the golden west volume 23 part 1 - 2001 may-june

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 17 May 2001 The BC NDP collapsed today. It looks bad for the environment and the Indians. There's no opposition. I sat in the polling station this aft waiting to vote, watching the very old, the drinkers, the addled, the weird, the pale podgy poor standing in line to register. Someone got them out. Jenny Kwan is 500 ahead and will probably make it. 18 What I dreamed. I was in a field that had been a garden once, looking at what was left of the bushes. There was a tall flowering plant we were trying to identify. I said a --- orchid. I stepped through a gap in the hedge and saw I was looking at Peter Epp's place, the tall grass of his yard. I'm in his house looking around. It is tall and empty as a barn. Three stories high, with a brick ceiling faceted at the eastern end. There's what I first think is a very fine hardwood floor with narrow boards. It's linoleum with seam ridges. High on the walls at third floor level are several large paintings with big frames. At ground level fireplace mantels and small alcoves with old things in them. At the far end of the room - I come into it at the southwest corner, it stands E-W - is a door onto a deck beside the creek. A cove of the creek has been deepened and is full of clear pale blue water. I am surprised to see more and more of that limpid water, a wide sound with yachts. In another dream later I am talking to my father about organic wheat farming. I am explaining that he could dress his soil with the leavings of some local process like flax oil pressing. I'm telling him what I did at Nora's. At some point I notice I'm sitting with my arm over his shoulder. Left arm. When I talked to Tom last night, when he was talking about work, I said, Do you want the upper hand or the upper air? He said, I'll settle for the upper hand, and then he cracked up. He laughed on and on. When he came out of it he was so smart it daunted me. That's new - his laughing. Are you going to tell me what Grandpa Epp's place is     Is it bad that it's empty     NO Because it used to have other people living in it     A lot of clear water     Those dreams are always a portrait of state     The space is unified     This dream     patriarchy, process, graduation, observation Grandpa Epp's house the house of creation     The house of creation now stands empty of influence     YES And on the edge of clarity     YES Does that mean ready to move in     Is it mine     YES Is my ownership related to friendliness with my father     YES Could I touch my father now     YES I've processed patriarchy and graduated to clarity     Is that what it means     no Will you say it another way     conflict, truth, male, heartbreak Conflict about the truth of male heartbreak     I needed to understand the heartbreak of the monsters     That left arm was forgiveness     I've processed patriarchy and graduated to observation     And that somehow allows me creation?     It allows me to give creation     About prepositions. I haven't thought enough about them. I'm just using other people's stuff. The cat on the mat. I see the two things together in some way. Mat on the cat. The on instructs very little. I have to know what on would be like in that instance. Do I see two things, look from one to the other? I definitely see the subject more than the object, there's a focal point in the subject thing. What do my eyes do about the mat in the first instance. It's just a vague thing. What do they do with the cat in the second instance. I have to look for it and it becomes foreground because then it's a foregrounded thing. The on tells me to see two things. I don't see a background to the two things - no, for the cat on the mat I see a step. If I move my eyes I can see a doorway. Door was open. Step was one. All of it from a particular distance. - Louie was in the corridor lying on her back fighting with Nancy on the phone, and then she opened the door and came into my room where I was at the desk with my lamp, working with the land and mind papers. She said, It's so quiet in here, starting to have wet eyes. She meant, It's beautiful in here, and I love you in your work. Louie holds back. My room at night, the blue, the yellow, the rug, the white, the lamp, the long table and its piles. Later in the kitchen she said the way I put Tom's photo with the Aegean field of column stones was good, the dark blue of both. She hasn't said so because she doesn't want to say nice things about Tom. Friday morning, milling. Don't want to lock into work, want more of the free end of the day. Marianne Williams notes - have all come true - "restore her value to the world" - "we restore love and act on love and witness to love" - let technology and intelligence work for that. 19 The form of social autism I have - sitting in the bath this morning thinking why I don't stay in touch with people in power positions - having made a connection I drop it. I stay in touch with immediate people, Louie, Tom, people who keep it going, but the rest drop out of memory. It's the split between love woman and work woman. Work woman has no sociality. The woman I saw on the left side, head and shoulders, old, dark, sad, hugely responsible, wintry, isolated. Looking at descriptions of university jobs - what is it about them feels so wrong - they feel like slots - I'd have to bone up obediently on a lot of stuff and not be able