in the hall of mirrors

Strength

On the other hand...

The past few posts have been very much about reflecting broadly on my life – as I frequently do anyway (sorry if that gets boring, but there you are). It all makes sense in a context of turning fifty – yet another real turn in my life, from the chaotic turn downward when I was seventeen, onward to the upward moves, defeats, successes, being stymied, finding ways forward. This turn, of course, which has no real events to mark it (knock wood – I suppose I could still have a heart attack, or be evicted, or some such?), is a consolidation, a re-viewing of the fifty years. But, so far, they have mostly been negative, mostly self critical.

After all that, today's class was interesting. Three of the young guys did presentations (at the last class, it was mostly the young women talking about gender and queer theory, so this was the guys' time to respond). Two of them had to endure massive interruptions, interventions, and reworkings from me, all in the name of clear communication – it was all very invasive, very heavy-handed.

It was also, I think, very successful, and the guys themselves were sort of grateful, in a slightly overwhelmed way. It was literally an attempt to transform their means of communication to something that engaged their audiences more, and represented more fairly what they had in their heads.

It's one of my strengths: a dangerous strength, of course – not everyone likes strong interventions (indeed, the fact that I have trouble holding myself back when someone seems to need such an intervention is my greatest social failing, and what has created the most dysfunctional relationships in my professional life). But when it works, when it empowers people and forces them into rapid and exciting progress towards something that, ultimately, they end up wanting, it is a fine thing.

Something to be proud of....

Taking a meeting

Today I chaired a meeting; it went well enough, as several of the meetings I've chaired over the past year.

The interesting bits, though – and it's not the first time I've noticed them, but they seemed exceptionally present today – were the moments when I had a relatively smooth, helpful, mature relationship with everyone in the room; a joke would be made, and my hearty laughter (I am unavoidably loud, but there you are) rang out with a friendliness, a supportiveness, that helped put people at their ease. And, despite the moments of disagreement and the endless frictions of a colonial working with Brits, the general tone was pleasantly professional, and people went away feeling as though they had been heard and contributed. It felt almost as though I was channelling my father, or my late senior colleague Philip B–....

What's odd about it all: I could see, in the interstices in the two hours of meeting, fleeting glimpses of the person I might have been had things gone differently in my life – someone less damaged by inchoate rage and resentment, less uncertain, less bitter about what the world had done to him. A Sagittarius without the vein of Scorpio running through him: someone not quite so insistent on facing other people with their own flaws, less accusing, less cruel. Not because I would particularly want, even in an alternative universe, to chair meetings: but merely that such moments of authority, of relationship, might be so easy that they would become unimportant, minor chores in a life, a career, where I was an easy and supportive authority for others, rather than a somewhat bitter semi-failure often on the sidelines, and one so often unable to communicate without aggression or defensiveness.

You could even imagine me, lighter and more confident, and of course healthier, than all the people I have actually ended up being – able not merely to chair such a meeting, but to do so with grace and kindness, with the skill that moves groups of people forward and enables all their productive ideas to function:

what I might have been, if everything had gone differently....

The Idiot

I have, unfortunately, volunteered to do a presentation on Friday on some materials and a paper I've written on Meredith Monk – foolishly, insanely foolishly, given that I must finish the Buffy article for presentation in Liverpool Tuesday, given that part of Saturday is lost to a birthday lunch, given that it was entirely and loonily gratuitous to volunteer in the first place.

I'll cut my losses, of course, and minimize changes to the work I've already done, and play a series of videos, which is really all they want anyway – but I even, and thoroughly, resent the loss of the three hours that the entire seminar will take from my day.

Volunteering for such a non-essential academic event is the kind of dysfunctional move that has colored a lot of my career; in the 1980s I was frantic to do things, anything – write program notes, manage dance companies, sing in any ensemble that would have me. Some of that was about trying to get into some artistic profession that I could survive in (and it's lucky I finally turned back to academe; I would be so unsettled, so desperate at any of those professions on any ongoing basis – they aren't protected enough, there isn't enough free time attached to a salary; and besides there are too many events to manage, not enough professional space to read books).

