in america volume 18 part 3 - 2009 august-september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Plainfield 5 August Flying yesterday - the coast mountains sharp and bare, colored, deep rust, buff, grey, small patches of snow, small emerald lakes, a field of strong jags to the horizon. Mid-afternoon over Saskatchewan or Manitoba an exquisite canvas of geometric and natural form interworked, section and quarter-section squares, irrigation circles, colors pale gold, mauve, tan, grey, creek meanders drawn dark in preserved bush, zig-zagged coulee gashes with smaller run-off zigzags in their flanks, the whole glazed over with white air, and best in it, strong contour-cropping parallel stripes following their rims. Not describable. There was a moment when a dragon swam into view. I gasped, it was a visual construction of such superb complex coherence I was in rapture. - Feeling it means something for what I'll do in film. Thinking of Tony disliking the 'expressive mark.' Dreamed him the night before, he was asleep in a room with a sports channel on TV. - It's not an expressive mark, it's a visibility of two systems in completely motivated interaction. That makes it philosophically as well as visually something. Is there a way to do the same thing in writing - as gracefully - field & field does that sort of. Is there a way to generate both and have them mutually adapt - that's not the word. What am I seeing, a matrix calculation at every point? If the calculation at every point works out to keep the facts of topography and overlaid geometry strongly visible. Everything in the image means something. What kind of image I can make that means something and is integrated overlay. If it were somehow the separate structures there actually were. I'm wondering about algorithm. Grid movies [sketch] - white grid - does it move - the movement somehow makes it. Parameters as separate - shimmer across lines - that's Trapline, oh dear. [Written during a fac meeting where we were visited by Belenky and Tarule who wrote Women's ways of knowing] They aren't interested in genius, which is strong world-formation that sets out differently in conviction. Their version feels too communal to me, adjusted. Says socioeconomic status. Eustress. What's collaboration for the genius - primarily contact with the world. Moral distress. 6 Res second day, union meeting. Oh his overbearing voice, let's finish this fast. 8 Jaes' story of a church that has a hole in the floor where people can touch earth. Another story of a church with a black madonna at the end of a dark passage. 10 Dreamed that I was in a room with my parents. Judy was there undressing. She undresses in front of my father? I'm staring. She's scrawnier. Are her breasts still nice? Then I see she has a fingerling penis. It's small, someone says. They all are, I say. Then I see someone is pouring a fluid into her mouth from a big plastic syringe - not exactly that - like a turkey baster. It is a decoction of money - water that has had money soaking in it. Karen Ricki Coleen Tasha Erin Mary Emilee 11 Caryn like an oiled frog gleaming cross-legged on her chair saying Ellie should do workgroups so somebody else could do three-part workshops. She and Ruth had cooked it up. Also saying she doesn't want HAS/IMA cross-listings anymore, meaning not only wd I not be able to make up a delightful lecture, but I would be locked out of the HAS audience unless I leveled down to sharing with a HAS prof. She and Ruth for some reason had decided to broach it today, which is long before workgroup assignment usually comes up. What was that - Lise defended me, Caryn crossed swords with her and blocked her. She shut up. Ruth said which workgroup would I be interested in. Then she said disingenuously, as if I could be flattered, that I'd be good with the G1s because I'm good at structure. I ignored her. What do I really think about this. I think the others do how-to workshops because they are easy, don't take much prep, don't need an original framework. I don't think putting me into the how-to work will promote them into doing what I do, I think it would just mean residencies without intellectual scope. From the other side, I've noticed myself this res showing more arrogance than is wise - I won't say more than I earn. I've wondered why: things are jumping out of my mouth. Will you talk to me about this   Should I do a workgroup   no Will I do a workgroup   no Are we going to change the name of the program   no Will you comment   direct your anger toward deep change for improvement Improvement of me   no Improvement of the program   no Of my working conditions   Can I do that   - I was coming from the faculty meeting, furious, and on the way met Jaes and Deidre at the door. Jaes said to me, out of the blue, Do you have a workgroup now? I said no and rushed on. Later she said she saw something in my eyes she'd never seen. It wasn't that