Vancouver 23rd October 1996
Wednesday, raining. I'm hesitating whether to say you or he in the next sentence. You left two days ago.
24th
Metaphor is being something in a way relevant to something else, in a way that is aware it is so.
Imagining metaphor I imagined two branches with the space between them sentient.
Coming back to this question I feel the ethos I've built, as if I feel its texture, the quality of its light. What I felt is its contemporaneity, a lightness of the air, like an architecture, spare, open, clear. When I stand within it I read anything differently.
Thinking of Tom from here I think of him as having taken me captive for purposes of his own, quite deliberately, by means of triggers he knows women have. I never wanted to be with a man who looks or speaks the way he does. Saving and serving him is nothing to do with me.
It says: love woman is pleasure, you're the provider. Marry, be happy.
27th
Sunday morning, slight rain, autumn in patches. Chestnuts and street cherries still green, though a dull dark green. Maples in full leaf but yellow. Acacia yellow on the outside, green further in. Street locusts, are they, bare to the branch, a few hanging pods. Street limes bare above, sparse yellow-green below.
As often, I am my house. There are two new chairs, good turn of the century kitchen chairs with wires under the seats stringing them tight. That's all I have to tell. Reading Langer, 1942. Her tone is heavy. She cites too many unknown men. There isn't the buoyancy of revision from a shifted center. She slogs. But she spots things - here are the three ways we mean 'meaning' she says, separate them and you won't be confused. She is sure of herself. Her citing is like friendliness. Her tone is her time's teachers' tone. She's not a modernist. She's not much of a writer. She doubts that music causes emotion: she thinks it alludes to emotion by evoking as-if sketches of it. She thinks of ritual in the same way, as if a sort of discussion. She misses the fact of global change of state. She's one-note maybe: furniture overwhelms the room, stabilizes her chemistry from all sides.
Dinnerstein's tone is Old Left: she's thorough, heavy, pleasant, penetrating, in the same way as Langer. There was something else, though - that Old Left sophistication which is, however, a heavy sophistication. I'm not getting it. I know it from books that were around in the sixties. It's pre-drugs. Something has lightened since.
-
Bobby Wong gave himself an enema, had a bath, brushed his teeth, sat with his guests eating food he liked. Was annoyed when one of the guests was late.
Said goodbye. "Jan-Marie, life has been so short! Can it really be over already?" Took the pills. In twenty minutes he was snoring lightly. Most of his friends went home. Two lay with him one on either side until he died at nine next morning. He had asked to be left forty-eight hours but the man he chose to be his executor couldn't stretch to it.
28th
My photographs are so persuasive. I've given myself images of a man alive in blue grey air so thick the focal plane is hardly any width at all. Within it whiskers show individual rimming his chin, silver hairs arc separately into deep space. Deep tangible space behind him, around him: his quality. He's old and beautiful. So beautiful. Bashed battered destroyed. Sensitive, tough, sexy, wild, sweet, intelligent, intact. A marvelous old human. It's not how he looks to me when I'm with him, although he is all those things.
29
I have love eyes today. Sat on the dock at Joyce's barge looking at what the water was doing with the vertical white stripes of corrugated metal on a boathouse. - There the phone rang. Louie was annoyed. It frightened me.
It was motion I couldn't follow, I could partly follow, I could sort of see what I couldn't see. Simultaneous different rates of movement, scales of movement, directions, qualities. All mapped dramatically, white lines on green, lines with edges, like painted lines -
30th, Weds
It's five in the morning. Winter darkness. Motor noise vague and continuous like nerve noise in the ear. Here I sit in my house. There's the train whistle and engine. Can I work? Am I lonely? Is anything happening? Is there anything I can feel?
-
Look at these photos of Rowen, so beautiful.
And here's the photo of Tom I want. Maybe this is a revelation. "Let's try one where I'm smiling. Do something." I did. I did! I had the materials to hand, the hole on my teeshirt shoulder. Here he is laughing. What he's laughing at is my left nipple. [*Tom laughing]
Alright, this is the picture I can put up and I won't get unreal. I'm looking at it with love and gratitude and dawning joy. "I'm so grateful to be in relation in kind of a mature way." I came back from Joyce and wrote him instead of here. This is a picture of his willingness to be happy with me. Why didn't I see it? I was somehow still in the habit of - what? Thinking an image is all I can have. It can't be true: I have a real living being who's my - my what - my own what - my attachment. Alright. We've come this far. With great bravery. "My demon likes courage and you've got courage in spades." We're both more real. I'm softening. He's less formulaic.
1st November
Crows from the east. Thousands. And then thousands more. Milky sky before dawn, a dull orange rim they were flying against. I was making tea. Last night in bed listening to Dire Straits, excruciated, amazed. This is the emotion he lives with, looks for. People create with this pitch. These touches of sound - knocks, tumbles, stretches - this mastery of touch. Where have I been. I wasn't ready. Howls of pain. So unlocked and inflected. The unlockedness was blowing me away. The precision was staggering me. I noticed myself skipping away from it. It's a gift. It's an atmosphere. It supercedes. I was saying, meet this for yourself, not through the thought of him.
I phoned. It was 10:30. "It's you" he said. On his bed reading The dispossessed. "Thinking of you furiously." It was blowing my mind, I said. YOU GOT IT he said.
Alright, daytime.
I was in a canoe paddling. It occurred to me I could paddle the way people do in canoes, straight down. I shifted position and dug down. Paul K was in the stern looking at my juicy bum, so pleased with my speed he was wanting to marry me. I was thinking, It's only Paul. Then, or earlier, the two-headed duck.
