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....

Alternative histories

Last night's dream: a music conservatory, walking between buildings in rainy autumn weather – I am a student working on my technique, talking with others – serious, committed and reasonable, as I never actually was in school... a surprisingly detailed, and strange, setting. Like another life, one that might have happened.

Today I was working, yet again, on the film scores chapter of my book on music and AIDS. The Velocity of Gary, a surprisingly inept but colorful translation of a play to the screen, which involved a number of fairly famous actors – a fragmented (and sometimes quite striking) view of a scruffy street life in downtown New York, chaotically strewn with hustlers and drag queens. Another possible life, filled with passion and despair.

Although I frequently (and while, unfortunately, whining too much) imagine various aspects of my life having gone differently, it is strange to imagine really huge dislocations: what if everything were different – what if I'd gone off on a sharp angle at some early stage, such that not a soul I've known would be a part of my life, not a cityscape I've loved would have been a setting for me, nor any of my smaller goals or experiences or homes... what then? What if I were entirely unrecognizable to myself?

It is amazing to think of – and not entirely improbable: more than most, I have blundered through my life, through many places and situations, without a clear sense of where I was going or how to get there. A few sharp turns, no sharper than the turns that I have actually made, could have landed me in vastly different settings, in worlds that would be utterly other.

I can't help wondering: and – would that have been better?....

Adorno's Dreams

After last night's brave and admittedly somewhat demented post – not that I discount its ideas and feelings: I think I really could crack my behavior, my limitations, open, if I had the energy and courage, which I may yet be able to find – I put myself together today to go to the pharmacy and the office. Did necessary errands, picked up my now even vaster cache of medications, and took a taxi home after less than an hour in the office, as I could hardly stand... and am now still physically drained after some hours of sleep, shaking slightly when I walk, or pick things up.

But still able to read and type, of course.  No research today, despite yesterday's wild vows; but headed for bed, I picked a very strange book that I bought last month off the shelf.

You see, I regard myself as something of an Adorno expert. Not like Paddison, or the terrifically irritating L. G. (initials only in her case) – I am not someone who wants to explain every aspect of Adorno's ideas, or take them all entirely seriously; but I'm also not someone who wants to dismiss his work because of its idiosyncrasy, nor someone who regards it as outdated or repressive. I spent years trying to 'get' Adorno in the late 1980s and 1990s, and still regard him as a central intellectual figure for my world and, in an odd way, an intellectual friend; but a friend as Benjamin regarded him as a friend – as someone who could be misguided or overly driven in his conclusions, as someone to whom one would say in exasperation, Yes, but surely you can see that you're exaggerating the difficulty of....

Of course the great intellectual and emotional tragedy of Adorno's life was Benjamin's suicide in 1940; because it appears that Benjamin was the only person Adorno took entirely seriously, the only person whose challenges he felt deserved a carefully considered answer. For Adorno, almost all other humans were to some extent fools, dupes, madmen or weaklings; and when Benjamin died, the only person who could disagree with Adorno and yet be taken seriously by him died, finally and forever. It's hard not to see the shattered postwar Adorno as grieving not only for Germany, for the Jews, for political freedom, for cultural freedom, but also grieving even more deeply for the only person he ever really respected.

But that is a rather grand overview of his story... and almost all of Adorno's books, from the brilliantly canonic to the flippantly sardonic, have found a place on my shelves. At one time I identified with him, perhaps too much (as he probably had ten or twenty IQ points on me in any case, not to mention better training of course, along with his intricately messed-up personality); and my work, although it has fallen far from his in material and ideas, barely conceals its deep Adornian roots. I do feel lucky, and blessed, to have had accidental meetings in my life that caused me to take Jung seriously rather than Freud – it has kept me from the malevolent, despairing cynicism that I read in most of the more Freudian or Lacanian intellectuals, and I'm grateful for that. (Think of it this way: who could bear to have both AIDS and Lacan in their lives? Impossible, or at least insane.)

