the golden west volume 7 part 2 - 1996 july-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

19th July Four papers: 1) how does the brain do sound 2) how does the brain do metaphor, how should we reorganize how we talk about metaphor, what does metaphoric ability/action suggest about the brain 3) metaphoric talk about sound, metaphor by means of sound - a. Smalley's description of multiple evocation and music, b. Ligeti's and music as stone - metaphoric talk about sound, metaphoric evocation by means of sound 4) brain and 'metaphor' as self recognition, landscape and brain Here's a task: Rowen arriving just now and Barry laying down a deadline for 15th August for two papers. In a panic - will I be able to write with Rowen here - and sort of about Louie getting into such interesting sex, I'll never have sex again - and about whether to think of myself as going on with Tom - or not - I have no idea - have lost my cool now that he's gone. 21st Sunday morning. Rowen has gone back to sleep in his room. Birds in the quiet. The day's standing quiet and bright among the houses. 25th Thursday morning. This is what happens, I work, I'm seeing connections, and then brain fog moves in and I'm not moving anymore. It is a sensation actually of brain swelling and blur. It's my technical problem to find out how to get neural cleanness, stamina, back. 26 As if I don't need to say anything. I'm working. It's hot. Rowen is around. A lot of mail from Tom this week. He's talking and I'm not. It's as if I have no problem with him because I have given up. He sent Men who can't love to own his patterns: [summary of what it says] touching displays of vulnerability, fearless pursuit, a level of emotional intimacy, future-talk, sexual absence, does everything to convince you, contradictions, bed too small for two people, changes dates, no concept of what he really wants, doesn't think about it, too different, neglects to return your belongings, trains you by means of the phone, hidden agenda. Your response is typical: you go into obsessive whir, try to figure out what's going on. He gets you to accept therapist or mother role. They recommend: know he doesn't think like you, set the pace yourself, cut the fantasy, give your independence not your adoration, don't mother him, ask action not words, keep your other options. I said, You have struck me as chaotic. [bookwork summaries] You need a high-testosterone man to be able to fight against control. Better to work against inner control. High-testosterone men are not very rewarding to be with. They need to adore a woman but the atmosphere of femininity is disgusting to them. Their strongest emotional need is for approval from their father and their peers. They are lazy about learning skill with a woman and just learn the triggers. You should rather look for a medium-testosterone sexual man. There adoration works. You misunderstand this. Can't have good sex with a hyper-manly man     yes I want a fight     something like a fight "Man who can't love" is testosterone?     no, trauma High-test surges?     yes Does he use it as a drug     no uses drugs on account of it You are afraid of completion, you're afraid life won't be worth living, but it is your losses that make it dull. You went on as if you weren't mad at them. Because of your own lying about / unconsciousness of betrayal you everywhere expect to be betrayed. Discern: The man you project: ambition and success in writing Testosterone man: needing to stand up to control The real Tom: what he really wants A voice in the house, attachment, belonging, touch, health The work - struggle with romantic fantasy vs real open heart 28th Sunday night. Will I talk to myself again? I'm on the balcony in the velvet chair with the small light on my arm, the pillow, the page, one side of the palm. The sky is all open above and to the side, there is openness still, there's distance. Louie bought me a copy of Last tales at a yard sale this afternoon. Dinesen, Le Guin, Lopez, the breadth of myth I can sometimes feel in a story when I'm in love. There is something to be known about that breadth. There is a relation between myth and the sky - it is a feeling context. I feel the existence of Tom in wide time and wide space. A bit. That's correct and something's wrong with it. Look at the palm moving in a breeze, feel the breeze. The weather is shifting. These have been happy days. Rowen's beautiful temporary beauty in my house. The smoothness of his skin, his wonderful brownness, the specks of freckle finer than pepper back from and below the outside corners of his eyes. The African fineness of his neck and the deep round back of his head. His legs like thin African legs. He is judicious. There isn't anything I need to say about him. He has beautiful eyes - they are still the clean perfect eyes they were when he was five. He is eager for technical knowledge, mannerly and careful. He isn't angry. He still has big teeth. He's lightly romantic with me, rubs his brush of hair against my arm. I am not feeling enough to be able to feel his evanescence, what I should be noticing and asking. I am like Tom not taking account of what I have missed while I have been afraid to be larger. What could we do with a free mind that isn't hopeless? 