[Looseleaf at the beginning]
San Diego 5 August 1999
Haven't written since I got here, lost the journal at LAX. It feels wrong, forbidden. In a week I go home. I've worked hard and made just enough money. There hasn't been a night Tom and I haven't been together. I'm tired. As if I'm too tired to write here or talk to the book. I have nothing to say.
We've been contented often. I feel I haven't registered what we did or felt. I didn't really see or feel because I wasn't keeping the consciousness that can write later. I've been resourceful in action. Working and negotiating. As if I've given up the hyperconsciousness that made me separate. I haven't been judging Tom or adoring. Just getting along with him from moment to moment. There haven't been panics or crises of pain. There haven't been flushes of feeling.
Last night I dreamed anxious search, looking for the place I'd found for Michael and Lise so Rowen could go to school on the net. Later I'd accidentally shit in my blanket and was dragging it with me over a mountainside looking for home.
There was a moment in the truck when Tom said You're going to be my wife, you're going to be my wife. My solar flushed with pleasure. I'm considering living here with a garden design business Nora suggests she'll fund me to start. I can imagine it.
At the same time, the heavy work makes me feverish with exhaustion. I'm living easily with Tom at the cost of everything extra I can be. If I have a garden business we could work together as we have been. We could rent and then buy a little house. We'd have to be married so I could work here. We'd buy a pickup. Tom could make phone calls and write ads and design leaflets. He's beautiful when he's dirty. At the same time I would have to be thinking always for both of us. Watching exits on the freeway, watching his impulsivity with money. Taking flack for doing both of those things. He doesn't want to know when he's not focused in work. It's painful to me when he doesn't anticipate me, leaves the bucket where I'll have to move it when I bring the wheelbarrow to the truck. I'm ashamed of the ways I try to direct him without antagonizing him, making the suggestion a question, indicating a lane change by flicking my eyes, phrasing it like a slave with a tyrant. I thank and appreciate to excess, knowing that isn't how real friends speak to each other.
Should I marry him? Should I give up everything else and be a garden business person for ten years, so I'll have something to sell when I'm old? How should I make these decisions?
There's sex. I mean not. He says there should be but there isn't. I am not fretting. I have given up for now. What I like is touch and his voice - his energy and otherness. I am sheltered with him from the agonies of empty and lonely time. He drags me into action.
Am I dying with him? Is that what I'm supposed to do?
14th
Didn't write for a month, since my journal got left behind on the phone kiosk at gate 46. Didn't miss it, worse than that, have lost confidence - just realized I could call it that - which has never happened, though I've written dull anxious journals. The lost journal was the one started after I broke up with Tom. It had Borrego and the trip back, trying to write, coming back broke. Is it true I hardly care that it's lost, was there anything in it I miss. The photo of Rowen on the cover.
This paragraph: there's no reason it should exist. Maybe I should take it that writing should shift, or has shifted.
I am writing to see what happens, but it is as if my living doesn't feel it needs it now. That was a big sigh.
It's not that I know everything without it. It's not that I have stronger consciousness in the moment - less, maybe. I'm not sure I have the unconscious residue to be examined later, which is what it mostly was. A strong, I want to say lateral, registration that was isolated maybe, not part of the system that acts. Really it's that - I don't feel a residue. Not having that residue feels skimpier as existence. I don't think it's that the moment has more integrated in it. I feel and notice less. It scares me to say this - a thinner weaker more ordinary consciousness - I think - here the book says no I am more integrated - but, I say, everything that happened with Tom in San Diego, I feel the significance so little. I have so little of the strong memory I used to have, isn't that a loss of consciousness? Yes it says. Is there a gain? Yes, end of nightmare. So I've traded the end of crashes for a flatter existence. Yes. That's what integration does? Yes. - Maybe it's the Premarin?
