in the hall of mirrors

Flirt (Sitges IX)

This last night of the trip, I have determinedly done what I didn’t really do at all this time – go to the major gay bars and clubs. Bear Bar – I’d forgotten what it was like, and five minutes are enough (I escape, I’m afraid, especially after the one interesting French guy walks out the door just ahead of me). XXL – I’d been there two or three times before, and always found it a combination of fun and pretentious (I hear French a lot in here too, and that is often a mark of, well, prétentieusité, if you know what I mean). It’s more fun tonight, and I see a cluster of three obviously Spanish guys, and think – ooh, I want a Spanish boyfriend. Later one of them wrestles with me in the corner – the short, everyday-looking one, who is in a way the hottest of them all (very, very Spanish) – I’m actually pretty captivated....

And ending, again, in Trailer. Ah but tonight is a Tuesday night after the end of the season, and things are vastly quieter – and frankly more fun: there is time to look around. No shirts off, but I get to dwell on looking at some deep, dark Spanish eyes – what was the Laurie Anderson line, something like: “your eyes / it’s a day’s work / just looking at them”. A charming, sweet Spanish guy, sitting next to me, looks sleepy – I tell him so, laughing....

But it’s my last night, I need to get up in the morning – time to go, time to go (and that's another, more obscure, Laurie Anderson quote – I bet you've never heard that piece). I follow the studliest out the door (and it turns out he’s French, too – il n’y a pas de question, ça, c’est un grand mec) and stumble quietly home. Flirting... and perhaps a sense of why it might be fun to be here, when it’s not The Season....

The last day at the beach (Sitges VIII)

Well, the last full day, anyway – tomorrow morning will be fairly brief before I have to leave. This is also the title of a favorite track from William Ackerman’s Conferring with the Moon – a beautifully melancholic string ensemble leading into acoustic guitar; one of the finer examples of why I think Ackerman was, aside from being the founder of Windham Hill, one of their best composers (and one of the most refined exponents of new age, a genre that has a sometimes unfair reputation for universal cheesiness).

I am less sour than yesterday (thank goodness); Susan and Rob cheered me up over dinner last night. Today, however, they have been attending at Neville’s deathbed; I have still not gotten to visit the hospital, though I have repeatedly (and quite sincerely) offered to come along. Chances are he wouldn’t recognize me anyway; but I wouldn’t mind helping with the general process of taking weight off of Chris, of Susan, and so on.

It does, however, still feel a bit as though this week was a rather costly waste: of course it is generally true that a change is as good as a rest, and there have certainly been some amusements (although the only dependable amusement has been Susan, with Rob trailing a bit behind; most other supposed diversions have been mildly diverting at best, and certainly not worth the expense of changing countries to engage in them). That is a frequent problem with vacations – especially in gay locales, especially in resorts – especially for me; I enjoy vacations so much when I’m with other people, and perhaps as long as I live alone, travel will intermittently seem a waste of time.

Which circles around to the same rather obvious solution to most problems in my life: that I should actually get one – a life, that is. It might be a nice thing to have....

Desafinado (Sitges VII)

There are always points in any trip or vacation when one feels out of tune with the whole idea of vacations – they can come because of overdoing it (bars, restaurants, credit cards) or contrarily from underdoing it (as though you aren’t taking advantage of whatever supposed delights were available).

The conjunction of insulted annoyance at the fact that I have been unceremoniously dropped by Nick (the local lad who found me amusing for about three days), combined with a disaffection for the gay locales (most of which are unusually inane, or of course intimidating given the perfection of the local torsos), plus a certain boredom I’m feeling for shopping, eating, and other tourists, have put me distinctly out of tune since yesterday afternoon. Then of course there’s the fact that I have not done anywhere near as much work as I had hoped – but perhaps I will do more today, or tomorrow.

And, of course, behind all of this, the difficulties of Neville’s illness, and the tangled complications of the hospital, visiting, possible worsening problems....

All of these feelings are at least timely, in fact sort of to the day – I hadn’t realized it, but yesterday at midnight was essentially the End of the Season (end of the Festa Major, last weekend in August) – people have been going by me in the direction of the train station with suitcases all day (reminding me of an eerie production of Szymanowski's Krol Roger, where for the entire third act extras walked past behind the singers in traveling clothes with suitcases, walking up an airplane stair into nothingness). It's true that the end of August, and the end of September, will be additional ‘ends of season’ – but this was one of the most clearly marked. Therefore perhaps it’s appropriate to find this town tinselly, overly hot, greedy... or maybe I’m overinterpreting.

