| the golden west volume 22 part 3 - 2001 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6th March I'm 56. Hello day, blowing my nose still, fasting. There's sun on my head, on my palm when I hold it up. I see ridges like on fingertip skin. A shiny yellow-pink hand in sharp warm light that I can see has entered the flesh. Look how suited it is to this light. Sometimes the small heave of a pulse at the origin of the lifeline. It's my left hand. If I hold the fingers together it has the hard-skinned look of a primate hand. My friends have been dropping out of the sky. I feel I have many years left. I'll die at 82. That's my guess. 26 years, as many as there have been since I came to Vancouver. Awake at night I imagined myself in the pink-floored house writing memos into a laptop. Send a writer and photographer to Vanaja Ramprasad's project. I'm noticing an impulse to censor what this morning state says as too grand. But go on. I imagined a house seminar with Ramprasad, Le Guin, Debbie Rose. It's a mind and land seminar. Country. I show the slides from my country and say how I came to make them. Le Guin would read to us. The foundation hires photographers and writers to do beautiful documentations, and then it places them in magazines. It publishes books. Before a house seminar beautiful documentation has been given to everyone.
The day has gone by and Tom has not called. He's not picking up the phone. The machine isn't on. Last Friday night, was it, he sounded drunk. Is he in a bar? He said he was pleased about something, as if by something he'd bought and sent. I assumed. I didn't remind him because I wanted to risk it and know for sure whether he's able to forget. Now I'm scared. Not scared like I was.
7
- What do I want chapter 4 to do, what's the important thing. Some of the how of spatial engagement because it's the core of embodied aboutness. What is it about reach and grasp differences. What is it about place sense. I don't know what I'm doing in this chapter. It should be built around visual focus but I don't understand the saccade stuff. Reach and grasp are each built around focus. Reach shows the earlier system more. Grasp is getting toward representation. The contrast shows the systems independent and coordinated. The IPS area shows matrices whose order has not been discovered. Multifunctional is important. Mirror cells are important. Gradients and distributed, gradual, are important.
8 Dreamed I was finding my way through a rapid series of branches on a highway. I chose the wrong one and found myself shooting southeast on a road that first rose on a steep hill and then dropped fast. Below I saw a truck slide sideways, quite a distance, and then straighten and keep going. When I got to the crossroads he had been next to when it happened, I turned off, wanting to go back to find the right road. There was heavy equipment on the side road. A transport truck bearing down from the direction I'd come from. A piece of equipment was being lowered almost onto my car. I was watching from outside and shouted. I stopped it in time. 9 Ray says it's tremendous. The land and mind foundation. What I have is right but it's vague. I don't know how to start. Start with supporting people I've found. Document it. Start a donor list. For now it's private funding and publicity. Ask UCSD woman for a job. For now do both myself, later a fundraiser and writers, photographers. Start with a website, try to place in magazines. 10 It's 7 on a Saturday morning, cold. How're things. Went with Louie to Before night falls last night. Louie and I see each other at the ends of days, without energy, familiar and unfeeling. She feels my skepticism about her dedication to achieving always more extremely nonfunctional shapes of the body. I understand that if she's going to be a yoga teacher she needs to be in the in-est yoga crowd, and the most admired, but it costs her all her time, is not making her better looking, is not taking her to the next stage of her much more interesting talents, is compacting rather than liberating her spirit, it seems to me. Is a de-spiritualization, bourgeoisification, solidification rather than what I've always known yoga to be when done much less and not in that grasping spirit, a refining fire that makes beautiful, quick, smart, sexy, graceful and deep of intuition. Second thing: I'm wondering about Being about and the land/mind project. I don't have inventive energy for Being about, and I do, though I vacillate, for the other. Am I dropping Being about before I've seen it through defending and giving it, is it abandonment? My dreams last night seemed to say. Abandoning it for grand fantasies. It's as if I don't care about it, have no hopes for it any more. I slog because I have to. It is better than I imagined it would be, and yet I don't have energy for it. I'm doing dribs and drabs in a day. A subtle illusion that men are in control of its reception, it says. That's true. Okay.
