in the hall of mirrors

Better

With cooler weather, I'm feeling a bit more normal: not energetic, but not as drained, disoriented, worried, as I've been for much of the last week.

There may be a slightly embarrassing unpredictability about my more volatile reactions which may be slightly out of my control... I do wonder if the stroke has had any effect on my emotions. If so, I assume it's temporary.

I will admit, although I keep emphasizing (rather aggressively) that the main remaining symptom is a blind patch in my eyesight (apparently I'm no longer allowed to drive unless it clears up? – but then I haven't owned a car since 1992), that I'm still struggling with proper names, phone numbers, and the like – essentially, more recently learned information. I keep hesitating with people's names – but when I guess, I'm always right, at least so far; it's just that all those names and numbers look unfamiliar in a strange way, as though they might just as well be something else.

I had an interesting time remembering passwords and such at the end of last week... I wonder if an aging computer-oriented population will lead to some unusual strategies?...

It's also irritating to handle minor treatment problems. (Why in the world do so many British-made medicines include lactose? Because only foreigners are allergic to it?...)

But I suppose I can fit another set of habits, needs, and mild annoyances into the ones I already go through for the illnesses to which I'm already heir....

Well, as you can see: I am still a bit grumpy. I suppose they call that continuity.

Dis/orient

A day that was fairly normal at the surface, if incredibly tiring: I actually went to the corner store – three bags of food, much needed but almost more than I could carry, changed the bed and did the laundry, took a shower.

As that all tailed off this evening... and just before the neighbors starting singing pop songs again – they're not unpleasant, but it's somehow strange, almost like incantations – I start to disintegrate, emotionally....

I've complained a great deal in the last ten years about being taken away from too many things, about landing too far from home, about there being too many dead people I would want to depend on. But tonight it is incredibly present, the reality of being alone and in extremis... this is why you're supposed to have a family, I guess: so that you aren't completely freaked out and disoriented when serious things start to go wrong, when you're thrown off base. But my family is far away, and I'm gay and most of my generation is gone to AIDS, so... oh well. Old whines, too often rehearsed.

By which I don't mean to say that friends haven't called, haven't come by. One even just e-mailed me – but I don't quite know what to do with this: isn't there supposed to be someone you turn to and trust when everything disintegrates? Tonight it feels as though those someones are all long dead, or continents away...

I don't know what to do with this e-mail. Should I actually ask him to come over, just to cheer me up, simply because I'm feeling a bit panicky?

And all the while, the eerie pop chants continue from downstairs....

Existential

Very tired and weak today; and a certain amount of confusion, trying to negotiate with messages and phone calls from family and friends. Some of their confusion (as opposed to mine) is understandable; when I was in the hospital a number of my colleagues visited me, and I was talkative and cheerful – at least for the most part; the increased medical uncertainty, the physical weakness, the existential panic of the past few days hadn't set in yet, and I think most of my colleagues decided I was fine and they needn't worry. Then I started to feel worse – weaker, more worried....

I'm finding it difficult to cue people as to how they are expected to react: is this serious, am I panicking, what's going on? My message to visitors in the hospital was, at first, just a kind of 'war story': no biggie, don't worry, it's serious but I survived. Then I got more tired and less sanguine toward the end of the hospital visit... and now I just can't manage people at all, I don't have the energy.

Some are reacting with concern, figuring out that something serious has happened and I'm truly frightened. (And many of them know that, after more than two decades with AIDS, I'm not easily frightened about my health.) And then I can manage their concern... which many express by phone, asking for explanations that... well, I'm not always feeling quite up to giving, or repeating. Partly because I really don't know what to tell them: should I be reassuring, or – but what else is there?

This must be some of the withdrawal that old people experience when they are ill or weak, and can't always be articulate or entertaining about it. It is difficult, though – people are busy; and as someone who lives alone, it's hard to know how much to involve them in my worries and concerns, given that some of those worries may be exaggerated panic reactions in any case.

I feel like an old soldier, tough and unafraid of a host of dangers, suddenly confronted with something unexpected, something unknown, and filled with fear because it is outside his training... or perhaps I am merely like a dog in a dogfight, turning and yowling at the discovery that yet another dog has bitten him in the butt.

***

The downstairs neighbors are playing some sort of singing games, imitating pop songs, but only with their voices: it is actually charming in a way – but it had me disoriented and alarmed when it woke me at around 11:30 pm: are they magic rituals, is something weird going on? Well, it's just singing – and not unpleasant singing: actually, culturally, it seems a remarkably innocuous and cheerful thing to do, to get together on a weekend and sing pop songs.

But my first impressions, of incomprehensible magic, of rituals and drones, of something strange and eldritch going on in the room beneath me, are still with me, making it hard to sleep.... Do people who have had a stroke, and been left with more confused brain functions than I currently have (such as, as my sister reminded me today, my mother), hear things this way? Does the world become magical, threatening, more possible and open, but more complicated?