But it is annoying to sit at café tables and have French people blow cigarette smoke at you; and then walking home through what seem to be an infinite number of yapping, peeing little dogs... I suppose I can’t decide whether it’s more exasperating that I’m here, or that soon I’ll have to go home.

Xiguerit-pocquerit (Sitges VI)

Tonight was the final night of the Festa Major de Sant Barthomeu, which involved a lot of people in large circles doing the Catalan national dance... which is actually quite peculiar. It’s sort of ametrical (are there about nine, or twelve, steps in irregular groupings?) and extremely restrained, to say the least – frankly it’s about as fiery as soy milk. Susan and I were watching it for some time; she thinks it looks like the Hokey-Pokey (which, in Catalan, must be spelled Xocquit-pocquit). Certainly, you put your left foot in, then you undoubtedly put your left foot out, and there appears to even be a point where you shake it all about.

It’s sort of dignified, in an odd way – not grand, not stately, nor in any way even faintly sexy (an Iberian dance that is not sexy? just imagine). It must drive flamenco dancers mad: imagine all those flamenco types doing their best to make every move, every line, every growl, as elaborately, overbearingly sexy as they can while keeping their clothing on, yet next to them the Catalans are ignoring all their pornographic gyrations, instead endlessly and unflappably doing this rather odd jiggery-pokery – step-step, step-step-step, step....

More interesting, but just as peculiar, are the local bands, which feature shrill double-reeds; basically they’re ensembles of sopranino and (metal) tenor oboes backed by alto and tenor brass (with a pennywhistle and miniature drum to, uh, punctuate). The oboes (they’re apparently a saxophone-like variety of the ancient Greek aulos) are actually quite wonderful – it would be great fun to play one.

Ultimately, I suppose my favorite thing about Catalan culture is still the language, which seems so peculiarly like (and I know that this is linguistically impossible) a Flemish version of a Romance language. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as weird as Basque, but still....

Out to lunch (Sitges V)

Today Susan and I went in to Barcelona on the train, to wander around and indulge ourselves. I wanted to do something unusual for lunch – in Sitges we have been a bit too conservative, too pedestrian, landing repeatedly at a popular Argentine steak house (pleasant but a tiny bit boring). So we were thinking in terms of El Bulli, the famous Costa Dorada restaurant that has ‘deconstructive’ cooking – not because there was any intention or even any faint chance of getting there, but because the demented chef who created it has followers and imitators in Barcelona. So we ended up at the Santa Maria... only a mild version of deconstructive cuisine, with a lot of what would really be called fusion; but the idea was there, and it was an amazing meal.

We had the ‘taster’ lunch... odd variations of ikuru-sushi, tuna empanadas, sardines with curried mayonnaise; then a cube of tuna; and, most intensely, a chunk of duck’s liver, fried – amazing and appalling at the same time; my body reacted to it like a strong shot of tequila, the kind where your eyes tear up and you leap for the lime. Then figs sliced on bread, covered with melted cheese. This was followed by three desserts – a small cup of cantaloupe, mango, and something I couldn’t identify, covered with a layer of pudding; a dollop of a tiramisu-like cream, like a ‘conceptual’ tiramisu; and finally a cluster of cornflakes on white chocolate and a rather fierce dark-chocolate truffle, in case you weren’t completely wrecked by this point.

Amazing... intense, but amazing. How to have fun with food (without, of course, throwing any of it)....

•••

Later that same day, I had dinner (as though I needed it by then). This was, however, the opposite kind of decadence: rather than elaborate avant-garde fragments, we ate the heartiest and most overwhelming of traditional food – two Catalan dishes, a calamari fried in tons of garlic, followed by fideuá with seafood. Perhaps my digestion will never forgive me, but: what a day for a gourmand....