So... the publication of Adorno's Dream Notes induces a strange mixture of responses – exciting, disturbing, fascinating, and even faintly funny. That this most fiercely guarded of men, always on the offensive with almost everyone, would write down his dreams and consider baring them for publication – it is amazing in several ways. It also has its sad side – the dreams are almost all dark, the frequent sense of danger and loss and collapse testimony to the fact that Adorno actually reduced the darkness of his world vision in his professional writings. (I am grateful that some of my own dreams are more golden than black, that there are sometimes bursts of love, light, and almost utopian flights, that sustain me through whatever the day may bring.) But, to someone who has spent as many years 'involved' with Adorno as I have, it is like listening to an old friend, exhausted and somewhat disoriented after a major illness, saying strange but resonant things in a tired whisper – one feels concern and even pity; but it builds an even deeper three-dimensional sense of his extraordinarily rich personality.

Such that one could almost – but no, it is still almost – love this tragic, brilliant man....

Boy band

Hmm, what a ruthlessly symbolic dream: sitting around with a bunch of charming, handsome, talented young men who have a (classical, I think) ensemble that has somehow become famous; I ask them to come perform, collaborate, work with us in the North, and they say no, politely, with regret – we'd love to, but we have very heavy schedules, all already set. Then, and in front of me, someone from the South (Surrey, Brighton? – it is a dream symbol, and doesn't need to be quite a real place) asks them the same, and they accept with alacrity.

And I sit, trying to be pleasant, but feeling fairly despondent, old, a failure and unimportant, around the table where they are all making plans to work together... hmm.

Such an unsubtle dream.

Dreams of buildings

[The writing group exercise this week: list two buildings or places; list words associated with them; and what is unusual or unexpected that happens in those buildings?...]

I am always enchanted – literally: mesmerized, ensorcelled, under the power of, unwilling to leave them – by buildings that flow. Ancient buildings made by hand, to no regular plan; curved spaces, irregular corners, wood and plaster (or even, sometimes, metal) that seems to melt, or seems to have melted once, a hundred or a thousand years ago, and frozen again.

It's about a humanity in them, a sort of organic life: it's why, despite disparaging remarks from my sister and most other respectable artists, I love certain kinds of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Modernismo. Guimard, Gaudí, Mackintosh... what I wouldn't give to live in a house like that.

Which will never, of course, happen – the older houses are museums; and nobody carves like that now, it would take too long for anybody in the modern age. Nobody would shape the branches and leaves of a Guimard chair; nobody would even bother with the plainer ornaments of a Frank Lloyd Wright table. Costs too much, ultimately; workmen want to get in and get out, that's the way it is.

And those strange handmade houses of the seventies – wooden or earth, often eco-creations or hand-built, out in the forests – I was a bit young to get to live in one of those. It even seems hard to find them these days....

So the only way to indulge my passion for rounded corners, aside from occasional museum trips, is in my dreams. Those dream buildings: not only are they often complex, asymmetrical, sculptural, carved; they also have the advantage of all dream things – they can change shapes at will. In fact they can actually flow, not just appear to do so: as you turn your head the wall melts, a winding wooden staircase, with small windows that let in the late afternoon sun, leads in large, increasingly irregular curves down into a small room with a rocking chair and a double shelf of books. And perhaps if you look out the window you will see that this room is out on a hill, a steep one, and you look down into a valley filled with trees....

But then there are those other buildings in dreams: high, intricate ones, with many windows. Buildings with some symmetry, but a strange and complex one: they lean over, literally over, as parts are cantilevered out into a twilight lit up with flashes of lightning. And as you climb there are more rooms to traverse, and your goal seems to move further and further from you. Their green-gray stone keeps metamorphosing, at first when you are not looking, but with increasing contempt for your opinions about the appropriate behavior of granite and steel, in front of your face: mocking, they multiply, overlap and expand, while sirens and explosions wail up from the dark streets far below.