Okay - how was I living - Tom and I lived in turbulent peace. We lived in an exquisite cottage, nervous about the floors and white towels and white bedding. Tom lay down to sleep in a room with branches at the window. I would lie holding him until he went to sleep and then go barefoot out the kitchen door and up the brick path to my own little house. He would come out at five thirty in white shirt and tie with his hair flat to his head and kiss me goodbye, or I would be up and dressed in my blue work shirt with its tears from rose thorns and he would drive me to my job before he went to his. When he picked me up after work he would bring a drink and something to eat. We'd do mulch runs sometimes after work, to the plateau at Miramar. On weekends, manure runs to the back country north of Escondido. He'd wear his jeans and boots and longsleeved olive green teeshirt and look beautiful. Physical and relaxed. We'd come home after work and I'd make steak and salad. Once I made him spaghetti. I baked a plum pie. We'd eat on the brick patio under the darkening sky with Rue at our feet, or we'd be a couple with a dog at Dog Beach or Fiesta Island or Cabrillo Point or Ocean Beach. We had what we might never have again, a house with a garden, a sofa we could lie on together with a dog on the rug. A table on the terrace. A washer and dryer. A tiled shower we could stand in together. We lived together. I wasn't going away into mind work, fighting to keep my best energy for it. He had the safety of his job. We weren't pressed tight in his room. We got away from the TV. We had fights. We had trips. We worked together - not perfectly well - awkwardly - but with satisfaction. We got to be ourselves. I only once, when I was exhausted, felt overloaded by him. I couldn't sleep next to him, though. The down in Eliz's bed made my marrow ache. I wouldn't fuck. I said I wanted physical flow first. I didn't want sex. I sometimes said I'd had sex, though he hadn't. Once when we were lying on the sofa and he was opened by repenting for having dragged me to the Cove. I said desire is satisfaction when there is flow. He said he doesn't want desire. I said with decision, You're afraid of desire.
Last Monday evening - Eliz was coming back on Tuesday - there was a moment when I was sitting on the box at the front door looking into the dark yard under the high trees. I saw him walk to the guest house looking for me. "I'm here." He came and sat on the wall in front of me, held my hand tight. I could only see that his face was there, I couldn't see it. He was crying, saying thank you for what I've been to him. I was scrambling for thoughts, felt I should be crying too but I was blank. I was wondering whether he was saying this thank you and goodbye in some final way, from some sort of knowledge that we'd done what we need to do.
There was the moment at the beginning of the visit. Saturday morning. He walked into the back yard from a direction I didn't expect. A moustache that made him look like my old father. (He went off into the back of the house and found a razor and shaved it off.) We faced off immediately at the point where we'd separated. He wants to smoke dope. I held my condition. He was about to leave. I knew I wouldn't be able to work for Mo or Nora without him driving the truck for me. I knew the month would be agony if we separated again. I said I'd be his friend for the month. He started to leave. I said stay and I'll make breakfast. He did stay, and went on with me. I dropped my condition. We had a beautiful month and yet my condition held. What we were was friends. I wasn't vulnerable. And when I left I did something I know is questionable, and yet I felt was right to do. I brought back the package of my love letters, which had been in his red barrel. I read them. I thought to read them to him but I didn't. I was feeling - he won't miss them, he doesn't read them, he couldn't answer them when I wrote them.
What I did was questionable because it separates. I did something secretive. I preempted a possibility of coming through into my own passion by holding a secret theft. And yet I was convinced I did right. That vulnerability somehow had been stolen by him and I was stealing it back. Is that it?
The secret thought I also held was that he won't save the money to visit me in September. He won't go back to AA. He won't write what he says he'll write.
His feet healed because he was loved. The sticking terror in my solar went away because I was able to lie in his arms night after night.
The fact that I don't trust his judgment is painful to him but it is correct. He hasn't built his judgment. He is building it.
I am not asking, is it over. What is my question: is that withholding correct? It says yes. It's correctly judged. I was way overextended. But I want to live the passion I'm holding back. So where can I live it? In coming through, it says. Coming through what? Your weakness with men. I'm not exactly understanding this. If I'm holding back the passion, weakness is what I'm holding back. So I should tell Tom I've got the letters? Yes. Giving up separation but not going back into fear. Passion lives itself in principle and not in fear? Yes.
At this point I think of Edelman and talking to Cheryl about who I'd want for a supervisor. I could write the project for him and post it. Write a summary for him. Maybe try again for the postdoc. Publish in the meantime. A postdoc residency as some kind of artist.
Moments I wanted to note: coming out of the Ken Theatre last Friday night, I stood waiting for Tom next to a sidewalk café, in near dark. I felt an electric 54-year-old, straight, bright, exercised, goodlooking. I was aware of a man sitting at the nearest table. Our age maybe, more money, business guy. Tom surged into the theatre's forecourt in his boots, jeans, green waffle teeshirt, with his grey hair rumpled, appeared onstage with so much vitality we both, as we turned together to walk toward the truck, saw the business man startle. It was a moment where I was feeling - look at the man I've got, but also - look what we are together, electric old beauties.