my eyes were going back and forth but as if something behind them was, a trapped dashing side to side. She said she was watching me during the workshop. I present the workshop with my whole body and there are sparks in my eyes that are trying to ignite something in the student. She was across the room trying to hear and the young woman next to me jumped up to trade places with her, so she ended next to me with her soft bright face watchful and amused. When it was time to start the round of what will we know I hesitated, four lines each? Said three. Lise on my right began and we went counter-clockwise. When we were coming down to the last page I was wondering whether it would make it all the way. There was less and less left, but then exactly three for Jaes on my left, so it was done, beginning to end in the circle of chairs like a torc open where I sat. - Mariposa traicionera Eres como una mariposa Vuelas y te posas vas de boca en boca Fácil y ligera de quien te provoca Yo soy raton de tu ratonera Trampa que no mata pero no libera Vivo moriendo prisionero Mariposa traicionera Todo se lo lleva el viento Mariposa no regreso Ay mariposa de amor Mi mariposa de amor Yo no regreso contigo   Nunca jamás junto a ti Vuela amor vuela dolor Y no regreses a un lado Ya vete de flor en flor Seduciendo a los pistilos Y vuela cerca del sol Pa'que sientas loque es dolor Ay, mujer como haces dano Pasan los minutos cual si fueran anos Mira estos cellos me estan matando Ay, mujer que fácil eres Abres tus alitas, musios de colores Donde se pósan tus amores Mariposa traicionera Toddo se lo lleva el viento Mariposa no regreso Ay mariposa de amor Mi mariposa de amor Ya no regreso contigo   Nunca jamás junto a ti Vuela amor, vuela dolor Que tengas suerte tu vida Ay ay ay ay ay dolor Yo te lloré todo un río Ay ay ay ay ay amor Tu te me vas a volar. 14 Dream some mornings ago, a two-volume dictionary on the ground burning. 15 Thinking noises - hear yourself begin to say it - take a breath instead - let the silence hang in the air. Authority - you don't tick with good friends. Vocalized pause. What do I remember - it's Saturday morning, I have two hours till the taxi comes. My seven: 1. Mary affect somatics 2. Erin yoga and Islam 3. Emilee writing 4. Ricki novel, conceptual structure 5. Tasha girl power 6. Karen girl power 7. Coleen body memoir Anything to say about them that I don't already know - likely not. Mary swing dancing after the cabaret, small and fast. Erin's big eyes and twisted little mouth, her girly enthusiasm and elegant yogic postures. She wants to be deluded and I'll let her, which will bore me. I have a blank somehow about Ricki, kept forgetting she had already spoken. She was lost in her head, talking about fiction and Western society as if there were such a thing. A pragmatic novel I know will be tediously abstract. Karen a tired, life-blasted foster mother ex-alcoholic and teenage badgirl who was submerged in misery last semester, and this semester I've said should write from herself before she was shot down. She wrote perfectly as 12. Coleen 260 pounds, a beauty lumbering in heavy padding. Her mother had her in a dog collar. She's had talk therapy for years but has never found it in her body. She's the hero of the semester, is willing to do it, will write body memoir. My Emilee whose buttoned-up primness was exasperating me. She was saying thank you all day long. There's been a lot of thanking going on, I said to my group, I want to call a halt to it. Lovely Tasha, diesel dyke body big through the chest, fine pointed white fingers, smooth white face, anime spikes of dyed black hair, wonderful tomgirl energy. Jaes knocking on my door at night, Jaes beautiful standing on the path, her grave grey eyes. Her left arm tattooed blue and orange from wrist to shoulder covering her scars. Zach introducing me at the intro session, beginning by saying, Ellie probably asked me to introduce her because she knows I adore her. I was standing close at his side and inclined my head and said, That was it. When Caryn during our fac meeting showdown was saying she didn't at all mean to imply that she doesn't value my workshops etc, I took a swift but slight step into the open, said, holding thumb and forefinger toward her about two inches apart, Little bit. It was a moment completely jumped out of the polite covert mode of fac meetings, naked challenge, and yet inscrutable probably. Then later, at supper, Caryn walked into a pillar with her tray, crash, and I felt, there's my reply reaching her - something like that. - Three hours to go. I've set my clock to Pacific. We're at 36,000 and above someplace with straight roads. The very small farmhouses are bits of white gleaming under haze. Here comes cloud cover in little cells, formed, except for here and there a fuzzed glow, a smudge. Like blown snow on top of packed snow in a long exposure. O round earth how implausible you