11
- Down a level. Conversations like midlevel managers who have to deal with each other a couple of times a week, not showing all their cards, believing bad things about each other. Being glad not to be in pain, not alert enough to call the other out of it or investigate, a life without feeling, fantasy instead of feeling, is it a level of corruption, rather believe bad things about each other than investigate. Is there anything you want to say to both of us: Tom is looking for intelligent speed. Fight withdrawal by balancing the child. When there is withdrawal look for the child. Search for an overview of heartbreak and anger. Slow growth of responsibility for child's losses. Act for true unconscious betrayals. Tom's dream - fix his teeth, live in Mexico, new hotels, promote himself into concierge. His impatience. "I want to improve my money machine." The intimacy and trust and love, aimless bullshit, you call it and then the conversation is over, being called self absorbed. Unfinished business, punishment. Talk to the book before I talk to you, on my side, callousness, I believe he doesn't care and I'm protecting myself, I have been in a lack of faith. I don't have Joyce, I don't have Louie, I don't have any one who knows how to open my heart.
-
Let me try this just talking - I'm scared and sore - I'm just slogging every day - reach and grasp still isn't good and there are two more sections in chapter 4, and then I need to run through the whole again. I feel lost in the whole, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have the whole in my head. I'm crawling. At this rate I may not have got past section II when my money runs out at the end of April. Then what. My heart hurts. I'm scared. Then I'll have parts I and II and they'll be pretty good, but I'll have to stop, go on welfare, find some sort of job. I still won't be able to be with Tom. There will still be no touch or heart life. I can't go forward, I can't go back, I'm smothering in the birth canal. I'm scared. There's no one who can help me. I don't understand why I can't go faster. I have always gone faster. Is my brain dying? Am I working the wrong way?
I guess it has blown over but I'm lonely, still. Sunday night. I haven't worked today. I bore the struggle with Tom on and on and did what should be done in it but I didn't get what I need - do I? - compassion I think, like Joyce or Louie's seeing into the heart. What burst out of me was anguish of need. "If I find someone who likes me more than you do, I'm going to go for it." The book said I was being a baby and I saw it was true, and said so, and yet what am I to do when I am a hungry heart. Tom has no compassion for a child's heartache. He has no compassion for his own. I would love to be with a man who has compassion for himself and me, and so could be interested and curious about many things. A warm man. I can struggle with Tom and sometimes he is better. What is the truth about my situation. I don't want to say something harsh, like I used to. I'm better than I was, I don't rush to believe the worst. And yet when I offer heart and am brutalized I do shut down. The way he was when Frank died was brutal. My birthday was brutal. I haven't been freaking much when those things happen. I've been saying to myself, I don't really want to be with this man. I've been liking it when I don't care about him. I've been thinking I'm closer to being free of him. He doesn't care for people. He cares for the old men in the hotel. He cares about people's opinion but he doesn't care about people's welfare. He's like my dad in that. I've worked so hard to be with a man like my dad and now I'm with a man like my dad and I'd rather be with a man who cares about my welfare. But I'm with a man like my dad. I am sentenced to purgatory for my crimes. If I do my best, if I'm faithful with the task, one day it will be over. Is that it? One day I'll be let off the hook. I haven't earned a man who cares about me. I don't really like Tom very much. I'm sentenced to him for my sins. That's true, isn't it. I'm like Don Juan Mateus learning impeccability by living with a tyrant. One day it will be over. Is that the way to think of it? My task is to learn to have compassion for the man who cannot care for me or anyone. That's my task and I should be glad to be given it because I asked for it. I didn't know what I was asking for, but if I am faithful in it I will be more able in the rest of my life. I think I believe this. If it's true, I have to pay for therapy the rest of my life because I won't be able to stay alive in feeling if no one can see me. 12 I'm thinking there is something wrong. I'm in a zone where the work is never done. I'm in a nightmare. I had all my chapters worked out. I thought I only needed to check out the brain stuff and put the chapters together. That was in 1998 in fall in San Diego. I applied for the postdoc and didn't get it. I broke up with Tom. I expected just to be able to write. I kept going through my notes and making outlines. I couldn't write it. I came home broke and made up with Tom and worked in gardens. In fall and spring I TAed, got loan money, and tried to write. Found I had to make a new foundation in evolution and aboutness. Wrote it in the spring semester and then said, I have the summer and can write. Wrote all summer. It was very bad. TAed in fall, and in spring got loan money and reworked introduction and chs 1-3 so they read better. Now I can maybe get through chs 4 and 5 before I'm broke. That leaves chs 6-9, four chapters for the doc and a fifth to write later. Better if I could get it done. Half the thesis left.