29 [his letters] "Abdication of intelligence associated with the alcoholic personality." "The magpie, the sense of vastness of the landscape, the heat, the mercurial translucence of the stream and the sub-aquatic gloss of the cobbles in its bed." "At other times I think of the hotel as a kind of perch, not an aviary but a ledge on a cliff, and all these storm tossed birds, petrels come to mind, are sort of blown onto it dazed and feathers all out of order. All these birds are so stunned that they just perch, beaks opening and closing, with an occasional chirp or squawk until senses regained they lift off." A derelict writer, who said he liked to follow the order of my sentences as I speak them. When I lay down in the afternoon I shifted into the room behind the left side of my face, and there I found the sensation of home - I was on the road from our corner to La Glace, I was in Clearbrook on an afternoon in July. 30th This wonderful thing about Joyce. I said, If you were my mother wouldn't you say, "Ellie shouldn't be with somebody who has been zonking his brain all these years, she should be with somebody who isn't so sleazy"? She said, "No, why would I?" - She saw the adventure of it, she wasn't moralistic. She saw that it's interesting. She liked that he sent the book. She said she admired him for wanting to change after drinking from sixteen to fifty. That set me back: Wouldn't you admire somebody more who'd been honest all along? No. I was grumpily trying to show how I think it and she got right onto my interest in managing him and myself so I won't get seduced, ignored, lied to, cheated on, ridden roughshod over, again. That's not the way, she says - the way is not to manage but not to despair either, but to say without demanding: this is what I am, this is the kind of wanting I am. You need to hear yourself say it, she says. These last two days I have been hearing helicopters with pleasure. They are a chord sustained as it moves. The higher note is quite constant and the lower, which I feel as a dark scumble, rolls louder and lighter, wider and thinner, below it. A satisfying song about air. I want something here - I've been contented in these perfect basking days but I want to be singing too, as if by writing here I could move into the sky and on and on. I want to be wide feeling sailing, unrolling, riding, leaving a mark. I want to be grand and free in motion like the moon. 1st August Where are we now - a wind is blowing through the house - it's night - the wind has blown around two corners to get to my bed where I'm watching Tekwars under a bright overhead bulb - this is a movement of living air - it's fresh and free - is it too soon to be happy? Yes, it says. It isn't over. Will you tell me where we are     excluded children, slow growth, friendship, research I'm happy for that     YES This wind is carrying a few spits of rain. The letter today spilled over its book. He felt his chest open. He told two wise rich dreams. He raced on in his ownself telling what he saw he heard he felt he thought he did. He was happy telling, he was overjoyed with himself, his tailfeathers were blowing all around him in the liveliest wind. I was his best friend laughing with delight. There is a black rock in a fast creek in a clean northern country. It isn't a pet rock. It was a California rock and now it's a BC rock. It is happy where it is. There is a lot happening. 2nd Water pouring from the sky, pouring over the leaves, the grape leaves on the electrical wire, the cherry leaves on the street trees. Pouring onto the alley - the gravel, the grit, the grass, the tarred holes, the shopping carts. Pouring on my neighbour's garden, the grid of little bok choy plants, the matted mass of pea-vine fading blond on its pink ribbon strings. Pouring on the hemlock, pouring on the silver scales of the asphalt roof. It's Friday morning, eight o'clock. The neighbourhood isn't up yet. It's quiet as if it's night. I'll make another cup of tea and then I'll work. Scissors, stapler, red green blue and black pens, xeroxed articles with colored underlines, printed Med-Line abstracts, notes sorted into topic pages themselves sorted and ordered. Here I go. I don't want to. I want to sit around glimmering about Tom. Well, you can do that, dear, but then - "The first time I've closely read a book written by a woman." Today I saw a coyote as I was coming across Venables to the garden. I asked Brian whether he wanted the herb garden. I want to work in the wild area. The coyote had ears like a fox, was standing listening into the center of the playing field. 3 I came to a filling station where a woman was standing completely naked, very beautiful. She was unconcerned, washing her car maybe. The next time I came by she was naked still or again. So beautiful a body, round bum, round breasts, supple. Bent over drawing her panties over her ankles. Three or four men sitting on the gas pump platform to see her. A wonderful thing, numinous. Sexual feeling?     