvilehto T 1998a The theory of the organism-environment system; I. Description of the theory, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(4):321-334
Jarvilehto T 1998b The theory of the organism-environment system; II. Significance of nervous activity in the organism-environment system, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 33(4):335-342
Jarvilehto T 1999 The theory of the organism-environment system; III. Role of efferent influences on receptors in the formation of knowledge, IIntegrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 34(2):90-100
Jarvilehto T 2000 The theory of the organism-environment system; IV. The problem on mental activity and consciousness, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 35(2):35-57
16
What I am saying about rep function and simulation is their ignored half. Simulation of all the kinds can be understood in a way completely compatible with embodied cognition. Simulation can't be understood except in relation to presence. But the bare fact of discoupled sentient seeming says brain structure is in some sense the relevant locus. It's non-relational relation, which can be understood as readiness, but it is also - what?
We're larded through with simulation, it has to be accounted for -
Conversation is dynamically coupled dreaming.
Let me strike out boldly from the other side. The brain is the locus of sentient being in the sense that it can briefly sustain structure of kinds that are co-activated when we are engaged. No. The entire body and environment sustain the being of the dreamer; that is, the structure that dreams. The brain, though, is the locus of the seeming to see and move.
Let me say more about the sense of sentient being. In waking, the presence of world and body is given in the sense of sentient being. When we dream we are not sensing what sustains us. We are seeming to sense what in no way is sustaining us.
Alright. The embedded body is always the locus of sentient being, but sometimes sentient being puts on a little frill. It's like being mistaken. I thought I was being sustained by a helicopter over the ocean.
Yes. But when I am being mistaken some particular structure of my brain is the being mistaken, is the seeming to see. My actual embodiment is what makes it seeming rather than seeing. But whatever it is that is shared by seeing and seeming to see - that something is what I am saying is seated only in the brain structure. Is that right? Seeing is being in contact and knowing it, seeming to see is being in contact and ignoring it and being mistaken about it.
That's alright as far as it goes.
Back to the point: the means by which I am seeming to be in a helicopter are purely neural means. Particularity of neural structure accounts for, is the means of, particularity of seeming. The structure that accounts for the particularity is a subset of neural structure present - can I say that?
Neural structure is not isolated ever. This intensity of activity is the result of inhibitory activity elsewhere. This standing structure is facilitated by specific connections in many places. Can I say there is such a thing as the means by which I am seeming to see? They must include the means by which I am not seeing, ignoring.
So the means by which I am seeming to see are not just that. They are also means by which I am doing other things. The most that can be said is that there is momentary and evolving structure and it is part of the means by which I see when I do and don't see when I don't and seem to see when that happens.
I want to say there is a subnet by means of which I sentiently see and/or seem to see. But lo, that is representationalist as can be. I can think of it in a way that makes it a throw rather than an absorb - ie the organization that relates me to specifics of what is there - and in that way not an internal representation - though it is a kind of covariance - but still it has the representationalist feel of a determinate inner structure that is exactly the structure that makes me see or seem to see that.
This is very difficult and I don't know why it is difficult and my thesis is hanging on it.
When I see something as determinate there does not have to be a determinate means by which I see it. That's what Millikan talked about - attributing to internal structure the properties of what is seen. It's rep fallacy.
I have to think carefully about what I want from the notion of wide nets. There is a figure-ground in the brain. It's some way rather than another. What makes most sense is to think of it as through-circuits with contacts that contextualize to coordinate.
But what can that have to do with what I see when I look out the window. I have no reason to need to know those slants of roofs all together, and yet I know them. I had no reason to seem to feel the yaw of the helicopter and yet I did. There is grand superfluity of aboutness. So there are through-circuits in action - and in acting for purposes of sensing -but there's also structure having to do with all those roofs - the structure by which I see them to no purpose - and seem to see them to no purpose.
I cannot see anything without means. Whether I see simply or complexly, the means are complex. When I seem to see, the means are complex. They are right when they say, Don't think, though, that you have to accumulate a structure that is as complex as what you see. Excellence of seeing may be structurally less complex rather than more.
Imagining a percept is ongoing trouble. When I think about imagining I do feel as if I'm seeing a picture of the ocean from above. I'm imagining imagining, and imagining it that way.
Alright, but in the event of dreaming, is there a sort of shaped net that is the dreaming exactly as it goes on? And if so, is there, in seeing, a different and similar-shaped net that is the seeing exactly as it goes on? If so, is there something about both shaped nets that is the difference when seeing/seeming to see sentiently? If so, is it integration, synchronicity?