are. A river full of gravel shallows, looping broadly, its floodplain visible as smooth land with an edge. It's starting to be dragon country but the light is wrong, the colors aren't clear. I look at this knowing I won't remember any of it. The clouds are throwing long diffuse shadows. Lake a greenish gold. Stopped by a long hard edge and there's a little dam. Field-squares cut between parallel crevasses. The light has changed down there, an old light on orange-glazed dark umber and dark green. I so want this traveling to be over. It's almost two months. And I'm hungry. [end of travel record in black notebook] [left side, to do list] San Diego 16 August Sunday morning, I've come from Tom's house, dispersed my things into their nooks. The hotplate is ticking. A bit at a loss. The Fauré requiem is on and it's just come to the part I heard in St Alban Martyr. I could miss London. Should I transcribe the travel book to bring all of that here into this room. Laura Taylor/Byrne died Friday morning and Wende Davis a day or two before. In bed last night I thought of Tony with joy that I'd found him. The different man he is now, a more contained man. I think of him with a little wrench at the heart. 18 Tuesday morning under coastal stratocumulus. The air that rises in the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the tropics subsides in the subtropics, acting to inhibit the growth of clouds there. However, along the eastern margins of the subtropical oceans, the moisture which rises from the sea interrupts this pattern. This moisture rises to feed bubbling cumulonimbus clouds, while from above a stable, warm mass of sinking air effectively acts as a lid, trapping moisture close to the surface and forcing the cloud formations to spread out into a shallow layer rather than continuing to grow vertically. The result is expansive decks of stratocumulus that can extend hundreds or even thousands of miles out to sea. I have a lot of nice things to begin to do. There's my beautiful monitor on its black glass expanse. - This book of names, places, slow events and cultural fantasy and color, Sourcebook of decorative stone, Monica Price 2007 Firefly. Limestones - sedimentary rocks, marbles limestones that have been metamorphosed by heat and pressure. Delle pietre antiche marmorata marble yards spoliated dimension stone - slabbed and polished for architecture bedding quarry variation igneus, sedimentary, metamorphic Juliana's note today: reading the introduction to your Being about was one of the things that made me clear and brave to do this what had been blocking me. Definitely the big one is that clash between Gilligan style and Deleuze style. Gilligan explains too much for me. Deleuze and the like never work with people, they never ground anything. So in your introduction I found the middle. You are speaking for philosophers but being true to the complexity of the artistic side. You are asking their questions but not bowing down your head. And you are writing for yourself more than for them, but in the tone that you've always told me, as if you were in the future and your ideas were accepted. I didn't write from vanity but I was proud and wanted to show there was not shame for working differently and that opposite of there being less rigour, perhaps there was more. - As I was copying this, two emails arrived, one from Louie because I'd sent her J's note, and another from Juliana. (The first was nine hours earlier.) 19 Dreamed I was happily with Greg somewhere. We had been walking together and I lay sideways in the air and he lifted me with one arm, public play I liked. Was thinking it would be just right to have two men, one who listens and one who talks. [left side notes on anti-inflammatories and statcounter history] 21st Dream a couple of mornings ago. I'm in a cave with someone. A boy comes past on a bicycle. He looks at us though we're in the dark and he's in daylight in the canyon. Then it's dark and a light streaks past. Then another. Two bicycles chasing the boy. After a minute the boy rides into the cave from the L. The wide beam of his lamp moves into the dark. - What has made me remember it is the lights and the moment when we were expecting the boy not to see us but he looked directly at us. - Writing this I see that the boy's look and the moment when his light enters the cave are alike. Last night I was in my bedroom with a boy. We were high school age, and he was under the covers doing something. My mother came in to check. I had to get him out. Wondered whether this one had something to do with my question about how I shut down when I'm with Tom, just want to get away from him. It happens in the texture of our small exchanges, I think, he says something and I don't believe it or I find it stupid or ill-judged, and then I'm gone. Read something last week about better, more complex, brains organizing simpler brains - thought that's what I do with students, the letters organize them over the semester. Friday morning on Garnet Ave, the smog station, there's the squeal of my beast. 