•••

And the next day, lunch at almost the same level of density – but this time, after the avant-garde and the traditional, the sophisticated. A quasi-French, quasi-Catalan restaurant of great hauteur – the starter was an intense conglomeration of mushrooms, some of which had been shaved paper thin; the main course was rare ostrich and pears with chocolate sauce (and when did your mom last make that at home?). I ended by choosing a plate of cheeses, each of which was seriously intimidating (the kinds of cheeses that have more personality than most people) – the truth is, they were too much for me, and I felt a bit as though the menu itself had pointed out what a provincial, suburban colonial I really am.

Okay: it’s time for me to pull back. Three intense meals in a row: enough to make anyone a bit dizzy. Tonight, for dinner, I am allowed one fig... and water.

Getting Out (Sitges IV)

After the previous two posts, sleepless and, as always, aware that one should employ every minute of vacation time rather than waste it, I went out at 3 am to Trailer, my favorite of the dance clubs here. It turns out that 3 is too early for Trailer, and it was virtually empty – I pantomimed dismay to the handsome, short Spaniard at the door, and he launched into an accomplished defense, claiming that vast hordes of amazing men would pour in at about 3:30. So I walked around a bit....

Friday night in an attractive beach town: tourists, clubs, beautiful little streets – a strange combination of a real, honestly beautiful and still fairly natural, Spanish town, combined with intermittent bursts of the trash and commercialization you can expect in a blowsily commercial resort. Only a few moments, however, of vandalism – a bottle breaking on the quay, and two tourist lads smashing in a door in a quayside shack; the Spanish clot of teenagers stares at the lads, but they seem to have little sense of having done anything wrong. The vandalism is sparse because, after all, this is not England, where a crude and sullen hooliganism is an acceptable rebellion against authorities who aren’t anywhere around; nor is it America, where crime and homelessness might devolve the dimmer corners of this little town into slums. (Query: is generalized sociopathy perhaps an Anglophone invention?)

I find my way back to the club, which is now, as promised, booming. I didn’t get my drink from either of my favorite bartenders, unfortunately – not the intensely hunky young Spanish stud with the tattoos and short beard, who reminds me so strongly of my old friend and roommate Paul P– (whose Italian name was almost startlingly similar to my own, at least by sound) that this could be his little brother; nor the sweet blonde girl who looks like your favorite reference librarian, after she has had a successful makeover (although she still looks like somebody’s sister, she has been made stylish with a feathered, stripped do, square clear plastic glasses, and a pale green cotton shift that goes down to there). Instead I have to deal with the black guy who seems to have the personality of this month’s fashion spread – attitude for days (though, to be fair, I later saw him greet someone he knew – an enthusiastic kiss, and he stopped pouting and actually seemed human for several minutes at a time, a reminder that practically everyone does indeed have a third dimension).

The customers are fun to look at: some puppylike, others horsey or intensely bullish, and even two camels in the corner, glaring arrogantly down hooked noses at representatives of a lesser humanity. There are more distinctive characters, too – a young guy with a rather chubby face and an unsuccessful beard stands in front of me, trying to get enough attention to get a drink; in what is perhaps a calculated move, he takes off his shirt, revealing a startlingly handsome torso and an amazing curve to his back. Just below the ribs, his spine cuts way in before it snaps back out in an opulent butt – it may sound strange when I describe it, but it is indeed so sexy that it makes the more normally straight backs on the other gym-built torsos in the room look distinctly boring.

I am startled away from looking at him by a dark face peering at me from behind – let’s call him the odalisque: a disorientingly sensual face, whose every feature is almost too exquisitely shaped, and all with a pearly sheen that models would pay a fortune to imitate. He is breathing in my ear as part of what I suspect is a sort of pan-erotic broadcasting system (PBS?), suggesting that perhaps he’s taken a pill; he introduces himself, and I am so struck by his looks that I ask if he’s Spanish or North African (his looks seem so intersexual, and interracial, as to suggest a lot of very attractive conquerors and conquerees somewhere in his background). He says no, he’s South African, from Cape Town – as I’m babbling at this point, and can only sputter what little I know about men from Cape Town (they’re very good-looking) along with the expletive “beautiful” at intervals, he sweeps off into the crowd. In the corner is the big, bulky, Hawaiian- or Samoan-looking guy whom I named the Henchman the other night, while talking to Nick – he somehow suggests the hapless role of the villain’s bodyguard in a Bond movie, the one who doesn’t release the sharks quite quickly enough. But when I called him that, he seemed goofier, more charmingly insecure for his bulk; tonight he has the set look of A Guy Who Can Get Laid Whenever He Wants – of course, that’s probably just another indicator that it is indeed Friday night.

