in the hall of mirrors

Sunny

The weather is sunny, and so am I (mostly – with a cheerfully anxious tinge to it).

Shows that I really should live in a warm climate, yes? Ah well.

Tonight, about ten people coming over – party/dinner – so cooking. As always I'm more enthusiastic than competent in the kitchen, so have gotten much advice and am trying to avoid getting too experimental. We'll see...

Since I'm busy of course (too busy to write this, mostly) and cheerful, that suggests that a lot of my depression is from inaction. No surprise, knew that really. However it also suggests, as do other details, that I would be just fine in a rather everyday, bourgeois approach to doing things and working – that, aside from being gay and having AIDS and feeling occasionally rather ill, and being artistic and perpendicular to everyday culture, the truth is I would be just fine in everyday culture. A domesticated gayness, a couple where both took HIV medications, an everyday job that wasn't too onerous... (hmm, John would be pleased, that's just what he wanted).

Which of course suggests, insidiously but probably quite accurately, that I'm not really cut out to write, at least not to write books, or to achieve difficult artistic things. In another era, one where I didn't have a job – say, if I were a non-working aristocrat of Edwardian times – I would probably be pleasantly busy, a diarist and casual essayist, a dabbler... which, to a large extent, I am.

Not a bad life, once you've given up expecting anything bigger....

Ghosts

Tonight I saw an Ozzie comedy show, with many Oceanic celebrities, everyone having fun, in-jokes, etc.....

When I'm really frustrated – aching, rather than bitter or resentful – at the Sydney debacle, at not living in that city, I don't think about the really grand or remarkable times or scenes – not the bridge, not Mardi Gras, not the trips to Waterloo and Hobart. I remember the small things – late-night Asian fast food with John along a scruffy stretch of those Redfern back streets; looking down into Woolloomooloo as you come out of the Botanical Gardens; walking down a tree-lined side street off of Oxford, very early in the morning, after a night out. It's the casual and everyday that I miss the most: despite not having been allowed to do those everyday things very often or for very long before I had to leave, I somehow fell into the ones that I did do, and they became entirely natural for me – they feel like ghosts of an experience not had, like phantastic images of an everyday life that I wanted to experience, and almost did.

It's imagined like an alternate path, one that might simply and unproblematically have simply happened – and I almost experience it that way: as though that entire existence is, itself, a ghost....

Grey

[N.B. not, in this case, 'gray' - I'm not generally enamored (enamoured?) of British spellings; 'analyse' seems rather nice, sort of aesthetic, but 'colour' is merely affected (English isn't French, however many Norman aristocrats would have wanted it that way) and 'programme', which comes up daily at work, is just ridiculous. But I'll admit that 'grey' is more properly, well, grey, then 'gray' is. More of a soft, dove grey, as opposed to some rough piece of construction paper?...]

So the weather is grey, again, and I am a bit too. The worst thing about the first three years here (as well as the last years in San Francisco, when so much seemed to be going wrong) was that I seemed permanently stuck in greyness, unhappy, worried, overwhelmed by things to do, unable to move far out of it all. That's been somewhat less true this year, but I can still fall into All That without much difficulty – the weather pushes me towards it, and the minor ups and downs of work and daily life still seem to involve more downs than ups. (I should live someplace with good weather – and probably by a beach. And obviously, way too obviously, and whether or not I feel up to the commitment, not alone.)

By the end of last weekend, it felt as though too many little things were demanding attention; I finally decided, rather helplessly and with some uncertainty, to cancel the coming trip to London, for Europride (maybe I'll go the following week, which sidesteps the festival – which is either stupid or clever of me, I can't decide which). Trying to focus on the many little administrative things still floating around, like midges – they all seem so exasperating after two weeks straight of meetings (now that all of the students have left, how can there still be so much to do for them?). And of course when a large pile of work gets shifted, behind it are always the various things undone: big projects, writing....

Hmm, story of my life. Not a terribly exciting one, I know, but an annoyingly accurate one.

Perhaps the solution is to drag myself into town, get a haircut, do some shopping, ignore all the boring stuff until tomorrow... that would probably work.

Dreams II

Not yet asleep, his house, his bed, I breathe
His skin, reshape my legs to fit his legs;
But when I leave the waking dark to feel
Another air, I’m faithless to this place:

Dream buildings.  See, they rise with radiant walls,
Yet skeletally, fling steel bones from earth
To air, float nets of brick and painted wood
On broad, calm lakes of plaster framed with sky –

Tall homes, night visible inside, whose rooms
Change shape: doors vanish, melt to curtained traps,
Blue mirrors glint with eyes that trace the path,
The hidden latch to open secret stairs...

When morning falls, I’ll start awake to rise
And smile, as though I never left his house.