Okay, make up my mind. I bet there is localization relevant to how we are perceiving/seeming to perceive, and what. It cannot possibly be modular; it is loopy, diffuse, integrative, gradient. It is built across through-circuits.
I can't get this further. We're thinking of localization wrongly but there is relevant localization for action, and thereby, and also non-thereby, for non-action seeing and seeming to see. Keep watching for more on this.
17th Dec
I remembered to phone Luke around ten this morning. His cell phone rang in a restaurant in Cape Town. He'd had drinks and his accent is more South African. He's moved out of Cheryl's place. It's his 30th birthday. He said, Thank you. I said, My pleasure.
What I'm feeling about time is mainly how much more I know than I did. Six years ago the warm chocolate cake when Luke was 24. I hadn't met Tom yet. Thirty years ago the moment his new-born foot touched my arm. Since then he has become Luke.
I had been feeling I'd tell Tom about talking to Luke, about his photo, other things, and found him stressed about Christmas. I lose patience. I say, You're in conflict between wanting to be at ease and wanting to be impressive. Why don't you just fucking deal with the conflict.
It's not just that he goes into a spin and is ashamed not to have more money so he can look good. It's that he does not have genuine care and pleasure in giving so he'd have things picked to give ahead of time. He's sending me a card and photos of things in his room and a letter cobbled together in a panic. I hate being included in Christmas guilt.
I have more dead people than I did - Helmer, Janeen, Opa and Oma, Choy. What about that. It's as if who I am was formed with certain people around me and I don't believe they are not in the world any more. What happens now in some ways doesn't really happen.
18
- Descartes' strict dreaming alone in a room.
- I'm wanting to say, speak for the other side.
- The beyond-evolved body in the beyond-evolved world. Beyond-evolved in the sense that humans have rebuilt themselves and it.
- Who has control of how it is built?
- Who is it built to suit?
- Who has control of how people are built?
- Who are they built to suit?
- I'm wanting to say, speak for the other side.
But that is not what I meant to say. I meant to say, speak for my self in the journal, the life's long time of noting how it is to see, do, dream, read, remember. It's evolved and far-beyond-evolved.
I love the evolvedness and the beyondness. Make a style that includes the farthest-beyondness, don't take on the toy worlds of the philosophers' model railway rooms.
I love in my own evolvedness the way it resisted and sprang back from their attempts to rebuild me.
I love in my beyond-evolvedness the ways I can play with pleasure.
19
Oh day - here you are - I will sit down at the table, but not yet.
Why not.
Want something else, what. Don't know. An exit. Reading journals last night disordered my nets. Is being attached to Tom bad for me. I'm more sidelined, again, but I was desperate when I was unattached. Etc. And about the thesis work. Other people will figure it out, I'm not in a position to get anywhere, should I drop out when it's done. Etc. And about the journals. I want them out. I don't want them to die with me. But the slog of typing and editing, and then what format, and who'd want to read them. I'd need typists and a good editor and an agent.
And a background fear that I'll be diagnosed with cancer or heart disease and die soon.
Alright, in the immediate. Revising the preface. I've scouted various people I should have read, the aboutness externalists who'd support chapter 2. I found mirror neuron stuff for ch 7. More about parietal-premotor for ch 5-6. The mirror neuron-Broca's connection for 8 and 11. I've glanced disdainfully at philosophy of place stuff and seen who cares about epistemology for ecology.
Now I should work, but something's wrong. My heart/solar is tight as it hasn't been for many months. Something is wrong. I've been hiding from this sensation. I feel it now but what is it.