Transitionals

The unhappy weight of guilt around productivity has let up somewhat: since Mitchell has kindly started giving me my marching orders – literally telling me what chapter to draft next, and send it to him – and Melinda, going a bit outside the normal range of activity for a therapist, has chimed in asking for the same – I am getting some work done, and can remember once again how everyday, how easy, it really is to do what I think I am supposed to do, with my life.

So, when I lost the past four days to, first, a cluster of things to do for other people – a report on a doctoral thesis, a recommendation letter, a chain of minor administrative discussions; culminating with M.'s slightly anxiety-producing discussion with me of what he wants me to take over in the fall, which is definitely more than I wanted to take on – and then a big system crash and rebuild (two and a half days, basically) plus erratic stomach problems – it was all annoying but not depressing, not terrible, not merely Another Example Of What A Failure I Inevitably Am. As it usually is.

Although last night I looked through the supposedly drafted chapter, amazed that it was really just notes: and realized I needed to get up today and write out paragraphs, so that I would have something to send to Mitchell and Melinda on Tuesday.

In the night, this evolved into its own kind of panic – a dream of wandering through my neighborhood, then a few blocks away to an area I'd never seen before, with beautiful houses, sandy earth, and warm, dusty weather, where I discovered various castoffs and started to take them away. (Is that what scholarship looks like to my inner selves? – well, I admit, as today I need to go through a pile of secondary sources looking for the necessary points where somebody has talked about my current topics, it's not an inappropriate image.) And then, as I climbed a stair behind a house to another level, the dream turned dark and hopeless, as the things I'd collected were lost, and I was in a scruffy wasteland of urban trash.

Just a dream: but I woke aware that I was frightened of the possibilities of failure, yet again.

So: coffee, and attacking paragraphs, and cranking out – something. Some attempt to avoid, to hold back, to overcome, disaster.

•••

In two days, to Stuttgart for a week that includes Easter weekend, to work with Joyce on another long-delayed anthology. Stuttgart is, I think, the German version of Norwich – a rather isolated, boring town, pretty and well-off, but with a population that most of its compatriots treat as slightly ridiculous. I remember from visiting there in the early 1990s, an exquisite toy-like train system – a result of a highly technical town (home to Mercedes and BMW), lots of municipal funds, and a relatively small area and small population. Cute, to be frank.

Probably a good place to get some work done....

Concerns

A disturbing dream of my sister in pain, suffering with the chemo, sleeping, getting worse – at some strangely chaotic, crowded conference; emphasizing the insensitivity of not knowing what she's going through, of not helping.

***

The family seemed calm and even cheerful at yesterday's Christmas phone call; probably the ones to worry about are her husband, after everyone goes home (what shape will his life be now, with her gone? – and him only in his mid-fifties); and my mother, who received so much extra care through my eldest sister, and of course now my younger sister and brother are finding out how much work that can entail.

Well, I guess they have their work cut out. I wonder what I can do to help – or what I could have done to help before....

As you can see from my last couple of posts, I'm actually feeling very heart-whole, calm, myself (except for that dream, of course). Midwinter, after the holidays, and after a death: but with nothing really broken.

Cycles, dreams

Having been back about ten days, and having done only administration, plus many chores; and lying around a lot the past few days, sleeping; I start thinking...

cycles: the hours that make up a day, and how we move through them; the days of a week, a month; the school year, with its enormous contrasts (greater than those of business people, which reminds us more of the passing time). And, unavoidably, the huge, different or not sufficiently different, parts of one's life.

Of course I remain highly self-critical about my own management of all these cycles: I still have a terrible (and I mean: terrible) tendency to waste time, to use it, at all of these levels; there's no doubt about it, when I face whatever judgment there may be at the end of my life, even if it's just the one of diminishing awareness as my heart stops, the economy of my use of time and energy has been poor. Wasteful. No other judgment can really be reached.

