in the hall of mirrors

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....

Braw

Fragmentary entries on Lars' blog about writing, about finishing his second book. A friendly flag from Patrick on Facebook about finishing his book. Both times I'm interested, impressed, glad for them, and then – envious – am I the jealous Iago, the Loki of these dramas? Or worse, am I merely someone more pathetic and dim in the background, someone who doesn't quite cut the mustard, who fills in the rest of the cast, someone who can never finish the book he's supposedly working on....

Somewhat disoriented, somewhat angry, and then somehow a kind of rebirth: the past couple of days I keep imagining, sensing other ways I could be, could think – the freedom of summer colliding with the raw crack in reality that is the stroke, a sense of starting over and hang the consequences. New selves are imagined, new responses come to mind unbidden: perhaps after the stroke my mental pathways are flimsier, more easily crossed and broken and remade, who knows. If so, that's grand, just grand – they were traps, all of them.

Thinking, wondering, I do the dishes, a bit more roughly and quickly than usual, then stagger into the shower: yes, I'm still fairly weak and my hands are shaking, I'm veering from side to side a bit, but I take my shower, wash my hair, again faster, more roughly than normal. I'm wondering if I can reinvent myself, at least a bit, at very least somewhat: or maybe even, a lot – could I be more like some imagined, stronger, more heroic self, battling my way through all this, rather than moving slowly and pathetically, too cautious, too sad to get anywhere? Could I grab this book in big, juicy chunks, could I just write the damned thing and to hell with fussing, with anxious imaginings, with wasting so much time in a pallid, vertiginous lotus-land of computer games and trivial television?

Somehow the Jungian studies of the past year are giving me a theoretical grounding for this: that such male energy has always been available, but in my daily life I ignore it too much, I fuss and control and worry, making sure everything in the apartment is neat and clean before I can do any work.... But what if I took it, or more accurately took myself, more rawly, attacked myself, wrote whole pages, whole chapters out of the energy I can sense, can almost see? Thinking of it in transformational terms, in terms of the possibilities of my Jungian analysis rather than in terms of my own history, I seem to know more deeply, to realize: the truth is, everything can be broken up and revised, renewed. I didn't break myself up in this way when I was in analysis years ago, but that's because both I and the analyst thought I'd be dead soon – it was all retrospective then, a matter of forgiveness after funerals. This could be different, and I thrill to realize that it could be possible: to break up my sense of myself, my habits – I don't need to fit whatever I do tomorrow into yesterday's pathways....

I am still shaking slightly after the shower, still finding it hard to stand and walk. But if I can hold on to, channel, some of this energy, even in the coming days while I'm recovering, slightly dizzy, slightly confused, maybe I can use it, drive forward with it, and write in chunks, write until I fall over exhausted....

And then I would be something else: and that is one of the men, the better men, that I could, possibly, be.

Sub specie aeternatis

I am very, very lucky – despite hosts of administrative things happening this week, most have gone off well; most answers to e-mails today were yes, okay, done; and I don't leave for Zürich until Sunday.

Therefore there is some quiet time to finish reading some of the Jung I wanted to read before leaving; and there isn't a feeling of chaos, loss, uncertainty.

Somewhere among the waves of ideas and small events and actions, I can collect things into a sort of a pile: yesterday's snowbound meeting with students and friends to talk about life and AIDS; my colleagues waving cheerful good-byes today, asking for chocolate from Switzerland, but with everything else apparently fine and requiring nothing from me; a few chapters of Iain M. Bank's Matter, the latest Culture novel, wherein though stress and violence are in the forefront the background is filled with those strange people of the Culture, who can live casually and freely, without lack, for however long it takes until their lives make sense to them; and Groundhog Day plays on TV, its strange plot a reminder that taking advantage of one's time can lead to incredible things.

And among all those, and the snow outside, I hit a phrase in the middle of Jung's autobiography: sub specie aeternatis. By the standards of eternity, according to eternity, as though it is a piece of eternity, something like that. And Jung is speaking of making sense of his life, by those standards: and the phrase, the idea, seems to glow as it never has before – I want to remember to live as many days as I can, aware of where they, and I, stand in eternity....

All time, all space

Home from a pleasant Christmas lunch at Ian's – excellent food – and sitting in the living room, with the tree glittering. And a beautiful strophic folk song by Chris Wood playing; and pulling out the tarot deck, to do one of those bottom-of-the-year readings. And seeing on the computer news of the Marshall Islands, where climate change is starting to strike: people flooded out of their homes – the islands of the world will be the first to weather the storms.

And, somewhere among these tiny fragments of experience, I suddenly am given that eerie Olympian awareness of time, space: of sadness and joy, of many, many people, and places. As though I see myself dealing the cards on my living-room carpet in the light of the tree, and it all slows down, as though in a film: and time slows and moves choreographically, as I become one of many tiles, many spaces and movements, weeping and happiness.