[Los Angeles, 12/18/91-6/19/92]

The hillside

'And I fell asleep and had this dream':

after continuing to read about awareness, eternity, and timeless responses to tragedy or despair in the Upanishads and Buddhism and Taoism;

after the last in a long chain of long days of meetings, tired of but not upset about so many things, and after some champagne (the farewell reception for Religious Studies, in a context of hearing startlingly bitter farewell speeches) and wine (dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, where they always treat me like family, where I had a brief discussion with the waiter of our mutual reactions to death, loss and return in Solaris):

A dream, almost without incident, but all made out of a single incident – a single process, with the kind of magical aura that would make Jungians consider it a 'deep' dream – in this case almost without embellishment, the most naked of processes, perfect, clear and reassuring, almost startlingly stripped of unnecessary detail or story.

On a hillside near where I grew up – as it so happens, on the hill where the house stood of those neighbors who, mysteriously enough, had as a family name my own first name – I was friends with their middle son, whose first name the same as my father's, and my brother's – all very confusing, I'm sure, for me as a young child; and of course rather obviously now, from a dream point of view, intended to point back directly at me, in the most arresting way –

a dream of a vast year's process of planting, summer, winter; of the empty hillside with the tiniest of seedlings, then a long process of growth into a thick harvest, then rains and water pouring down the hill in literally torrential floods (that vast flooding: I must have been so impressed, when I was five or six, at the changes in weather when they turned to snow, ice or water, and ran down that steep, long hill near my parent's house – an entire street, Overlook Drive, had been built along a deep ravine, and many of our neighbors lived in houses at the top of long steep stretches of ground): and change, and the death of all the plants, but with the knowledge of their return. All of this blended in what was almost a long stop-action movie in a single arch, which felt both like a travelogue, and also like an experience, as if I were born to this change, to this harvest, as someone who knew these plants and their cycle intimately.

I told you it was obvious. But how extraordinarily powerful, nevertheless....

Demi-overload

Another long day in a series of long days. Some things going well, some exasperating, near to maddening. Colleagues intermittently pleasant, wise and helpful, or occasionally, luckily and mercifully briefly, flaming assholes. Not so bad I suppose – many in business deal with much more, and much worse; and I have of course fought intermittently over the years to have more responsibility, more executive control. And such meetings and clashes appear when one climbs the ladder, even a little bit.

Naturally this is all in a context of delayed promotion (my bizarre and disjunct career has left me finally having certain kinds of authority only fairly late – as many as ten years later than might have been appropriate) and the perpetual difficulty of dealing with people's chaotic, sometimes irresponsible reactions (my inability in this area is actually slightly heightened by my increasing tendency and desire over the past couple of years to detach myself from the chaos of people's battles – as though, at the points in my life where I can increasingly deal with emotional worlds, I no longer want to waste too much time on them). That of course suggests my long-term position, which actually fits many of my decisions over the past five years – keep moving forward, keep moving up, when it's worth it; and at the same time retreat from the unnecessary to perhaps focus more on writing, on research, on the inner world that should probably have been my single focus since I was seventeen, now over thirty years ago.

Apologies for the Germanic, and/or convoluted, sentences. Mild apologies only, however.

The good news is that none of the difficulties really bother me; even the worst moments of the past few days were merely management problems, merely evidence that a certain detachment is valuable. Too bad I hadn't firmly reached this point by the time I was forty – ah well, we all develop at different paces, and of course there are many ways that I have grown up over the years, including many ways I would never have thought necessary or worthwhile had I been planning my life myself.

(There's a perhaps rather obvious thing to notice: damned good thing I didn't get to dictate what happened to me in life, isn't it? Probably a valuable thing for anyone.)

From left field, a different problem presents itself – next Saturday Europride in London; Patrick and I might go. My immediate reaction: must go, it'll be fun, but could I possibly lose twenty pounds first? It is disappointing these days to be in a fun gay context, with the possibilities of meeting someone, and yet feel dowdy. Oh well... the same reaction last week, when Hans-Rainer kindly called, wanting to know when I'd come to Berlin, when we'd see each other; and of course my first thought was, well, when I magically lose some weight. Hmm; perhaps I learned too much from LA body culture.

So: no anguish, no big problems. Not even some of the tiring grayness of a month or so ago. But a certain hesitation, a certain unclarity – as though waiting for things to go wrong, or perhaps not quite wrong but only inadequately right.

At today's lunchtime writing workshop, I got to reflect on some of the associated feelings around all of this by writing a mini-tour de force; we settled on a rather silly, conglomerate writing exercise – write about your worst date ever. I ended up doing about six pages, rapidly, of the most maddening dithering I could come up with – essentially trying to reproduce someone telling about their worst date ever, but taking so long to do so, with so many detours and unimportant turns and tangents, that the reader would want to strangle them in sheer annoyance. One of the women, laughing, said it won the Avoidance Award... perhaps that's the pattern here: the dizzy, mildly silly spinning of one's wheels....

But, behind all of this, the flash of grace: in working on my paper on Sondheim, Buddhism and Heidegger (yes, I know – one can't help the reaction, 'Huh?', but trust me), I continue to think about those senses of being, of time, of eternity, and the perfection of what is. Merely on a bus, reading Steiner on Heidegger, and reading an explanation of the links between being and time: that perhaps helps me get through the days....