Used for energy?     pumping - Am I interested in anything in this brain/sound stuff? I've got what I wanted, which was a general geography of the brain. The most interesting new stuff is the detail of how <maps> work and how they should be spoken of. Less-known less-considered questions about sequencing. In relation to the big project is there anything in this stuff that suggests how a brain is 1) perceptually intelligent, and 2) metaphorically capable. I'm kind of lost - I've got too many notes - I can see how the first paper could be based on Suga and Konishi - a finer sense of a sense - but I don't know what to do with the second paper. I have about ten days for two papers. I'm afraid     That feeling of not being able to take in is fear     Will you lead me     decide excluded child will come through the writing The panic is hers     YES Something about the intelligence I need for writing     This panic is the child     YES I have been keeping her down for days     YES This happens whenever I have a paper     It's because I have to include that part of my brain     If I included her would I always be that smart     YES Do I have to be frightened to be smart     no Please lead me     you lead you Speak to the child       Little one come into my arms     YES (tears) (rocking) You're so scared     yes Will you tell me why you're scared     I'm scared you're going away from me Do you want to stay with me while I work     YES I need you with me to do the work     no Why do you think I don't     I'll spoil it   Is it true she'll spoil it     Please explain     she is a structure acting unconsciously, a reserve of strength But I must ask her to become conscious     YES   Little one are you willing to become conscious with me     yes   Is my vagueness because she is becoming conscious?     YES Should I lie down     Quite intense     YES That stiffness of resistance       Do you feel like you're with me now     yes   Will I be able to work now     Is there anything you want to say     processing, integration, completion, turn for the better You want to tell me about these papers     be responsible in the struggle with unconscious missing Will you tell me how     feel the energy of separation when it arrives When I'm working there'll be pangs     Will it feel like missing Tom     I should feel it as the child     Why do I have a headache     birth 4th Trainspotters - trash life - because they have nothing better to do. The horrible Olympics where resolute not-stupid people demonstrate what they think best to do - succeeding or failing at lifting 166 kilos over their heads. What I am doing is hard and so I imagine it is worth doing. What if I could do something real, what if I could find what should be done. Hello     just keep going What should I do when I think of Tom     think of him What is happening when that happens     conflict Between what and what     love woman and reserve I feel enslaved     the conflict enslaves you Love woman wants to be with him     NO she wants to be herself Is it my body     YES Wanting to be a woman     YES Will you explain the reserve     when you were younger you had to keep your father at bay I still have to do that whenever I write?     no you don't have to but it comes up I had to block distress about him     YES Because I'm using a part of myself that historically is him     YES Love woman is a defense against the father's aggression     YES Eroticizing it     So she comes up because I'm undefended when I'm working     That's why I got triggered yesterday     5 After I cracked two nights ago I physically shifted state so that I am waking early with my solar as if pouring a stream of force up toward my brain. I have been able to work longer. When I lay down last night to sleep I was anguished and as if disoriented - as if hanging on by a thread - I was feeling my connection with Tom as so impossible, so irrational, so dangerous that I'm near snapping out - I was imagining what snapping out would be. Yesterday I noticed too that I was driving as if I wasn't quite there. Dreamed I was moving into the top floor apartment of the large house I have dreamed many times before. It was the maid's room probably, is bare and poor where the rest of the house is well-built. It is heated by a stream of warm air out of a pipe near the ceiling. Louie sees the beautiful wood of a kitchen one floor below - I say no, that isn't our kitchen, we only have what's on our floor. - I don't know what either of these papers are about. I'm in a welter of detail. There are basic things I don't understand, for instance I don't understand how the cochlea works. I don't understand what it actually responds to. I don't understand something basic about the concept of frequency spectrum. Here is a thought: write about maps - arrays - 6 Yesterday morning after I'd been working two hours I cracked again. It was the out-of-touch hanging-by-a-thread feeling, more intense. I'm not describing it. It was panic of a kind that was making my senses slightly strange. I