13 I worked well yesterday, organized the last two sections and then could fix reach and grasp. I had concluded that I should understand I won't finish by April. It might take a year. I must find money for the summer and TA in fall if I have to. Send out sections. Begin to work on mind and land. Relax and work harder. See if I can get UI. It's getting good. I don't have to finish before I'm finished. - If he is lying about this one, it is over. I'm frightened. Barnes and Noble, someone called Liberdad, says The Anza-Borrego from A to Z shipped on March 2nd. When he said he was sending another one it scared me. Colin spoke to me today about my first section. What I say about artists he says is very wobbly. I am marveling at that. Kirk too. They hated what I said, which wasn't much and I never imagined controversial. So it's something about my stance. I'd have to send a nod to Derrida, he said. I speak in child simplicity when I speak as an artist. They maybe think of their artist self in terms of mastery, is it? Presumably many people do. If art is tapping early love, and early love is heavily denied, they won't like it to sound simple. 13th Frank lost his farm when he was 45, around the time when Rowen was born, 1986, a while after I last saw him, which might have been 1976 or 1977. The day he died he was calm. He sat with Marj and watched a Christian broadcast on TV. When she went to her volunteer job at the school he asked when she'd be back. She said she had a chiropractor appointment at 2. Throughout the morning he answered the phone when it rang. Three people spoke to him, the last at 1:30. One of them was his sister Judy. He put on his jeans and work boots and his old blue jacket. He set the stepladder next to some of his stuff stored in the garage, honey from his bees. The coroner said it was an expert hanging. He used electrical cord and tied eight knots. Talking to Marj was like talking to an imbecile. I said mm encouragingly and tried to listen through what she wanted to say. She didn't want me to talk to Sharon. She thinks Sharon would tell lies about Frank. The psychiatrist said he was very intelligent and therefore hard to help. She said, You couldn't bullshit Frank. Tell him the truth or don't say anything at all. I said I didn't think it had occurred to us to bullshit each other, there wasn't any need. Last October he arrived one morning in a terrible state. He had dreamed that he hanged himself. She took him to the clinic. He had electroshock six times in October and November. What happened to him was a failure of his culture.
14 I dream I am being driven in Ray's car which is an old-fashioned luxury car, very high off the ground. Under a sheet I am carrying a naked baby against my skin. It's a baby I'm taking care of for someone else. The baby is asleep in my arm, very relaxed. I notice I'm in sensual pleasure with the feel of the baby and other things. A man stopped next to us asks Ray if the baby is his brother. Somewhere in there Ray says I likely won't get the doctorate because they are changing the rules so there is a time limit. When we park Ray walks ahead. I have to make my way carrying the baby. At one point a little boy, five maybe, jumps up to help me at a step or barrier. I don't remember why but I see his eager alert face. Then I have to push through tree branches in a back yard. There's fruit on the tree, an unusual kind like loquats, though the tree is like an apple.
16 When I woke at night I was telling Jean Waite a story about Tom. I said it began the night next to the fence post on the ranch site on High Bar Road. 1994. I prayed for a strong heart. A year later whatever I had prayed to said to me, if you want a strong heart, my dear, I have a project for you that will exercise it. A year after that I was next to the stream with Tom. He had his head on my lap, telling me his real story. He climbed the mountain on his broken feet. We read the skeleton woman story on the way home. I put my rock into the stream. This doc is the second project that began at the High Bar site. I drove back to town to start school. What did I think I was doing. Making a living. I said I would do something about scientific visualization partly because I wanted to see the tapes, partly because I thought the men would want to fund it. I would not have been funded to do what I am doing, although what I am doing is what needs to be done. The men would not have wanted to fund it because they didn't know it needed to be done and would not have believed I could do it. Alright. Let's see if I can be as clear about this project as about the other. I know what the parts were: perceiving, imagining, metaphor, digital studio, audition, vis tapes, brain, math, connectionist philos of mind. I thought it was about spatial imagining but to be about spatial imagining it had to get to the ground of being about. So I went there faithfully and set spatial imagining in that frame. But now I still don't know enough about how spatial relation is done. That's my hitch. I'd know what to do with it if I had it. I'd say there's simulational aboutness using the same structures to be as if about. And then there's the different ways spatial simulation is used culturally. My frame is fine. I just don't know enough about how it's done. There's a hole at the center.
I need to do an outline that says what the major new ideas in it are. Maybe a box in each chapter.