So much time, so much space: everything has such depth and beauty from that point of view.

But, I suppose, how could we ever live here?...

On the way to living

The past few days have seen some work, and a great deal of not working: in the midst of some lovely weather, much quiet, much space.

Today I followed several patterns familiar from this summer: up at 6, surfing the web unimportantly; then slept another hour or two; then...

but here the patterns broke a bit: I inadvertently diverted myself right into the mainstream of thinking about living by watching one of the two videos left by Randy Pausch, the computer science professor who just died, famously, of pancreatic cancer. He reminds me a lot of my brother-in-law (the one still recovering from my sister's death last December – I should call him, and will today, and will call my mother too); thin, smart, energetic, pragmatic, very American, a regular sort of guy.

One reason for me to watch Pausch's work is that I think I know at least as much, if not more, about illness, dying, mortality, and what it means, than he did (he wasn't ill for all that long). However, obviously, he's a guy with a family, with an energetic approach to things, someone who was very busy and engaged – none of which really applies to me, at least not much of the time. So: what does the optimist do when faced with these awful, anti-optimistic things?

And it was useful to see him talk: a bit fast and pragmatic, but good at rousing me from my overly introspective lethargy.

Indeed, one of the first things I did at the end of his 'Time Management' talk was to throw one of those beautiful Indian shawls that I leave over the doors in my apartment over the television set. Not that it's impossible to watch the hulking beast, of course, but now there's a brief barrier that might help me ignore it more often. I took notes on his talk, too; downloaded some (more) time management software, and moved it all to one folder.

(Slightly eerily: he gave that talk at the University of Virginia, where I was an undergraduate more than thirty years ago; and, at the very end, as the camera panned back to show the room and its architecture, I realized that it was in Old Cabell Hall – smack in the middle of the music building, a hall where some of my more thrilling and more embarrassing performance moments happened in the 1970s. A source of intense and sometimes very unhappy memories... one of the places where, in fact, I first gave up on myself, washed my hands of myself as a hopeless case, a lazy fraud, a dreamer not a doer.)

Speaking of giving up on myself – it becomes clear that one of the big differences between Pausch and myself in attitudes towards death/loss is that he really had a short time to deal with it, where I've had more than twenty years (twenty-five years, if you go back to Reid's death). And in fact the entire color of my life has been determined by decisions made at the end of the 1980s: realizing that I wouldn't live long, I understood many things about life – but also because I was sure that I wouldn't live long, I didn't work to implement any of those things, to change my own life to something that would make more sense. And still, that is how I operate, at some deep and all-encompassing level: waiting for my life to end so that I don't have to do the work to live it... and now it is twenty years later. Amazing stasis (that should, perhaps, be a hymn: amazing stasis, how sweet the sound, that destroyed a wretch like me).

At least I know all of that is absurd.

While finishing those notes, organizing, I played some music – since I'm writing about the classical works, I put on some of Ned Rorem's choral works. I don't care that much about Rorem, but his two settings of Paul Monette's AIDS poems need to be written about early in this book, as they are rooted in much the same aesthetic world as the AIDS Quilt Songbook and Corigliano's Symphony no. 1. And, in the midst of writing/thinking about all of this, and how the main barrier to writing/living for me is a range of foolish decisions to give up on myself that I made between 1973 and 1987, the Rorem/Monette came on – a vast, dark waltz, intensely sung, with a certain savage power and beautiful falling melodies, unmistakably more powerful and attention-grabbing than the pieces around it, so that I recognized the sense of it without even knowing the piece. Ending with the phrase, howled passionately and repeatedly over the crescendoing waltz of time, the one that defies any possibility of giving up: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here...

The larger sense of time

Late last night, after a day of getting some things done and some falling aside, looking for a book to take to bed: and I picked up the big collected poetry by Czeslaw Milosz.

A beautiful book – well, a book full of beautiful stuff – but really too large for a poetry book, even more ungainly than my collected Auden; I'm glad of everything that's in it, but it's hard to carry around.

(And so typical of me: I got rid of any books of his work that were duplicated in it, so now I can't carry around anything more portable. Like when I was complaining to Bennett in a bookstore the other day that I probably need to re-purchase all of Jane Austen, because the Penguin complete works I replaced them all with is in such tiny print as to be unreadable.)

Looking through the Milosz, almost anywhere in it, reading his vast wisdom and sensitivity to time and meaning – it was comforting, and brought me a certain clarity. Sleeping, I had a sense of myself between yesterday and today, between sleeping and waking; between my past stories about myself, and some possibility of a future. I even dreamt of possibilities of love – not really erotic, but more the intimate awareness of another person.