So I concentrate on the hours of a particular day to try to make that work better, or I give up on the hours of that particular day because it's already a dead loss so that I can perhaps handle the next day better. A few days ago I went ahead and organized a Real Holiday – ten days at the beginning of August, in Sitges with Susan and Rob – all justified by months of conversations about the Mexico trip (that was no holiday) and the summer (requires a holiday). Having made one, though, I can see how now my summer will be broken up in a way that will just preclude any serious work getting done... except that of course work can always get done, if only I don't waste the time.

The day wasted, the week wasted: the summer wasted, and then another semester to waste. Then a year off perhaps, to waste, and whatever years spent at this institution to burn, to flake away to ash. Then....

The truth is, this whole problem of time was vastly easier when I thought (honestly, half-hoped) I was going to die soon (since the late 1980s). I thought then that I had wasted so many days, weeks, years, but I could easily say: aha, well, if only I'd lived longer I'm sure I would have gotten it right. And as I stopped believing that, it simply became an easy way of fooling everyone else – if indeed everyone else was fooled, which perhaps they weren't: if I'd died in the mid-1990s, I know people would have said it was with unfulfilled destinies snatched away from me; but would they have actually believed it?

All of the above is easily subsumed into the ironic smile of the older person, of the ones who juggle with life and death (which is true of everyone at my age, actually, though some of them don't seem to know it).

One cycle which does seem to grow and enrichen is the cycle of dreams: one reason I'm sleeping a lot is that, when I went to Mexico and Washington, I tried to move the time of my thyroid medicine, which I know is a mistake and leads to the thyroid hiccuping, therefore more sleep, more somnolence. (See, again: something that's not my fault...) And so there are days of sleeping the morning away, and afternoon naps, then nothing done in the evening – but all actually filled, with growing, changing dreams.

The sadness of a rich dream life when there is no real life, though – according to mental mechanists and behaviorists my dreams mean nothing, they're merely psychic garbage; but I prefer to turn to my other soothsayers, the Jungians, the mystics, the fantasists, who think a rich dream life is important, and worth developing. (Dunsany was such an active, amazingly accomplished man – yet so many of his writings are drenched with the idealization of dreaming; in spite of all the trappings of his lively external life, was all the stuff in his life that really mattered simply what happened when he shut his eyes?)

In any case, my dream life moves onward. Today, a period of sudden weakness brought on by drinking hot chocolate in the morning (I've noticed that can be a real mistake for me – some combination of the theobromine and sugar with my thyroid medications gives me a woozy period later in the day)... heart hammering, feeling very weak, putting everything down and lying on the couch... and giving myself over to it, as though drunken or drugged, really enjoying it, for once. And thereby passing into a dream that was much influenced by seeing handsome Aussie guys on the Gaydar website today, and thinking again of what a life there would have been like: suddenly my weakness was transformed, I was in my apartment in Sydney (?) with a mysterious man waiting for me at the door (??) and my casual, familiar but kindly roommate concerned and helping (???)... the substance of the dream unimportant, but a whole life lived in a dreamscape made of whatever I liked.

No wonder I resisted waking, coming back into this mere cycle of a day that is already mostly wasted, as opposed to the cycles of a more active, more loony, more enjoyable life in my dream-soap-opera-Australia, with my dream-friends, in those dream-spaces....

Weight

I apologize, again, that the entries for the past month or so have been so distinctly unhappy. Of course that is in a general context of me as a depressed, disappointed, angry person who has been especially upset by my life circumstances over the past five years (even more than in the other dark stretches of my life, and unfortunately there have been several rather long ones). So perhaps these entries are no surprise; perhaps it is simply the way I am about things, about life.