- Do you know what this is about
- Something to do with Tom
- His crumminess about getting me a present no
- Something I don't know about no
- Did he lie about something
- That's how it feels, do you know exactly what the lie was
- Can you tell me in a sentence work, to recover, and temper, the child
- His work no, yours
- My child was hurt by the way he was about my present
- Little one will you talk to me yes
- Does your heart hurt yes
- Will you tell me about it YES
- You think Tom is mad at me yes
- Does that scare you no, hurts my feelings
- Is there something you'd like me to do yes imagine, heartbreak, unknown, early love
- Do you mean yours yes
- Do you mean in relation to Tom yes
- You were feeling happy and secure yes
- You saw how incapable and uncaring he is in relation to his child yes
- You felt he couldn't look after you yes
- Would you like me to buy you a nice present yes
- Is there something you want yes, Tom
- You want something from Tom? Tom himself
- You want to be with him yes
- He's not a very nice daddy yes
- But he's the only daddy you've got yes
- Leave it now? no, go further
- Will you lead me anger
- I'm angry no, she is
- Are you angry at me, little? YES, you come through strength and happiness into isolation
- Do you mean working no
- You're angry at me for being apart from him yes
- If I'm with you will that be just as good YES
- I'll take you to a movie tomorrow YES
- Do you want more Christmas cake yes
- And keep you company YES
- Would you like me to tell your stories yes
- And stories for you yes
- Would you like us to write a book yes
- This one yes
- You're interested in this one yes
- Something to do with Tom
He spends my Visa-card Anderson's gift certificate on three plants I despise - lurid particolored houseplants, coleus, croton and iresine. I say I'm speaking for the kids and I want to say we are delightful and he should be delighted thinking about giving us presents, it's insulting when he has to force himself to get us something or other. He says, Look kids, I'd like to do the big tree, roaring fire thing, but I can't do it. I'm doing the best I can. I say, But Daddy, we really are neat.
What he does is indulgent, he misses the fuss they made of him so he makes a fuss about himself, being incapable and stressed and guilty. On my side, I see evidence that he's incapable, he can't look after me. But it isn't really can't, being incapable is his game. It's won't. He doesn't want the responsibility. He's afraid responsibility will take his life.
20
Now I have to get into it, get pointed, live clear - all that optimizing discipline - but I like it when I get into it. I'm wayward and hanging back. Don't I believe in it? I did last week. Which I am I, that doesn't? An I that stuffs her mouth and wants to escape. A faint backroom whininess. Alright what do I want to escape from?
It turns out to be escape to - a wider faster less pegged-down kind of creation. So I thought about the big project.
Congeneris Foundation for Land and Mind. And got some bibliography together.
Here's a thing I catch a glimpse of when I'm planning.
1. It could go the way of the bland mush of Parabola whose topics are riveting and content unreadable.
2. There's something about getting it organized that makes me want to dump it.
Conclusion: there needs to be a well-spring of dissent and contradiction.
21
No, it is can't. Tom is disabled. He can't take on any sort of enterprise without unbearable stress. His flash temper makes it impossible to have jobs other than the kind of job he has. The Golden West is right for him. He's burned out, he has no ambition left except to be safe and loved. He's on hold until he dies, but he lives in love and enjoyment and does good. He relishes the moment. He's grateful.
What does any of that have to do with me. He's my romantic retirement. That's alright, I think. I can be proud of the relation because it's a live match.
When I look across the room I see under the closed door a small strip of bright turquoise. It is dim cold eight o'clock daylight in the hall.
-
A rage when I saw his Christmas letter. Two paragraphs of excuses and self absorption. The photos are alright but they aren't a gift. Even now when I think of it my breath speeds up. A sign-off compliment. I feel sick thinking what I'm settling for. Then I think his real present was what he tried to do for Paul, what he put himself through trying to do it. Thinking that makes it possible for me to think of him without contempt. But really my heart's enraged.
Then I think of Rob's perfect present. And then I think of Rob last night disapproving what I think of as leadership and he thinks of as control. Tom doesn't hate and fear my aggression.
Don't be enraged, think of it as pitiable, it says.
- Is he ashamed of it
- There's a crucifixion in it
- Is this pain his
- Are you sure
- Is none of it mine some of it is
- Should I ask him what he'd give me if he could
- I would hate what he'd give me
- Because it would show me he doesn't know me
- And if he doesn't know me he cannot love me no
- He does
- By patiently trying and enduring to learn
- Do you want to comfort me
your child
- She's saying, he doesn't care
- The way my dad said it of his
- That sorrow is just primary
- It means they weren't seen YES
- The evidence is
- The mothers didn't see them
- They don't have mutuality in them
- Isn't this making excuses for them no
- Because I'm not denying
- There's a crucifixion in it
Artists tell me what I am, not usually in the sense of describing me or telling a story about me. They tell me what I am by making something I can use. The event is most valuable when it's a cognitive fit. This novel knows me. I know myself in this novel, this painting. It is a great joy when the fit is particular enough.
If artists tell me what I am, why do I need cognitive theory? What do I want from theory? I often don't know myself in theory.