Today I got to work, a bit; had to handle things needed by other people, watched a student DVD (of a country-western musical, of all things) and agreed on a mark for it. Later at night, I was making lists of different books and CDs needed to write different chapters on the book about music and AIDS – and thinking, it feels endless: there are so many bits of things here, so many downloaded web pages, so many pieces I only know a little bit about, so many possible links and bits of information I haven't found yet, or at all. And so very many pieces I'm planning on writing about – have I set an impossible task for myself? Or at least a task that it isn't possible to do well?

Talked to Mitchell, cheered up, calmed down: that Miloszian sense of being suspended across time led, metaphorically, to a feeling of being suspended among all of these works – and a sense of being untroubled, of having plenty to say, without troubling to worry about saying the perfect thing, the final thing, the only thing (which is, in any case, impossible).

Like a brief vision of what it is like – might be like – will be like? – to be 'in the zone' with writing this book: to be aware of all the possible things to remember, and float among them, easily....

So: the book has a future. And I, maybe, have a future: Milosz has successfully reminded me of that....

Focused

Fragments of busyness, many of them – as I move through the overlapping needs of our exam period, various scattered administrative tasks, applying for a promotion, applying for a job elsewhere – and move towards research leave.

Reading unusually alert books (though still not books about AIDS, which I probably need to be reading right now): the brilliant, complex James McCourt, who now has seven books (and that gives me hope – given that his first book was in 1975, and he seemed to vanish for years, even decades, his sudden productivity since 2000 is heartening), and the less skillful but still pleasant John Connolly. (Yes, and they're both Irish – tells you something about language, thinking, and the pleasant facility of the Erse.)

Odd moments of alertness, of waking up or noticing – something, as though I'm being told things – or as though the possibility of noticing, of being aware of where I am, of when it is in my life, is always there, but suddenly I actually register it. I turn my head, and it's like waking from a dream – except there is no dream, and I'm already awake: and I can't quite remember what I just realized, what I saw out of the corner of my mind's eye.

Tonight, thinking: three days and sixteen hours until my official research leave starts. (Okay, the real change over to being on leave will be fuzzier than that, but it's a goal to head for.) And the thought: I'm waiting for... my research leave? or, I'm waiting for...

nothing?

In northern England, on a winter night

After a long day, during a semester with a number of long days; a semester with lots of small successes, and some unpleasant failures; a semester where I was conscious the whole time of aiming towards the freedom of the end of January, when I'll go on research leave, and won't let anyone ask me for anything at all –

I found myself already utterly sleepy at 7:30 pm; pulled the Greek cotton blanket (surprisingly warm, and after many washings very soft) over me, turned out the light, and listened to the wind in the chimney.

And for some reason kept returning to this phrase, this idea: I am here, in the middle of winter, in northern England – what does that mean?

I have an impending birthday; fifty-one – an age where one can no longer get away with wild or hopeful speculations about one's own future. I'm worried about people a third of the way around the world, and wondering if I should do something about it – I found myself telling Merrie today that it had occurred to me that perhaps I should simply resign, and go take care of my family – especially because of my (admittedly intermittent, and inflected by my attempts in cognitive behavior therapy to defuse some of my preconceptions about myself) sense that my life here is not what it should be anyway. So why not be brave, drop everything, career expectations and home and all, and go devote my time to something valuable – to people who may need me?...

And last night, a friendly, talkative, rough-edged half-Scottish, half-South African man, eating dinner at the next table at the Italian restaurant near my home – the very picture of the British working bloke – told me all about his traveling life at dinner, and was friendly in a way that made me wonder whether there was more than friendliness going on. Yes, he gave me his card; and last night I had a long dream that was partly a response to what he made me imagine, of road adventures, of leaving everything behind, and going to see what the world might give me – one of those dreams that felt more real and more interesting than anything in the waking world.

And, perhaps, some of this is a reaction to reading Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which was giving me a disturbing sense of the demands of time and place. Clarke's exquisite writing, her witty entanglement of Napoleonic England with the dangers of magic, her selfish dandies and calculating women, all give a sense of delicate suffocation – the constraints of a competitive society in turmoil, where it is so difficult to find the place you want and hold on to it, but also absolutely necessary to fight for that place. Such gorgeous writing, but you want to help the characters find a way out: a way that they can be free of a demanding and money-ridden life, a way that they can find happiness, rather than just the correctly wealthy husband, the secure inheritance....

***

So, with all that in my head; and the events of the day, meetings, a word with a colleague in the hallway, tomorrow's classes – so many connections, images, inputs, demands; it is interesting that my mind would suddenly throw up this attempt to clear the air, to judge where I am, and who I am, on the most basic terms – I am here, in northern England, on a winter night. What does that mean, and what does, what can my life mean as a result?

