The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook B

January 15, 2000

Self-examination results in confabulation.

Confabulation is the falsification of episodic memory in clear consciousness, often in association with amnesia, in other words, paramnesias related as true events.I

But the neurologists are wrong; we all confabulate, brain lesions or not.

I wonder if I am explaining things away now, remembering my life all wrong. I look at Dr. F. I try to remember. I can’t remember. So much has disappeared from the past or appears altered to me now. Remembering is like dreaming unless it was yesterday. Dreams are memories, too, anyway, hallucinatory memories. And the doctor is himself and others at the same time.

When you don’t remember, you repeat.

But in reality I would not know that I possess a true idea if my memory did not enable me to relate what is now evident with what was evident a moment ago, and through the medium of words, correlate my evidence with that of others, so that the Spinozist conception of the self-evident presupposes that of memory and perception.II

That is all there is — perception and memory. But it’s ragged.

Why do you always walk with your head down?

Elsie Feingold said this to me on the telephone.

I didn’t know I walked with my head down.

Why do you always say you’re sorry? I’m sorry this, I’m sorry that. Why do you do that? It’s so annoying. You’re so annoying. That’s why the other kids don’t like you, Harriet. I’m telling you this as your friend.

This happened, words very close to these were spoken. Lung constriction. Pain in vicinity of ribs. I remember I had pulled the telephone into my room and am lying on the floor just inside the door. I say nothing. I listen. A litany of crimes — my clothes, my hair. I use too many big words. I am always answering in class, brown-nosing Harriet. As your friend…

You must be quiet. Your father is reading. I am so quiet and so good. I hardly breathe.

What are you doing in here, Harriet?

I am smelling the books, Mother.

She is laughing, letting out her high chiming sounds. She leans over and kisses me. Does she kiss me? I see myself as small. Observer memory.

Do I remember this or is it because Mother told me? Her laughter was a balm, always, but this may be her story of little Harriet smelling her father’s books, and she laughs when she tells me the story. I was four. I may have stolen the little tale from her and given it an image, a memory that is mine by proxy. I see the study with its big desk, and I smell the pipe. Why did all philosophy professors smoke pipes? An affectation. His students, too, all young men, smoked pipes, every single one of them. The graduate students all grew beards, and they smoked pipes on the seventh floor of Philosophy Hall. The Analyticals. Frege. The logic is out there.III

Felix is standing in the doorway. He is looking through me again, as if I am not there. The note to Felix the Cat from the couple in Berlin is in my pocket. I have carried it with me for a week. Practicing what to say, learning it by heart, so simple.

Before you leave, I say, I would like to return this to you, a note from friends. It was in your blue suit, the one you wore to the opening last week.

I can see the surprise in his face, can see his embarrassment, not shame. He has become negligent, flippant about it all.

He takes the note and slips it into his pocket.

But you know, he says, it has nothing to do with you, my love. It has nothing to do with my love for you.

I am erased.

Dr. F. says, I don’t think you understood how angry you were.

No, I did not understand how angry I was.

Last night. This I remember, don’t I? Yes, it is clear still, parts are clear enough, although there are peripheries never seen. Too many voices to distinguish any single voice except now and again — a soprano squeal or squawk. The throng in the well-lit white room, the paintings — so little on them — but a few hazy body parts, underpants, garters, bottles of nail polish and perfume. Mildly interesting. The artist smiling. He has a stiff smile, but who can blame him? Long, convoluted essay in the catalogue, quoting that buffoon Virilio.IV Phinny has put his arm around my waist. I can feel his hand. I do remember this warm gesture, this little goodness. In that instant, I worry over Bruno’s refusal to come with us. Maybe it is Phinny’s hand that makes me think of Bruno, my mauling lover. I am back to life under his hands, his rumbling voice, his jokes, but he said, I hate that art world shit. It’s worse than the poetry world, and that’s pretty bad, but there’s no money in poems. Just egos.

Phinny and I: PH. We make an F sound together, as in phuck you.