was trying to have the cards talk me through it but I felt I could hardly understand them. Then I thought they were saying it was drug withdrawal, my drug being Tom/fantasy. As soon as I understood that, I straightened out and then worked all day. As I lay down to fall asleep I noticed I am (as if) completely detached from Tom. It was like sneaking a quick look around - is the coast clear? Yep, looks like I'm free. Could I stay this way? Would I like to? I saw the grip of the drug, which has been tight against the whole air of my being. Somehow really working again. Today I stuck to papers about inferior colliculus and nucleus laminaris mappings until I got them. What I wanted was to be able to imagine more - but it's much too vague still to be able to see through it the way I can in other areas - there's something forming, and it's less than an image - less than a metaphor - a sense of where the interest is - it has shot past into more specific technical possibilities - that is the wrong way to say it - I can see that the terminology is holding me and them back everywhere - call it a target range map but in fact it's a slice of a through-mapping onto muscle control - call it a pulse-echo delay-sensitive neuron but it may be doing other things - something about a neuron passing 'multiple codes' which only means it does something with incoming response that ends up being different at different exits, and to very different effect - This aft lying down to recover more - went into left room of face - was breathing on the R and quite stiff - hard to hold to L against pull back to R, but then when I intentionally balanced L-R I got into a state of perfect transparency of the whole body - 7th Baby turtles struggling up out of the sand and jerking like automata toward the brightest horizon. They meet a ripple and it bowls them over. They struggle forward into the next dense element. Just that little programmed dash across the open. Tom phones because he's been thinking of me all day he says. What have you been thinking? Oh nice stuff. What? Nice stuff. He's explaining why he's phoning more than I understand. That means something but I don't know which thing of the things it could mean. He got a letter that was the best one so far, he says. That was the one where I got funny after I saw Joyce, "learning to drive your brother mad with noble poses." "The one where your therapist said we deserved each other." Oh yeah now I remember why he sounded nervous. It was because last Saturday I rose up and smoked the fax machine being offended that he called me a woman on a string. Lee at Circling Dawn still has a silver front tooth but is no longer an orange-haired fairy. A body stiff from neck to knee. Are you still married, Lee? No - she's separated. She was involved with a couple but one of them couldn't take it. She gets a spark in her eye talking about sex but I can't see her doing it. "What about you, Ellie?" 8 Try it this way - perceiving is when and to the extent that we are what's with us where we are. Imagining is when and to whatever extent, and in whatever parts, we aren't. I have been seeing that neural response is temporal entrainment with where we are, with what's happening where we are. But it is also selective spatial activation of one very complex total state out of many possible total states. That's 'tuning.' Is that what Gibson means? Resonation of a totality to a totality. Conscious experience is anyone's feeling themselves being that? Not really, some of what they are being they are not feeling. I feel I'm clarifying into a real knowledge of what knowing is. As if now I understand various things I've read. - Look at this - the relation of 1. the resource I feel a man is, who nakedly really wants me, and 2. the fact that romance is addictive. - It's night. It was a long day and went wrong partway through. Long ago at 4 I woke streaming some. Too early. Try to sleep a little more. Oh no - I don't have milk. I can get in the car and go to the 7-11. Fresh first dawn, white moon over the alley, waning crescent. Sky what color could I say (I was thinking), dove grey. 9 Pearl grey. Deep deep white blue grey. Happy. Why. Knowing how to sort it. Not writing yet, but finely sorting. What took so long. I couldn't read the auditory neuroscience papers though I could read them well enough to know there was something in them. Just this week I made the push and could read them. One after another. Why. Because I had come at them in relation to each other, from enough directions, and it began to jell. But then I still wasn't there, I was combing them again because I couldn't hold them in relation to each other, I didn't have an outline. I sort of had an outline quite a few times, once a day maybe, but I kept losing it. It's almost a question of emphasis. Coming through again today I saw I should put a ring around the notion of filters. <Maps> are graded filter banks. Scheduling effects are temporal filters. Connectionist rigs are self stabilizing cooperative filters. Any unit can be more than one kind of filter at a time, depending on