The moment I came out of the supermarket with my frozen pie shells and found him leaning against the truck with his boots crossed at the ankle, arms crossed over his chest, face grimy with mulch dust, hair rumpled, grinning, a lovely physical man - the grin I think of as his happy husband face.
Beautiful flights and jokes. The voice he gives me - the naturalness to him of translating dog. Being so tuned to the dog that he's feeling his thoughts in a minor thug's voice deeper than his own. Where's the rabbit, where's the rabbit. That's so good, boss, oh, I like that.
He was noticing when he was manic and when ADD persistence was taking him over.
The moment at South Mission Beach sitting in front of the site of their old house when he dug a little hole in the sand - we were sitting with our backs to the warm wall - and poured in the remains of Vic's ashes left in the plastic bag, then covered them over with one stroke of his beautiful hand. Spoke aloud to Vic: You brought us here.
Lying on his back on the grass at the cemetery shading his eyes with his arm, speaking to Vic and Mac. Vic said, You did it in a half-assed way, kid, but it's done. The ash fine-ground and clean, caustic to the touch. It's against the law to pour cremation ash on the cemetery grass and we were more surreptitious than we should have had to be. It was a messy ceremony and yet it freed him from haunting responsibility he couldn't manage. A beautiful hot day on the lawns among stone markers whose minimal cost is $750, or $850 for two names.
Later that afternoon we walked into the ocean for the only time this trip, first time since the January when we parted for the first time. Ocean cold for August, a confused chop, levels changing all around us. Powerful energy but no order, lifeguard wading in to herd us north of the checkered flag. It was late in the day, family parties had begun to go home.
What else. The hills north of Escondido around the narrow road to the mushroom farm. Tom's pleasure in new sights, always.
He's more present in his senses, he says, more in the moment with me.
In the day book from the year he left Rebecca and tried to live with Lorrie and had begun with AA, before his dad died, I read that he had grabbed Lorrie's throat and hit her on the head. Also that he made love to her with tremendous passion. What about it. It's not true that he doesn't hit women. But also I have only felt physically endangered by his driving when he's angry. I've never felt he'd hit me. She would play up to him sexually, put on high heels and little girl socks and walk up and down the boardwalk waiting for him. What about it. It's not a thing I can do. Is he barred from fucking because he bars himself from hitting? We're living in peace because we didn't fuck?
I got angry twice, once over the top in rage. That's living in peace, I know.
Maybe there's more but I'm going to stop and consider Lise who is talking about killing herself, Suso and Emma report. Mike wants the farm and doesn't love her. She's ugly because she's hiding. She doesn't want Michael but she wanted to marry for her family whom she curries for the sake of money. She lives in a fog of sloth that comes from holding onto lies. Everyone is jumping on her about Rowen, and she is entrenching in wrongness. She knows she's wrong but she wants to win. Is there anything you want to add? Yes. She is being controlled by an unconscious child who is in competition with Rowen and out to defeat him. The way to go is to give that child what it thinks Rowen has. Is that the crux? Yes.
[hardback journal from here]
Vancouver August 17th
Mr. Choy died in the early morning hours of Aug. 10 of respiratory failure and pneumonia. He had cancer. A service will be held at the Armstrong Funeral Home on Dunleavy on August 19 at 1:30 p.m. [typed notice put through the door by Rhoda]
[My brother] Paul was here with his family, lovely Tova. We were with Ed and Mary on Sunday, drove through the rain to visit the dead. At the lunch table Paul had Tova on one side, me on the other, his graceful daughter playfully calling him Dad, his distinguished sister talking on willfully about her landlord's funeral. The old man sat silent, if he couldn't think of anything nice to say, which he couldn't, pointedly saying nothing at all.
It was trickier defending Paul than it used to be, because I am of less importance in the family than he is, now. When food was being given at the end of the visit, Kathy had to intervene to remind Mary that none of it had yet been given to me. Paul came back from Russia having been praised by an international community of Mennonites. It has made him, I think, in the sense of taking him to the brow of the hill he always had in front of him. He looks more real.
I think of myself as having come over the brow of my hill, but I did it privately. No one has seen me there. I think of Paul and Judy as needing to get to something in the family that I had from the beginning, no longer need and can be generous with. But what if I had succeeded in a way everyone in my family had seen - wouldn't I be in energy I haven't got now? I have no faith in the family's ability to see me, or the Mennonite community's. The gardening community - well, gardening. The film community - but why have I abandoned it. I don't persist. I don't persist.