to reorder it so it made sense. And I can't teach technical courses. I should be writing, but shorter things. I should be directing something about land and mind, making a website. I could like to teach if I didn't have to fit in. I'm scared of something. There's some kind of lack of fit between what I think is possible and what I think I am - is that it? It says no, but there is some kind of lack of fit because nothing clicks. Is it worth trying to work at this with you     Is there the perfect job     Do you know what it is     In academia     In business     Freelance     no Does it have a salary     Is it artistic     Would I need to find a patron     no Would I find it on the web     no Word of mouth     I don't know what to ask for     Is it research     no Does it have to do with land and mind     YES Go ahead with the project as I conceive it     YES And be paid for it     YES Does Gabriele know about it     Is it like artist in residence     Feature Being about and make land and mind     Would they write in an artist in residence     YES Is that as much as I need for now     Ask for a lecturer's salary     20 Sunday morning, sun on the floor. It's still so cold I need the heater. The windows have hardly been open this year. Here I sit. Seven thirty. I'm wanting to pull in a big breath and sink to the core - see the point in the big world that I should move to. Is that the way to think of it? Do I have to find it by arduous explicit search? - Was there something to see that I didn't see? I opened the door on an old woman in greenish goggle sunglasses, matte pink powder on her withered cheeks, a thin neck, dowager's hump. A little skeleton in narrow shoes, her voice the same pleasant rasp as when we were girls. I so much didn't want to know anything about her. I kept feeling mean for not wanting to know more about the condo, the son who calls at Christmas and Easter, the job, the trips. I was discouraged by the dullness of anything she had to say. She says she knows a gal who ..., the gals at work ..., a lot of people lost their shirts on leaky condos, her old car certainly was a workhorse. Did she think we had a pleasant time? I tried to tell her things that would help her understand why I won't phone her. (She did have a wonderful photo of Peter and Luisa among young poplars.) She was cheap with the tip. Was she starting to try to witness to me? I couldn't be sure. She was saying with some agitation that people are searching for spiritual life outside the church community. She had a nice smile that lit her blue eyes. Bony cold hands. Next to her I felt robust, meaty, and young, though my hair is partly grey and hers a very even dull dyed brown fluffed and hairsprayed at the top. She was wearing earrings, a fine chain necklace, a pearl ring, quite an elaborate black and gold watch. Her jacket was one of those mauve and turquoise nylon shells with a sort of embroidered band. It was very strange the way she knocked at the door in her sunglasses. I can't see you, I said. 21 Is there more to be said about Ellen Guenther? What happened to her? What lack brings someone to choose a jacket like that? Could Louie have made something of her? She looked starved. Her father had a brown head solid as a nut, with keen black eyes; her mother a sparky slant-look in a fine-boned face, and a thick waist. They were farmers with intellectual interests, musical. When I asked again why she'd phoned me she said her father was a man who was interested in people, he reached out to people. There was spirit in her parents and in my grandparents. They battled. Why isn't there in her? I didn't hear love in her for any single thing, although she did say weakly that she likes to get in touch with a place when she travels and not just stay with people. She liked the Grand Canyon. Neither did she say she dislikes anything. She said God hates divorce. Twice. Her parents were religious but they had selves. What kind of life could have given her spirit and substance     a life that accepts death, shares pleasure, deals with betrayal and loss She did what she was told     The conditions of spirit are not the same in her generation as in her parents'     22 It was beautiful last evening driving from the airport. There were the mountains blue and small in a line along the north edge of the delta. There were the towers of soft leaves on the boulevard. The greens and blues were standing silent in open, open space, in pale gold evening light. I was liking the muscularity and rhythm of driving, looking in the mirror, signaling, shoulder checking, pushing across into the next lane. The car window was open and I heard the motor growl in acceleration the way I haven't heard it since last fall. Meantime Louie and I were not liking each other. Louie was gone into her worst subself, that thick heavy stupid righteous being who speaks in a guttural Germanic accent. I said cautiously, Do you hear your tone? She said what that person says, hostilely, Your tone is not lovely either. I had said my say and come out of being offended, but I could see there was no talking to her so I shut up and drove. There was the advantage, I was thinking, that I did not have to hear about her trip. Here's the question. Why does Louie still have so unclean a defense? Why was she coming from four days of holiday so ready to drop into stupidity? Do you want to answer those questions? No. Do you want to answer a different one? Yes. What's