A creative eagerness. Cognitive theory is changing, it is changing in many ways at once, it feels like it's going to gel. Being part of its coming into changed order is a way of knowing what I am, because it is changing in me at the same time as it is changing in other people. Theory is where art is happening at the moment - reading other people, picking up, recognizing, how it has to go. A complex systems metaphor of theory formation. Something is being made, at the same time in me and in other people. It is fun to be part of it. It won't be the final theory.
And this theory is going to be relevant as cognitive theory has not been, to how art is made and used, and to the people with that bent. The artists will still be ahead, but the theory being made will give them a way to talk about how making is made. Partly by getting rid of the unworkable wrongness of the old ways.
This is the way to take it. I want to know what I am. Cog theory has not told me. Artists tell me, making tells me. Not so much as description as in making something that fits. Here's the point about theory at the moment. It is being made in a way that fits. It's where art is at, at the moment. Being part of making the theory tells me what I am. It's being made in a form that will be useable by such as me. Because it evokes kinds of knowing that were mute, socially unsupported. This theory makes it possible to evoke kinds of evidence that have been ignored. But can this theory have anything to give the making of complex cognitive artifacts? Of course, like any theory of materials. Like gardening.
22
Ray said he's thinking let's just do it. Think of it as a book and get it ready. What it needs is integration between the neuroscience and what I have to say about aboutness. Neuroscience in smaller chunks.
And then what it was like to talk to Nathalie. She is sharpening. She's speaking well. A way of thinking of grammaticalization as a function of a population of speakers. Operational metaphor, I said. Exactly, she said. Just like that. I often don't know what she is saying but she seems to know what I'm saying.
Now I'm excited and can't work. I have to go pick up my check and get Ray to sign the orange sheet.
23
Waking thinking about how working is done. By seeing that something doesn't work, like inner rep, being irritated with something. By twigging that something will be how it has to go, the way it was with language being social management. By being in the middle of it and seeing more, working on some part, combing notes, making outlines, and organizing, reordering.
I have never seen the process described. I have never felt the process described. It is all, always, recognition in the midst of some kind of doing. Like placing rocks: it has to go there. A sense of fit.
That's how the invention goes, a welling-up in many places, like boiling in a mud-hole. But now I have to go work in a different way. I'm somehow less able in these days, strict close judgment to cut and amend the text there is.
The tone in the old version is good but it's very spare and dense. The tone in the new writing isn't good.
What do I want the preface to do? Tell them I am working outside the disciplines. Tell them what I want in theory.
- Is the problem that I'm not smart enough at the moment
no
- That I don't know who I'm writing for no
- Differences of state no
- That I'm not honest yet no
- But there is a problem
- Do you know what it is
- Can you help me through it
- Will you lead me something about losses
- An interference? turn for the better, is delayed, by not coming through, of aggression
- Hesitating to be aggressive enough no
- Is it aggressive enough NO
- I'm worried about saying
- I'm worried about saying bad things
- Is that what you mean no
- She's right that it's not authoritative enough
- Will you tell me what you mean look for, coming through, passage from difficulties, by persistence
- I haven't been aggressive enough with it
- Go at it with more energy
- I used to be able to do it without so much deliberation
- Would it help to do yoga no
- Would it help to do the gym
- Estrogen every night no
- Cut down on stimulation
- See people in the evening no
- Be clear what I want each section to do
- Is there more you want to say no
- That I don't know who I'm writing for no
-
"One morning he was riding the Bullet Train, with the utterly silent alpha-wave flicker of the countryside rolling past the window, when, he says, a geometric idea floated into his mind. Suddenly, there it was in front of him - a formula so well-shaped, so compelling that he knew he had to write it down."
A piece in Saturday Night, Kim Rossmo inventing a program for geographic profiling. "I analyze crime sites, and work backward from them to find the criminal's home base." He calls the program Rigel from the star in Orion.
"Variables such as distance-decay functions, buffer-zone behavior, and 'Manhattan distances' (the walking distance between two points, as opposed to a crow's flight)... The result is called a 'jeopardy surface.'"
Relationship between buffer zone and least-effort principle can be geometrically calculated. Right-handed criminals turn right if they encounter a wall. "If they are pursued, they will break to the left."
What about this story. It's a story about coming to know. Not his moment of getting the formula, but the longer story of a smart person making himself a theory that works.
It's my beat: stories about knowing.
It's also land and mind. He figured out how someone with particular motives will see and use a place. But that's for later. What I am struggling to judge is what to say about what knowing is like - what coming to know is like.