Woke in the dark thinking that if for now I'm alright with Tom, then I'm faced with the terror of the work. A sensation as if of coming out into the open - maybe I shouldn't say more than that.
2nd
As if I'm supposed to be working differently and don't know how.
Thinking about Louie and the unconscious. Louie is mad at me because I have been saying she is fighting dirty with Jamila. I am seeing Louie's evil in action - very determined and spiteful. She holds a long grudge by holding it secretly from herself, and then she strikes her blow by means of secrets. Jam doesn't know what hit her. Louie gets furious when she is found out, because her effectiveness depends on her cover. She feels she's being disarmed when she is found out. I feel her demon as a high-density dwarf. Determined. A child, I guess, compact, compressed, intent.
Artists have to be in touch with, in work with, the unconscious, so keeping secrets from them disables them. Louie's freakouts demonstrate that she's exquisitely sensitive to inner disparity of knowledge. But she doesn't take the route of good conscience. I think yoga forces the uncon, the way drugs do. Get the goods without sacrificing the defense, which is always a self-suppression.
What does this have to do with my run-in with Carole. That goblin Al Neil phoned me on Hallowe'en telling me to get my car out of permit parking or they'd have it towed. I say to Carole riding a wave of anger, Why don't you talk to me yourself instead of getting your ugly little thug to do it.
I like to be a dangerous woman. It's a rush.
But Louie is busy trying to figure out whether it was really me who managed her into her crash with Jam. It's true there was teamwork. I fed her Ja-Min knowing Jam would stagger. I suggested she should live there. I tore up and replanted the oregano. Last time I met Jam at the house I sneered openly, as if she'd fallen for bait. What else. I do want to expose Louie's two-facedness that has her everywhere thought well of. "Louie has piles of ego but she is smart enough to conceal it." It has been teamwork all around. Jam is so vainglorious she doesn't take account of her weaknesses and so can be harmed. Louie hides her vengefulness and so it is easy to enlist it. And me - I certainly have it in for Jam and for Louie in her aspect of femme rivale. They mostly did this one themselves but it pleases me. It pleases me to see Louie's demon exposed because it has used the same tricks on me. I am getting a measure of her method. My weakness has been (it says) that I think the story is over. Jam is still harming me.
- Jam truly harmed me no, you harmed yourself
- I shut myself down in my time with her and I'm still angry
- Are long grudges always about that
- Should I try to find what I lost with Jam
- Why to recover love
- The flow of love is what is stopped
- The flow of love is a relation to the uncon
- Is there anything I should do about this right now
keep asking
- I shut myself down in my time with her and I'm still angry
Thinking of judgment as hatred makes what kind of difference. It makes sense. I don't mean to be pious. It's exciting. It suggests I could have a good time when I meet spirits. I could meet them with curiosity, safety.
- I just did. It's as if love is a nearby freedom, and the only hitch is uncertainty how to sort the difference between this free position and the suppressive ways we were taught something that sounds like it. As if it would be easy to do it wrong - but maybe that is nervousness about old dangers.
4th
I made a reservation for December 17th.
Here is a strange story. David Birch in his so-far unending campaign to get something out of his folks talked his dad into going with him to hear Robert Bly. His dad said, No I don't think so. David said, I thought it might give us a chance to have a talk, Dad. David's mum put in a word. The old man, he's eighty-three, came around. The night was wet. They were crossing the road to the hall. Hold on, Dad, there's another car coming. The old man doesn't like to be told what to do, kept going. He was in the middle of the road trying to halt the car with his black umbrella. He wasn't killed but he was badly hurt. David was on the sidewalk holding him in his arms. He's been living at the house nursing him since. He's feeling better about things. He thinks the problem with Rosalie is going to work out.
-
What is it about this photo. I look at it as if I don't understand that he is looking at me. The right side of his face scares me, and the fact that it scares me thrills me. It has an animal quality, as if fur, and no pleasant expression. The eye is strong. I don't know whether the mouth is angry. The left side is suffering. It's a grand face, what they call tragic. If I soften my eyes I begin to see my own in it.
5
I miss your vision, i.e. micro/macro observation/extrapolation of the sublime (at your best). It's that vision I want to feed by showing you my world which of course is simply coming at your world from a different perspective: cross-reference, a better hologram. And, it's my vision that needs to be fed by yours. Together we are coming to our senses.
One last thought on integration. Yours, not mine. I like the love woman / helicopter gorgon intellectual split - but it is not a dichotomy. I said I loved your vision and that it affected me. It was the mergal of love woman/gorgon lady that I was talking about. It allows you to see deeply but with loving detachment. That's what takes my breath away - all that brainpower - acumen - discernment plus caritas. When you're on that wavelength you see to the depths and you're stunning.
P. S. It did not rain today. The sky was truly china blue with linen white clouds. The sun was warm; hot even. All things chlorophyll were jumped up including me.
Work: I've spent days edging into one idea.
6
I edged toward understanding that I might dream Louie as love woman not because something is speaking when I dream, but because Louie in me is rooted in love woman. Cognitive roots. Young feeling and mental structure.
7
I understand that some structure that's strong can touch off at night just because - I'm seeing the thready little channels cut in beach sand - it is still there, a path already cut. But what sets up the relations of figures, the story? Did the image tell me? Tributaries. Then a dream would show strong structures and probably some weak structures touched off in passage.