The different curves of bodies: this particular club is about half gym-built – enough to be fun to look at, not quite so much as to be impossibly intimidating. (Admittedly, though, other nights are not quite so body-perfect, and I blend in a bit better.) But the gym produces such different effects on different physiques – next to me, an opulently curved, hairy guy wears a long chain that culminates in beads and a cross; it falls naturally into the deep valley between his pectorals. But he could be almost another species than the rigidly flat torso across the aisle – a man whose entirely planar muscles suggest a Mondrianesque abstract construction, but a remarkably sexy one, topped by one of those faces that refers simultaneously to Spain and Arabia.

And I think I’ll go home and go to bed: because I’ve had the break I needed, because my second glass of Arujo on ice is beginning to seem like too much to finish, because the unreality attack I was suffering (represented by the two previous posts) seems to have subsided, and because Susan will call at ten in the morning so we can take the train to Barcelona, where we will indulge in an orgy of aesthetic retail....

The abbot’s story

Have I ever told you the story of the Japanese abbot? – no, of course I haven’t.

It was a tale that caught my imagination, or perhaps arose into my memory, some time in the late 1980s; on my computer is an aborted text where I tried to tell it, embedded in an imagined story of myself at the time (dying, of course – all of my selves in my stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s were dying); but that story couldn’t be finished, because I didn’t know enough of the context. But I’ll tell it to you as I imagined it, or perhaps as I remembered it, depending on your beliefs (or on mine).

A previous lifetime of mine – probably not the previous lifetime, there have perhaps been others in between, depending on just how fast the wheel of karma rolls around – was as a Japanese Buddhist monk; this was somewhere in the middle or late nineteenth century, in the context of the cultural disintegration and confusion that followed in the wake of the Meiji era.

Through intelligence and study, I had risen through the ranks of a monastery on a small island on the north side of Honshu, and been made abbot – head of the monastery, although my youth was unusual for the position. And, perhaps, I was not really ready for such responsibility; the story suggests that I was one of those figures familiar in Zen teaching, the scholar who can quote all the sacred texts, but who doesn’t really understand them.

Pirates came to the island, violent men, seeing in the island monastery and village a plum that, though small, would be easy to pluck. An ultimatum was delivered, a threat couched in a demand, and brought to me: but in Japan even criminals respect monks, and a careful or diplomatic answer might have saved everything.

But I was young and proud: I sent back an answer that was too careless, too direct. And so they landed, and took everything they saw, slaughtering everyone: monks, villagers, everyone they found on the island. And, as punishment for my arrogant answer, I was seated on a bench in front of the monastery, looking down a small hill towards the village, the small bay, the sea; my arms cut off at the shoulders, my legs above the knees, as only those very fine tempered-steel samurai swords can cut through such joints in a single swipe.

Bleeding to death, slowly and painfully, forced to look at the butchered bodies of all those I was sworn to protect, to reflect on how utterly I had failed them....

And that is why this lifetime of mine has gone the way it has. I am expected to learn what it is like to be unable to control what happens to me, to be an unwilling pawn in games I don’t control, to be at the mercy of decisions made above my head by people who are barely aware of my existence.

And maybe, after a long, long time, I will be given responsibility again; but, obviously, only after I understand how important, how very difficult, it is: to have responsibility over other people’s lives.

Temporal (Sitges III)

After midnight, difficult to sleep, hearing David Lang’s shimmering, wispily endless Orpheus Over and Under pieces.

There is something bothering me about Neville’s illness and impending death (aside from the obvious), plus its effect on his partner Chris, plus our mutual friend Dennis’ moving away up the coast, and the possible knock-on effects of these changes on Susan and Rob coming here to Sitges every summer, and thereby on me – all suggesting the death also of a knot of relationships that had seemed firmly tied to a geographical location. Is Neville terrified of his own death partly because it will turn out that he, as a former beauty and fine dancer, but ultimately as an appendage, as a small speaking role, in the life of a known scholar – that he will wink out like a candle, and after a year or three only a few people will even remember his existence, and that too faintly?...