Last night again. James Rukeyser has heard that I am building on Felix’s collection. He is interested in me now. Oh, yes, I hold a sudden luminous charm. Felix’s wife has Felix’s art and Felix’s money. Maybe he will lure me into a purchase. Show me the cabbage. That is what he means as he smiles. I am wearing my blue velvet beret. My affectation, which is not a pipe, courtesy of Phinny. James gives me his card. I have a flash memory — the stiff paper in my right hand, my thumb visible over the name. The business card is beige with black type. Miriam Bush joins us. “I have not seen you in years, Harriet! Why, what are you up to? Someone mentioned you. Who was it now? Are you still making those little houses?” James looks confused: little houses? He does not know that I have ever made art. When Phinny and I get outside I throw the card away. I see it in the wet gutter, its lettering invisible, just a small rectangle vaguely illuminated by the streetlamp as the ice-cold rain falls.

I am ten in the memory. Am I ten? Maybe I am eleven. I cannot feel ten or eleven anymore, really, can I? No. But I am inside this memory; I am inside my body. I have walked from Riverside Drive to Philosophy Hall on a Saturday to surprise Father. Why have I done it? What possesses me? An idle whim? A plan? No, I am just walking in the spring air, and I decide to walk there. The day is sunny after a rain. Sun over puddles. That seems right, and it comes into my head that I am so close to Father’s office, and I walk through the doors and climb into the elevator. But I am nervous, yes, some anxiety is attached to this bold move. I have been to his office before, as he dashes in to pick up papers, while I wait with Mother. There is a smell in the gray hall, a dry smell like erasers; it is never noisy, hushed but with a hum, white noises, I guess, and low voices here and there, as if these are the sounds of mental work, of thoughts. I knock. He must say Come in, but this I don’t really remember. I see him before me at his desk and the window behind him. The light is hazy; the glass is smudged. His head is down. He looks up. “Harriet, what are you doing here? You should not be here.”

It has nothing to do with you.

“Harriet, you should not be here.” The ten-or-eleven-year-old is flummoxed. I’m sorry. Do I say I’m sorry? I think so. But this is crucial. What is the tone of his voice? Angry? I doubt it. Strict? Puzzled? Perhaps puzzled, but I can’t recall this accurately. What I recall is the drawing in of my breath, the pang, the shame. Why shame? This I know. I am deeply ashamed. In the memory he says nothing more. He looks down at the papers in front of him, and I leave. But is this possible? Maybe he escorted me to the door, and in the shifting eddies of recollection, those steps with Father to the door have disappeared. Maybe he patted my shoulder. He did pat my shoulder sometimes.

And sometimes, too, I heard a hint of musical softness in his voice. I learned to listen for it — a crack in the tone that lifted a vowel into another register, not fully controlled. And something broke for an instant, as if he had seen me, his child, seen and loved.

Mother is lying in bed. I hold her hand and idly look at the protruding veins in it — the palest of greens. I wouldn’t have recalled that if I hadn’t said to myself, Her veins through her skin are the palest of greens. Words consolidate memories. Emotion consolidates memories. Something has happened to Mother after Father’s death, and she is telling now, telling her life, telling me that my father did not want the baby. When she told him she was pregnant he did not speak to her for two weeks. I feel the cramp of emotion, but I don’t want her to stop. After I was born, I want to know, was it okay then? It took some time, my mother says, before he got used to you. Your father loved you, of course.

Hume couldn’t find anything to hold on to, no self in the bundle of perceptions that become memories. Imperfect identity.

He did not want me.

But this is nonsense, Harriet, isn’t it nonsense? How many men have not wanted their unborn infants? Millions. How many women, for that matter? And how many have come to want them once the little thing has arrived, is out, is real? Millions. And yet, it took some time, she said, and there is the feeling, as if I’d been kicked, as if it had all become clear, as if a door had opened to a truth. And I look into the room, and there is the thing that has been born. There is something wrong with it. Count the toes.

But I would first ask you to note that I do not attribute to Nature beauty, ugliness, order or confusion. It is only with respect to our imagination that things can be said to be beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.V

But imaginations mingle, Professor. Imaginations merge. When I look at you, I see myself in your face, and what I see is deformed or missing.

But nothing happened, did it?

There is no one story, no perfect answer to the problem of H.B. Until about the age of three or four, every one of us is hidden behind amnesia clouds. The feelings come back, but we don’t know what they mean.