11
My car has something wrong that sounds very bad.
12th
Sandra [Semchuk] at Nicole's opening last night [Gingras, at the Western Front] saying the kids say nature is just representation, she can't bear it, she can't bear it. I say, Where are they getting it, the other instructors? She says, It's all around. She wants my writing. She refers to my work once a month.
13
Luke helped me take my car to park at Rob's and stayed telling about his trip. I was under the lamp sewing, stopping to look at the atlas.
The first night he got to the coast west of Eugene. Manuela was sleeping in the back. He parked off the road, got out of the car and walked up over a dune. There was a dull roar. He expected to see the ocean. Instead he saw miles of dunes in moonlight, unending. He went back and got Manuela. You have to see this. They climbed a dune so big it took them half an hour to climb. Sat at the top looking over a terrain like Africa, he said.
Meantime I was making him a cup of tea and heating food. Brown rice, lentils and pine nuts Nicole brought to the meeting last night. "It's an Egyptian dish. We used to have that" Luke said. There was something about having on hand food unfamiliar to me and familiar to him, and handing all of it to him on a plate where he sat in the green chair.
When the trip was told he talked about Manuela, and that was when he began to relax into the chair, put his head back. A woman he hadn't realized didn't know how to pee behind a bush. On the way home she got in the back and slept for a couple of days as he drove through Idaho and Montana.
I don't remember how I got there but I asked about the time in Portugal when he ran away from Roy and Sara. He was ten. He calculated it, he said. He asked them to stop the car because he was going to be sick. He thought he'd just walk off and it would take them a while to notice. That's what happened. He walked into a field. That's far enough, Roy shouted. He kept walking. He could hear Sara, Go get him Roy, he's just being a shit. He remembered the trick from TV where you duck around a corner and they pass by. He got behind a bush and that's what happened. It works! Telling it he was holding up his thumb toward me as if I were there, the invisible companion of the time.
He kept walking. It got dark. He lay on the ground and went to sleep. He woke under an orange tree, the oranges somewhat egg-shaped with thick peels. He ate three. In the dark he'd been walking toward a glow in the sky he took to be the nearest city. He kept going in what he took to be that direction. There was a river. He tried to catch tadpoles and terrapin. When it got dark again he was hungry and cold. His plan had been to get to the city and from there back to England. There'd be a way. Crawl under a tarp on a truck.
Something scared him and he ran from it. Found himself near a hut on a hillside. He was sitting on the stoop afraid to knock. Could hear people inside. Finally put out his hand and rapped. An old man opened the door. Amazed. The hut was miles from anywhere. The woman gave him something to eat. They were talking fast in Portuguese. The man took him outside to a kind of tricycle scooter with a platform. Luke rode on the platform. At the nearest little town the police put him into a car and drove him to what was in fact the city whose lights he'd seen. But it was further than he'd thought, maybe an hour and a half in the car. Roy was at the police station, completely pissed, when he got there.
15
I have a bad aftertaste from something I read yesterday, a Jewish man in his sixties marrying a girl in her twenties. I wonder if I can say what was so horrible in the book. The facts. He wrote ingenuously, showed what he is. The beauty of the land the beauty of his mother's breast, he said. His rapture with his young wife's breasts - but only in the right light. His irritation when she didn't wear a dress. The way he needed her to present herself in the way that would get him to infant bliss, and then his fright and anger at being thus open to control. Conflict he handled by splitting it so he gave fantasy, the addictive surge, to someone else, her labor coach. There was the Jewishness too - the sight of this sexual princess on the phone with her friends, millennia of cultural coaching behind her. Fucking and flattery he's helpless without and helpless with.
I kept thinking it's his generation, and here is the question: what has changed? He's like my dad - how is it I'm feeling it - inexperienced, blind, cleft down the middle of the brain, like a newborn rat - that blind unworkedness of feeling - retarded. He adores women in a way that keeps him lonely and leaves him stupid. Robert MacLean. Ken. That kind of man is romantic. Tom has been like that but he isn't now. That calculating right eye reads me not sexually but humanly. He assesses me as an animal but he doesn't stop there. He knows he wants a companion for his flight out over the ocean. But: in a way he doesn't assess me as an animal. Jam did - now that I think of it, Jam was another of the retarded lovers. Okay, I'm not at the bottom of this.
I'm sexually nowhere. He hasn't got that lover's attention. I've never felt that gasp of desire thinking of him, that I used to feel when I thought of Ken biting my neck. Or the sleekness I'd feel during the week when I'd been with Rob on Saturday night. With Tom it's been all emotion. I did like, when he was here, feeling his hot squirt through the shampoo suds - that sweet vulnerable look of his mouth when I started to touch him. My body hasn't trusted him. But it can: the way, the day we went to the Quinta, I was like a pond registering every least stir and vibration. That was purest heaven. And it was specific to him. It was openness through the heart. Is this the difference? Those dopey adorers are closed at the heart? I think. Then does the form of their aesthetic attitude have to do with closedness?
- Book says most of what I've said is wrong. That I'm sexually nowhere with Tom because he's unreleased. That what's wrong with the adorers is that they don't do the emotional work. That the guy got attached to her labor coach as the unexpressed other side of her, work woman. That adoration is correct. That he lied in the book and actually fucked the labor coach, so there's a falseness about the whole book which is felt from the beginning, and that's my real objection.