My time with Tom in Eliz's place was a kind of theft. I wanted to be arrived with him in a circumstance neither of us have earned, though I feel I have earned it and not been given it. That's true in a way, and certainly it is not that she has earned it, unless being nice to her parents is what earning means. In her case it is what earning means, and many other peoples' abilities to be willing to be uncomfortable in complicated rather than in simple ways.
The book said, wanting money is what's making you unconscious this time. I didn't understand. I was ignoring the prompts I was getting about unspoken conditions on my employment by Eliz. I did fine with Nora, but I wanted Eliz's house and truck. I was straight ahead about it and saw nothing wrong in it. The wrong was that she didn't want to give it and hadn't. At this point I want to say, oh well. It was worth it. There are consequences. I've lost certain possibilities in San Diego. There are others. I may have lost Nora on account of it - that's the consequence I'd mind. She gave her work mornings to talking with me, she loves what she gave me to make in her garden. She's a beautiful spirit. She accepted what I said about Cass. She wants to know. I love looking at her. I love her moxie in making money. She spent 35 thousand dollars on her house last year and none of it was borrowed. She had me work on her place not because I was cheap but because she wanted what I could make. I'd like to keep her.
Those are the losses. What are the gains. Gains for Tom. A life enfolded in calm, beauty, affection, space, taste, comfort, respect, perception. He didn't need TV for a month. He could feel equal to anyone. I stole from the rich and gave to the poor, which included me. I demonstrated to Tom what we could make for ourselves. We had a beautiful holiday. Eliz was annoyed in a bratty way but she lost nothing except the sense of controlling me.
It's eleven on a sunny morning. There are three weeks before I have to teach. I can get started on the thesis.
What else. I want to keep what I got with the digging work. I look good. I want to set up good clothes.
There's patching and painting the corridor and kitchen.
18
Eight in the morning, sun flat through the east window, through the bedroom door, into the hall. My house has its charms of color back, the wretched grubbiness is less. The broken wall above the stairs got patched while I was away. When doors and windows are open in all directions and on different levels it is an airy high platform holding up a few good shapes in sweet colors. Yellow door, blue wall, red embroidered rug, dark green fig tree.
You phoned in the last of the evening light. You ask how was my day. I'm not used to it yet. I tell you, I'm pleased to tell you, but I still hurry my story as if you'll change your mind. You say something snapped into place, you can stay in the moment, stay with me. Then I feel, oh goodness is it true, do I have this lovely man.
Your story is about biking along the silver strand and seeing marine light. You sound delicious, I say, you sound happy. King Charming, who can facilitate other people's charm. What a reward for faithful work.
Now my heart's stirred up into joyful love - I don't know what to do with it.
19
A cog sci conference. Compare it, oh, to an experimental film conference, where there are visible and seeing souls walking around -
20
Two days experimenting with dressing up. Today I wore the pale green suit, which looks like silk or very light linen and is beautifully cut at the back of the waist. I wore it with the cuffs rolled over my new red Converse sneakers, black jersey without a bra and my hair down. I'm still tan and trim. I looked stunning. I knew this conference was not particularly a place to look stunning but I wanted to go for it while I can, before winter and head work put me back into podge. Yesterday I was leading up to it with my funeral clothes, the black pants and sand-colored version of the beautifully cut jacket, and the black jersey backwards, with my docs. I'm embarrassed to talk about what I wore but today I was more dressed up than I have been since the green silk Afghani coat - 1976, maybe, when I cut off my hair.
Looking stunning made me more self conscious, less approachable, only slightly more noticed, and what else - less depressed by being unimportant maybe? I don't know what to conclude. It's like walking around in a shield. It's okay. It's only glamour and is being seen as that - I mean it isn't value, which is the real thing, a good state. Though there's a way this kind of glamour is a good state. What way. It shows self pleasure and adventure, but of a pop culture kind. It says, you people are ignoring both being and seeing visible bodies, but I'm saying, I'm here and you are too.
21
But nobody was returning my flash and saying you're here and I am too. Rick Grush, large man with trimmed beard and knob of a ponytail, Paul Churchland's doc student who wrote about motor simulation, moved on stage as if delivering a talk was tai chi - he'd keep bringing himself back to center, feet together, hands touching each other symmetrically at his chest. His right arm would make strong forays and then he'd step into center again. This would happen over an unusually wide area of the stage. Beautiful and unusual.