22 I think almost everything I do, I try to do it in her name. She was a dishwasher. She worked in a restaurant. To the memory of our mother, Jeanette SM Jones, who could have done much more in a better world. Edward Jones 2003 The known world Harper Collins Yesterday I passed smog, pulled morning glory at Taft. On the way home stopped at Target to look at curtains and came home with a floormat that looks sophisticatedly right between the army green filing cabinet and the new army green bathroom curtain (Amvets table cloth pinned onto the dowel, sew it later). It makes an entrance. The white room. [left side more anti-mold notes] 24 Getting ready to write the London intros. Read through vol 1, sickened at frenzy about Peter and Ian. I trusted feeling to lead me, and feeling was contradictory. Is that the way to say it? No. I wanted good things I had with them, but they came with costs I wouldn't tolerate. Both were freaked by what they felt with me, and that wasn't about me, but I exacerbated it. Neither of us understood it. We had no information. Marriage is a way of handling men's freakedness about women, but no one had explained that. I'd seen that marriage levels women, that's all I knew. So I was in a battle zone with men. Their infant ambivalence surged at me. They had to demand what they didn't actually want. I had to refuse to give it, but I had to refuse it in pain at losing their company, confusedly. What would have been the right way, if I'd known what was going on? Clear firmness, I could have said this is yours, deal with it or don't. Is that correct   Do you want to say anything about this   creation, loss, processing, judgment And then there was what was mine   The split of feeling and thinking   So my feelings were young   And no way then to grow them up   Was my freakedness like theirs   no My freakedness must have been about the mother too   no Not as deep   Was I wicked with these men   no, confused Were they more freaked because I was beautiful and smart   no Those hooked them, but anyone who hooked them wd ?   Was it wrong to want Peter's company   no Was it wrong to want Ian's beauty   yes I objectified him   YES Was it wrong to want better sex than with Peter   no Will you explain why I'm so sickened by the story with Ian   YES success, friendship, art, practical Is that what you want to say   Disgust because he needed to wreck those in me   In him it was envy as well as jealousy   He needed that in spite of his gifts   It was wrong to get involved with both of them   Should I just have held off and not got involved with anyone   no Was there anyone who would have been right   no So it was a genuine quandary   YES Should I have fought for Carmichael   NO Stayed with Greg   no If I'd been more clearly firm would I have found someone suitable   no Was Luke in some sense foreordained   no Do you approve of that act   YES So I basically had to careen through the way I did   It was a sort of learning   For a whole generation   YES I know what I know now because of it   Did O survive   no Did Don   no Did Greg   no Did Ian   no Did Roy   no Did I   yes By survive you mean without giving up essence   Did Tom   Did Judy   no Should I read those accounts remembering they weren't to survive   Did Tony   Did Lis   Did Sal   Did Jo Ann   no Did Sarah   no Did Mafalda   no Is this a kind of egotism   no Did Cheryl   Did Trudy   no Did R   Has Louie   Has Paul   Will Luke   Will Rowen   Did Mike   no Did Jam   Will Susan   Can I survive to the end   25 Pressured dive into facts for the London intro last night, cost was louder hiss than there has been, very loud and still there in the morning. - Someone in Bangkok googled lifetime journal and then google-translated the index page of w&d. The translation leaves words it doesn't recognize in English - misgivings, Boetia, Hesiod. In the first two pages of the search it was the only actual journal. Someone in Burlington Ontario looking at Raw forming. That Pittsburgh reader has been coming since April. On the 6th and 7th someone in Beijing looking at Frank. - 67.193.134.209 is really Kingston. Was at Tom's doing laundry tonight, found him worn out by his month on $65, a thin-faced quiet man I immediately loved. I held his hand smooshily. There were a couple of things in particular. One was when he wanted me to see the star he was seeing in the Gegenschein he took my shoulders lightly and moved me into position. He did it naturally, without thinking. What was the other. When I said I'd been cranky he smiled broadly showing his new teeth. I liked his thin face and his blue canvas deck shoes worn w/o socks. - Found a photo of Martin Ware last night - bemused - a man my age who evaded our era - an elderly Englishman in elderly professor clothes, grey tweed over a checked shirt and dark jumper, glasses on the end of his nose. In rateyourprofessor.com some pert outport boy calls him silly as a bag of nails. He's said to be funny, knows his students' names and will speak to them in corridors. 