24
What was it today. I worked this morning but not much. I'm scared of the first chapter - is that it - I'm scared I can't do it. I'm working too early. It has been raining every day. I am going days without speaking to anyone. Dumbly resisting going back into monk discipline again. Inventing but having trouble judging. Love the clean house, clean bed. Daydreaming the California house, wanting the light at the windows.
25
Why am I having so much trouble revising? I have blocks of text I like but I don't have a clear drive through the way I do when it's good first draft. I don't know how to get a clear drive in a patched thing. It's worse than that. I don't know what I'm saying. I feel mentally damaged.
Get structure from honest overview and shattering the structure, it says.
The first section is half-baked and has good writing in it. That's why I'm having trouble with it. I have to keep going to the outline, keep clarifying the outline over-all.
26
It's raining again. I woke at 5:30 and refused to get up. Now it's 9 and I'm refusing to work. Write about Cheryl yesterday. Domestic Arrivals is in the dungeon of the airport, low-ceilinged, windowless, crowded, with the luggage carrousels grinding enormously in the center and people packed together and stumbling onto one another in the narrow periphery. The arrivals doors are on the far wall, unmarked and low, and there is nowhere to sit or stand to watch them. I found a plastic crate and turned it over and sat on it. The moment of appearing. That's her. She has spiked her hair, it's red-brown, she's wearing a striped sweater in many colors, she's gaunt but very rosy.
I took her to my house and we sat on my bed for six hours, was it. She was in Louie's spot perpendicular to mine, and again and again I'd see her one way in profile and then completely different when she turned her face toward me. How to say this. In profile she was beaky, sharp, nose and tooth and chin chipping away at life on and on in miserable necessity. And then the face she'd turn was tragic, sexless, gnarled like the join of a branch to a trunk, so asymmetrical it was as if a line had been drawn, and - fascinating to see - each time it turned, shining in wrenched, gnarled, tragic joy.
She spent the spring reading about the Jews of Europe. She keeps up with the art community, talks to the eminent, goes to movies alone, has won a second A grant.
What was the most interesting thing in the hours. A skirmish in which I could see the use of my work. She said perception is mostly imagining. I said, absolutely not. She said, but we're full of our wants and needs and we see what we need to see. I said we aren't full of them, we are structured as them and of course we see what we need to find, that is what seeing is.
She says in the eighties they said nature was part of culture but now they're saying culture is part of nature. Place is big.
By the end of the evening I was seeing that she is a young man, or if not young, a man of a small thin blazingly mental kind, an achieved, artistic man.
She wasn't interested in anything in my house. She didn't enjoy the color in my room, or notice the lamp.
-
When I'm stuck, go to body feeling.
27
I turned on the radio and heard women singing In the bleak midwinter. They were singing it informally, as if they were at a kitchen table, but musicians at a kitchen table. The voices were overlayered in a way I can't describe. Single socks in a drawer is what I'm seeing. It was Jane Siberry.
Tova asked from the back seat of the rented Buick, Do you have any sib-lings, Tom?
They were at the Cove at sunset. There were burly surfers, forty year olds on eight foot waves, smashing their way back through four foot foaming break, said Tom.
28
I'm having nights where I wake every couple of hours and lie there. One of the wakings this night was from a dream that I came into my back room and found the right window boarded up. I suspected Trudy because it was the window that overlooks them, but as the dream went on I found the Choys reroofing and rebuilding. I protested with tears. I am an artist, I had my bed under that window. Now that end of the room is dark. And so on, at length.
My right eye is my photography eye, but I don't have close focus with it now. Is that what it means to have it boarded up? My right eye is my real-world eye. My left eye is my text eye. Cheryl makes pictures with her text eye.