Then in the 1990s, although you would think I would have grown past the desperation of Doing Anything Anyone Might Want, I still did many presentations, many conferences, many little things as opposed to big ones; something I actually counsel my students against – although, admittedly, presentations of new material drive one to write papers (or fragments of them), they don't give the necessary reflective space to write anything larger or better.

All, of course, as anyone could see rooted in a general world view of Never Enough – this is the world of the negative narcissist, the perpetually insecure and inadequate, the professional barely concealing the panic he/she feels at being found out as not good enough, as not having done enough, to deserve their position of authority. It's unfortunate that the contemporary academic world encourages such an attitude, and can even create such an attitude in those who didn't already have it; but I have always been a prime victim of such ridiculous worries, as I was already exactly like that.

Well, at least it means people around the world know my name. But it's silly – and the impulse to volunteer was the impulse of a younger, sillier man, one who shouldn't be on the verge of fifty.

All right then, we'll make it all symbolic: since this presentation will occur on the last day before I am actually fifty years old, I'll try to make it my farewell to the desperate wish to please – on Saturday I will drink (not alcohol, I'll need to do work after that celebratory lunch, but let's say Chinese tea) to the prospect of a future where I only do things that actually lead forward, that are more satisfying and enduring.

Despite history, despite habits, I will magically become the – comparatively – wise one of fifty years....

... sleepy... [and] *click*

Sleepy today.

Since in addition to problems with HIV and its medication and HCV, I also have an auto-immune thyroid problem, I've been taking medicines for a while now – one year, two years? – that keep my weakened thyroid from allowing me to sleep all the time.

Unfortunately, I've been a bit careless about the thyroxine for the past ten days or so – too much travel, not taking it at the right time of day, etc. This is in the category of Not Good – if I don't take it on time (8:30 each morning) my system goes a bit haywire.

So I'm sleepy; trying to do things, but tending to just lie quietly and let sleep take over....

***

Tonight I met for a drink with some of last year's masters students who were graduating – a charming and intelligent bunch, now far-flung (Ireland, Canada, etc.). At the end of the conversation, while we were walking back to the station, I explained the paper I'm having so much trouble writing – I did, in fact, exactly what I push my own postgraduates to do over and over: to simply explain exactly what they want to write, or the part they are currently writing, etc.

And came home, and *click*: started right into two pages that made sense, that sounded interesting, that set up the paper....

Off to bed now; but I feel considerably more able to finish this than at any time in the past three months. Ah....

Conversations

I neglected to mention the best part about the past week: two sets of casual conversations with wonderful, calm, sensible friends – neither of whom unfortunately live anywhere near me. Such a valuable thing, really the most wonderful thing, and something I miss a great deal: in Hong Kong, Australia, and northern England (that is to say, for the past nine years of my life), although I've had good friends in all those places, I haven't had the easy, local support of someone who can listen, who doesn't work where I do, who has the calm reserves of wisdom that are worth so much. I've tended to depend on occasional phone calls, e-mails – Jay, Trisha, Terry, Philip, and other remarkable, sensible, thoroughly sane people, scattered all over the world.

It's a difficult thing, not to have that kind of deep support, which was always remarkably common for me in California (both in San Francisco and Los Angeles, though admittedly slightly more so in the former). People acculturated to connect with their own and others' emotions, people who are developed enough to have the necessary ability to reflect, not the kind who simply respond with more complaints or neuroses of their own....

Of course, it probably reflects on my own development, or lack thereof. In line with some (admittedly fairly mystical) systems like Jungian developmental psychology, or Hindu ideas about spiritual awareness, or even est – a shameful confession: I took a lot of est seminars in the 1980s, and actually learned a lot there – we tend to find our own level: we gather to us people who are at our level of development. Which would mean, rather disappointingly, that although I've met a number of kind and supportive people in my life, it is significant that I don't generally end up working or living around the best of them. At least I'm far enough ahead to bump into those people, to make friends with them, to recognize how special they are. But evidently not far enough along to belong in the immediate spaces around them.