[untitled]

The classroom reeks of undergraduates.
The walls lethargic beige, the chattering,
resentful, handsome faces, golden thighs.
A grimy fog of answers, questions lost,
and every year they miss the point again.
The concrete park outside is filled with bursts
of advertising, merchandise that blares
with stenciled letters, mascots, girls’ glazed smiles.

The struggle ended years ago.  But still
we make our motions, fake a gray concern,
while knowing that the center and the heart
of it is dead these many years.  We fall,
a slow descent from sense to sense, the loss
of all our lovely castles, and the air.

[Los Angeles, 5/9-22/90]

Suspendu

Hanging between: the restaurant banquet table, and the bathroom door. Or at the table, D– on one side, B– on the other. Between the conversation and the piano: and the imagination of doing something with the piano. Standing among D–'s explications and my doubts. The walk home – between these green summer trees and blue sky, always between heaven and earth. Among all the things I imagine, but hesitate before or during, or within, the doing of them.

If the reasons for my regrets are all the things that have gone wrong, the context behind those reasons is the constant sense of the many other ways things could go, could have gone. Suspended: why can't I play a dazzling, charming Schubert impromptu on this restaurant piano? What if I were to be as sure as D– is of the validity of writing, of ideas? What if I were firmly present here in this pleasant group of colleagues and friends, or alternately at home alone, but not always hanging in between?

I know of course that no one is totally here, or there (with very few and special exceptions): that doubts, hesitations, unclarities, nauseas, inner disruptions are everywhere, for practically anyone. I certainly don't think I'm unique in any of this.

But there is an endless wistfulness in this for me, as though I've got my nose pressed to the glass of other people's lives: it must be so real to be like that one, it must be so fun to be like another, it must be so... they must be so certain of themselves... aren't they?

And of course the interesting question, amidst all my usual regrets and false turns, is not only how would I have lived my life differently – had all those contingent accidents gone in other ways – but, in the context of vaguely believing (but not quite believe, more perhaps hoping) in reincarnation, how will I handle it better next (life)time? Or a thousand times hence.... Am I moving forward, is the hesitation proof of development or backsliding, am I anything but waiting for the universe to tell me what I'm supposed to be? Which is, self-evidently, a fairly poor place to be.

Pendu, suspendu, sous-pendu. Le pendu.

A weekend unblogg'd

"Another lapse in this book, I must confess; but if I do it against my humour I shall begin to loathe it; so the one chance of life it has is to submit to lapses uncomplainingly."
- Virginia Woolf, diaries, 23 October 1917

Friday two students called me back to work after I'd gone home, to give me a chocolate 'champagne bottle' for the end of the year – a nice and affectionate gesture. Unfortunately led me to a weekend of chocolate, other candy, sugar, other junk, bad eating, miserable digestion. Yuck. Unfortunate that I am a dog and not a cat (dogs will eat until they're sick, cats stop when they are full – I've never had any control over my reaction to food in front of me, which is particularly unfortunate given my bad digestion, which is of course perpetually mildly exacerbated by HIV meds).

Also having rather bad mental digestion from too much television – jingles and scenes flashing onto my mental processes. Yuck.

Therefore nothing written and nothing done. Truth is, nothing experienced anyone would want to hear about, I suppose...

X-Persons

Went and saw X-Men III tonight. Enjoyed the gay metaphor at the beginning – rather touching really, especially with the lonely teenagers – and some of the setup was impressive; the ending was rather flat of course (why, in an age where fantasy and science fiction films are so amazing looking – finally; I love science fiction, and it's great seeing certain things come to life – do the makers of these movies show so little skill with resolutions and aftermaths?). Fairly fun though; of course the Juggernaut was sexy, in an overblown, male-Pamela-Anderson kind of way, and Ian McKellan had a lovely moment at the end. (Why, though, don't any of the women characters ever complain about getting called X-Men?)

What was more amusing was afterward, in the pub, making up powers for ourselves and for imaginary mutants. The best was undoubtedly I–'s 'The Stylist' – he waves his arms rather airily at people and they suddenly look fabulous. A close relative of his was 'Gayman', who can flap his wrist at an army and make them all gay. Pubman is of course able to instantly fill everyone's pint with their favorite microbrew; Organization Man makes everything suddenly very neat (he is often accompanied by his partner, Cleaning Woman).

As for us: R– became Countryman, who could make people weepy and nostalgic with a single twang of his high-tech jaw harp. L– was Philosophyman, who made people rather thoughtful (imagine distracting an army with ontological questions...). Couldn't find anything for P– – don't think he really wants to parallel the Juggernaut (perhaps he'd like to be Good Friends with him though). I decided my power had to depend on putting my fists on my hips and giving people a stern look – I– said it would make them shrivel up. (Stern Look Man?... Testyman?... I'll work on it.)

Which recalls similar silliness following the Harry Potter movies, where B– and W– tried to match up characters and members of the department. They decided that I was Professor McGonagall – which was actually quite a compliment: after all, as M– said, "Well, who wouldn't want to be Maggie Smith, if they could?"....