all the connections down the line for the function names that fit. Filters can be multiparameter by having input that converges. Multisensory or sensorimotor filters are just multiparameter filters. Higher-order filters are filters that use the output of a previous set of filters. There are kinds of pattern latent in the peripheral sensor filter banks - all that is necessary at the bottleneck is just the sort of variation there is - a report of what relevant periodicities are present simultaneously (though they are not reported simultaneously), at what intensities relative to each other, and of the changes of those two variables over time - rates of change and rates of rates of change, and so on. And there are kinds of pattern that are emergent from the perceiver's interaction with those patterns - is that the way to say it? I haven't seen it yet. Sunday 11th At 5 was awake understanding how to show what the connectionist contribution is - the neuroethologists are showing where the maps are and how they come up through the brainstem. The connectionists are showing how they can form themselves as differential sheets by interacting locally and on to the next level or back to an earlier one. It is as if the entire brain from conception is being formed by the intersections of its in patterns. At the intersections of its in patterns. The same neurons can be doing completely different things because what they are doing depends on what else is happening - in all directions at once. Is there anything I really am interested in, in this stuff? I am interested in auditory function as an instance of complex differentiation in the central nervous system of humans and animals. [there it shifts into the paper] - I want to say something: I feel there is a space in the air on my right and you fit into it. It is something chemical or electrical. I like your company. I like having you around. It is not a quality of mind or character, more like an emotional temperature ... a vibe. I feel at home. But also this - I know it is way too soon to trust you. Even now I'm aware that you may be lying to me about two things that could do me a lot of damage. You may be lying about having quit weed/booze - (intending to quit one of these days, soon) and you may be concealing something about Lori. I wasn't expecting to have her show up again. If she phones you three times she wants back in. She is twenty years more beautiful than I am. She can wear high heels and she has sex magic (I have sex magic too but you haven't found it yet). If you are seeing/sleeping with her you certainly will want to hedge your bets and not tell me. I'd be foolish to assume you aren't doing that. So I am in a position where I'd be insane not to hold back. But holding back wastes my time. I already know how to do that. That's my quandary. - Writing since 6 this morning. I'm up to 14 pages. Maybe I'll finish the first paper tomorrow. Then one or two days for the other. Tom's voice was strange, spinning he said, the [Republican] convention. It wasn't his power voice, his manic voice or his relaxed light voice. It was blurred in the low frequencies. Something like that. Had a husk. No cigarettes, no booze, no weed, is it true. He gave in to coffee and wrote - he said. I dunno. Taking a break this late aft I arrived at the garden thinking, Ken will show up at the bees. He did. Point-nosed little English boy, amazingly young. He's forty-six? ­seven? Could be thirty-seven. He doesn't show his suffering: how is that? He was wearing wonderful logging boots with fringe over the toe. He wagged his face toward me to impose a kiss. I dodged and flapped my hand, hesitated over a hug, made it a hard insensitive one. Would Tom look as well as that if he were more of a vampire? Ken Sallit takes great care with his appearance because he must be constantly attracting fresh blood. He must attract fresh blood because he is so quickly ruined in his ability to feel the old. He is quickly ruined because he so fears his extreme addiction. He is extremely addicted because he is evading a well of pain the like of which I know. I have learned a lot since my days with you. Would you believe me if I told you? Keeping the love you find, a wonderful book, Tom says. That one and The dysfunctional family and The child within. But why is Tom broke if he isn't smoking or drinking? 