Perhaps I wished for something rather than nothing — a smack of passion to make me believe I was really there for him, not missing. And then the blow rises up from imaginary depths. When there is nothing, the phantoms come up to fill the emptiness. It is not true that nothing comes of nothing. There is always something. I stand on the stool and look out at the street. Stand beside me, Bodley. Here, there is room for you, too. I love you, Bodley. You are my best friend. Breathe now, Bodley, breathe fire.

Your order is my wilderness, Father. I cannot walk between the high rows of hedges and find my way out. I am not out of the maze. Stifled. I am trying to breathe, but I cannot. I am hardly breathing.

Your patterns did not make sense to me, Father, or, rather, the sense they made is shallow. Tidy formulations to clean up the mess. I have read your papers, and I am a little sorry now, sorry for a life spent on true and false, however lean and elegant the logic.

The “specialist” emerges somewhere — his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins — his hunched back, every specialist has a hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked…VI

Felix goes to work. Felix comes home. Felix gets on a plane and flies away. Felix sells and Felix buys, but you should have told me about your secret life, Felix, your secret lives, on the chase. It did have something to do with me. You were wrong, Felix. But you wanted your babies, didn’t you? Yes. They were easier to love than me. Maisie rushing to the door, bouncing up and down in her pajamas, panting with excitement. He’s here. He’s here. Daddy! Daddy! Elusive fathers. How we love them.

I am feeding Ethan, his tiny soft nose smashed against my breast. He pauses, a thin stream of milk bleeds from the edges of his mouth, and he looks around confused, blinks, breathes noisily, and returns to feeding. The curious Maisie is watching, pushing her head into my shoulder, whining at me. Is my Maisie lazy? Do you want to cuddle under my arm, lazy Maisie girl? Yes, Mommy. And I have them both, one hanging from a nipple and the other nudged into the cave made from underarm and elbow — a triple body. A depleted body of three. Tired as I am, I know this is joy. I say to myself: This is joy. Don’t forget it. And I don’t.

To end there, with the babes. That is good for the sleepy mind grown lazy with writing.

Tomorrow there is work, and there is Bruno at night. I call him the Rehabilitator, because he loves the big body of his big love. He likes to see me spread out on the bed, Harry, an aging, naked Venus no Baroque painter would have chosen, but here I am mooning over my own dive-bomber, Bruno the Bear. Not so young, my Romeo, an old fart if there ever was one, with a gut, too, and most of the hair worn down on his legs and the skin turned smooth, to his surprise! He’s not young! What happened? He worries over semen flow, a bit low, the flow, compared to days gone by. You’d think he had walked around with a volcano down there for years, conceited man. But face to face and pubes to pubes, or face to pubes and pubes to face, or straddling and riding or fingers inside delicate orifices here and there, God (why do we call on the supernatural at times like this?), God, I cannot wait to tackle that fat man and kiss his round ass.

And we fight and snarl, too.

H: Finish the poem or flush it!

B: Get your butt out there and show your own work, you coward!

But I’m in love, isn’t that mad? Now, to really end here. I am wanted, wanted. In your eyes, Bruno man, I am shining (well, at least part of the time). Sleep now, sleep, as the bard says, sleep, the balm of hurt minds.

January 18, 2000

Maisie reported today that Aven has an imaginary friend who lives in her throat. The person is known as Radish, and is causing upheaval in the household. Maisie has taken to addressing Radish, which means that Aven spends a lot of time with her mouth gaping, so her mother can confront the invisible insurrectionist directly. I am all sympathy because Bodley was with me for years, and I remember him with much love, but Maisie is worried that Radish has made her appearance (it’s female) for dark psychological reasons — the child is under stress in nursery school. They are showing her letters and numbers she wants nothing to do with. She has just been given eyeglasses, another worry (for her mother, I believe, more than for Aven). I told Maisie that these friends, wherever they may be lodged, inside or outside, are usually helpful and serve some useful purpose. My own mother was very kind about Bodley. She set a place for him at the table and talked to him politely (when he wasn’t misbehaving).