16
Jam phoned. Her worst voice, stiff, facetious. We sat in a restaurant in the Chinese mall on First at Renfrew. I was scrappy and irritable. There she sat - deafer, blinder, puffed in the face, a silly straw hat, knickerbockers and thick socks, a sort of plaid jacket with elastic at the sleeves, bizarre haircut. But I hardly saw her. I didn't want to take her in. I was trying to talk about humiliation and she was making up nonsense about our having really loved and respected each other. She was what seemed to be contemptuous on what was really a platform of respect, she says. Why does she want it that way? She was really contemptuous.
I said when I was first with her I'd been open-hearted as a discipline. She didn't want that. She wanted to have it that my open-heartedness was our open-heartedness. What else. She was lying - she said she makes a good nun, body is a fetish, her real body is the family, desire in diaspora makes mystical bliss. I said What does your body feel listening to you say it is a fetish?
I don't know what to think - she's gone to dereliction, denial, despair - what Joyce says - people prefer deprivation.
When I told her about Tom, suddenly she got clearer and younger, simpler.
It's an irony that when we were kids, we were pushed to give up the body and when we are grown up the stresses of the body are such that we give it up voluntarily because it's hard. It isn't the body that's the temptation.
She sees things, she says - a covered bridge, cartoons - in a hole in the visual field. There's a name for that.
17
"What developmental psychologists call a 'strange' development, i.e. an atypical developmental pathway created by unusual interactions with the world."
19
It's winter morning. There are smudgy clouds lit up behind the hemlock. I see with a thrill that the sky is blue above them. The sound of an airplane fading. California is in the air. I just understood what it means to say that. The way 'the air' is a pun of being. This is beautiful to know. When I say 'the air' I see sky but I mean also the transparent medium that is the brain: it means itself. "California is in the air:" I am two places at once, the means by which I am them is a mixed means, a mixed meaning.
I'm stopped in a kind of grateful and humble amazement at the beauty of this vision - what it can imply, how internal to the moment its extension can be, as if the space inside an instant takes a breath. How the physical can reward its own faith in itself.
With this realization is the realization that I will write, I will say, I will show, and people who read and hear and see will read and hear and see with their own means; they won't get it, though I say very plainly.
-
Leah phoned from Vernon to tell me a dream in which her father is insisting she stay a nun. Her robe is Irish linen, white, eyelet embroidery, more like a wedding dress, she thinks. She is trying to break away, he is dragging her forward over high ruins like aqueducts. They fall into a river the most beautiful clear turquoise blue. She is afraid to swallow water: if she swallows water she'll be baptized and then she'll have to stay a nun.
-
I think it is coming around through:
- - the Orpheus video is theory illustrated
- - the journey was to find feeling and understanding
- - I can use my slides
- - which always knew what I now can tell
- - the journey was to find feeling and understanding
Today this is what I'm singing: Belladonna's on the high / way.
Inner gender and rescue. Theory is marrying the one who always knew. Love eyes.
21st
A light in the room like Alberta in winter, snow on the roofs reflecting in. Clouds softened by white light from below. Stopping and looking around is like celebrating. My heart is a warm nest, fur or down within it. I'm coming! I am making a dress for you, love woman.
Listening to Jackson Browne. I feel the danger of happiness. I'm happy. This dress declares me so nakedly. Ellie dares to love a man. It's the most complex pattern I've ever cut - it's intelligent and subtle, parts curve around behind other parts, it's not slabs, it has small arms that slip up around the back of the neck and others that come from the back to wrap themselves around the waist. Light rayon crepe, black with blue and gold, a pattern that's the most elderly I've ever worn. It's so light I'll line the skirt with the back and front of that washed-out silk shirt. "A stunning example of early '40s styling, designed to emphasize feminine curves, drape elegantly, and give the wearer an aura of discrete sexiness." Yeah. Suitable to a philosopher.
23
Hello - so cold. People have blotched withered faces. I'm gearing to write. Biting my nails. Pages spread on the table in the workroom. In the kitchen, pattern tissue and cut shapes of fabric. When I'm waiting for water to boil I'm pinning. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that: my brain is more interested in thinking ahead of the intricacies of that assembly. Both of us have our project. When I'm in the kitchen I turn on the Jackson Brown tape. It's you. The love I feel for mortal boys - that ache.
24
Sunday night. Tom phones. "I'm missing you so much." I love to hear that. He's realizing this time is soon over and he'll miss the correspondence; we might not be separated again. Maybe I'll go to a conference, I say.
What I understood, again, sort of, today. That when I look at landscape I am landscape. The structures by means of which I am landscape extend to other structures that are how I am other things, and those same structures are or are partly coextensive with feeling oneself being the structures by which one sees. When I see/feel Tanya I see/feel her (partly) with the same structures I used to see/feel the stages of love woman. None of it is 'projection,' it's something that goes in the opposite direction. Coleridge musing on the moon through the dewy window is being something, feeling something. He feels what he is in the thing he sees. The moon charged with what he knows isn't in it. Symbol he thinks. Of what? he asks. Some answer comes. He writes it down. Some term he uses for vaguely known sensations of that kind. Now moon is symbol of term x, rather than inner presence of moon-seeing structure (and its connected outlying structures) as felt.
25th
It's early, dark. The workroom with the heater fan humming, second cup of tea. Papers sorted and spread over the whole of the table. There stands the palm at the other window, a bit bare. There's my wealth of images unconsidered on the wall. There's Tom asleep in 154 with colored light on the ceiling, loved and confident and saved for now. Here's my writing week beginning. Here on the black glass in front of me a machine drawing of a chaotic attractor white on black and three-dimensional like a ball of thread in zero gravity, thread like cloud and like wire. So beautiful.