Compare Schwartz or Rosenthal, neurotic little clerics of the sensation-perception distinction. Rosenthal was jerking robotically between two points. Schwartz was stroking the fuzz on his bald forehead like a nursing baby.
-
Learning machine - laser activation - deep yellow and deep blue - we need to be able to say we see blue - we can talk about it as a blueness we perceive but properly speaking we are simulating and may or may not also notice we are simulating - we want to say we perceive the illusion.
We can think of seeing a colored object as 1) seeing just that object or as 2) seeing the condition of light or as knowing something about cognitive conditions (in the absence of 1 and 2). Perception as causally codetermined can in principle be knowledge of any and all of these.
We don't <know> only one thing at a time, in the sense of being ready to respond or speak. We can <know> many sorts of things in perception relations to the same world conditions, depending always on cognitive conditions.
-
Yesterday Mr Choy's funeral at the funeral chapel on Dunleavy. Uniform black, people's clothes and their hair too. His widow sobbed through the service. Faint taped organ music sounded as if from behind curtains. A taped soloist singing Amazing grace and Coming home, tape presumably provided by the funeral parlour to anyone without soloist resources. The singer drew out the ends of the words on the last lines of both songs to signal that the song was about to end, a stupid effect. Why, exactly. Because apart from signaling what doesn't need to be signaled, the singer lost what intelligence there had been in her sound when she stretched it obedient to another kind of instruction. There's more I haven't got.
The minister spoke in Chinese about everlasting life, which insults the community probably accurately. The ritual that followed was from another kind of tradition. People I thought must be officials of the four tongs Mr Choy had belonged to, took hold of a wreath, in turn, waved it toward the coffin in three circling motions as if wafting flower essence toward the corpse, and then bowed three times and stepped out of the way. Wallace as oldest son delivered a eulogy in which he called his father a great man. Meantime I had a few times been able to recall Mr Choy's face as he'd stand on the porch waiting with my receipt while I came to open the door.
The last motion of the service was the realest, a shocking moment when the white funeral official stepped up and opened the top half of the coffin. It was like an Eleusinian showing of the mystery - there was Mr Choy's face dead, polished and compacted the way it had begun to be in his illness.
At this point everyone attending was funneled past the mystery to bow once or three times according to some rule I don't know - first the people who'd come too late to find a place in the chapel, then those standing at the back, then the pew-sitters from back to front, which left those most affected to watch everyone else step into the spot where they faced the corpse and acknowledged it as fact. That individual facing and acknowledging and then departing by a side door from the house of death is very exact, and it was perfectly completed in the way, as we left, we were received by two gatekeepers just beyond the sill and given a gift by one of them - an envelope containing, it turned out, two wrapped candies and a dollar coin. We stood about on the pavement sucking our candies, which restored us after the shock of facing what we'd faced. My solar plex was buzzing and the candy actually calmed it, but I left the coin on a fire hose connector on the Hotel Patricia wall - not to take bribes from death.
As I sat watching the flow of people toward the coffin and out the side door - on the left - I saw Rhoda's back. I noticed I was feeling what I used to feel with her, that she is doing something more rigorously and real-ly than I am. I wanted to see how she would make her bow, to know the best way to do it. I was thinking Mr Choy would have respected her more than me, he would have had a more living connection with her. Then I remembered that her father died when she was in her teens. She would be feeling Choy's death as that death again, among the many other deaths she's had in the last years. And also she hasn't refused to live her entire life in relation to her family's deaths by murder - but she has also aligned herself with her people's murderers, by refusing to have children, by abortion, and by confining herself to a ghetto. She has been her own Nazi, but why does that make her impressive? She looks like what the Nazis wanted to be, an übermensch, clean silver, uncompromised. But my question needs to be, what's that to me. She is the accuser, and what do I accuse myself of, and why? Is it a false accusation? No, it says. I accuse myself of being less than what I am, and that is still true. She is also less than what she is, but that's not the issue. The more I need to be is not what she is.
22
Pylyshyn yesterday on bare objectness - he invoked Jimmy Gibson - "a demonstrative function prior to description" - "attentional individuation" - he wanted to call it indices but that's rep talk - a where/deixis prior to knowing something about the what.
Deiktikos able to show, <deiknynai to show, prove
I notice I'm imagining myself in a light green silk suit striding - hair down - long elastic step - seen from the right, above. I don't see the shoes but think of them as the red sneakers. It could be my wedding suit but it's my in-the-community suit, entering the community suit.