30 years of doing that. - Youtube of Duncan [McNaughton] reading in Switzerland, stone room, lamplight, he in black with white hair, a woman in a long black robe standing at a little distance also looking down at a white sheet of paper as if she's his prompter or alter-ego, the image broken so they jump into different relations to each other. Two intense spots of light on the floor, a square of light on the wall. The effect also of a watcher behind and to the side, and a child on the floor. He moves a lot, she has stopped against a piller. - The Kingston person, who is probably Joan [no - Ben], came back yesterday and today to RF8-1 which describes Christmas dinner with them, and then is merciless telling Peter's ineptness in sex - I've come away from reading it repelled by myself. Repelled to have been part of it, repelled to be a person so ill-bred that I publish a description of Peter's "crooked little finger-penis" - the odd fact that hardly anything could be more damning. It's more damning than his trying to poke a young woman in a room across the hall from his wife and next to his daughter, which is icky enough. - A book called Love and its disappointments. "Love, art, psychotherapy and spirit." - John Adams Shaker loops 28 Friday morning, Starbucks. 10 days before packets come in. I've gone through Feb 09 to landing back, looking for action to pick up. Notice the misery and illness of last spring, which is gone - isn't it misery and illness that happens after a winter's work. - Misery and illness, which I can hardly remember now, even in London. Is it bad air over the winter Is it no exercise Is it being enslaved to students Is it hours at the computer Is it isolation Have I fixed it with supps   How to set out now, into the long stretch till next June, nine months, with a trip in Feb and April. What do I know - I need travel I need friends I need hard exercise I need to concentrate on a project and finish it - web monograph first I need love-work first thing in the morning I need to figure out bp fast I need to study aging and work around it intelligently - The melting softness of the lotus picture, at full size. 31 Spy thriller Tom gave me - I was reading it suspiciously, by the end disliking most the feeling that everything in it manipulates the reader. At first it was the politics, a book Rush Limbaugh could like. Dick lit, the usual, powerful competent men on both sides admiring each other, a lot of fast travel, supremely easy money, a few females who now have impressive jobs but only matter to show the hero winning with women. At the same time the pull of shreds about places - the railway bridge I crossed into the south end of Hampstead Heath, Parliament Hill Fields - and times - bright Christmas morning at Westminster Abbey. Dramatized back room information about government and secret service dealings and structures. Dread of Islamist evil and torture shown as effective. Paranoid ambiguity. The seemingly inescapable vileness of all the agencies, all of the sides. It did make me feel the naivete of the left along with the stupidity and venality of the right - it dissolved confidence - a feeling of not knowing enough about what is really happening. Came out of it feeling doped. 1st September Playing with InDesign this morning. Bagel and coffee at the café next to the science museum. The lotus is old now, won't bloom again until June. 2 My brain is more alive since London. A bit. Worked until after midnight formatting Ambitions of documentary. It's not done but I figured out how to get R and L sides independent though R is threaded. How to design character styles. I'm not easily remembering procedures, have to learn them many times. But trying to format something brings up questions that are hooks for instructions when I find them. I liked yesterday considering the Orpheus texts with pictures. I could do a book-script. Sunday at five o'clock I went with Tom to Mission Beach. There was a soft fog just off shore so the sun was a white coin, the foam zone silver, and waves as they rose pale green. Where we went in the shore dropped quickly so I was waist deep though not far in. The water was warm. Tom swam outside and caught waves and was happy. On shore a lot of families. This wonderful garden book. Sally Wasowski 1995 Native gardens for dry climates Clarkson Potter. Ruth wants me to join a committee for [the college] on the web and I'm growling at what feels like more intention to cut me down. [to do list for Scott's garden] 3 I sorted the growl, Ruth said she's concerned too about being a grad program with no intellectual challenge and my minicourses are worth the hours. It's 8 on a Thursday morning, sublime day, will be hot later. Last night went to Mission Beach at 6, saw the sun marachino pink just above the horizon, standing in warm water to my chest, small waves from many directions, fairground noise behind us. After the sun went down a storm pile of cumulous pink above the roller coaster. Then later a three quarters moon. Foam hissing in as lavender lace. Bare feet in the parking lot. In the mornings I don't want to sit with computers, I want to go out. It's too early for the café at the science museum. 