Just think: if we could see ahead to the whole shape of our lives – even if they seemed disappointing, if there was a lot of loss, or if eventually we got painted into what seemed some rather small corners – would we have the sense to make more of what we do have? If we could simply accept the facts, the limitations, of where we are, could we make more of it – can we find some certainty, some happiness, some fulfillment, in whatever corner of the world we accidentally find ourselves, in whatever situation we land?

Can I make some sense of all this – stand firm where I am, wherever it is?

I am here: in a small brick row house, in a suburb in northern England, with the wind sighing in the chimney. It is now: near midnight, on a winter night in early December, at the end of my fiftieth year.

That is what I have.

What can I make of it?...

Time: imposed, imagined

Sleeping too much, drifting: probably my thyroid is off again. Since Duisburg: several busy days, mostly administration, and a conference day; a lot of floating anger about promotions, ambition, respect; all among the strange long days of Spring in the far north. Those are the more sharply defined moments in what has felt like a soft, bright fog of vaguely lost hours.

I've been reading a lot of Avram Davidson lately, as I've mentioned. Dense sentences, and a rich, complex experience of time and accident. But behind it all is the lengthy tale of Davidson's increasing irritability, his irascible and uncomfortable old age, his sense of failure, his constant complaining about money and success – all of which sound rather like the way I'm getting with age. Resentment as a way of life, and the entire sense of time as a narrative of not-enough....

And Gerhard and Kunsu have to sell the house in Kreta, and I wonder how they will manage their old age. And Laura will be visiting Edinburgh this month, and I'll get to see her – but will have to answer her questions about how I'm doing, in comparison to her relatively successful, streamlined life. And my eldest sister and her MRIs, and my younger sister and her shaky job security; and my mother in her nursing home. And Trisha battling with her business while setting her poetry aside, and Terry as perpetual freelancer who's currently doing well, but not forever; and A. who has moved in with K., and may be finally settling down at long last; and L.'s new Irish colleen, who is moving here, changing countries for her new relationship. R.'s rather arrogant successess, D.'s dimming prospects. Perhaps it's no accident that these friends-and-loved-ones are mostly in the arts, or academe, or other thinking-oriented lives; it's a tough and unpredictable world to live in. But all these people will get older, more fragile: somebody will need to take care of them – who will it be?

Lives, and time: that eerie sense that we all end up recreating patterns over and over – and some manage to break patterns; and some patterns are more welcome than others. One of the most valuable aspects of the academic and literary lives is reading biographies – that is, reading about people: one becomes very clear that most people who suffer do it to themselves – and most people who fail seem to do it to themselves too, though it's not always entirely clear how that happens. And success is unavoidably a matter of chance, a roll of the die.

It's sort of a fanning-out of my usual anxieties about myself, to think about all the people I know: how they will do now, how they will get through their days, what will they be like when they're older. And a smearing of quantum variations in possible universes: as though you can imagine the whole fan of possibilities opening out from each moment, and what each might entail. As though ambition, anxiety, hope, despair, are multiplied, but not into mere grayness, but into a vast swatch of hues: all pastel though, because the intensity of emotional focus on any particular career problem or a hope is leached out by all of its variations.

Strangely, this makes me feel even more helpless in relation to my life: with all of floating time and possibilities, it becomes even more difficult – no, not difficult: merely implausible, merely rather pointless – to focus on doing something right now, on engaging in some action. One of Tanith Lee's beautiful stories in Tamastara runs through two parallel lives, one of a boy, one of a girl, both with the same soul and born in the same moment; both have joy and great sorrow (the boy a beautiful drone who loses his looks in a bus accident, the girl a dancer who marries without love). At the end the whole story evaporates as the soul moves on: the two stories were parallel visions of what might happen if the soul chose birth then, but it doesn't – neither story happens at all, both are negated into vastness.

This is sort of how my life feels now: sleeping too much, a bright fog: drifting – in time....

at [x] in the morning

My first paper on AIDS and music, back in the mid-1990s when I thought death was imminent, and honesty unavoidable, was titled, "at three in the morning, with both pedals down".

Now it's four in the morning. Half an hour ago I finished the Sondheim paper – or declared it finished.

Calm, exalted, distant.

Yes, I wish the thresher (really more an abbatoir) of editors and publishing house wouldn't mangle everything, put everything through such processing-machines (exactly 7,000 words and not more – and boy did that last hundred words hurt at points). But the Sondheim – Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George, especially those songs that triumph over time (which is what the paper is about) – playing from my computer speakers, very quietly, is an excellent soundtrack to living at this level.

If I lived in Rome I would go walk through the silent streets among the vast, beautiful, ancient buildings.

In Los Angeles I would walk through warm streets and the buzzing of endless halogen lights. It's considered strange to take a walk in Los Angeles, but it's still comfortable, possible. And you can go a long way.

In San Francisco, if it were warm, I would walk, maybe even out to the Marina, and watch the sun rise....