in the hall of mirrors

Her Face

for Ma Jaya

1.

Arc and klieg lights, endless fusion:
the spark leaps from one to the next,
a barely, fiercely controlled explosion.

Paintings melt in profusion, pouring fire
down the walls, flaring acrylics shimmer
through the alarmed, the seduced lens:

the walls melt into us –

2.

Sheer visual density of the figure:
the live brown map of face, great eyes,
rich silks with figured threads, gold clashing,
lips curled up in ecstatic laughter:

she reaches out her hands towards her own joke,
flinging forms of glowing heat to us. Yet, as
a flame changes, so swiftly the eye doubts
the difference between light and darkness,

there is another, visible only as afterimage:
goddess weeping, pure face frozen into grief
that does not move: tears run out
of their own weight, endlessly.

3.

Bina,
a light and moving figure.

Strings vibrate in sympathy,
eyes open deep into the camera.
Held notes maintain a solid ground,
the dull twin gourds resonate
with suppressed and radiant time:

the instrument that tunes the moment,
the dance that shapes us,
the note that plays us.

4.

The moment flickers as she
looks out on demanding meadows of
unflowerlike faces, sucking at energy:
feed me feed me feed.

She fights through flickering nonlight,
a fragment of abyss, a moment of
freedom-from: she turns towards again,
fighting the deep gray formless current,

Speaks, sets her face into the form
that it must take: and in a vast second
vaults over exhaustion, while speaking
comes alive: the form becomes reality, she

returns to her face, and in the time between
then and now – the space between the front
of the hand and its back – she is here, present,
real: aliveness that creates.

5.

Rudra Das.
Sharp planes of cheekbones echo through
the forged lines of an untarnished brass torso,
this body which is carved, made an emblem
by the hard, swift hands of a great artisan –

feet solid ground mountain:
Ksartriya, the warrior at attention,
deep attention to the mother's words.

6.

The web of many colors shifts: asking for
an old song. In the field of people, waving like
tall grass still not mowed, are scattered those
with strong memories of a certain time:

and over the crowd, a fragile armature of that
dramatic social hope, that public love, which
was living fabric a quarter century ago –
it rises, sparkling but barely seen, linked

from the outlines of crystalline forms,
spinning out above the crowd...
as the song ends it falls, silently, delicately crashing,
fading about our feet into the air...

7.

Shambo.
This drumming carves out
long, deep arches of air beneath dim rafters.

Flickering drumbeats, tiny
delicate ones suspending
the sharp bloody slap of strong beats:
they drip, they glitter, battering themselves
into rose petals

that drift redly across the still water,
silence, dimming twilight...

8.

Rain crashes into the dark banana leaves –
a sound of dull small hammers.

It looks like beating, like abuse:
but this is sustenance.

9.

At night the pond gazes upwards.

Smiling at stars, her liquid gaze
sees into their blazing cores:
the long eyes crinkle, remember
all their childhoods, assure them
of endless life, love without limit.

And the face resonates, burns through
that time when the candles are blown out,
our ashes are cast forth,
the fountain vaults, asserts:

all fused within
that eternal, dissolving moment
when red and white flowers fly,
land in the water, held by it lightly...

they are her eyes,
they are her heart.

10.

But when our own dawn comes,
what can we hold to us alone
and shivering under the banana trees,
when the fountain is turned off,
the light is pale and lifeless?

But see: among the reeds
are flowers still unwilted, floating.

[Los Angeles, Sebastian (Florida), 7/25/92-1/2/93]

High Spirits

So, in this rather weird transition between the semester and its end (a few meetings left), and also between working hard on the Liverpool presentation and working on the next paper, and having made myself a bit sick in doing so (gastro mostly), and trying to get a list of things done around the house, and sleeping too much in the day and too little at night – I'm resetting myself, bed by 2 am now, and some work out in the world tomorrow afternoon – I've been reading Robertson Davies' High Spirits. For the third time.

A minor book, a collection of occasional Christmas amusements, his yearly ghost stories for the time when he was Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. I think my eldest sister bought it for me one year, when I was completely excited by his Deptford trilogy – now you see where I first got my idea of Jungianism – and I remember thinking ooh, this will be fun.

It wasn't. I was bored, the jokes seemed drab, the stories dull and academic. I was hugely disappointed the first time through; I must have tried again, on the off chance it had gotten better somehow, a few years ago, and it probably wasn't too bad.