4 Barbara Stafford 2007 Echo objects: the cognitive work of images University of Chicago transdisciplinary ... those of us in the humanities and social sciences ... new intellectual tools compelled me to rethink the major themes of my life's work ... scholars of the myriad aspects of self fashioning   She went to the workshop on computational neuroscience. Changeux, Damasio, Edelman, Deacon, Gibson.   Susan Blackmore's interviews. Ramchandran's Reith Lectures for the BBC.   mastering of visible proof of biology in culture and culture in biology marking neuroscience, cognitive science, and the new philosophy of mind epistemic objects neuroesthetics double gaze of the humanities and the sciences going out of its way to equip visualization with cognition   She's thickened by her formation in art discourse, the mass of her references and her impressor vocabulary.   Era of Neanderthal 220,000-45,000 Sapiens 45,000-10,000 Neolithic revolution 12,500   Romantics functions of the unc - [left side notes for learning to swim] Richard Holmes 2009 The age of wonder Vintage Humphrey Davy increasing energies of the human mind The whole field was wide open to a new generation, and the time for a great chemist to emerge Coleridge - "second scientific revolution" a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work Romantic science, two generations, Captain Cook's Endeavor voyage 1768 to Darwin's Galapagos voyage 1831, 63 years. First was Newton, Hooke, Locke, Descartes, Royal Society, Académie des Sciences, 1600s. Instead of applying observations to things we wished to know, we have chosen to imagine them. Condillac Precise, even reverent contemplation of nature is clearly associated with the Romantics, and can be seen arriving in private journals and letters from the 1760s onwards. The journals of Joseph Banks ..., of Gilbert White in Hampshire, of Coleridge in Somerset, of Dorothy Wordsworth in the Lake District Lavoisier set out the aims and ideas of experimental science as a great Romantic adventure of the mind. Davy a materialist - thinking matter. stars immense reservoirs of light The perception of the truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other ... Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion .... Davy Works What might we not hope for in a state of society in which the character of the philosopher [scientist] was united with that of the artist... . D the poet carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science C He has been endeared to me by being a Thing of Hope to me. C on D a land of promise in philosophy 5 Juliana's note about a conference in Bogota on performance and politics. I wrote a reply I liked finding, That 'performance' shd be code for embodiment - I guess for me there IS something suspect about that. I have felt sometimes as if there are two main branches of what embodiment studies can be: one of them to be crudely general is about wildness, desire, conventions relaxed, 'embodied writing,' etc. Recovering the repressed. It has an excited tonality. The other has a different tonality, for me more like silent space. It's more a reframing of everything, a way of understanding ALL writing as embodied, all mathematics, everything any human does. The implications of that. So for instance when Christine says that neuroscience says the body is chaotic, that belongs to the first branch. In the second branch, where I live, neuroscience says the body is not chaotic but exquisitely ordered, like the Milky Way, like a field of grass. 'Chaotic' in this context, the physics/math/science context, does not mean disorderly but orderly at a very fine scale. So when Christine says the poststructuralists show us what it means to work from that chaotic body, that tells me why I am still not very interested in the poststructuralists; I don't want to work from a disordered body, I want to work from the whole of an exquisitely ordered body. I'm lonely for a community interested in that. - Stafford's language. She wants to say something about images that we can use to see or somehow feel, intuit, how the visual system works. But in fact she is imagining something and using it metaphorically to think something else she doesn't visualize accurately. She talks about processing, filtering, representing, assembly of pieces of image. Impressor neologisms. Internality of vision. Ch 4 caves - in caves people saw things