Then there is my brief fling-ette with Nick, as I cross through his tangle of friends – Sarah and her new girlfriend, Hilary and Paola and their dramatically, publicly disintegrating relationship, even obnoxious Ray and his sexy little baseball guy: my relationship to these people is obviously transitional and unimportant, whatever impulses appear or seem to be required. And of course there’s the whole hallucinatory quality of a town that becomes alive in a particular way at a particular time of year with people who fly here for particular reasons, some always present, some frequent and known visitors, some impulsive day-trippers... the knowledge that perhaps, if I am awake, I should go out and see the bars or clubs. Where I would be anonymous, another guy in the corner... would I care, would anyone?...

All these things suggest something exasperating about time: and how they all seem, in the dead of night, to be splintered across time, the advent, beginnings, peaks, fadings, deaths of relations all simultaneously visible, immanent in a way that threatens the shallow apparent reality of this shimmering, deeply unreal beach town. The evanescence of minor artists, of the rootless, even of those who take their place in a family: our fading existence.... Something about how anticipation and disappointment drive so much of time’s apparent forward motion, about how things that seem so real, so concrete, fall apart or were never really there to begin with – and how this has become especially true for me, living too quietly and too dimly in my head, at the edge of other people’s relationships: because I have allowed myself to be cast as a disposable character, a walk-on with a few lines – because I have made choices that have increasingly made my life a pale appendage to my supposed but also practically nonexistent writing, and since I am thereby only at the edge of things that are happening to and among other people, my status inevitably fades, evaporates, whenever the situation changes....

Perhaps it’s a reaction to my impulse to come here this summer: I missed Susan, wanted to see her, knew she and her husband would be here. It’s like family, or almost like family, and my impulse to come felt almost necessary, as though I would be missed and things wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t show up: but what if the family changed, what if the pattern of summer visits changed, would I actually be missed?

And, if it all disintegrated and no one that I knew came here, where would I go?... would I be left looking for the next European vacation spot that interests me, making friends (really: making acquaintances) in some other summer spot, getting used to a different pattern of store openings and closings – all in the rootless manner of someone who is perhaps too old to have never really had his own story?...

Gloriana

Listening to a favorite work, perhaps not one of the monuments of Western music, but, well – Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana, a suite of all-too-short dances that represent a miniature masque held in the Elizabethan court. I love the whole opera, too, although the best recording doesn’t seem to be available any more; of all the Britten operas, it is the most fun to play through bits of this one at the piano.

These dances are so tersely bizarre – embedded in what at first seems a rather friendly, square meter are a whole collection of peculiar, Stravinskian rhythmic textures – great fun. The one for the men, under a minute long, adds the wit of a tricky set of tongue-twisters, all full of different plosives and sibilants that keep landing in unexpected places – it must be maddening to learn. And the final ‘dance of homage’ has such a gracefully sad, farewell sort of quality to it – it resonates with the beautifully fragmented last minutes of the opera, which present snapshots of the latter part of Elizabeth I’s life in a way that suggests the fading of dreams and joy (almost, in fact, like the second act of Robert Ashley’s Improvement, where it is made clear that the protagonist Linda has lost much of her confidence in her own life, even through the successes and changes that she lives through). A beautiful piece of work – what a shame that the bourgeois Elizabeth II didn’t much like it....

Imperturbable (Sitges II)

Even after a demented pair of nights spent trying to keep up with Nick, a handsome, sexy younger guy – one whose approach to everything is aggressively, even competitively, sensual, and who complains in one breath about the “bubble” of Sitges (by which he means the strangely unreal effect of the desire-oriented population – and that is not only the tourists, of course) and announces in the next his impatience to move on to the next drink, chemical, or erotic activity – I’m not disoriented or uncertain. Even Susan and Rob’s gentle teasing about my not getting work done seems merely genial, amusing.

This is, I think, because I am now so different than I have been in the past – certain gaping chasms in my emotions or confidence are long and solidly healed up. I can view youthful sensuality with humor, and without feeling either annoyed or intimidated; and the (inverse) relation between pleasure and productivity no longer worries me. I’ll get some work done, and it may not be all that I’d planned but it will be a lot, and that will be all right....