her illusion, she thought I was saying her yoga is mediocre? Yes. Was I? No. Is it? No. But it's not affecting her well. Yes. Because she's holding out in some core? Yes. She's doing it for money rather than transformation? Yes. She doesn't wish to be transformed. Yes. Is there any more to be said about this? Yes, work to graduate her. Alright, what else. I woke thinking the Mennonite self is stunned into a kind of nonresponse. I'm thinking of my mum too. A blankness. Frank didn't have it. It is a blankness in relation to the physical and emotional presence of the other person. More? Yes. It's from social control. By someone in particular? A small group of men. Tribal? Yes. It's control to preserve a culture in which people like them can be in control? Yes. So it's stupid. Yes. Frank didn't have the cultural tools to name it. Neither did my dad. The boss men are people who made a cynical decision? Yes. They didn't believe but they saw the use of it? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. Was my Grandpa Konrad one of them? Yes. It's the meaning of the secret lodges, etc. Yes. Did Grandpa Epp see it? Yes. And opted out. YES. Religion for them was an entirely cynical use of mythological levers. YES. It's not about money, it's not about cultural survival, it is simply and solely about maintaining control? Yes. That bespeaks a deep despair. Yes. Which comes from male rupture. Yes. So Grandpa K's tears when I rebelled were tears of powerlessness not tears of piety. YES. Did Oma know it? Yes. In the end she knew it all. YES. She laughed. I know the liking of control. I absolutely do. At its best it's in creation. This is the answer to the other question I had in the air, about my early notebooks, what it is that's wrong with the mind in them. It's still wrong in the interview with Mike Hoolboom, though not in the parts I added later. It's unprocessed, disconnected, it says. 23 Walked to Harbour Center to the computers and found - by looking for something else - a whole book on motor theory of language - Robin Allott - and the Place paper too. And it nowhere - neither of them do - refers to mental or brain reps. 24 A yellow Apollo with flat handlebars. Steven Lewis ranting [on CBC Ideas] about environment, economics and politics. Pandemic, global warming, war, starvation, corruption. I say ranting although he makes sense. Someone who has a global overview wouldn't have to screech. Does my project have any relevance in the face of that     YES Because it asks what can allow people to love and care for their land     Nothing I could do could make a difference     YES I want billions of people to die     But I want to be alive     YES It is incompatible     Is it evolutionary pressure     YES Billions of people are going to die     But it won't be enough     Lewis's solutions presuppose rationality     Is weather catastrophe necessary     Should I be on the side of the death of irrationality     Many beautiful spirits will go down with the irrational     There'll be banditry     That means repolarization of gender     It cannot be stopped     YES Could the irrational all kill each other off?     YES Is North America a sort of ark     Do you want to comment     men, come through, delay, in sharing pleasure Bring the men through     It can only be done one man at a time     A woman has to have great leisure to do it     It can't be done at scale     Solutions that don't factor in irrationality aren't solutions. Educate the intelligent. Make a world for them, keep finding more of what can be used only by very few. Let the rest be subsumed in cultural order that uses irrationality. Make a permeable border between the two orders so the best can always find their way out. That's what there was and partly is. Can anyone come through     Are lies bad in every case     Is the jesuitical solution evil     Practically speaking, could a despot in Togo come through     Given the conditions there are     Do you understand Hitler     YES he was angry at truth, friendship and responsibility Could he have been brought through     Is there anything you want to talk about     action on deceptive judgment about responsibility: deep change, passage from difficulty, come through, to truth Feeling responsible for the world is a pathology     YES Alright, what's the truth     exclusion is searching for action and generosity Social exclusion is looking for a way in     Handle it in a doable way     25 A girl from Wyoming who had lived near an Indian village went east to college, and when she was a young PhD student at Bryn Mawr took an assignment to an aboriginal community in the Victoria River valley near the northern coast of Australia. It was the end of the dry season; the earth was red and grasses were yellow, gold, orange and brown. On the plains the scattered gum trees had strikingly white trunks and dusky green leaves. River and mesas provided a contrast of color and form: sudden hills moved snakelike toward the horizon, and a dense tree-green marked the path of the Wickham river. The sky was big, and immensely blue. It was the most beautiful country I had ever seen. Deborah Bird Rose, 1992, Dingo makes us human: life and land in an aboriginal Australian culture Cambridge Freya Mathews' ten-page summary of female standpoint epistemologies and what became of them in the postmodern attack. I am still a standpoint epistemologist in the sense that I think cutting off or coming through