in the hall of mirrors

Diagnosis

Was reading Storr's Dynamics of Creation, where he analyzes creativity (as viewed through biographies of 'great' artistic figures) in psychological/psychoanalytic terms. It's one of his earlier books, and a little clunkier than the later ones – Storr has made a career out of intelligent but popularly-oriented explorations of various experiences in psychological terms; one of the pleasantest things about the books is his willingness to be speculative and essayistic rather than dogmatic, which is rather rare in the world of psychology.

Anyway, he coasts over various artistic personalities, viewed through a diagnostic lens – schizoids, manic-depressives, etc., mostly interpreted in terms of Kleinian theory (I told you it was an older book – does anyone spend much time on Melanie Klein these days?). Naturally, I thought of myself throughout – and clearly my symptomatic problems are most associated with depressives (unfortunately not manic-depressives, which is probably why I don't get much work done). The Kleinian diagnosis was of course a bit insulting, including the identification of sexual fantasies, which was rather annoyingly plausible – I hate all the Freudian stuff about development, stages, and sexuality, especially because it claims that gay men are so 'arrested'. (And I also tend to dismiss most Lacanian theory, although some of my colleagues use it a lot – it seems to me merely a mass of pretentious and paradoxical obfuscation made to cover up the problems embedded in Freud's ideas.)

But it's interesting to think about aspects of a 'depressive' condition, and how it might dictate some of the problems I'm always trying to solve for myself. I know that psychological self-diagnosis is always pretty doubtful, but I can't help hoping that some analytical thinking would help lead me out of – the hall of mirrors....

Unusual

Weirdly energetic today.

No, strike that: not weirdly – normally, but unaccustomedly, energetic. (Beep beep beep: adverbial overload alert.)

Feeling fairly calm, physically not depressed, awake, all the way down to my 'core' sense of my body. Woke after sleeping only six hours (short for me) ready to do things – vacuumed, did a bit of cleaning, settling down to write and edit. I even had coffee (well, instant, anyway) the past two days, without a disastrous gastro reaction – that in itself is unusual. The only big hitch is, of course, the number of things that there are to do – story of my life the past decade or so, there is always a vast backlog of everything; but I'm sort of used to that by now.

But I don't feel, physically, or perhaps psycho-physically, unable to deal with it. It would seem that the new medication might actually have a significant impact on my life; and that would change a five-year – no, strike that too – probably more like a sixteen-year reign of depressive reactions to daily intake of toxic chemicals. Isn't that strange?... one point for the behaviorists, I guess....

Near Sea

Traffic on the bridge
is heavy. Your foot
tiring on the clutch.

Pull into the marina;
that must be your boat, I
read the painted name.

Stand alone on the deck,
cool salt breeze, turn
slowly, about to call to you –

I am far from home,
the wind blows flesh
off my bones

I am vanishing
I am nowhere

[San Francisco, 6/26-28/93]

The Process

[Los Angeles, 1991]

I’m not dying.

I’m sitting on the couch next to the windows with my feet up, feeling the breath of the afternoon air; the sun slants away across the grass and its sprinklers. I’m wearing my gray robe, the heavy warm one, and waiting stoically for another coughing fit. I’m sick again this week, but I’m not dying. Of course, I do have a damaged immune system, and I’ve been having various troubles for some time now, digestion, skin, it’s all quite annoying. The doctors fuss over me, at least when they’re sure that insurance will cover the cost, and give me tests and various prophylactic medicines. Prophylactic medicine, that’s always an embarrassing thing to talk about, I think they need a new word for it. But then, sensitivity isn’t exactly an overwhelming concern for the medical profession. Today I just have a cold, but it seems to have ambitions to become a mild bronchitis; the hacking, wet coughs are tiring, and I am full of antihistamines that aren’t working. Actually, they are working in that I can’t quite think straight, and everything I touch seems slightly padded, and when I take the corner between the kitchen and the hallway I can’t stop myself from veering into the wall. However, in spite of these problems, I think I can definitely say that I’m not dying.

When I talk to people I haven’t seen in a while, particularly over the phone, I can almost hear them thinking: I wonder what he looks like now, how is he doing really?, and I always make it clear that I’m really doing just fine. Yes, I have occasional problems, no, I won’t be in today because I’m not feeling well, no, it’s not serious. It’s hard to convince some of them sometimes, most people obviously prefer soap operas to just picking up the dull shards of living, day after day. Yesterday, when I called to cancel a meeting, I was coughing explosively into the phone, wiping it off, trying to get through a few sentences coherently. I could hear the concern in her voice, and could imagine her working out a tangled problem in friendship and management: what do we do if he gets really sick, do we keep paying him or what?

Dying isn’t a medical category, not really. Doctors aren’t comfortable with ideas that emphasize time and process, they’re much happier with machine metaphors – either you’re working or you aren’t, and when you stop working they try to fix you, and if they can’t do it someone has to go out and buy a new model of whatever you were. And then there’s a bill for labor and parts. And even for normal human beings, the kind with feelings and hopes, dying is always a retroactive narrative, a story that is told only after its end has already happened. He’s dead now, so he must have been dying since last June, or even March when he first went into the hospital. Or, he’s looking just fine, he was sick last year, we all thought he was dying but I guess he wasn’t. And we all say, I’m so glad.