As for the plot, it seems to be working. Phineas has been offered a show of The Suffocation Rooms at Begley in the spring of next year. I had a hallelujah moment about my own queer sensibility, about showing my Phinny man. But then a hint of sadness, low thoughts soon after. I have begun to wonder if I could show work by Anonymous. That might be impossible. There is no orderly vision without context, it seems. Art is not allowed to arrive spontaneously unauthored. Bruno says that turning my pseudonyms into moving pieces in a philosophical game about perception is just a cover for my insecurity. I am masked twice. Phinny disagrees. He has been out and about with me, traveling incognito, so to speak. He says that he has seen it over and over again. He has seen that it matters little what I say; my intelligence is discounted. Piffle and twaddle. Were I to come out with The Suffocation Rooms, the powers-that-be would instantly back away.

The work would look different.

Would it look old-womanish all of a sudden?

I insist that this is a question with urgency.

I have often wondered what a Josephine Cornell would have looked like to people? Piffle and twaddle, frippery and sentiment? Soft?

Not the same, surely, as Joseph.

When it’s a gay man, it’s something else again, right?

Phinny says yes and no. He cites Ethan; it’s queered, he says, but there’s macho and fey, top and bottom, somehow important.

Is it?

I tell him I like being queered with him, paired and queered.

Eve, with her high heels and her low-cut sweaters and her corsets worn on the outside and her Rube Goldberg machines made out of old dresses, is oblivious to the onus of her sex. Well, she’s young. She knows about me and P.Q. She had to know because she lives here.

Two days ago while we were lounging about before bed, Phinny actually yelled at the big B. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what she does! They see the widow or they see her money. They are blinded by what they think they see!”

Another Goldberg, the Goldberg study, 1968. Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same results were found when they were presented with a work of visual art. Goldberg study revisited, 1983. Men and women students rated the essay with a female name attached more poorly than with a male name attached. And so it goes, but there is a twist as the research progresses in the 1990s. When expert credentials are attached to a woman’s name, the bias disappears. For artists, expertise is fame. Sex and color don’t disappear; they no longer matter.VII

Bruno does not want any part of bias studies or psychological research. I am not just another dame. I am his very own brilliant Harry. Give the jerks a chance. They’ll come around. Weirdly, his faith that Phinny and I are wrong makes me happy, and Phinny’s insistence that I am right makes me unhappy. I am perverse.

(Phinny is thinking of himself, too. The glare of prejudice is all too familiar.)

Sometimes I think of Anton sadly.

There is something else. I met Rune. I can’t say why, but I didn’t mention our encounter to Bruno. It was at the opening for some silly work — balloons, faces. Such a handsome man. Anointed, heralded, wearing his laurels. Vain, I think, probably very vain, but aren’t we all? And then maybe we attribute more vanity to beautiful people than to the plain, and perhaps it isn’t fair. We talked about memory. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. Cicero. One thought led to the next. It was almost as if he knew me, one of those uncanny connections. And what about machine memory? This fascinates him, artificial intelligence, but, I say, they have hit many dead ends. I told him about Thomas Metzinger.VIII Looked at Rune’s work again — faces in surgery, flaps of skin. I have a catalogue. New surfaces, he was saying, surgically transformed, but also bionic technology for new limbs that respond to the nervous system, computers as extended selves-minds. All true. But what does it mean? He spoke to me about external memory — an odd idea. For him the frenzy for documentation, photos, films, the second lives on the Internet, the simulated wars and games. I pointed out that self-consciousness is not new. But the technology is, he insisted. He said, “I want my art to be these questions.” We don’t agree, but that might be the pleasure, the sharp back-and-forth, the agon with a worthy partner. I recommended papers and books to him, and he wrote them down. Read Varela and Manturana, I said.VIIII He said he would. We talked about Wechsler. On him, we agreed. O’s Journey. When we said goodbye, his handshake was just right, neither limp nor too firm. When his e-mail arrived, I felt giddy with hope, for the end of exile in my own head, for someone who will understand me, someone who will see what I know and talk back to me about it. Is this so ridiculous? Isn’t it possible?

Recognition. Dr. F. Isn’t that what we talk about? My greed for recognition. One to one. Tête-à-tête. You and I. I want you to see me.

Bruno listens to me, but he doesn’t always know what I am talking about. Nobody seems to know what I am talking about.