make the difference to whether one thinks of knowing as transcendent or participatory. I think that analysis crosses cultures. And I think that it is not a totalizing metanarrative, more a personally testable technique. I think women can work in a way that strengthens women's presence without having a theory that says all women are anything or other. Something about the position of the notion of consciousness in philos of mind. That it's a trouble to them because they can't make sense of it from a distance. Whereas much can be known by those who participate. The notion of introspection has been a notion of staring at <contents of consciousness> as from a distance. The notion of inner rep is essentially a notion of distance and separation. David sat in the kitchen with me as it got dark last night letting me tell on and on the story of traveling in Morocco. He didn't say mm or ask or interrupt, he just listened perfectly so that something beautiful could exist again. On Main at Carrell, in the hell blocks, a big middle-aged white man crossing the street has to walk around the front end of a huge new gravel truck that's stopped a few feet too far over the white line. The driver's a Sikh in a turban. The white man is looking up at the driver waving his fist screaming Fucking Paki, craning over his shoulder, following his load of belly, screaming on, You should be driving a camel, not a fucking truck. Oh what is the matter with Louie, she phoned me twice today, still mad, on pretexts. She's mad that I was offended, but I gave it up and she's still mad. You're still angry? I say amazed. Where would it go, she says tightly. Well Louie you could deal with it. 26 Spatial attention and memory. 1. structure, where he says memory I say structure; 2. selective activation of structure; 3. spatial orientation is a result of it and organizes it; 4. simulational orientation and activation; 5. metaphoric uses of it, ie not simulating presence. Simulational orientation is motor sim feeding back onto other areas. Prefrontal activity is entirely motor sim. Is there any simulation without motor sim? No. Prefrontal is how. The notion of motor structure <programs>. The behavior has temporal structure. That is, different parts of the body move in their various ways with different temporal relations to each other. Goldman-Rakic P 1987 Circuitry of primate prefrontal cortex and regulation of behavior by representational memory, in Handbook of physiology Section 1: The nervous system, volume V, part 1, V Mountcastle ed, 373-418 American Physiological Society Goldman-Rakic P 1992 Working memory and the mind, Scientific American Sept 1992 267:110-117 Goldman-Rakic P 1994 The issue of memory in the study of prefrontal function, in Motor and cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex, A-M Thierry et al eds, 112-121 Springer-Verlag 27 The way dreaming riffs. Two examples. Looking for my shoes in shelves and piles of shoes, more and more shoes, each - was it each pair? - noticed, and some examined. The process of examining brings features into being. A tooled leather boot, but it isn't a boot, it stops at the ankle. Second example. Looking at the thick trunk of a rose tree grown up through the closet of a house. A horizontal branch shows bruising where I tried to twist it off. Because I'm examining it I see the branch has been cut through a bit further to the left. I'm at the end of brain work today. Maybe I can do land and mind work. Here's Debbie's book, that I can't seem to settle into. I'm picking at it. What do I want in it. I'd like a clear passage I could extract but there isn't that. Yet. She has moments of outrightness I like a lot, obvious strong selfness. There's a lot I don't understand. She's clearly political. People spread out through a large landscape for 50,000 years without cultural mixing - they are the most primitive-looking people on earth and seem to have the most refined philosophy of land and mind. What's my question - absence and presence - what's their way with those different states - and what's the way to understand the dreaming - and why is it called that. Mythology - fabulous stories - the unexplained world - unexplained feelings about world-things - remarkable dreams - inchoate memory and value - inchoate recognitions - the power to imagine, dream, invent, the whole power of simulation, absent presence. Elaborations of any of these in storytelling or other presence/absence coincidences of that sort. Presences of absence, which includes memory. Gods. Powers. What's the relation of this polysemy, to the notions of life principles, how to conduct life. They are teaching stories with deep hooks - that happens with any religion, they associate rules with psychic powers. The notions of origins and physical principles of order go together. "Use the term 'Dreaming' to refer to a wide range of concepts and entities which are not all covered by the same term in their own languages." Philosophy? No. Cosmology? No. Natural philosophy? Yes. Because in an immanence natural history includes ethics. 1. Each part shares in responsibility of sustaining itself and balancing others. 2. A moral obligation: learn to understand, to pay attention, to respond. 3. Symmetry: in opposing and balancing each other, parts must be equivalent. 