Maybe in a couple of lifetimes....

Wind and rain

Wind down the chimney, pushing against the house, rain on the windows.

Next to the two-dimensional, virtual, commercialized world of the computer screen, downloading South Park episodes; and the more three-dimensional, slightly more real, but still rather predictable world of my apartment, with its IKEA furniture, books, foodstuffs; is this passionate, truly real world of winter weather.

It's not my world, of course; there's no way I could really engage with that world. Even going out and wandering around in it is implausible for me – wouldn't be much fun, really – and I am so not the person who would go sailing or mountain-climbing or whatever. That whole way of using it seems to reduce it to another version of passive entertainment, anyway.

But its big, sensual reality does make everything else seem so, well, trivial....

Under such circumstances, reading Ballard is probably a bad idea (well-written science fiction stories, but all paranoid, all about a malevolent universe – and in fact so paranoid that one can usually imagine the ending of the story from its beginning). I close the book and put it on the shelf, somewhat pointedly. Better, perhaps, to read something like Coleridge, de Quincey – something from an era where reading and writing were plausible, where they mattered more, where there was no television....

Perhaps that's one reason it's so difficult to write this article that is so very due: writing about television seems so second-hand, so innately marginal, especially when that wind is blowing.

Us and Them

[Speech for the third World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2006. The speech for the 2004 vigil is here, and for the 2005 vigil here.]

I’m a member of the Newcastle HIV patient group. One of the things we do fairly often is talk to medical students, most of whom look, to me at least, very young indeed. Before we say anything, though, the students are usually asked to imagine some of the problems that might come up around HIV positive patients. We’re supposed to sit quietly during this part, and sometimes we manage well enough; but usually the students come up with one example after another of all the different ways that we might accidentally infect someone else, the ways that we can cause different kinds of trouble for other people. Now that is all very important of course, and we all care a great deal about it – but sometimes, after they’ve gone on and on like this for half an hour or so, I get a little impatient, and I can’t help feeling, as they’d say in New York: so what am I then, chopped liver?

I know what they’re thinking – at least, what they’re thinking before one of us speaks up, before we start to tell our stories, before they start to register that the patients in the room are real people, with feelings, and pasts, and maybe even futures. For them, at first anyway, we’re already past any kind of hope – their first impulse is to sort of ring-fence us, to make sure that the problems we represent don’t get any bigger. This is a version of what we call That Us-And-Them Thing – you know what I mean: when you know who belongs to your tribe, your family – or your country, your type of person – and, even more importantly, who doesn’t: because it’s not just a matter of who you care about, it’s also about deciding who is simply off your radar, or even who you see as a threat.

It’s a natural thing, and something we all do: you can’t care about everybody in the world, you can’t make everyone’s problems your own. So you draw lines – some of them obvious: you care whether your sister is happy with her new boyfriend, you care whether the friend who’s making you a cup of tea is looking worn out, you might even care whether the guy who works at the corner store seems cheerful today. But you don’t care as much, and maybe you can’t afford to care, whether a woman on the Metro looks upset, or whether somebody’s dying of starvation in another time zone.

Of course, AIDS has its own huge history of Us Versus Them, going all the way back to the beginning – when they first called it GRID, Gay-Related Immune Disorder, the best thing about that name was the reassurance that it wasn’t a problem for anybody who wasn’t a gay man. Then, and for a long time, all those who weren’t gay men were The General Population – and that phrase haunted us for years: the government worried that the virus would get out of the gay ghettos into the General Population, which meant you and your mom and your cousin Fred; if it ever did that we’d be in real trouble. Later it was all about the Three Hs – Haitians, homosexuals, and hemophiliacs – and that was strange. A joke from that time, from the mid-1980s, went something like: What’s the really hard part about getting AIDS? The answer: getting your wife to believe that you’re Haitian.