25th
Thinking of the night at Trudy's, maybe 1983, her place on the corner - Jam, Rhoda, Renee, Sandy, I think - when I read what will we know and there was silence. It was a friendless moment, their ill-will stood plain in the room. But it was also the moment when I came up through the midst of them. I was certain of its value and now I had it to measure them by.
27th
It's Wednesday night, raining. Black winter night, chill, rattling with rain. I looked forward to the moment when I would sit down and discover what sort of moment it is. Quiet but alive. I'm in the green chair in the kitchen. The California lamp is directed against the wall and the wall is sending out a dim glow. It's light like the quality of the sound, ambient.
There was a moment I liked today: when I was on Commercial buying tea this afternoon I propped my bike in the entrance of the shop. I saw it fall as I walked through the door. I ignored it. 100 grams of Irish Breakfast and 100 grams of Lapsang Suchong, mixed, please. When I came out my bike was set upright. How did they get it to stand that way? Beautifully upright, not propped. I study it. I see that whoever picked it up noticed that they could set the pedal flat on the ledge projecting out below the display window. It was an elegant generosity.
Another moment I like when I notice it is when I come home and am opening the front door, which opens inward. I turn the key, twist my hip forward and give the door a little bump. I do that whether or not I'm carrying things.
-
Then a phone call that scares me. He's wanting to get me a double room, fresh paint, cockroach bomb, flowers, desk, you're home. Only he doesn't have the funds to put the money down. We're both embarrassed.
He is going to need to think of himself as looking after me, and it will please him if he does, but it won't be easy enough to do. Helping him help me is going to be a complication I don't like. It's going to cost me money. He will pay me back by spending money on for instance a concert I'll go to only because he wants to. I'll be carving the money off my daily freedom to be somewhere on my own. And so on.
28th
What it is about him and looking after me is that it throws him into an old stew pot. I feel the annoyance of someone thrown in with him. I want to say, Forget it, I don't need looking after. But that simplifies wrongly. His true love resources, his realness, which I want, are on the other side of this stewing through. But meantime I'm with my dad being carried across a puddle in arms that resent me and are holding me as if they are going to drop me.
29th
I've got into the grip of sewing. My forties dress is hanging next to my shoulder, just finishing left to do. It fits like skin. Last night I picked up the purple cotton, the Tibetan shirt I started when I was pregnant with Rowen. When I stopped last night it was 10:30. I'd been sewing five hours.
When I'd seen myself, going back and forth into the bathroom to iron and try on, I looked - I don't know what to day - I don't want to insult myself - I want to say appalled or appalling - I looked kind of like that picture of Tom - extreme - old - an extreme old spirit - naked in hardship. There it was and I didn't linger looking at it, but I feel a kind of bubbling telling it. Because I can tell it.
Tom phoned me in the midst of it. He'd brought the kids on the desk with him pie and coffee because it was Thanksgiving. He said he woke laughing because of how strung out he'd been on the phone.
I said among other things that he has no idea how he used to be, he's much better now. He said stroke in a tone that gave me perfectly both his sensation - now that I think of it - and mine: the way he holds his head, the touch, the young pleased feeling; and on my side the fine flat surface of his hair, his head firm under it and my own affection. We laughed. We laugh that way when we succeed at something we don't quite realize we're doing. I have never noticed how a sensation in conversation can be two-sided in a perfectly integrated way.
I woke this morning with the solar pouring transparent force.
2nd December
Two weeks from tomorrow I will be on the train.
I'm sitting in bed, four in the afternoon, aching and dim, the paper still to write. I have laid it out. I started from the front and then I started from the back. But I have not been able to make it meet in the middle. The middle is where it happens. I can't see where it happens. It's what happens where I can't see it that's worrying me.
There is something about the idea of skeleton filters. Hinton and Sejnowski seem to be talking about small nets within a wide net, "embedded," Hinton says, many of them latent in any structure we are perceiving, imagining, thinking by. These small nets would change something about the wide nets, they'd change what we could think of as their inner structure. In perception, they'd change how something looks, what we notice. If we're imagining or dreaming, they might change the subject, they might change where we think we are. The whole net might reconfigure like a flock veering.
If my friend and I are looking at a tree and she says "It's very muscular," I stop looking at the leaves and look with her at the bulges running up the trunk under a skin of bark.
I'm remembering Castenada talked about assemblage points where perception is assembled: displacement of assemblage points.
Sejnowski T 1989 Skeleton filters in the brain, in Parallel models of associative memory, G Hinton and J Anderson eds Lawrence Erlbaum
Why am I writing about metaphor, what did I want to understand.
At this moment I don't want to understand, I want to drop it. It's as if when I ask the question I grope to remember wanting to understand. I've understood that theoretical talk is not grounded the way talk about doing things in the world is grounded. It is imaginary in a deep way - it is imaginary in a structural way.
I saw how talk about 'mental representations' (images or symbols) structures itself the way talk about looking at pictures or using writing is structured. I saw that such talk, if it's understood as metaphoric, can be taken as not wrong but setting one into confusion. I proposed that we should talk about mental events by imagining them as coordinated spatiotemporal configurations of activation in the brain. I proposed this in the spirit of insisting on the deep reorganization of our talk about cognition (by which I mean various combinations of perception and imagining) that will lead and follow from increased understanding of how the brain works.