4. Autonomy of each kind. The gods bring language, rituals, songs and dances, special objects, and knowledge of tools, hunting and cooking. Each kind was a god. To share a shape or body is to have the potential to share a culture. The power of sites All kinds are conscious beings Places have powers to alter minds, as do all things. The polysemy of <dreaming> has to do with those powers to alter mind. Psychology and natural history coincide. The power of each kind to alter mind. Sometimes the power is particularly felt. There is always also the power of being about. Localities with a cultural character and a natural character, the two related in the notion of dreaming - localized nature-culture. I have responsibilities for three countries. Territories don't have edges, they extend out from a track. A plurality of promised lands, each with its own chosen people. What I feel with this stuff of Debbie's is my responsibilities to my countries, part of which is two unfinished projects, something with Notes in origin on CD, We made this as video, the Being about book and website, and the umbrella Mind and land project that includes all these. Frank after his life. Can I do all that? Is there an order of doing? Can I handle the business end? I need a lot of money and technical help, organizational help. Hunting and gathering people, basic to subsistence is knowledge of place Anthropology, "at best a search to encounter with others the fullness of our shared humanity" In a kriol, grammar and verbs remain fairly stable, lexical items may be from any language Each group regards its own country as the best understanding that life is a gift, and that respect for life's manifestations is the only form of reciprocity worthy of such a gift 41 strings ... sets of identities which cross-cut each other as the tracks cross-cut each other, forming elaborate webs and stories, so people assert their rights and obligations both to differ and to come together autonomous countries each node is its own center of the figure to be in a center is to have one's own perspective localities, defined by Dreaming presence, language, cultural practices, plant communities, ceremonies, and by the fact that there are people who belong there and take care Dreaming travels are celebrated in song, dance, story, and ritual strings are webs of connection, dreaming strings connect and divide, cross-cut and re-converge. The particular 'figure' one sees depends in large part on how one defines the context of looking. And as these strings are also songs and stories, the particular 'figure' depends too upon who is singing or telling, who the audience is, and what the purposes of the performance are. 52 distinct plant communities the animal or plant relatives of people human and geographical identity a human being embodies several spirits, at least one of which remains embodied on earth one shares flesh with country cooking the baby in slurry ... delivering it both from and to the earth confers rights to place When a human being is fully alive Yarralin people say that the person is punyu ... good, strong, healthy, happy, knowledgeable ('smart'), socially responsible ('to take a care'), beautiful, clean, and 'safe' both in the sense of being within the Law and in the sense of being cared for. I understand punyu to be a state of being which involves living in the fullness of life, maintaining one's own health, promoting that of others, and promoting the health of the whole world. Punyu - the fullness of life - is a state which must be nurtured. When Yarralin people talk of 'growing people' they refer to actions which include feeding, protecting, singing, and teaching. The term does not distinguish between physical, mental, social and spiritual being, nor does it distinguish between country, Dreamings, and people: these are all part of being alive. 65 can be reversed through inadvertent damage to country or Dreamings; they can also be damaged intentionally human beings finish and stay finished forever before Europeans dead bodies were placed in tree platforms When only bones were left, people returned to the tree and removed them. Finally they were returned to earth: placed in a cave in the dead person's country. Occasionally they were taken out and rubbed with fat and red ochre to improve the health of the country. As bones disintegrate they become part of the earth In this way country contains its own life, Dreaming life, and the traces of all those other lives that belonged to that country. Plants, fish, animals, and birds and people are all made healthy through the presence of bones. a sense of benevolent presence in country When Yarralin people go out hunting, fishing, collecting or simply visiting country, they call out to their dead relatives, identifying themselves and telling the bodies to make the country good for them. At night, camping out, we talk and those people listen Dreaming Kuning is the term for a species that shares country and responsibilities with a set of people who are related to each other through their fathers. With kuning, the nexus of shared being is country. share rights to, and responsibilities for, particular country ... a ground of authority ... a power 'Dreaming' has a broader set of referents than simply the patrilinear kuning People speak, frequently with pleasure - invariably with deep emotion, about the country and their Dreamings, ... they show little enthusiasm for articulating social divisions mostly they reserve 'Dreaming' for relationships which have a specifically spatial component responsible for the well-being of both their mother's and their father's country. They most frequently use the expression 'my Dreaming' and 'my country' to express these relationships. They had walked this country with their parents when they were children, and their father had taught them the significance of the area, admonishing them always to remember that it is their country, their responsibility. So this is a human being: sharing flesh with country and with other species; killing and taking care; loving life and required to die; born of woman, and of earth. To be located is to have a ground from which to know, to act, to invite and deny, to share and ask, to speak and to be heard. 