Well, the joke's on me now – I'm enjoying it this time, and have even laughed out loud several times. Which tells you something about me – I've finally reached an age where the humor makes sense (lots of old-fashioned academic in-jokes); the whole is pleasant enough, a bit like Dunsany's Jorkens stories (which somebody or other recently published complete in three volumes, which, yes, it's true, I bought). Very clubby, very cigar-smokey, very casual, but funny in their quaint way...

At this rate, I'll grow a white beard before long.

A slice of orange

A slice of orange floating in the bath oils....

There is peace in my heart these days: or, to be less religious-sounding, there is a certain peacefulness in my heart lately. I almost hesitate to mention in it; not because I think that saying it will make it go away, but because I have claimed at other times, to myself and others, that I am happier, calmer, these days; and it hasn't really been true, yet, or the feeling has faded again.

The short-term version is: I have finally gotten over the overwhelming, frustrated rage at being sent out of Australia four years ago; that, although I had embedded so many older and newer dreams in the image of that one job, that one new life (that sunny, happy life, warmer and more entertaining and sexier; a fulfilling job working with people who more closely share my ideas and interests; head of department, and I heard last week that the woman who took it in my place is soon to be Director of the Conservatory; and, of course, the little house in Woolloomoolloo, with the boyfriend working in the garden – all of which assemble many of my experiences and hopes from San Francisco and Los Angeles in one package, and gave them an antipodean spin I found irresistible), I have finally gotten over losing all those dreams for a different life, a different scale of expectations. Something that only time could have done.

But there is a longer-term aspect, because frustrated rage has not been unusual for me, ever since I was seventeen – I have often felt cheated; I would like to say 'obscurely cheated', but I have tended to be obsessively specific about what went wrong with my life at various points. Wrong university, shabby jobs, AIDS, Reid dies, shabby jobs, failed composer, failed performer, yet more shabby jobs, and of course debts and forced moves. A long and tiresome whine....

But I simply don't feel much that way any more. It is interesting that my goals are increasingly inner ones – to write, to think; I have always been concerned with my inner world, but now perhaps I am trying to make my outer world match up with the inner one, rather than the other way around. Maybe it's just age, maybe it's just time – maybe it's even this opportunity to write freely and yet connect to reading eyes. I would want some specific event to have made this change, if it is one, happen, but probably there isn't one – as my analyst said when I went through Jungian analysis between 1987 and 1992, if it actually works, you won't know why or how.

I don't mind that I don't know. It is the holiday season; I have certainly had a fair number of holiday seasons alone, but this one doesn't bother me – I'm not steeling myself for anything; the small pleasures are just fine with me: dinner with friends, parties here and there, buying a few gifts. The small but living tree, decorated with ornaments many of which were made by my sisters (in some cases as much as twenty years ago). And especially all those things we use to bring strong tastes and smells into the dead winter landscape, the gifts of a stronger, waxing earth: the dates, the almonds in honey, the chocolates: the winter apples from a colleague's tree, the oranges.

The holiday – all the holidays, in a slice of orange....

In praise of Joan Didion

I have always loved Joan Didion's books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don't – yet it's the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly perfect. Almost as though there's no translation between her and the words – something M. F. K. Fisher also manages at her best (in The Gastronomical Me, which is among the finest and most honest of autobiographies).

I've had Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking on my shelf for a few months, a little unwilling to pick it up; it is her book about the year her husband died and her daughter nearly did, twice, and so I knew it would be pretty grim. Given that Didion is pretty grim anyway, I was a bit worried about reading that one; as you might expect from my background, there are plenty of books on illness, death, loss, mourning on my shelves, but I wasn't certain how this one would be, or whether I was up for reading it on any given day. So I opened it Friday evening, rather sleepy, and read until dawn, finishing it around 7:30 am.

Well, it's very beautiful, very perfect. Not because it was calculated to be that way: there is a sense that this is the finest artistry, that of being completely clean and honest – even the ending, when she admits she doesn't want to end the book (and I didn't want to stop reading it), doesn't manufacture a neat or pat or symbolic closure to its shattering experiences; and it doesn't do some sort of nihilist/modernist tailing-off, either. It feels very fair and real, and as though she wrote it while thinking: what would John have felt was fair to him, if I'm going to write about his death?