- Is it a true fantasy
- Light and joyful
- Light and joyful
-
Thinking about what I'd do if I had lottery money [Kathy's motivation exercise]. I'd use it to set up ways of intervening in how things are done, I'd organize. Start with a house and staff.
If I had much less money, 3000 a month, say - that's a better question, maybe - but see how it shrinks the sense of possible effect almost to nothing. At that scale it looks like it doesn't matter what I do. I don't have access. House is still first, and after that the money would have to support getting more money in a pleasant way.
I notice I'm not any more wanting to develop houses and gardens, and not wanting to be an academic though I want to have written the thesis. Not wanting to be an artist cooped up in a dead end. Wanting to walk around in a light green silk suit - where is that woman going? She's in the big world and she's working for paradise, she's working to make earth heaven.
House in California, organic vegetable garden, hosting and organizing, public education, activism seeding, quality/noncommercial media access, making and acting in the physical world, staff.
Action, access, autonomy, motion, health, wide relevance, growth, love, adventure, edge, truth, dedication, provision for Rowen and Luke - and Tom - focus, creation, integrity, influence, house with garden, all of these toward making heaven.
- Am I asking for the right thing no
- Will you tell me what I should be asking for turn for the better
- I have those already
- Ask to step them up to the next level
- Which is asking to step up to the next level of usefulness, effectiveness
- Do I have to rank them no
- They come together
- You won't tell me how to find it
- You won't tell me by what principle to find it no, unconscious and lost, act to come through
- This happiness is false
- Because it's denying something YES
- Is this in relation to Tom
- Work?
- Other things
- Why aren't I understanding because you don't understand that you are complete
- There's something wrong with the notion of finding YES
- Leave it for now
- Will you tell me what I should be asking for turn for the better
25
How much I don't like reading neuropsychology, monkey and rat experiments. It is laborious it seems to me to no purpose. I feel so claustrophobic down in the rat cage that I make a dash for the conclusion of the paper. The lists of authors make me feel the crush of thousands of experimenters struggling to be noticed. Conferences without end, all the dull clothes and heavy briefcases, a blind suffocated milling.
What else doesn't work. I've put my papers on the web where they look beautiful, or will with very little fixing, but they are inert and elsewhere and don't involve me in action. The poems even less, they seem nothing at all.
Whatever I do, I want success, I don't want to be isolated. Success is what gives movement. And yet I've been careful not to be successful at something that will bring irrelevant movement.
I make lists of what I want in work, lists of my gifts. It looks like I'm an executive now. I'd like to have an organization doing what I decide. But at the bottom the organization needs to be making beauty, and giving people more ability to be beauty. That's the part that I can't see.
Beauty is already made. People can only be beauty when they are what's right to be. I thought I could defend the very idea of contact - that was my notion of this work. Paul and Pat are doing that. And it does not look as if I'll have a way to get to a place in the arena where I could do what they do. In film I did work to support and build contact, but experimental film in that spirit is no more. Le Guin can go on doing it in fiction. I have had such temperament problems with film - doing the technical parts. I no longer think I am writing a book.
27
These days - these kinds of days - the lonely vacant kind - beautiful open days without contact or occupation. Can't work on the computers because the publab is closed. Will be teaching but not yet. Rowen will be here but not yet. Have enough money to eat but not enough to do more. Feel I should be writing the thesis but don't want to touch it. Don't know where to touch it. Don't ever want to touch it again but it's in the way. Miss being with Tom. Have no inner life, meaning am not in pain, am not in creation, am level and empty, not driven. Would like to be seeing Joyce. Am not getting through with the book. Don't know how to go forward when I'm not driven.
- Is that the question? Does it have to be somehow rational now? Am not feeling - does that mean shut down? Is that the way to say it? It's like I've squirted out of a high pressure time without completing and life has lost interest in me. It's saying - whatever. Is that it? Or is it health that hasn't found its way yet?