And if it were... is there a magic that could help me now?

Stroke

So: the news is – I never had the flu; I had, of all things, a stroke.

A stroke which fortunately left me with very little damage; for about two days I had trouble understanding and remembering things, but that has cleared up completely (as far as anyone can tell); and now there is a blank patch on my eyesight, at the upper right. Which may heal.

This is just about the smallest possible thing of this kind that can happen... but it is still terrifying – especially in my mood tonight: I'm sorry to say I'm really getting a sense of what this could mean for me, that at the age of 52 I could be susceptible to losing a part of my mind/brain/senses. When I first arrived at the hospital ten days ago, they were clear that the stroke was a function of one of my HIV medications; but for the past couple of days they've become suddenly less sure of that – it seems to have come out of nowhere, unsupported by personal or family history, or medical pattern, or probability. Just this... thing.

As the uncertainty of it seeps into my awareness, as I've realized how much more uncertain it makes my life – one which is already ludicrously uncertain: as though I needed this possibility, in addition to all the other disastrous possibilities/probabilities of AIDS, hepatitis C, living alone in a country where I'm not a citizen – I've felt suddenly even more disoriented about my own future, which has been uncertain for more than two decades: why, then, study with the Jungians, and get excited about a second career? Why bother to write anything, work on the AIDS book, deal with the drudgery of department meetings and undergraduate teaching and plans? Why do anything at all?

The worst prospect wouldn't even be a stroke where my brain turned completely to mush: it would only be, say, making it impossible for me to read, write, teach – no, I really can't go on speaking of this, it's too disturbing.

Honestly: is there not a point where I have had enough uncertainty in my life, in my future?...

And of course social workers keep coming back to the peculiar frustration that I live alone: that, despite having managed the HIV patient group for much of the past six years (which barely covered up a complicit plot by the group's organizers that I would end up partnered as a result), I'm still here alone, and various nurses and doctors saying, Oh, is there no one who can help you with...?...

I'm sorry to be so upset; I've been more sanguine (now there's a word that has new edges) about this for much of the past two weeks. But, just now, it feels like the most absurd and capricious of possibly-maybe, maybe-not-but-who-knows, demi-death-sentences....

Aargh. More existentialism than can be borne.

...

A technician told me my test results at the hospital today: distinctly bad. Which has various implications for the future.

In the kitchen, much of the fruit seems to be going straight from underripe to rotten, with nothing in between....

Thessaloniki

I don't know where I got the idea that Thessaloniki was known for being the home of witches in ancient Greece. I read it somewhere, but can't find any reference to it.

My mother's family was from Thessaloniki, from a small town called Pentalofos ('Five Peaks') north of the city of Thessaloniki itself. My mother and father visited there some years ago; Mom told the story of buying something in a shop, only to have the woman who owned the shop snarl at her in Greek, You can keep your filthy American money. But of course my mother speaks Greek, so she was able to reply: Well, I will then; and scooped up her purse and left the shop under the astonished eye of the angry woman.

Strange dreams last night: of Thessaloniki, of witches, of a pointlessly malevolent curse visited on a stranger for a trivial insult. A curse which might lead to speechlessness? – my mother's stroke; or curses that might visit itself on her children – her eldest daughter, her youngest son?...

For me, the curse: when von Franz, in her brilliant book on projection and its transformation from religious and superstitious thinking, explains the group of related fairy tales of which one version was turned into Swan Lake, she speaks of the curse on the sons, that they are transformed into birds: rootless, without grounded lives, homeless and scattered across the gray sky....

And it's strange how, all today since I started thinking of this, I keep dropping things, my knee keeps bleeding through various bandages no matter how thick, the bed and laundry seem ruined with bloodspots and bits of lint, and small mechanical items stop working completely.

I have a strange feeling that I should be trying to arrange a flight to Pentalofos.

•••

So much for that... my cousin Joan has corrected me, saying that we are from a different Pentalofos, the one in Kozani, which is some miles to the west and I think out of the traditional area of Thessaloniki... a good thing I waited to look for flights.

Carnivale

Another amazing television show, which Bennett and Merrie told me to see: Carnivale. A shame it ran for only two years before cancellation (but no wonder, either, it was so expensive and elaborate).

There's a great deal to say about it, of course – a Gnostic battle of good and evil, brilliant characterization and complex storytelling and deep, intense mystery –

but tonight I am especially seeing some of the startlingly beautiful pictures: this won all sorts of visual/artistic awards, and is one of the most visually conceived of complex television shows.

For example: when Libby is left behind by her suddenly cured husband and the healer, they have the nerve, the daring, to simply leave her in the center of a darkened road as they pull away, and the camera slows –

very beautiful.

Summer day.

Reading in the heat of noon

I grow sleepy, put my head

On my arms and fall asleep.