It was certainly a terrible time for her – it has always been clear that she was dependent on him for stability and optimism, that her own tendency towards fear, fragility, and depression would have overwhelmed her years before if he hadn't been around. And in fact this book tells a bit more of their daily life together (of which little flashes had appeared in previous books, occasionally) and how much they worked together, spent practically all their days, even most of their hours, together: in the early pages I couldn't help thinking, oh no, there's no way she'll be able to keep writing now that he's gone. (I was never interested in his writing – John Gregory Dunne: a guy's novelist, the thinking-person's end of the best-sellers – but for me he's always been that wonderful man who keeps Joan Didion going, which is enough for me to care about him.)

But there's also a clear sense, which even comes out of her prose towards the end of the book – though I wouldn't say it to her face – that she's internalized him enough to continue, in her seventies and however much longer she lasts (may it be long), thinking and writing, almost as though he's not gone at all: she may miss the daily talk, the exchange, the proofreading, the argument, but she'll keep going, almost as though he's right there the whole time.

Good for her.

Stumbling [and] Rhetorician [and] Aftermath [and] Ready

Writing this paper: pleased at a sentence, frustrated at a page; gratified when a point comes clear, dismayed when it blows up into something aggressive and nonsensical.

Read what I had for V–, and was surprised at how mad and rambling and repetitive and polemical and... well, you get the idea – how overdone, how Adornoesque, it all sounded.

Fixing it now, to the best of my ability. But this is the mania of the writer – I know, for my audience in Liverpool tomorrow, it's just this thing, and it's either amusing or not. (As in Hitchhiker's Guide, the recurrent joke about Zaphod Beeblebrox: "He's just this guy, you know...".)

But for me it's identity, it's universe, it's either a disaster or a vast success: which means the world of the narcissist and the world of the writer are perhaps the same thing....

***

Having turned a mess of notes into about ten pages of text (pages 8 and 9 still messy, but I'll rewrite on the train, then print at the other end), I'm pleased. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe it's in process, but: when I have my first paragraph, and my last, and they create a sort of symmetrical hat-trick of rhetoric, I'm happy.

Because, after all, I'm kind of a performer at these presentations – somewhat like the magician in a traveling carnival, a bit cheap perhaps, a little greasy, but suave and confident in his effects. If I can make magic happen, if I can manage, perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps even against their will, to ensorcel my audience: then, I'm satisfied....

***

A couple of days later: back home, tired, had fun, wore myself out a bit. Presentation was good. Still doubtful as to the validity of certain kinds of research writing; as I put myself together in the next day or two might comment on it.

Nice to just lie about for a bit, though... oh oops I have to buy my brother's gift on the Internet... later today, tomorrow, soon....

***

And the next day, after being out at celebratory dinner, which, for me, is partly celebrating an end  – since I'm no longer the head of the HIV patient group (I've handed it on), this was the last of their Xmas dinners I'll be invited to. A sense of being done, a sense of moving on.

So: okay, I did it this week, the paper, it wasn't hard. And another separate article was due today, but they said they'd "keep the door open as long as they could" – I need to crank it out in the next few weeks.

And I can do it. I have to do it, after all: it would be the height of absurdity for me to not be in this book – they're waiting for me.

And after that, I can actually do the whole book, the one I'm so identified with: whatever thousands of words a week, I know where to go. Hearing The Fray's 'How to Save a Life' ringing in my ears. Past broken promises to myself, past inability to fathom large works, I can walk right past my past bullshit – this is no big deal: and I can do it.

And I will.

Another life

After working on the paper in fits and starts all day – the starts are quite productive but short, the fits just useless time-wasting – and going through lists and lists of Simpsons and Buffy shows... I think about LA and wonder, if things had gone differently, if I might have fallen into another life entirely: that of the hard-working team player on a television or film set, a script editor with a well-paying if insecure job and his eye on a scriptwriter's position or some such.

Improbable, maybe; I don't know. I did after all live in LA for eight years; and a lot of smart people find their way into many niches and crannies in The Industry, who didn't necessarily plan on being there. I would probably not have been very successful, I suppose – my aversion for popular culture was pretty strong when I was young; the truth is, I've only indulged in my enjoyment of it (for instance, for this paper I'm writing) since finishing the PhD. Perhaps until that happened I never would have allowed myself to dedicate myself to anything else; I wouldn't have been ambitious enough to make it, I suppose.