106 locatedness identification with place Dream country is belonging. Every person has a place in the world in which they are needed, and in which they are 'healthy'. ... one night when I was camping in the bush with a small family group. Lying on the ground, with a fire burning to warn snakes away, the woman lying next to me told her father, who was nearby, that she had decided to leave her husband after many years of brutal marriage. In the dark her voice sounded hurt and bewildered as she said, "I don't know why, Daddy. He always beat me." Her father offered her his strongest and deepest consolation. He called place names, verbally traveling first through his mother's country, which is where his children had grown up, calling each water hole, each hill and creek, marking its extent and indicating the Dreamings. He spoke of places and Dreamings in his father's country, calling them by name. And he punctuated his words of comfort with this assertion, "All that, that's all your country now." 122 Knowledge is built up over a lifetime and it is the older people who have the most knowledge, the greatest confidence in asserting that knowledge, and the most intimate relationships to country. Ways of relating to country vary through a lifetime. From their earliest days on earth children are introduced to country, and some of these countries become familiar home places. From childhood people move into intensive periods of learning and traveling, followed by a fairly expansive period of asserting knowledge and rights to vast areas of country. Old people become increasingly like Dreamings, singularly fixed and enduring. While maintaining their far-reaching ritual obligations, they also become focused on the country in which they wish to die. the choice of place of death is a final statement in a person's own identity. 122 My approach is to look at marriage first as a matter of relationships between countries, ways in which people attempt to fulfill their obligations of providing a new set of owners for their country. Holding one's spouse in one's own country means the assurance that the children will be raised there. What I did today. Debbie this morning, land and mind thinking. Then Goldman-Rakic on the prefrontal, very clear, worth combing. Then bike to Harbour Center, print Canada Council pages, scan and fix images out of Fuster. Come home through very cold clear air - it's so cold! - cloud piles in sharp edges, cold blue, flamingo pink. The heater cord blew up, an incandescent flash. I'm lonesome, drinking orange peel tea. Forest fire in Alberta. These days I am back in my jeans. Here is part 2 of de Chardin on Ideas. A thinking earth. A large vision. The divine saying, this is my body. Noosphere, complexity and consciousness. The continuity of creation. Le milieu divin, as if air, "also the very center of us." To be attentive to this presence. "To establish myself in the divine milieu." "To offer oneself to the fire ... whom then can I adore?" Cosmological context for an ecological ethic. Human story and the universe story are a single story. "Those same powers are organizing the humans". Primarily cosmological. Gravity of consciousness itself. We are these forces reflecting on themselves, a sort of halo of thinking energy. Subjectivity within the whole. Exists everywhere in all nature. The superorganization of matter. What lies ahead of us maximal radiation of thought. 13 billion years ago, so much structure has emerged in so short a time. A deeper understanding of how structure emerges. Teillard believed the universe was auto-arranging. Teillard argued strongly for the coherence of knowledge. "I now live permanently in the presence of god." 29th Rowen phoned to say he visited the Co-op program at the high school in Campbell River and they liked him, they said he could write with a laptop, they said he could go into Grade 11, and that he could do a digital animation course. They gave him a math book that had all the grades from seven to twelve. Tom was delightful about this story. Joyful. These days Tom is joyful. I emailed him a jpg of me with my hands in Oma's dahlia bush. Two years old in a little dress, with a strapped-up fender and back wheel of an old pickup truck in the diagonal corner. June 1947. Did videocapture at InSight Post-production this aft. 30 Woke with two things: Mudras: the cognitive significance of hands. And a dream where I was at a post-production house talking to two men, one of whom was the older friend or brother of the other. I was there with some of my mind and land materials. I suddenly explained to the older friend that I wanted to work on it because people think mind is land and land is mind. He stopped in his tracks. I could see he would want to let me use his technical facilities. We were sitting