And dying can go on for so long. There are certain difficult types who claim that we’re dying from the moment we’re born, but I think we can ignore them since they’re mostly drunkards and poets. And so always we continue to live, moving through our different processes, some of which inevitably include being sick in various annoying or inconvenient fashions. But when the secret disaster begins, when the cells of the body begin to whisper among themselves, when morale drops in the liver and the spleen starts to spread nasty rumors of impending collapse: as though we’re being sold to the Japanese, and you’re all going to be fired. And inevitably the rumors get out, and the stock in T-cells starts to fall: it was worth so much more last year, but now look at it.

I wander the house, looking through the various rooms. I manage to generate the energy to start washing the dishes, but get bored halfway through and go back to the couch to lie down. My heart is racing strangely, probably from the combination of medicines; it is impossible to sleep, and I drift in and out of an irritable semi-consciousness. I go back out to the couch to watch the twilight, the kids from across the street running up and down the sidewalk. Lately, I haven’t liked my T-cell counts, or the way the subjects of wills, insurance, pentamidine and such keep appearing in my phone conversations and lists of things to do. It is, frankly, not amusing; I would prefer to spend my time otherwise. I am forced to admit, I’ve been hoping that the universe would get the point if I acted rather cool, somewhat preoccupied, when such things come up; but then I suppose the universe isn’t known for perceptive sensitivity, any more than doctors.

It has been pleasant to lie on the couch, to read comic books and feel the late, fading sun. I have enjoyed these days of being sick, in spite of the coughing. The nicest thing is the slightly woozy feeling from the drugs, that’s a big help, I like that a lot. It’s pleasant really, it’s been nice to call people up and tell them to go away, that I won’t be in, that I won’t be able to do various annoying jobs. I should do this more often. But there is that cellular unease, that feeling that things have been shifting when my back was turned, that the rules are changing and I haven’t kept up. I consider the health of others, those who died recently, surprisingly, and meditate on the disagreeable feeling of seeing familiar names in the obituaries, and of going to my computer address list and changing the information: erase the phone number and address, and put instead: ‘died 5/12/91.’ I consider my body’s reactions over the past weeks, I try to relate my energy and muscle aches to the increasing improbability of ever going to the gym again. I suppose I should be changing my diet too, but can’t imagine finding the energy. I wonder if they have a pill that prevents one from giving up. I sit and stare into the dark, watching the street lights come on one by one, irregularly.

Having reached various conclusions, I think it would be best to be open and straightforward about them. I turn on the light switch for the lamp above my head. I look severely at the coffee table and the couch, and I tell them, explaining it very clearly, making sure they understand that I’m making a precise distinction in both the temporal and interpretative spheres, that it’s certainly not that I was wrong before and am admitting it now, no, it’s just that there are certain processes, and certain changes that occur in those processes, and that our judgments are always based on the facts we have at hand.

“So, okay: now,” I say, and, aware that my audience is showing signs of impatience, I try to state my central point before I lose their attention, “now, I’m dying.”

[Los Angeles, 5/14-8/13/91]

Abandoning responsibility

No problems with my liver, and my blood counts were absurdly good (697 T-cells – literally the highest number I've ever had, in fifteen or more years of testing them), so the weakness I've experienced (plus all the usual gastro problems) the past two or three days must all be 'transitional' side effects.

What's been interesting has been the extent to which I couldn't do anything – the tingling, woozy feeling that leaves you really unable to get up at all. It's sort of lovely in a weird way – you really can't pay any attention to anything, so, well, you just don't.

I've mentioned Byatt's Possession a couple of times; I remember thinking about illness and shock a lot while reading it – the major nineteenth century female character has an awful shock (this is before she's pregnant, I think) and needs to take some months to recover. It's a very different definition of illness, as well as stress or trauma, than we would use now: the idea that when something awful happens to you, you need a long stretch of time to get over it – without responsibilities, without anything but rest. A very eighteenth/nineteenth century attitude, and one that I'm sorry we've lost – I know that even after the worst things in my life, I've had to get back to work somehow, just to pay the rent of course.

Worse than having to work, though, was the separation of the psychological and the physical – this is the "it's all in your mind" mechanistic critique of illness. The idea that only when something is physically (i.e. mechanically) wrong with us do we need time off....

(PS: No, I don't look like the Ingrés. It's meant to be funny. No, really....)

Toxic

Headaches, diarrhea, sudden bursts of fatigue.

Not overwhelming, just enough to notice, and to make me stay home when invited to see Guy Fawkes fireworks. It does seem rather weird, doesn't it, that a "reformulated" Kaletra would give me transitional reactions like a new medicine – but perhaps this confirms that this reformulation is different, that this one might really have fewer side effects.

Or – aargh – that my liver really is in trouble, and I shouldn't have added back in unnecessary vitamin supplements. How do I know?...

We'll see. Meanwhile, publishing In bed, as I did a few days ago – a long, complicated poem I've never really shown to people, or discussed in workshops – feels particularly appropriate....