- Am I shut down no
- Is it health that hasn't found its way no
- Has life lost interest in me YES
- Have you lost interest in me YES
- Because I failed with the book YES
- Could I have completed YES
- I could have written a book YES
- My self has lost interest in me
- What would it take to make life interested in me again anguish
- Going back into pain no
- I have lost interest in me
- Because I failed no
- Why because you're not angry
- Should I be angry no
- But anger is what drove me YES
- Is there something else that should drive me now YES, the whole structure (the lovers)
- Is it health that hasn't found its way no
I asked to see the man I am, and was surprised, interested. He is - should I say, I am? - he is / I am surprisingly tall, maybe 6'5", with a lot of power in his hips and thighs. He's dark, my color, but I couldn't see his face. I could feel him. He's not warm and not exactly cold; impatient, feeling his power and autonomy, kingly in his look, very impressive, but unengaged. He has no kingdom. He's slightly baffled and sad in his lack of work. Most kinds of work aren't plausible for him. He is too physical to be a scholar but too kingly to run a garden company. He's too commanding to be an artist. He could lead a small band of excellent men in strong adventures? In another time, in another story.
There was a man at the conference who worked for MIT Press who was tall and carried himself with a very straight spine. He had that look of disengagement. When I spoke to him he was stiff and suspicious. I wasn't sexually interested, I was curious. I thought he must be gay. He was out of place.
The man who suggested himself as me surprised me by not being who he used to be, an artist, Dave Carter or David McAra, a tender man. This man has my father's hauteur with more power. He's much bigger than my father. He doesn't have or want a wife. He's not weak but he's empty. He's sitting full of power with nothing to do. And he's nameless.
And the woman - she's the woman in the green suit who looked elegant standing there licking her fingers. She has my voice and subtlety, the way I don't know them. My dark beauty as it sometimes was. That smile. Queen Elfreda in red sneakers.
Today I worked. I sat at the table.
28
Dreamed I was asked to write a paper about film and the physical. I knew immediately I would write about film and touch. I would define physicality in relation to touch. What I was seeing was grainy black and white photos.
There was a set of photos like a small panel. They were below a larger more ordinary photo. They looked like paint streaks on dark glass but it turned out there was a critical distance, across the room, where I could see as if behind the streaks the dim shapes of furniture in a room, color masses like reflections in a steamed mirror.
- Are the color masses magno
- At a distance back from the surface
- The diffuseness is distance between receptors
- They are wavelength sensitive
- It's not film and touch, it's vision and touch no, film and touch too
- A black and white film
- Does parvo respond to black and white contrast no
- It was a stupid question YES
- Black and white are broadband contrast
- At a distance back from the surface
B/w photos are constructed with broadband contrast only.
Temporal areas obviously respond to broadband contrast too - parvo is not for the purpose of color experience, but for fine-scale object surface texture discrimination.
The point is that b/w photos support very fine-scale surface texture perception, but on the scale that we see as shadow, ie we see with b/w broadband contrast also when we're just seeing. We just aren't used to thinking of color as surface microtexture, partly because we use color, we build color into human contexts, so meaninglessly.
Surface texture is what is meant by photography and touch.
-
I'm flooding, very primed, spilling on every topic. Feel I'll be current and beautiful and powerful and sought for professionally, touching off work and excitement everywhere. Over the line into permission. The drug is tea. Web excitement. The exuberance possible to the form.
Maybe the woman in the green suit is an existence proof, maybe that's enough to be.
29
Court jester to the Neuroscience Institute. Not jesting but coloring with invention and feeling. Motley. Artist's method.
The one who sees though - is not serious in the court's terms - ie who isn't in the box.
30
Sitting across a table from Nathalie today. What a peculiar being, small, small very pale person dressed in outlandish fashionable gear, shoes like rubber duck feet, floppy black stuff neck to wrist to ankle, a sort of bandolier across the whole, it's a cyberculture signifier I guess, and dark goggle sunglasses.
She was sick today and looked sicker in the all-over cybergreen she painted her apartment, and being sick she looked even younger. She looked eleven. When she took off her jacket in the sushi place there she was in her sleeveless training teeshirt so odd a body, strong white arms rounded the way a young woman weight trainer is, but very boyish through waist and hips. There she sits, this white-faced girl with a silver dot in her left nostril, so constructed in the way she dresses, her apartment so willfully styled, and yet she's such a bare white little face, somehow desperately serious.
The kind of conversation we have when she talks about work. I almost follow it. It makes me feel I'm less current than I think. It's a stretch. She uses terms in a different way than I do. "Granulation." It's to do with the model, and there's a way those conversations are closer to where I'd been when I'm working than any other conversations, but I also wonder whether it's built on stuff she gets from Ray and Loki and stretches out.
- the golden west volume 18: 1999 august-december
- work & days: a lifetime journal project