Our present metaphors for mental/psychological/emotional function are going to dissolve. We are going to discover that they are metaphors, that we were thinking metaphorically.
Our thinking will be metaphorical still, to the extent that it is vague.
Our old ways of talking about cognition have been deeply dissatisfying, they didn't inspire, they didn't unify disciplines, they didn't suggest work. I have been looking for a way to understand cognition that would allow me to get under the disciplinary habits of the different kinds of work I do.
> Philosophy of mind - perception, imagining, representation, language, math
> Filmmaking - writing, photography, cultural criticism, intervention
> Therapy - personal work with a teacher to understand liberation
> Love, relation of feeling and understanding, gender activation, personal and gender liberation
> Practical work, gardening, landscape design, landscape politics
> Teaching in any of these areas
Nervousness and felt responsibility about the way technical innovation takes cultural control out of the hands of people of some kinds. How technologies are understood will make great difference to who is empowered by them.
> Philos of scientific visualization as a consequence of this concern
Perception, clear thought, personal intelligence are endangered resources.
- How knowledge is understood
- How intelligence is understood
I've been led by recognition, for years an isolated sense of significance in some phrase, some image, some scientific finding, someone's way of describing a scientific finding. I needed to understand the sense of significance itself, whether it was accidental, or whether it was given by an inherent coherence, something coherent, a kind of knowledge <an unconscious knowledge> not yet able to account for itself. I knew I knew more than I knew I knew, because I had experience in making images, writing, in conversation, in dreaming.
2nd
What does metaphor have to do with the vision I've struggled for all my life - that I've needed to find and make, to be able to be confident in myself. I've thought of it as a struggle to support the value of my gender, the public emergence of values my gender actually defends.
Metaphor is a word that has kept its imported look. An aura of exotic importance. Is there a way to translate it? It's a glamorous word. It could be the name of an angel in science fiction.
Is there such a thing as metaphor? No but we have good uses for the word.
If I imagine the moment's being as a wide net, partly lit and partly active but not lit, and the whole spread through a space of all possibilities, and if I think of focal attention as a brighter net within a lit net, then how do I think further? And why aren't I able to think at all? I'm stuck. I'm not moving. I'm not cohering.
I know there's something about skeleton filters. They are nets within nets, small nets. There are many of them latent but only one active (say). It directs attention. It is created by the coexistence of two large nets which normally would exclude each other - maybe not coexistence - maybe flutter, alternation.
I really don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm full of odds and ends of other people, I haven't done this work. What am I going to do. I have to be finished by Friday night. That's three days. I don't know what it's about. It's always like this. I don't know what it's about. I'm lost.
What do I really want to know. It has something to do with the way I can know and not know. The various ways we perceive or think metaphorically are generally ways of knowing, but not knowing what we know, as if part of our knowing is in the dark. Metaphoric knowledge is not quite knowledge - it is as if it is incomplete, partly knowledge and partly error.
Sometimes metaphoric effect is clear. It might be clear to one person but not to another.
4th
Wednesday. Tanking up for the day. These are dull heavy days. I'm past the worst of the beginning of the paper but it's as if I didn't have enough energy to crash deep enough to get enough of a shift into myself to be really streaming. I have four pages of introduction. Today I am going to set down my reinvention of the philosophy of language. I am sulky. I resent the harshness of the days. The weather is very dirty. My sleep is broken up with hot flashes. I wake in the dark and there's no pleasure in the day ahead. What else can I complain of. Little aches and health worries. Not having my car. Tom is there on the other side of the ordeal, two weeks from yesterday; everything's good I think but I don't have the drug of fantasy to put colored light into the intervals of the day. At least I'm not fat anymore. But I'm not having fun eating. I'm eating like an old woman. The toilet is blocking!
-
Oh that was long ago this morning.
I had to rebalance and this is what it took - I must say so because I forget what happens with the book. I promised I'd fight for my energy. When I've written things and made things I'll fight for them. I'll excavate despair, I won't stop. Then love woman said she wants to be funny. Yes! I want that too. Not less elegant, she said. She was happy she said. I was happy. I also said I'd take anger into the world.
5th Thursday
It's five in the morning. Look at this little writing. Look at my cowboy boots toeing out in the hall. Hanging back at the top of the writing day. Make another cup of tea. All these sheets of notes, red, blue and green. In twenty years I will be seventy years old. These days I'm sometimes making note of daily things as if I won't have them much longer.
6th
Bjorn's Michael on Commercial yesterday. I crossed a corner with my bike and there was a woman with a definite little face. I know her from somewhere. I couldn't remember out of context. She couldn't either. She got it first. "Philosophy - a party - Larry's" - something like that. What I have to say about her is just the way energy forms a face. It's as if there's a focused stream jetting out of her face all the time. It makes her wonderful to look at but it's a lot of work. That's the impression. She's interesting to look at but she isn't interesting. She's letting Bjorn break up her path.
Waking every couple of hours these nights. Dreamed Tanya had broken down a wall in her end room. A man sleeping there. That's an invasion dream. The smell of cigarettes at night, faint music.
I think I have the missing center: think of every perception, every context, everything coherent, as widely widely distributed. That means 'features' and shared features, always. Both they and their connections grow nub to bud to rose, they are connected from roots that are among them as differences in connectivity - 'filters' which are origins. That means global feeling knowledge which is young. Some of the connections of features are deep in the sense of undifferentiated. A metaphor is some rep construction that sets off overlapping features. The emphasis is what tells us it overlaps. - That's filter.