But, imagine it: me as funny but bitchy gay man, clearly aiming my life in so many directions that it was going nowhere, begging for attention but not focusing it anywhere (as I indeed was in my twenties); if at a crucial juncture I'd met some intelligent, charismatic older person who put me into some Industry slot; I might be very busy today – the truth is, all my tendency to catalogue and list and organize could just as well be spent arranging the tangled needs of a film auteur, or perhaps I could have gotten sidelined into a script library somewhere.

Nah. Wouldn't have worked, I think – there probably hasn't been a time before now when I could have seen an Industry life to be as valuable as a university job. Interesting that I can see it now, though: would I have a little stucco hacienda on the west side of West Hollywood, not quite in the Beverly Hills area? Would I be rather brittle and sarcastic, having given up on the intellectual pursuits I respected when I was young – although now I realize one could read books anywhere, I wouldn't have known that a PhD doesn't change anything really, it only changes the world around you. How would I have weathered the AIDS storm, if I had been in the Industry, and thus so busy that I couldn't take time off to be sick? –

But then, if we're going to imagine me as assistant to the director on a film set, we may just as well imagine that the HIV virus never mutated, never got out of the jungle – which requires only a microscopic intervention, almost invisible time travel – and then we get a whole new set of possibilities. Of course I've imagined that one often: who would I be – where would I be....

Loot

Pleasant birthday lunch with friends – a bit quiet for some reason (which is odd for our bunch, we usually all chatter like magpies), but everyone seemed in a good mood, just less talkative than usual.

Much loot. Felt pretty much like a twelve-year-old on Christmas morning – ooh look chocolates from A., Lush bath stuff from V. and P., classy (and cheesy) cards (several of which have great big FIFTYs on the front). A lovely book from Spurious – Blanchot's Friendship – left me trying to explain to P. on the way home what I understand of Blanchot, which is still extremely limited/unclear, but give me time.

The dim sum lunch took a slightly alarming turn – at first my fault; I'd remembered the 'Honeycomb' as having something to do with actual bees and such, but it is actually a kind of pork stomach that had a honeycombed surface (that's a mistake I remember making before); and then I marked the wrong check box, and ended up ordering cold chicken feet instead of something anyone had wanted.

Then the restaurant owner, David, who was very friendly (partly because he knew C., who was wearing a sort of Academy-Awards-cum-country-girl dress) ordered two more dishes for us – spicy hot chicken feet, and baby pork on the bone, both not the sorts of things I would not normally allow to get near my plate. We did eat some of everything – some of the guys did the macho I-Can-Eat-This kind of thing – but not by any means all of it....

The Germans have some useful words that translate as our 'ick': ekelig, ekelhaft – I swear that they're really just extended forms of 'ick', if some philologist ever works it out. (The ultimate literary spin on the concept of 'ick' is in Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, at the end of the fake Jacobean play – go look it up, it's one of the funniest moments in modern fiction).

All of which makes this entry, written before I get back to work on the article, devolve into a List Of Things I Hope Never To Face At The Table Again:

* Chicken feet (slimy and gristly, even when hot)
* Tripe (unless chopped up in haggis, which isn't all that bad)
* Pig's feet
* Chewy jellyfish (not as bad as some of the others, but fairly unpleasant)
* Duck's feet (see first entry)
* Fugu (a sort of sticky mustard-brown paste that tastes much as it looks)
* Sjøstrøming (Swedish rotted herring – once was more than enough, even with plenty of akvavit to wash it down)
* Unidentifiable pig parts or unspecified 'mixed meats'
* Sea cucumber (nothing like cucumber – since they're really giant slugs – a nerve-wrackingly authentic Vietnamese restaurant in Irvine, California, proved to me that I should never go near them again. You can slice them like you would a jelly roll, but...)

On the other hand, deep-fried shrimp heads aren't so bad. Go ahead: try one....

50

This is it... 3 am Eastern Standard time, which is 8 am here.

Huh.

Well, I'm having neither the "it's only a number" (i.e. it doesn't matter) nor any miserable "oh no I'm old" feelings.

Best articulated as:

Boy, am I fifty.

(I do remember telling my mother, when she turned fifty and was clearly a bit intimidated by it, "Hey, you're just halfway!". Actually a rather weird sentiment – halfway to what? – but I think she found it a bit comforting...)

***

So, I'm actually in a good mood – even a very good mood; gearing up for, after my birthday luncheon with ten friends, three days straight of working on the article before traveling to present it. However, although I'm cheerful, a remembered fantasy keeps crossing my mind in the past few days; it's admittedly rather pathetic, but I think it deserves a place here, and should have today's date.