17 Two things at once, Tom this morning and Peter Manning last night. Tom is wanting to say he is having sexual breakthroughs and has my number. (I've been trying to give it to you for years, I say.) He isn't telling me what he has realized but the word suspense is coming up and I think he may have got it. I'm supposed to think about what his number is. I think I know, but I have gone nowhere near it because I have been waiting to see whether he could be willing to learn mine. If so, then so, and we could notch way up. We should enjoy the fear, he said. Yes. Empowerment, he said. I am thinking a strap-on, a big one, a big black one. The thought makes me laugh and warms my bones and warms my zone. He has never fucked a woman in a way that gives her his actual sexual self, he says. That has to be true. Now about Peter Manning. There was someone next to Barry who looked so British it had to be him. Big eyebrows. Sideburns, curly hair. A portly man with beer puff in his face. Looked like a Yorkshireman, a hobbit. His piece was pleasure from the beginning. The large sounds had shapes and movement. Inner texture and foreground detail. They were clear to me. I felt I could see everything in the piece. There was nothing I didn't like. A very perfect sensibility, calm, exact. At the intermission I went directly to him. Barry was waiting to set up the introduction. I brought out my piece of paper. Sweet of you, he said. We can't have that, I thought. I don't know whether it's sweet but it's true, I said. He was standing next to me in the narrow space between rows of seats, not much taller than me, 5'8 or 10, not fat but portly, with a hobbit's round tummy. Grey tweed jacket, open collar. Mild British voice. His hand maybe a little smaller and cooler than mine. I said immediately that the difference between his piece and the student pieces was that there was more form over all and more detail. At that point, I think, he took off his glasses and held them so the right flange was poked against his right temple. He looked across the seats to the stage. He agreed calmly. I went on. When I said I'd like to talk to him about space in his pieces he said he would be glad to. There was a moment, I'm not sure exactly where it came, when he had turned back toward me and we were looking in each other's faces. What I was seeing amazed me, under or amid the effort I was making to direct the communication. What I saw was the person who makes the pieces, invisible up to then, or invisible to me in the Toby I had been seeing. I saw a young person, neither boy or girl, mid-teens maybe, very clear and calm, small-featured and slender, looking fearlessly and steadily at me. We agreed we'd talk on email. The intermission was over. We separated hurriedly. What I saw was the truth, wasn't it. He looked like that because he was seeing me. The meeting had the transparency of that look because I worked hard to call it there.
Tom said maybe we'll live in the Anza Borrego one day. I got specks of tears. It's too much to ask. To be able to walk out into beauty every day. I told Tom the story I imagined telling Jean. He felt it. Something else that came up. I tried to talk about the sense I've been having as I read the newspapers, that Christianity, as a culture, is rapidly becoming much worse. I see it as blackening and shriveling like a frozen potato. I've thought it must be happening to all the religions because the best have left them. It gave me a perspective I've never had - that losing me, all the versions of me, has been a catastrophe for Christianity. Tom and I imagined shipping all the Christians away. And Jesus can stay with us, I said. I believe something like that. I think what I do with the book and what Louie does, in as much as she does it with her intelligence rather than her rebellion, and what Tom is doing in his life at the Golden West, is Jesus alive outside the churches. Tom is not worked-out enough about religion to be able to bear what I said about my leaving being a catastrophe for the church. I could hear him fleeing. Does it mean I should have stayed in the church? No, it means we should think of ourselves as building where we are. Cultural quality for the ecological movement, I said. I'll ride with you on that, he said. [Electronic composer Peter Manning's In memoriam CPR, 12 minutes, octophonic, in the annual SFU electronic music concert] - [Notes from Trevor Harriot 2000, Qu'Appelle Valley, Sask: long grass bottom land nostalgia of the right kind that sounds an ethic of claims it makes on us the birth of our last child, Sage, five years ago journeys to recreate the world in movement over land What if we had allowed the Indians to become tribes of modern pastoral people ranging herds domestic and wild over the entire Great Plains? stories that can only be told when the snow is on the ground, with appropriate ceremony the grandfathers, spirit buffalo underlying fear of aboriginal entitlement the creeks a network of remnant native wildness The earth's crust on the northern great plains is still rebounding from the pressure of glaciers. authentic efficiencies
field biologists or naturalists leading me to research sites on their home terrain The camera has made our visual experience even more distanced and facile.]
19 I think I've got it though I can't prove or defend it. Say it but play it down.
|