in the textures of rock and then painted them - they became aware of hallucinating, dreaming awake - the essence of representation that blend of seeing and imagining. global primaries red ochre, yellow ochre, white chalk and charcoal I don't like the artificial significances in art discourse - the making too much of. It accompanies metaphor. a mythic concentrate hidden forms lodged beneath any painting intrusion of the apparitional [into the real] - ie hallucination amid perception - locate the effect where it is. certain types of art works permit us to see ourselves seeing the world Turrell "Minimalist appreciation for the literal, physical thing with sensation of the body as being-in-the-world." Minimalist and Romantic. - Pious English science, atheistical French. Davy married in 1812 at 33. Constable oil sketch of sky 1812. He set a diamond on fire. Hired the young Faraday. some claims to be one of the prose masterpieces of English Romanticism ie his paper on the invention of the safety lamp. Byron 1816 in Darkness: I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. - She's worried about self as volition as opposed to body/uncon as automaton. But body wills - I somehow don't have a problem with this. She's identifying I or we with conscious intention. Her worry is left over from that. She's assuming the nonconscious systems "face inward" - they don't. - These evenings I'm working on layouts often till midnight, gradually understanding. Wrote Martin today. Mafalda. Reading Stafford and Holmes. Deciding strict noncarb for a month because it seems I can eat anything I want elsewhere but not here - jeans are tight after 3 weeks back. See whether it makes a diff to bp and night waking. 6 Holmes says Romantic discourse about science had her mysterious and seductive, "more powerful than her merely human petitioners." But after that, early Victorians, a rhetoric of shy, reluctant, persecuted. Assault, penetration, rape. The observer never sees the pure phenomenon with his own eyes; rather, much depends on his mood, the state of his senses, the light, the air, the weather, the physical object, how it is handled, and a thousand other circumstances. Goethe the whole history of this beautiful discovery Darwin read John Herschel's On natural philosophy. Coleridge the clerisy the informing culture of a nation. 1833 somebody proposed scientist rather than philosopher. his sister Caroline never once mentioned God anywhere in her journals 1834 Coleridge died 1831 Darwin departed on the Beagle 7 Stafford's very unclear, I seem to see hints of right impulse but she wanders along dimly in rooms full of junk. The humanities mind without spatial silence, is that it? The sensation I have for what she lacks is strong spatial focus, something that resolves. Her language is mostly mystificational. "Hidden forms lodged beneath any painting," ie alternate forms possible to see. "Intrusion of the apparitional [into the real]," ie hallucination amid perception - locate the effect where it is. Certain types of art works permit us to see ourselves seeing the world. - Varela to enaction, active engagement Gibson "an experiencing of things rather than a having of experiences" Behaviour that intertwines - Has Emilee been wrecked by other advisors   no Has she allowed herself to be wrecked   no This piece is too programmatic   no You think it's good   YES Should we publish those letters   YES Wd Louie like them   Have I been needing the students to be soul for me   no Laura   Emilee   Carolyn   Will Millie ever be possible   no Michael   Layla   (Wd she allow it   ) Can I be more like what she was   Without drugs     Do you understand Ricki   Root is the anxious isolated child   My letter so far is irrelevant   no Is she really interested in immortality   no She's interested in death   Isolated perceptive child   Her novel isn't good writing   But there's something in it   YES The band of friends   She should write her, and Zack and Tash and Cam     Do you have any instructions about Scott   honest dealings will end foolishness Have Scott take instructions from me   Have me put them in writing   Have me supervise   Anything else   do it without being bossy 11 Woke at 4 this morning, got garden plan ready for Scott at 8, had time to work on Emilee and Mary, Starbucks to email documents to Scott, friendly focused meeting, breakfast at Whole Foods, read the Times. Home working on Karen, back out to get wireless, emailed to Erin, discussion with Scott about furniture, half hour nap, got started on Emilee, now it's 6 and I have nothing to do. - Forgot to say I walked through Mission Hills nursery and bought an agave celsii that has exquisite tiny-toothed black edges. My correspondents now - Shirley/Tia is the best. Jane, Mafalda, Dave B, Dave L. People who aren't replying: Anne, Tony, Luke.   part 4 in america volume 18: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project