Promises

Friday: a day of things whose colors were muted, rather dull colors mixed with gray; but those things, quiet and apparently unimportant, were nonetheless good, and important.

Reading Sontag on Goodman and Artaud, for no real reason, just because it was the book I picked up on the way to the bus, on the way to the doctor. Thrilling moments, full of that fantastic intelligence, that honesty, flashes of depth that promise to answer the questions that have bothered me lately – that is, how to live in a way that is worthy of its own needs. And such balanced, fused glances at the entire history of the twentieth century – even when that's not the point of the article, her ability to put it all together in such powerful ways. And the dazzling images of how she wrote at the time, in 1972 – a small apartment in Paris, an ascetic approach to life, creating for herself a space to do absolutely nothing but make words....

Then the doctor: casual, a 'professional' visit, where we both know so much of what we're talking about that we practically communicate in telegraphic code. He'll check the tests to see if my worries about my liver matter at all, or are just illusions made out of transient winter viruses; he's a bit concerned about my cholesterol (a side effect of my medications), but we agreed that rather than adding a cholesterol medication just yet, I'll use this as another thing impelling me to get some exercise.

Best of all: Kaletra, the most obnoxious and probably most important medicine I've been taking for – what? seven years now? – has finally been 'reformulated'. It's still basically the same stuff – it still has ritonavir in it, unhappily (doctors like ritonavir because, although it has a miserable effect on fatigue, mood, and the whole gastrointestinal system, it stays in that system, and keeps everything else with it – just what we need, something toxic that sticks around). But the reformulation, reputedly, cuts down on side effects – he says all his patients keep sending him messages saying, thank God, this is so much easier, why didn't they do a reformulation three years ago....

So that's good. Promises of feeling much better.

Online was a Quicktime copy of Wender's Wings of Desire, which I've promised myself I would see for nineteen years, since it first came out – my most interesting teacher at the time, the aggressive but brilliant composer named Paul Reale, considered it a must-see (and, given his anti-minimalist polemics, I'm sure he thought it was an antidote to the whole postmodern wave of 1980s art). It's beautiful, shades of grays and shimmering music (and ideas – why didn't anyone tell me Peter Handke was involved in writing the script), much more surprising and textured, and much more about Berlin than I'd realized – I think I put off seeing it because I was worried that it would be disappointing. It is really a sort of beautiful heartache movie, not just because of what it is, but also because it's about Berlin... which was my first overwhelming experience of a real Europe: huge apartments and those great dark courtyards – a city that gives you so much sheer room – space to live, vast spaces to think and do and act, a city that offers genius amid the rain and the schnauze. But it's also a city that sits heavily on your shoulders: the excitement comes with a cost, that of the sheer heaviness, the darkness, of overwhelming histories, of traditions, of powerful minds and terrible cruelties....

In comparison, my beloved cities – San Francisco, Sydney, Amsterdam – are blithe baubles. And even New York merely seems young, almost tentative, next to Berlin.

So it was a day of promises. Such an important aspect of living – they used to say in est seminars that it was our promises to ourselves that were so important, as they were the sources of everything else in our lives. Unfortunately, I have always been a bit scattered about my promises to myself – not like an uncaring friend, but more like a rather helpless and inept single parent, one who confusedly promises that things will get better, that we'll go to the park, to the circus, and then when there's not any money for the bus simply says, sorry kid, that's the way it goes. Which may be why I am always so saddened, and angered, by my own bad faith with colleagues – books I am supposed to write, research I'm supposed to do, in order to keep promises to Gerhard, to Meredith, to V–....

But the change in medications, the depth of some of the things I read and looked at today, suggests a promise (even in a month like November!) of some kind of renewal: of a new set of promises, that could actually be kept.

In the night

Amidst all this dim worrying and occasional working, and as the nights draw in, and everything transforms to winter – I keep thinking: I'm much more interested in my dreaming life, and sleeping, than I am in my waking life. This isn't because I remember many of my dreams, nor because those have some powerful heroic narrative in comparison to my rather disappointing waking life (as in Thurber's Walter Mitty, or perhaps Gaiman's A Dream Of You); but simply because there seems to be much more feeling and reality in dreams, at least for me.

Waking therefore in the middle of the night, unable to sleep for a while: for some reason I've been led, either in dreaming or in waking or some fuzzy interface between the two, to imagine myself now, but different – still older, a bit sad, a bit reserved, still with many of the same mistakes and stupid life accidents of the past years; but living in San Francisco again, and relating to younger, more energetic gay guys as a quiet bystander. And imagining therein some sense of kindly, rather patronizing affection from those younger ones – and feeling part of a community....

Along with this imagined context, I'm getting flashes of some of the interesting, bizarre guys I knew in San Francisco – discussions, lofts, tangential connections with lives that were so different that they are hard for me to imagine. And it's a bit frustrating to try to remember the details of what I did see – it's a good thing I write now, I really have a flimsy memory.

An amazingly different feeling of life, a different balance, a different sense of my surroundings, and of myself. At least in my (admittedly wistful) imagination.