A year ago, I saw part of his film diary — the man, Rune (once Rune Larsen), at daily tasks, brushing his teeth, flossing his teeth, lying on the sofa, reading, sitting in front of the computer, and then stroking a redheaded woman’s hair over and over as she lay with her head on his shoulder in a big rumpled bed. And I thought to myself, this is what we never see because we are inside, not outside, and most of us cannot recall habitual events except as a blur of routine. Is this why he wants the film? The date appears on the screen, and there is a film for each day. The film does not run all day. It is not Warhol’s sleeper or the Empire State Building, but he documents one event, often minor, every day.

Do I remember if I took my vitamin this morning or brushed my teeth? Was it this morning or yesterday morning or the day before?

The hair-stroking might remain inside Rune and the young woman as a memory, but most likely from the internal perspective of each of them, each “I”—but sometimes we remember as observers. It is a kind of false memory. I remember the afternoon I stroked your curls over and over when we were first in love. I remember lying with you in bed and feeling your fingers in my hair as you petted me for minutes on end and how lovely it felt, and I remember the daylight in the room, and I remember our love. What is the memory of love? Do we actually recall the feeling? No. We know it was there, but the manic desire isn’t there in the memory. What do we recollect exactly? The sensations are not reproduced. And yet, an emotional tone or color is evoked, something weightless or heavy, pleasant or unpleasant, and I can summon it. I remember lying in bed with Felix. But is it one time or is it many times merged together from the early days of our clutching love, when I ached for his touch? I know I held his head sometimes when we fucked. I know I put my lips to his ear afterward and whispered words long forgotten, probably stupid words. But do I really remember a single time, the once only? Yes, in the Regina in Paris, with the uncomfortable beds we had to push together. Five stars and those beds. I think I remember the line of light between the heavy curtains as I sat on top of him, banging him. Long ago.

I remember coldness, too, his back to me. The distance between us, his eyes dead to me. I remember this: at a dinner. Where was it? The caustic joke about marriage, not ours, of course, but the institution in general. What were his words? I can’t remember. I recall I started, looked at him. In my mind I see a plate with a gold rim. He turned his head. Now it returns with the memory, pain, perhaps not as acute, but pain arrives with a recollection so vague it has almost disappeared — there was a joke, a plate, a look, and a cutting pain. Is pain more durable than joy in memory?

What moron said the past was dead? The past is not dead. Its phantoms own us. They own me. They have a stranglehold on me, but I don’t know if the revenants can be dispelled. Maybe I will consult with Radish. Maybe she will have some good advice for me. I will just have to keep working — the studio is burgeoning with the unseen works, the myriad monstrosities by someone named Harriet Burden. Maybe when the revelation comes the proverbial scales will fall from their eyes. Maybe when I’m dead some wandering art critic will come to the building where the goods are stored and look, really look, because the person (me) will finally be missing. Yes, nodding wisely, my imaginary critic will stare for a long time and then utter, here is something, something good. Rescued from oblivion like Judith Leyster.X Then again, what if it’s all crap anyway, despite my precious pseudonyms — the ones they desire, rather than me, not me. I am going to be sixty. Maisie has said she will throw a birthday party, and I have said, yes, but only for the dear hearts — no outlying friends of friends. Phinny wants to shop for a dress for me to wear when I turn the corner of another decade, something “ravishing,” he says.

Felix in dreams. Another Felix — hateful. He was never hateful in life — cool, closed, but not hateful. Why does he come?

But tonight, as I sit here at my desk and look out at the water — at winter, at the night, at the shining city — I feel a grief that has no object I can name, not Felix or my father or my mother. Just now, it came hard upon me, the grievous ache, but for what? Is it simply that there is so much less in front of me than behind me? Is it for the child called Harriet who walked with her head down? Is it for the old woman I am becoming? Is it because the fury of ambition has not been beaten out of me, not yet? Is it for the ghosts that have left their tracks inside me?

Yes, Harry, it’s the ghosts. But are names ghosts, too, insubstantial? Did you want to see your name in lights, up on the marquee? Vanity of vanities. The letters assigned to you at birth, designation of your paternity. Paternal lights? Is that what you hoped for? But why, Harry? Your father did not want the Burden born, his squalling burdensome little Burden, but there you were.

He came around.