I think this is from the late 1980s –or possibly the early 1990s; this was a repeatedly imagined and elaborated scene, like a sort of video clip, of a future which, of course, never happened.

A part of the fantasy was that it happened ten years later from whenever I was imagining it: so, if it was the late 1980s, some time in the late 1990s – and I think this first crossed my mind on a sad birthday, when I was not in good health. It was the image of me, ten years older, healthy, happy, on another birthday, surrounded by friends – and a lover, whose outlines are of course rather blurred (Reid was long dead by then, and it was impossible to imagine Larry, Paul F., or any others in this role, I suppose).

The center of all this is simply what I say as I look around at them all – something like: Excuse me everybody, I need to say something. (Everybody around the table quiets down.) You know, ten years ago I was alone, with no job and no future, very sick, and I thought I'd be dead soon – a lot of us were sick then; I know I thought I'd never be happy again, and that I'd never – (and here I would look at the lover, not saying anything, but everybody understood) – and then I'd say, sort of tearfully but laughing a bit, So: I guess I just want to say – here's to hope. And everybody would laugh, and drink, and say: Hope, yes, here's to hope.

That fantasy sequence no longer has the pull on me that it once did; it feels like somebody else's fantasy, not my own. But I do feel a definite – not pity, but – compassion – for the younger man who so desperately needed to make up that scene in his head, and imagine that it might play itself out, at some birthday, some day.

Monk!

Meredith, I mean.

Although I have complained several times about the presentation I'm doing in half an hour – silly timing to do any presentation at all, thrown together out of scraps of previous work, doesn't even fit the Theme Word of the seminar (which they picked after I volunteered, thanks much) – the truth is that any work I do on Meredith Monk is good for me, and wonderful, and enjoyable – because the music itself is so rich.

The background is that for about ten years I've been talking to her, getting materials and interviewing and so on, for that book I'll write about her someday – although it has to wait on my current smaller projects and the book on AIDS. She's been rather irritated that I haven't done more – when my friend Trisha, the brilliant lesbian poetess, and I visited Meredith at her mother's in Palm Desert a few years ago, Trisha and Meredith said when they met, "Well he's an asshole of course." Meaning me. They then burst into laughter – it was actually one of the most affectionate things anybody's ever said....

But this music, and the videos I'm showing: such gorgeous, passionate work. Full of life and breath. Makes me glad I'm here....

Exaltation

Perhaps (he said cautiously, looking around to make sure nothing was about to fall on his head) nothing bad will happen around this birthday at all.

It doesn't always; it's just something I keep as a reassurance in reserve for the Bad Birthdays – which, for me, mostly mean the ones where nothing happens, where I wonder whether anybody remembers. There were particular bleak periods in my life that were like that; probably I've dug in roots of relationship with enough people that it's not likely to happen again for a long time – as it's improbable that I'll live long enough to be in some sort of nursing home, I may escape it at that end of my life. (So I don't need to consider the whole problem of Who Cares About Old Gay Guys?, as I won't be around to worry about it.)

Woolf's diary again, the exaltation that comes in and out of the entries around 1920, when the novels are a success and she feels she can concentrate on writing, on her subtle inner world. The developing relationship with Katherine Mansfield – which seems to exist only at the highest level: their everyday relationship is irritable and discomfortable, the truth is that from an everyday point of view they don't really like each other. But when they talk at that highest level, Woolf says that they can almost talk without translation – as though there's a pure space of understanding there.

Of course you can also see Mansfield is clearly in trouble at this point – she's getting ill enough that there isn't much left of her life.

But the sheer focus, the concentration, on what matters: we should spend our whole lives on that – although I am so incompetent at focusing on that exaltation of understanding, I resent all the time I have spent over the decades not focused on it. We should have time and support to do nothing else, because it is after all the only important thing there is to do: an analyst, for one thing (I don't mean a therapist, I mean an analyst – someone whose profession is to help us understand why we are the way we are); maybe a few priests of various rather flexible religions around; hillsides, small houses, friends. Not much in the shape of tedious work; many books, no televisions. A reasonable life....

Well, it seems I have fallen into some utopian daydream, something William Morris-y. But the day is bright and clear, and despite the still relatively pointless task of giving this talk today, preceded by a haircut, followed by putting medications in little bags for the coming month, there is this sense that I have all the time in the world: that the constraints, the boredom, that I complain about so often are all smoke and spiderwebs, that one can simply walk right through them....