In this country, of course, one of the smart decisions for guys who were gay was: don’t sleep with Americans. In America, it was more specific: don’t sleep with anybody from New York or San Francisco. Over the years, this all kept changing shape – for straight men, don’t sleep with anybody from Africa; for women, check the guy in the bar to see if he has needle marks in his arm. For governments, there would be decisions on a larger scale – let’s not have any immigrants from, say, South Africa, or Indonesia. As you all probably know, a lot of our friends from Africa were sent back by the British government last year, around election time – because they were somebody else’s problem, because they might cost money, maybe even because they were some kind of a threat.

Here in Newcastle, a young man who had come from Malaysia was told that he was going to be sent back home because his health was too good. The fact that it would be difficult for him to get medications at home, that he would probably get seriously ill if he were deported, wasn’t very interesting to the Home Office, because he was clearly one of Them, not one of Us. So he did something kind of foolish: he stopped taking his medications so that he would get a little sick, so that they would let him stay for a while longer. Sadly, he stopped them for too long, and his immune system went to pieces; some of you here probably went to his funeral.

So: what can we do about Us – and what can we do about Them?

Well, the truth is, we’re already doing a lot. We’ve all probably learned it doesn’t do much good to tell people to just stop thinking in certain ways – never quite works, does it? – but what we have seen is that simply letting people know that there are others around them who are HIV-positive, who sit on buses with them, or work with them, or go to pubs with them, makes all the difference in the world.

Once you’ve told someone that you’re positive – or, if you feel like being a little bit dramatic, you can tell them that you have AIDS – you can just stand there talking to them about anything: the weather, the traffic, what you had for lunch. You don’t have to tell them how to think, how to feel: but you can almost sense this little dial in their head gradually clicking over from ‘Strange, Scary, Infectious Thing’ to ‘This Guy I’m Talking To.’ And those who aren’t positive have the same effect every time they tell a friend, Oh yeah, my friend who has AIDS said the other day….

You might get a raised eyebrow, or a few questions; but as you talk, you can almost see them getting accustomed to a world that’s suddenly become a slightly different shape – a world where one of the members of ‘Us’ now includes somebody who just happens to have AIDS.

A bit wound up

Today is World AIDS Day; after the past few chaotic, often fun but occasionally fairly awful days, I need to get my brain around a BBC interview in the morning, and then I have the afternoon to somehow get my thoughts in order to find something to say at tonight's vigil.

It's a bit like a performance, a bit like teaching a class: you go over and over the same ground, hoping something will leap out at you as Your Hook, or perhaps: Your Punchline. If you find it, you can easily work up to it, getting gasps of amazement when you catch the trapeze at exactly the right moment – but if you don't find it you're fairly sunk. (And if that sounds too journalistic or frivolous for Such A Serious Matter, just remember – I spent the 80s scraping along in San Francisco without a position or career expectations, doing any damned thing anybody asked me in terms of writing and arts administration, in addition to classy things like being the snotty, undertrained receptionist in a large firm – I have a long history of doing pretty much anything for attention, which predates any professional credentials I have now.)

As for the bad things in the past few days: I worry about them a bit – enduring being the butt of a burst of passive-aggressive rage, sleeping on a broken guest bed, a closed bridge and crazed traffic – only because I have a history of bad things happening in the lead-up to my birthday (now eight days away). Perhaps it's because I have Scorpio rising in my chart – okay I don't know much about that either, but it's suggestive that, although the Sagittarius that I'm supposedly identified with should be fiery, powerful, cheerful, male, I also have the coldest and creepiest of astrological signs threaded through my existence. In any case, rotten things happen, and life always looks fairly awful, just before most of my birthdays; then, generally on the day itself, usually in the evening or sometimes starting the morning after, things clear up and get better.

A peculiar and, you will say, unbelievable phenomenon – well no apologies here; it's a bit like the strange factoid that I only get seriously ill every four years. No sensible medical reasoning here, just the fact that my major HIV-related miseries have occurred in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004. I will, of course, observe the beginning of 2008 with narrowed eyes and folded arms.

Anyway: I hope the next week won't get too bad. And I hope I'll find that hook, that perfect thing to say tonight....