- Is there more you want to say honesty,
come through, graduation, of feeling, love woman
- Do you want to talk about what happened with Tom
- Is he going to learn something from it
- Can I leave that to his process
- I want to know what hit me, was I feeling what he was feeling
- Are his rages always pain and fear
- When he amps me out it's the intensity of his pain
- It's not that he's hurting me
- I was stupid not to foresee it
- Is there anything else you want to say about Tom, turn for the better
- There will be
- About work, going into body YES
- Is it going to go better now
- Opening the right window has to do with honestly coming through to completion in feeling
- And that's what it has to do with Tom
- It's better for the body to be like that
- It's what drugs are good for
- So my question is how
- Without Joyce and without drugs
- Without being in love, without hormonal surging
- Will you tell me balance in the midst of change
- Is that a way to uninhibit
- Will you explain integrate and balance forces by tempering the unconscious
- Feeling is there and unconscious
- Not inhibited from happening
- Right-hemisphere segregated
- So it means bring it to threshold
- Going into body is one way
- Are there others
- Chanting
- Tell me the best way for me deception
- Being betrayed no
- Something bad no
- Deal with deception
- Self deception
- When it happens
- He should use emotions to think YES
- I should use thinking to feel YES
- Is that what's meant by tempering
- Say to myself, what am I feeling, and let the right eye answer
- That's knowing about feeling, not feeling it no
- My photography has been seen feeling YES
- Does that mean it's not good
- Has it been what I wish to feel
- I love the image
- I use the image to love
- This is core land and mind stuff
- Are the photos over-ordered no
- Should I find publication for my photos
- What I need to know is, do people not like them because they don't have a connection with nature and are afraid of it YES
- Or because there is something wrong with them no
- But there is something wrong with them
- What is wrong is the use I make of them
- To love in safety YES
- So are they wrong as art
- The fixity no
- They are dishonest no
- Will you say they are pious
- Sentimental
- Representations are not the thing
- Worshipping an icon rather than the thing YES
- So is there a good function for photographs no
- The feeling I have for the photographs I could have for the thing
- Is that the point
- Talk to Cheryl about this
- When I was working with the garden I did have it for the thing
- Art has to be made in awareness of participation
- Like that image of the edge lines
- Do you want to lead me from this point decision
- You want me to make a decision
- In relation to art
- A decision to give it up
- Does that include writing theory no
- Is my right eye supposed to be boarded up no
- An enlarging on the right side
- Will you tell me what happens to the window it has children
- That row of babies across the front
- I evaluate old stuff and get rid of it
- Get rid of my archive of photographs no
- Find a photo agent
- Give up on the garden video
- Don't imagine art grants
- Don't be on art panels no
- It is closed and has babies? NO there are many many windows born of it
- Do you want to say more losses, completion, withdrawal, art
- When your losses are recouped you withdraw from art
- And become a teacher no
- And become what unexcluded
- Do you mean I die no
- Is art always substitutional no
- But you want me to withdraw from art
- And what is the profession of my unexcluded self something to do with anguish
- Do you mean everyone's no, your own - make, children, ego, withdraw
- Something about childish ego withdrawing
- Childish pride
- Anguish made childish ego withdraw
- And art was built on that
- When I saw it was so I stopped making art
- Rightly YES
- Childish ego closes the right eye YES
- And art babies are born of it
- Is that what you mean
- Recouping losses means finding them not undoing them
- Do you have anything you want to say no
- I feel unsatisfied because I want you to announce a great destiny
- And all you're saying is don't make art because it's substitutional
- And I'm already not making art
- So is there any more to say keep processing
- Yes but do I have a great destiny YES
- Will you tell me doing what common construction
- Of an understanding of mind
- Okay
- Do you want to talk about what happened with Tom
What is my actual method, shall I say I'm making theory as if it's art. Yes. More about that. A preference for shattering the structure. Method of doing / method of presenting. Method of doing is recognition, state shift, divination or self-collaboration, reading as collaboration / structure-borrowing, sorting/fanning, tracking uneasiness, evading some of the difficulties built into the manner of analytic philosophy, reorganization of structure awkward in that cognitive manner. I should talk about it as a way of gelling differently.
Method of presenting: 1) manner of speaking will automatically restructure reader who can tolerate it; 2) giving practice at imagining complexity building ability to imagine embedded/embodied/distributed/multifunctional. And then other things will become obvious. Neuroscience chunks - say that's what they are for.
30
Working so slowly, still chapter 1. Hours awake in the perfectly quiet house twitching with little anxieties that find me lying down. Stiff this morning. Now there's a drum machine beat and the kids are thumping in their boots downstairs.
So I go back over the last two weeks with the green pen. What I see is the liveness of my not-public thinking voice. What if I could make it my public voice. What I thought then was that I should dress differently. Better, more expensively, but also in a style that I would make up. Soft pants - I can see the shape. Colors. It would need different shoes. Gym energy.
The point was an I-want-to-say futurist style - but I also don't want to say futurist, because it would be just contemporary, an invented but necessary cognitive style. In the realm of that chrome-sounding music. Philosophy's necessary style, the mind that can do it.
- the golden west volume 21: 2000-2001 september-january
- work & days: a lifetime journal project