I forget to close the window

And the warm air blows in

And covers my body with petals.

Yuan Mei, 1716-1797, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Marking

Marking many, many first-year exams in twentieth-century musics... but, for the first time ever, with the help of two postgraduates, which makes life vastly easier.

There are the usual glitches and amusing misstatements... although it's a pretty solid class (only one fail thus far!) and most of the exams are pretty coherent.

However, at least two amusing and inadvertent pictures so far: one was John Cage as a major exponent of dance music (we later figured out that they had written "chance" music, but with the c and h very close together). Which suggests... a high falsetto singing 'Everybody Dance Now!', with the drum part played on a prepared piano....

Okay, the other one's better. Several students got confused about the Second Viennese School, and the Darmstadt School, thinking they were actual... schools. As in: "Webern studied under Schoenberg, who taught at the Second Viennese School"... I suppose if Webern's kindergarten attendance had been better he might have gotten into the First Viennese School.

Which suggests Webern's school report: "Works hard on coursework. Something of a loner – needs to pay more attention to extracurricular activities."

Hot / James & time / Dollhouse / Göteborg

It is actually almost hot out: in the low seventies (Fahrenheit – even after living in Centigrade countries for more than twelve years now, I just cannot think in Centigrade, in spite of its logic). In California, of course, it would be merely a normal day out of, say, eight months of the year in the south, or perhaps four months in the north; but here it is frankly rather strange.

Bennett once said, of a day like this, "It's practically tropical outside!". Of course he was born here... I just rolled my eyes and tried to explain the difference between northern England and Hong Kong. Or better: Bangkok... do you know those beautiful old Thai paintings of court life, where everything that happens is outdoors in a series of open pavilions with silk drapery?... quite a different life than here.

•••

Colm Tóibín's The Master – yes, it really is beautifully written; and brings up Henry James' way of thinking, of experiencing, without trying to ventriloquize in his style (and that's a good thing – a po-mo pastiche of James would be, well, nausea-inducing). But the sense of time and of loss, especially associated with poor disoriented Alice James... very real, very subtle; and also the intricacy of being uneasy with being homosexual, with anyone knowing about it, etc. etc.

Of course this is typical of some of Tóibín's thinking – if you ever read Love in a Dark Time you know that he himself isn't always terribly happy with being gay. Well, at least he's honest about it (and he writes beautifully about his doubts).

I should go back and read Edel's biography (never did finish it, hey it's five volumes) and perhaps try Susan Sontag's play about Alice (Alice in Bed), which has also sat on my shelf for ages. (The Sontag isn't particularly graceful, which put me off reading it... but I'm sure it will be intelligent.)

•••

Lately I was completely overwhelmed by Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which has been on American television since January, and is just showing up here. It's a bit strange that I would only notice now, as I'm such an utter Buffy/Firefly/Serenity/Angel/Dr Horrible fan; but I guess that shows I'm pretty much out of the loop. To restate everybody's opinions on a show that has had a rocky start, with which I basically agree: the first five episodes were good but not amazing – approximately like The Pretender, which was always second- or even third-rate (but without as many clunky sentiments as that cheesier show).

But episodes six through nine were astounding... the basic idea is, of course, that secret contemporary technology makes it possible to erase and replace minds, in a way similar to computer software. So there is a 'Dollhouse' in Los Angeles – one of twenty or so in the world – where pretty young people who have had most of their minds removed wander around in pajamas, work out, get massages, and wait to have a personality implanted in them. Whereupon they become ideal sex partners, or ideal nannies or secret agents or... whatever. It recalls a lot of Philip K. Dick, or The Prisoner, but is more sensual and deceptively normal (not to mention corporate).

What's so powerful is the sudden plunge into deeply complex existential questions of being, emotion, thought – if your thoughts can be replaced or modified, do you really have them? Who are you, and how would you know you are that person? One of the edgier plot choices appears when some of the dolls wake up, and engage on a dramatic escape so that they can return to the world – but then we find out they've been programmed to do so, in order to relax them by giving them some sort of closure, so they can be returned to their glass coffins. Just the kind of closure that we need when we're watching the show...

which is of course rather creepy. I recently wrote a piece called 'chemical bodies', where I talked about drugs and surgery and other ways of modifying the body and mind; it's like that, but more so.

Incidentally, episodes 11 and 12 are also very well written – with some of the funniest lines I've heard in a very long time (notably "Carrots! Medicinal carrots!") – but they were also fairly violent, so a bit tough to take, for me at least. I hope Whedon gets to do the whole five years – and I'm curious as to what kind of mixture of dark/violent/funny/sensual he'll end up constructing.

•••

But the taxi will be here in ten minutes, and I am off to Sweden, for the first time ever – to Göteborg, to discuss our university exchange arrangements. And, I hope, to eat some interesting food....