12 Monday morning. A shabby night, a worn-thin night. Too much of the personal yesterday. In these working days I have felt physically amazingly well - a young body full of stretches and surges. I went out to buy milk and walked up the centre of the street seeing blazing shreds of cloud between the electrical wires. My body has been open sky. Last night there were little aches. Too hot with the quilt, too cold with the blanket. Hot flashes. A lot of dreams. That hostel I return to. A toilet overflowed. I looked down the pipe and saw a piece of shit clinging to the top of the pipe like a little animal. It kept trying to climb out. That's what was blocking the water. Jake's progress last night. Couldn't get used to how real it was, like the David Richards Adams piece. [Channel 4 three-part drama rebroadcast on CBC] - I'm full of creation today. I'll do the granular synthesis course next semester. Hands on. I'll make sound. Looking at the Menno Simon postcard I thought I could make a film about the face of the man whose face I haven't seen, what it was to be a Mennonite. I looked out the window and saw an edge of sun on grass standing half in shadow. I though I could make a film where I had a box frame with just an instant of some wonderful little picture like that, then go to black and come back to close-up grain detail of the picture. Do it again with a few more little pictures. Have the sequence tell about something, indirectly. Primed. Ready to go in any direction I get pointed to. It's a drug. Back to the paper. - About wrong numbers. Elsie, for years. Coincidence. The East Indian accent man today. "You have the wrong n ..." "Then sorry." "Okay, bye." Seven o'clock. I stopped. I'm not done. I've done the hard parts, the miles of slog. Headache. Twenty-five pages maybe. That's just the first paper. I've got the parts but not the elegant connections. It isn't elegant at all. It isn't really even organized yet. The stretch was in understanding the papers. I wonder whether it had to be as hard as it was. Was it brain fog? I read technical papers in neuroscience, engineering. Some of them were very compressed. I extracted their one most important concept and explained it in lay-ish terms in a page or less. I combed twenty, thirty? papers. I learned terminology I resisted for months: superior temporal plane, medial geniculate body, superior colliculus. I learned the difference between a gyrus and a sulcus. Eventually. And auditory stuff - I did sort out something about periodicity, formants, transients, match filters, notch filters, how the pinna could be a filter. Auditory maps I don't write well about empirical stuff - no, that isn't it. It's that a paper like this is too long to write in one sitting - that and I didn't know the stuff well enough. But what about the set theory paper - I didn't know that stuff well enough and it came out in the typing. The typing? Am I writing flat because - ? No. Those lucid and elegant papers for Kim were ten pages long! Representing continuity was only twelve. Brain and imagining wasn't elegant but it was - deep. Strong thoughts. Oh my friend me. Looking at Jake's progress I'm thinking of that sparky Irish kid in Philadelphia who was smarter than anyone wanted him to be. Not smart enough to figure it all out. Not well born enough so there was anyone to teach him. But tell my own story. [looking at photos] How does that face become beautiful when its two sides are not. Why haven't I seen that the right side is a sad doped thing and the left a contemptuous thug. His left side hates me and his right is zonked. Why do I look at this photo and see a valiant experienced soul who loves me? How is it in the boy - the right is sweet and the left is a bright goblin. What do I know about a little girl who was smart but not smart enough to know how to be smart. 15 Heart sore. It hasn't been sore while I was writing. What is this. The way tears come, disappointment, when I think of Tom. Something I'm not sure of, I am giving him what I wish I had. I'm aching to open up again and feel I can't. I was someone with him when I was a woman with him. And now I am not. I have nowhere to be a woman. But being a woman I was lied to, misled. I'm confused in this. - Barry liked the papers! He said I wrote well about acoustics. [included as Audition: an example, a section of Ch 3 of Being about] It is true. I wrote four pages that took me from five in the afternoon - was it? - to midnight, and then from five in the morning to nine: eleven hours. I didn't pause. At midnight my head was sounding brass, solid steel. I was getting underneath why I'm interested in the neural. I was writing without flagging the way I do writing the science - every hour or two hours I'd have to eat or walk around - because I was writing from my real base. I go to neuroscience to find support for my real base. I said the world touches us. I said it gets into us at the tympanum. I said we feel it in our tissues. It sounded sexual and I felt it that way. It was as if that sexual valence was the true base whose coherence was giving me flow. I thought of it as easy writing though four pages in eleven hours isn't easy writing. I thought of it as easy because stylistically I was doing what seems so easily done I've been led to feel it isn't worth doing. It's woman's talk, with canyons, deserts, seagulls, trucks, trains, the raised dot on a moth's wing - with love - in it. I forget the framework of physical comprehension I have built as the grid in which it stands. It's August 16. Let's do it this way: write the metaphor paper quickly, write the paper for Nicole quickly, and then do nothing but learn to be a composer. Learn to be an audio composer on the way to being a video composer.   part 3 the golden west volume 7: 1996 july-august work & days: a lifetime journal project