How metaphors are made is not different from any talking. There's structure and it gates a word. Words are peripheral organization. They don't have meanings. When Jesse says "The breakin' plow has bigger knives" he is just doing what people do, running off part of a net.
When people understand a metaphor it is something similar. Common elements are hyperenergized the way they are in any perceptual or speech setup that sets up overlap - for instance repetition or rhyme.
Systematic metaphor is just thinking by means of the structure that's there. It isn't about anything much, usually. It takes a long time to wire in so it's about something other than what we're used to being about.
Sci vis video is representationally-entrained partly fantastic 'thinking about' something.
7th
Nine pages today - energy - the things I have to say - I stop only when I'm exhausted, which I am now - a cake on newspaper in the kitchen - what sort of energy was it - lying down too speedy to wipe out, thinking of Frank - his letters - the kind of friend he was - I wanted to talk to him - his warm wry fond way - why am I crying - what it was like to be loved - personally - it pleased him to say you.
8th
Where am I. Sunday morning. Steady rain on the dirty city. Sky shines silver off the asphalt shingles.
Luke is in the air on the way to Chicago and Venezuela. He came in exhausted last night with his box of photos for me to keep, his bike to store, his kite for Rowen. I lit a candle for his birthday. He sat in the green chair, I was lying on the floor in my new version of the Syrian dress I wore when he was a kid. The depth of that connection. There can't be a deeper, and yet it's casual. I say to him, "Before you were born, I was ... April, May, June, July ... maybe four months ... it hit me, I had a thought, it came to me that the person I was sponsoring into the world would either die after me or die before me, that I was bringing a death into the world, that everyone who brings a birth brings a death." I think I shouldn't have said that. It would frighten him. And yet I wanted to name what was in the air, his far journey, and the way he brought me things to keep as if he had the sense I have before some journeys, that the journey is a risk. I sometimes feel I have his life in my hands, that I am the one who oversees his beginning and then his end. What I'm seeing is a shape like this [sketch], the motion that draws it to a point on the far side. I don't have that feeling about Rowen. I feel him standing steady where he is. He isn't in me. He's like a billboard of presence, strongly his own. But Luke loves me.
We say goodbye on the porch. He has his CD player in one hand and the cake on a plate in the other. I'm hugging him. Take very good care of yourself. Don't let drug banditos get you. He disappears down the steps. Thanks for the cake. My pleasure.
Yesterday my book said Tom is drinking, he's with Lorie, and my time with him is complete. I say to it: I'm willing. I'm willing for what is true to be true.
I'm imagining taking my bags to a room in Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, somewhere nearer school. I'll find people in the cog sci department. I'll be standing in a landscape where I'm the only one I know. My valor: what I know. His drunkenness: what he knows. We return to our bases.
And yet. When I look at the face in that photo I see him with me. He's looking at me with so much reality I don't believe he's gone. The writing I'm going to now with my heart stretched. Five days. The work this is. The bravery with which I'm showing how I think.
-
I began by describing a slide of childhood's landscape which carries hidden in plain view the illusion of a figure holding out its arms.
I said it is my feeling embracing the landscape, but I see now that the embrace is more ambiguous. Is the shadow figure embracing the landscape or is it holding out its arms to me?
I'm understanding now. The shadow is in the shape of a blind spot. I didn't see it because she is what isn't there.
It's true that it's the shadow I throw. I never stopped holding out my arms.
What I can't feel is that I'm holding them out to her. What I can't feel is that the shape cut out of the landscape is her shape.
When it's really there you don't know it's there.
What I don't know about disappearance but can guess. Something feels it. She disappeared. I did. Everything. I/she was love that didn't know it could be anything else, safe love. Confidence. One day it was gone. Then I was almost nowhere, because there was nothing around me I had learned to see.
They brought me food. Put books in my lap.
When someone loves me I go back into that state of confinement. The colored world disappears. Attachment has been dangerous because I die back almost to the ground when it is interrupted.
When it really disappears you don't know it's gone.
Dissolving: it's there but you can't see it. You might be able to precipitate it.
Unconscious structure might be like something dissolved. It's there in the spaces like a spirit, haunting. You don't know it's gone, you don't know it's not gone.
Missing someone is not because they aren't there but because you can't see them.
Disappearance and search.
Not going somewhere else to find her but staying in place and bringing her into common light.
As if she is round about what I know I am.
Sitting still in one place so it will form, so she will form. A welling up. a temporal spilling, from this to this on to this.
9th, Monday
I was hunting through the two volumes of Coleridge yesterday, looking for marked passages - what's the word he'd pick - suffus'd with affection and admiration for someone more me than I am. He got there two centuries earlier and he was there alone. I saw how much I've taken from passages I read once and didn't mark. He said he wasn't an associationist but he frames his hypotheses always in terms that can read directly as activation winging, creeping, rushing through connections in a brain.
I was asking also, what does the way I am Coleridge - and he is - have to do with early loss of the mother? "Me from the spot where first I sprang to light / Too soon transplanted, e'er my soul had fix'd / Its first domestic loves; and hence through life / Chasing chance-started friendships." He wanted his wife to die, and he thought it was because he wanted the other Sara, but in fact he wanted what he had, to have lost a woman and to be in agony for her. It was the engine of his mania but he used it to do more work in his good moments than balanced people do in their long balanced years. I don't mean he wanted the agony for the sake of the work, just that he was what he was - agony was his structure. If he'd got the other Sara he'd have made her the woman he wanted dead.