squashed together in one chair with our legs stretched out parallel in front of us. Do I understand that? Technical animus likes the project if I explain it in a way I hadn't thought it myself. Technical animus is parietal probably, major and minor. He was on my left in the chair. People think mind is land = rep metaphor. People think land is mind = their physical explanations are psychological projections. Technical animus is L parietal     YES The night of the sleeping animals is all the little organs of the brain     YES So can you tell me who the I is     the conscious parts Sensory parts     31st Yesterday I bought a ticket, and I brought Being about up to date on the web. That means I put the monkey mother on the front page, added three chapters and fixed formats. It looks nice. It opens on the monkey mother's eyes. - The woman who has just now become president of Princeton is my age and was at Queen's when I was. Dr Tilman. I spent the afternoon working with the framegrab jpgs. A Trapline page with a beautiful 3-strip. What else is good, the stairs. A current page. What do I have for Origin - field strip, poplars, neither very good because the tape had warped. 1st June I'm in bed with all the lights on, though it's 8 o'clock and June. The day. What am I doing. - Website fixing. Got the jpgs up, fixed headings and such. I love the site. Today I had a stretched little moment with the poems - have to fix the spacing - something for we made this. Deliberate simulation starts with motor     Accidental simulation horizontal     Language, horizontal/dreaming     Should I think in terms of levels of source of structure     Should I go back and put an action section into the presence chapter. 3 June What Joyce said: 1) when you're blank examine the blankness with all your might, 2) do anything you need to do to get yourself into the game. Looking at journal Dec 99 - April 2000 yesterday and April-Sept 2000 today - (made $60 selling things at the Strathcona street sale today, with David) - noticing a bit of what happens when I am with Tom after our months alone. Noticing key points were still coming in the work. I can still write good stories when I get my head out of the bag. Such deep pain sometimes. Bookwork I do that I forget completely. I emailed Tom the photo where I'm two and have my hands in the bush. He got it. He said he's the bush. Finding that photo now like never having seen it before. 4th Goddard on the web. Thinking how to apply. Notionally it's all good but their language and images aren't what they say they want to be. 5 When I look at their language I think I'm too high end for them. This morning I've read Leaving the land, again. I marvel in different ways. It has the clear fresh quality of my pictures. It says it. I marvel people find the philosophy too hard, it is so simply put. I marvel that Phil had misgivings about me, having read it. Debbie Rose's second book, Nourishing terrains. She writes about aboriginal land management, fires, sanctuaries. (It's just striking me that the aliens are us, the settlers. I mean the fear and fascination is remnant history: it has already happened.) The system of country affiliation means there isn't war. It's workable order. Deborah Bird Rose, 1996, Nourishing terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission There is another story, how a culture actually forms when there are (the right number of people and) 50,000 years of uninterrupted development in the same place. Second thing, how much pleasure it gives me when Tom tells me I'm a wild thing, though very polished - stubborn, outspoken, righteous. He describes me, laughing in a way that shows he's happy he's got my number because things would go badly if he did not. This was in the context of me saying I was walking on thin ice talking to Louie, who is saying she's had it with my intensity. He seems charmed by my intensity and righteousness. 6 'Dreaming' - presence and fantasy - people who practice presence might have a global word for nonpresence of any of its kinds - history, mythology, memory, storytelling, actual dreaming, thinking, religion, art, philosophy, cosmology, law: fantasy systems. As if the puzzlement settlers feel about the term comes from being blind to that category for their own practices. Is their contrasting term explicit? My question is whether they use that term because they are a culture unusually, maybe uniquely, aware that fantasy is that. Mind and land. There's land, and part of land is mind with its two possibilities of being present and being absent. A system that has powers of absence most closely tied to presence, it seems to me - "intimate links between Dreaming, land and Law" - she quotes somebody else saying telling a story is telling someone the land, connecting them to the land. All the art forms are memory forms, none are inscribed anywhere but in the body of one who has the responsibility of remembering and reminding. Daly Pulkara told me once that his people are 'born for country.' In many parts of Australia Aboriginal people believe that the spirit (or one spirit) that animates a foetal human is a spirit from the land: an ancestral Dreaming spirit, or a human spirit (baby spirit) resident in a particular locale these beliefs promote special relationships between an individual person, sites and tracks, and Dreamings. These beliefs also situate people as part of the outpouring of life in the country. 