Did he, Harry? Did he, really? Not to your satisfaction, I would say. Didn’t he prefer Felix? Didn’t even your mother favor Felix? Didn’t she say to you, You mustn’t be too hard on Felix? Didn’t she fuss over him, protect him?

Yes, but she loved me.

Yes, she did. But your work?

She didn’t understand my work.

It’s coming up, Harry, the blind and boiling, the insane rage that has been building and building since you walked with your head down and didn’t even know it. You are not sorry any longer, old girl, or ashamed for knocking at the door. It is not shameful to knock, Harry. You are rising up against the patriarchs and their minions, and you, Harry, you are the image of their fear. Medea, mad with vengeance. That little monster has climbed out of the box, hasn’t it? It isn’t nearly grown yet, not nearly grown. After Phinny, there will be one more. There will be three, just as in the fairy tales. Three masks of different hues and countenances, so that the story will have its perfect form. Three masks, three wishes, always three. And the story will have bloody teeth.

I. A standard definition of confabulation in neurology. Some brain-damaged patients fill gaps in their memories with stories and explanations that are manufactured unconsciously. Burden extends confabulation beyond pathology to the metamorphosing character of memory in general. In Notebook U, Burden writes at length on the myth that memory is fixed. She quotes William James in Chapter 11 of his Psychology (1896), “A permanently existing ‘idea’ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodic intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.” She cites Henri Bergson on memory, calling him “the enemy of every static division, threshold, and category,” as well as multiple neuroscience papers. “The demonstration of the vulnerability of memory when it is in an active state reinforces the idea that memories, reorganized as a function of new experiences, undergo a reconsolidation process.” S. J. Sara, “Retrieval and Reconsolidation: Toward a Neurobiology of Remembering,” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Journal 7 (2000), 81.

II. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 39.

III. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, who decisively marked modern mathematical logic and early analytical philosophy, in particular Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein (the Tractatus). “The logic is out there” probably refers to Frege’s contention that logic is an objective reality, not created by the human mind. According to Frege, logic deals with a world of ideal, not physical objects, but these ideal objects have as much objectivity as physical things. In Notebook H, Burden charts her reading of Husserl, who was influenced by Frege. Burden writes: “The mind is inescapable. How can logic be floating in some ideal reality beyond the human body and beyond human intersubjectivity? And yet, ideas move among us, not as physical objects but as utterances and symbols.”

IV. Paul Virilio (1932–), French cultural theorist, critic, and urbanist, has written extensively on technology. He argues that modern life is gripped by a never-ending acceleration and that speed and light have now displaced space and time. He has often been referred to as an apocalyptic thinker. Burden is obviously unsympathetic to his views. In Notebook X, which she apparently used as a dumping ground for random thoughts, Burden writes, “The man is nothing short of hysterical, in the theatrical sense. He has gained a following among boneheaded, equally hysterical young men by pushing half-truths to their logical but extreme ends. He is the theoretical incarnation of panic.”

V. From a letter dated November 20, 1665, by Baruch [Bendictus] Spinoza (1632–1667) to his friend Henry Oldenburg. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 192.

VI. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 366.

VII. Philip A. Goldberg, “Are Women Prejudiced Against Women?” Transactions 5 (1968), 28–30. The study was replicated in 1983 by Michelle A. Paludi and William D. Bauer, using male as well as female subjects. “What’s in an Author’s Name?” Sex Roles 9, no. 3, 387–90. For later studies, see Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).

VIII. German philosopher, born in 1958, whose work integrates philosophy and neurobiology. Burden took extensive notes on a book Metzinger edited, The Neural Coordinates of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

VIIII. Humbert R. Manturana (1928–) and his student Francisco Varela (1946–2001), Chilean neurobiologists and philosophers who coauthored Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1972), a book Burden mentions repeatedly in her writings. In Notebook P, she quotes from the book: “Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact; the niche, nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it” (9). This embodied, embedded-in-the-environment position stands in opposition to computational theories of mind.

X. Judith Leyster (1609–1660), Dutch Baroque painter, a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, celebrated in her time but forgotten after her death. Because her work was similar to Frans Hals, many of her paintings were attributed to him. In 1893, the Louvre purchased what was believed to be a Hals but which turned out to be by Leyster. The discovery helped to restore Leyster’s artistic reputation.