He is always asking for the secret Laws of Association and imagining in terms of them, but then he's always describing natural things in ways that make them seem pictures of those principles. He has long bouts of putting his mind to trying to draw landscapes with words. Those passages are very boring. But then he gets psychological again and is snagged by natural motion - shootings of water threads down - eddy-rose that blossum'd up against the stream in the scallop - that most exquisite net at the bottom ... all whose loops are wires of sunshine ... beside yon Stone the Breeze seems to have blown them in a Heap - an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk - few phaenomena of the Senses strike me with greater wonder, lead me more to the twilight of matter and Spirit, than a twofold motion ... the rising up & whirling round of a hundred sugar particles - "what we know of an embryo. One tiny particle combines with another, its like. & so lengthens & thickens - & this is at once Memory and increasing vividness of impression" - deep Sky is of all visual impressions the nearest akin to a Feeling / It is more a feeling than a Sight / Or rather it is the melting away and entire union of Feeling & Sight - In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro' the dewy window-pane ... I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awakening of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature - that feeling, to which Imagination has given a place ... an animant self-conscious pendulum, continuing for ever its arc of motion by the for ever anticipation of it ... Blossom-life in the centre of the Flower ... a life within Life, & constituting a part of the Life, that includes it ... A Consciousness within a Consciousness, yet mutually penetrated - touched by the outgoing pre-existent Ghosts of many feelings ... Touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real Touch from it ... it is it in an imaginary preduplication -
What I would have to do is set up a loom in which those passages would read the way I read them. Coleridge is where What will we know comes together with this other stuff. He dwells in what he sees, and feels that he sets himself up in his cognitive roots - the nets within his nets which are primal standings-together. That was what I was after trying to understand skeleton filters! Misunderstanding them because I kept wanting to see these veiny little rooty shapes of another color, which are spread throughout the net from having been close together in the nub - and keep their connection, holding it all together - from nub to bud to rose.
12th
It's Thursday. There's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday - today I had the nerve to borrow three thousand from Rob. Two wouldn't've been enough. Three isn't enough. There will have to be more. I hope Nicole likes something I write and pays for it. And then when I get back it's rent paid for a month and that's it. By the first of March I'm going to be five and a half thou in debt including Visa and line of credit. And it will be alright though I will be at the end of my borrowing and there will be three months to go. What else. I bought four pounds of tea, shampoo, vitamins, seventy dollars American, a kung fu jacket. Deposited Rob's check. Paid a check into Visa. Came home so tired - have been so tired all day. Was up at five reading my paper. When I read it I like it. Afterwards I fall into doubt. Three days to write more. Louie's truck wrecked, I'm running around in the wet on my bike. It's wearing. I'm too tired to sew. I phoned Tom this morning to say that when I think of him I feel a little jump. I didn't say I am jumping into his arms. I was going to say that but I stopped where I did. There will be an older woman who gets off the train.
13
What the paper could be now - should be. I understand that what matters to theory of metaphor is to see:
1. it is a net always - functional dispersal
2. every perception very distributed, dispersed
3. the metaphoric interference is a coactivation effect of a sort that can happen in other ways
4. it is done by means of structural connections on site - nothing 'transferred'
5. when there is an action situational structure on for 'abstract' thinking (implication is there is no abstract thinking), there is procedural/switching structure performing not 'guiding' the thought
6. 'features' is used in a confusing dual way - it's something about the thing and the structural means by which we see them rather than other things
7. what we think of as 'a feature' can be seen as a result of structure itself dispersed - there is no limit to the grain of ability to sense detail and it is always dispersed on some scale
8. its dispersion is noticeable just in the way we can see different things samely - we can set up ability to see that about them both -
9. or metaphorically, to see that about A in the presence of B, given a mode that sets up ignoring B
14 Dec
There is a crescent moon, fuzzy. It has been a day in passage. I am quite fragile, I think, sore around the heart. I was in the credit union this morning and thought I was maybe going to die - lying down in the staff room - hearing the tellers on break - holding on as if with my will.
While I was writing sometimes it was as if I was going too far physically, using something up I should reserve. I don't know whether I am working too much or too little. I am driving through whatever I take up, but it's as if I don't believe that what I do can take a toll since it isn't done by muscle.
Look at this picture - I love this picture - we've amused his demon.
Nicole [Audette] invited me to lunch at the Bo-Dai. Buddhist yellow table cloths. I don't have the energy to tell it but I loved her. We'd sorted it out today, we weren't competing. I said we were having a good time because we're neither of us afraid to fight for it. She has her knickers in a twist because she is fighting love woman. I know it up and down. Gave her Joyce's number. Miz Sufi is on the path for sure, but she's trying to fly over a ground war, trying to fly with one wing, I said.
Something about this photo that was odd. When I took the slide to Customcolor I was picking up some other prints. The guy marked this one paid - he gave it to me.
Another thing. I went to Pilgrim's Market today to find a suitcase. Suitcases in the basement. There was one dropped on an armchair, two zippers at the base. It expands to hip height. Shoulder strap. Wheels. Black. New. $4.50.
Nicole last time I was at her house said she didn't give a flying fuck about the afterlife. I feel relieved with her. I love her fight and realness. Her eyes are beautiful, pointed bright brown eyes, houri eyes. She said she doesn't see herself as fat, a photo shocks her. In our two hours across the table I saw many faces, all beautiful and living.
- the golden west volume 9: 1996-97 october-march
- work & days: a lifetime journal project