39 their residency created the character of the land. Burning and creation of savannah, which makes it possible to walk easily, see tracks, attract animals. The notion of caring for country is quintessentially Aboriginal. Nowhere in the world is there a body of knowledge built up so consistently over so many millennia. Nowhere are there so many living people who continue to sustain that knowledge and engage in associated land management practices. It follows that nowhere in the world are there greater possibilities for regeneration of ecosystems, and for the development of a truly coherent relationship between human and ecological rights. 'Caring for country' has the potential to become an ethos of the settlers as well as the Aboriginal inhabitants of this continent. 84 What I feel in this discussion is that I am somehow a spirit conceived from out of the land and not from out of family lineage. I also feel I'm the only one in my family to be so conceived. Frank was also conceived that way, but not many are. I don't know what it means. Will you explain?     it happens after birth, a structural indecision that allows slow growth of observation So one isn't captured by ideology?     Alright, the day. I have sat in bed dwelling with Debbie's work until 11. Have to write the application to Goddard, ask permission to give references, and I have to go back to the simulation notes and get them sorted and start writing so I can finish that chapter before I leave. Joyce Murray is Campbell's new minister for water, land and air protection. Earning $110,000 a year. I'm starting Edelman's Penguin, maybe getting ready to make him an offer - I'll say that while I can imagine doing it, because I am likely very soon not going to be able to imagine it. 7 There is something very uncomfortable I have to check out - it's what I feel when I find institutions that agree with me - for instance Goddard's statements, or California Institute for Integrated Studies' statements. I feel queasy, icky, as if those things are mediocre if they are said, as if they need to stay on the other side in silence, as opposition, as if their institutionalization is a threat of utter loss. This has obvious bearing on my project. Part of it is that I don't want to turn soul into dead language. I don't have to write dead language. I can take care as usual. Am I right to distrust institutionalizing myself     NO Am I queasy about the thought of being inside     no Are those places mediocre     NO Is it internalized oppressor     NO Should I write a mission statement     And call it that     Lend my strength to those places     Are the old kinds of places more rigorous     no I want to join the highest prestige places     But am not welcome there because I'm as I am     Finding places that would welcome me feels like being demoted to Mongoloid school     The best have welcomed me     And the mediocre have welcomed me     I'm always uneasy with the latter     It's necessary to come to terms with it     YES Will you explain the uneasiness     you are looking for action to end illusion and come through Those places are genuinely radical     They have settled on something as a dogma not a process     I'm uneasy seeing what's process turned into dogma     Working with a place like that would be a different kind of dogma, but doable     Alright, which one should I do first. Mind and land statement of intention. 8 Louie was giving off sparks last night. She has a new car, which takes her from a little orange tin to a silver bullet with a velvet interior and one of those windshields that drops deep over a low dash so there is a lot of road to be seen. Definitely a class shift. And she is moving from basement to top floor south window, which is better but still not right - I didn't say - because there is a powerful light shining all night straight into the bedroom window. We sat at Clove and ate good stuff. Drank English beer. She had her hair in a pony tail and was wearing her prosperous Buddhist jacket. When she was at the counter talking to the restauranteur I thought I saw something more straight-ahead, less ingratiating, in her manner, as if she was taller. We didn't get to the bottom of what happened. We got this far: the state she was in resents everything and feels it must hold on to resentment or be lost. It is saying, it's hopeless, I'm out of here. The state I was in is saying, she's in an irrational state, it's hopeless while she's there, I must get out of here. She said she found my state male, closed, hateful, tight. I said she seemed half her size and very dense. She said I seemed twice as big and twice as dense. I was interested to realize that I've never realized her perception changes when she's in that state. She is with an authority and determined not to be silenced. What happens seems to be howling feedback through an unconscious system that has both of our conscious selves almost turned to stone, very minimal and immobile. That state cannot learn from this one. It's encapsulated. She has mainly only that capsule, and I have more than one, I think. There is outright autism, whose antidote is feeling; dislike, whose antidote is gratitude; escape, whose antidote is not staying but responsibility, it says. Do we go minimal because of that howling feedback?     It's necessary?     the conscious net shrinks to keep basic judgment. part 2 the golden west volume 23: 2001 may-november work & days: a lifetime journal project