Dying / not-dying

Feeling well today. Then feeling very tired, so went and laid down. Then well again.

And talking to Alfred, who has more success and fame than I ever will, and who is thirteen years older. After having been treated yesterday by Jambo, my acupuncturist, who is twenty-eight, full of life and presence and direction. I feel somehow bracketed.

I've spoken before of my bad habit, over the past twenty years, of expecting to be dead soon – of AIDS, of course, if not just generally... – but there is also my bad habit of having always-already given up on myself, of thinking of myself as older and more hopeless and resigned than I am, than I need to be. Alfred, for instance, is unavoidably and almost even annoyingly sturdier and more optimistic, more youthful, than I am... I actually allow myself to be, no, I make myself into an old man.

My dream several days ago was of a big, dark music conservatory, a place where I was a serious student of the clarinet, where it was raining. A serious, respectable dream, I thought at first. But John, my analyst, pointed out that, although the dream is very respectable and not shameful or unhappy, it is in its way pretty bleak – just as my current work, my research, my teaching duties, are all things I don't much enjoy, just things I feel obliged to slog away at. Indeed, as an analyst, he is quite different than Mitch was – if Mitch encouraged me in grimly facing the worst (appropriate in those years of short lifetime expectations), John wants to know why I'm not enjoying my life more. It's an annoying question, and I really can't answer it – at least I can't answer it and still sound intelligent, in charge, in control.

An obvious problem – one that I'm seeing for what is not entirely the first time, although John insisted that I look at it a lot more than I have, more than I am comfortable doing – is my fatal, miserable willingness to be older than I am, more hopeless, with less to do, less before me, less hope. And, of course, why would I have hope, if all my tasks and work seem so mundane, if everything I set myself to do is essentially so boring? Even in these pleasant summer days, warmer than usual at these latitudes, I fret, I look backwards, I sigh at my usual despair and diffuse, uncaring use of the hours of the day. Frankly, who would want another twenty or thirty years of that?

I was reading Edmund White on various older writers and artists (Art and Letters), and it's true that many of them seem younger, more hopeful, than I am. A few are admittedly more hopeless... but those are the ones we know were seriously messed up (Bowles, Genet, Kafka, etc.). I'm neither of those – neither really deranged (okay, that is good, right?) nor particularly optimistic....

So, I can look at: my dreams. My thoughts. Me: and the limitations of my not very successful life, now dwindled to that of an academic living alone in a small foreign city. But, when viewed from outside, it seems so – well, silly: that I would turn those limitations into a good reason to truly, seriously give up, to cut off my hopes and stop living.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to be a person who is not dying; or even, and this seems to be what John, and Jambo, want me to be, one who is, at least more thoroughly, living....

Comments

[Liz King]

I always worry about being too lowbrow for you, but here's a lyric from the introspective depressive songbird Joni Mitchell. It jumped to mind as I was trying to formulate helpful advice.

Dora says, "Have children!"
Mama and Betsy say, "Find yourself a charity.
Help the needy and the crippled or
put some time into ecology."
Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
And lovely landscapes to discover
But all I really want to do right now
Is find another lover

[inthehallofmirrors]

My dear! Lowbrow??? Not in the least. I didn't know this one though...

[Dave Robinson]

I know, it's so hard to know what to do to feel that one is living. Or how to be, so that one feels one is living. I feel quite desperate this way myself.

Yet all I need do is cut this way of looking and the world comes back into focus.