However, what seems different – and, for me at least, always analyzing my own psychological moves, interesting – about the past month is that I am not really depressed per se (i.e. not numb, unfeeling, or inert). Being unhappy, being disappointed, being angry, are more present for me than they have been for years – I think the combination of changes in medication (i.e. the reformulation of my HIV antivirals from last November, which has given me somewhat more physical and mental energy than I've had for a long time) and an increasingly direct confrontation with certain aspects of my life have allowed me to feel more than I have for some time. Those feelings are not amusing – they are not terrible of course, I don't have an awful life, just one that is disappointing – but they do seem to impel me to move forward, somehow.

Such movement will probably not be massive and exciting. I'm not going to get a job in London, or New York, or Vancouver or Barcelona, any year soon; and no handsome, pleasant man is going to show up on my doorstep. The world will probably not transform in an instant, become brighter and more positive; I suspect that some of the stasis of the past five years has been due to me foolishly waiting for such a transformation.

However, the struggle to move certain things up a few notches – to finish pieces of writing, to get some exercise, to avoid agreeing to useless and problematic activities – seems at least worthwhile. I have a certain determination to improve things, even in the face of the various minor messes and dull, brackish backwaters that make up my life these days. There is therefore a function in being upset, in being unhappy – at this point anyway, it may help me move forward, out of some of those backwaters.

***

This morning was frustrating: having finally spent far too much money, and effort, on a trip to a conference in Mexico City – one that does not even interest me; but I am going to give a paper written by V. and I, so there is a responsibility-to-those-who-have-passed-on aspect that can't be avoided – I discovered that the conference program, finally distributed today, has scheduled me for two presentations about six hours before my flight lands. Just grand, I thought, frantically e-mailing people to ask for changes. And the small conference after it, seminars this fall, and a mess of meetings and distractions and minor requests – the sheer weight of all the things that I don't even want to do, all of which demand attention and money, is absurd. In a year when I'd sworn to myself that I would be increasingly free of nonsensical demands, there are more of them than ever.

This weight pushes my imagination in somewhat new directions: which has resulted in a distinctly strange, and new, kind of dream. Although I have had dreams in the past where I was singing on stage, forgetting words and not knowing what to do next – a barely exaggerated version of experiences from my years of singing cabaret and musicals in the 1980s – this was different. In today's dream, realizing I don't know what to do, realizing I'm not ready for a performance, I simply refuse to do it at all: facing whatever fury from the woman organizing the concert, contempt or surprised anger from the audience, I tell them I'm sorry, I'm just not going to sing tonight. Or ever.

A refusal that is frightening, but exhilirating. I wonder if I can do more of that in my life: to just cancel some of the demands....

As if

Going back to bed, still fuzzy with a cold that has lasted several days, and which keeps returning, unwelcome – I am imagining my life differently, as I do so often: what if that had happened, what if I could intervene here, what if I had chosen to do this instead, what would have been my ideal vocation, the career that would have worked out beautifully. A favorite game, though admittedly a somewhat desperate and pathetic one.

The extended dreamscape that ensues is strange and unexpected – but perhaps entirely, if cruelly, deserved: unrolling with the apparent narrative clarity of a 1960s film, it is full of the unexplained and incomprehensible – is this some film colony, some coastal resort? Why is this alternate-history version of me, this as-if me, doing all these inexplicable things – driving this bulging 1940s car with two children, lying by a pool chatting with women in lounge chairs? Although the surface seems coherent, nothing quite makes sense – time is dislocated, people who should be long dead interact with this as-if me, there is no possible clarification of the generations. The I who observes, the me from this world, unshaven, gaunt, and in pajamas, after three days of being sick in bed: hiding behind bushes, afraid of being caught, of asking too many questions that lead up to the key question: what does he (what do the as-if I) do, what is his life made of, what is he known for?

Since too many questions would lead to this haggard alien being, from another timeline (from our own timeline), being imprisoned, thought mad. A painful if understandable judgment, a reminder of something I already know: as we are told over and over by so many wise people, you can only live the life you’ve got, play the hand you’ve dealt; and therefore the ridiculous game of imagining a life spent playing a different hand can only lead to incoherence, disorientation, confusion – hiding….