in the hall of mirrors

Borges: Blogger

It's going better now; several hours of successful work last night, the end is in sight.

Some blogs keep returning to the subject of blogging as though they need to justify it: I have certainly spent time trying to get it exactly right, but justifying it seems unnecessary – why should any kind of writing, communicating, articulating, artistry, artisanship, need justifying?

In the interstices of working and not-working, I pick up the Borges Selected Non-Fictions. Borges was clearly a blogger – brief, fascinating pieces on a variety of topics, each of which defines a world. (It's actually amazing that his substantial reputation is based, on the most part, on such short pieces of writing.) There is a 1934 piece, 'I, A Jew', where he responds to a Fascist news sheet that claimed that he was Jewish – he says he wishes he was; the piece is brief, poetic, speculative, fun, and would make an ideal blog entry.

Hesse wrote critically against 'feuilletonistes', against the tendency for newspapers to fragment into little bits of prose; but I think he was wrong or, at least, as Adorno was about popular culture, ultimately unfair. Feuilletons have their own place in writing, and certainly in newspapers. Brief, personalized fragments of writing are valuable. Speculative tours-de-force are wonderful.

Blogging is good....

Aaargh

Almost nothing done for nearly thirty-six hours. Puttering, cooking, washing dishes; walking around the books on the floor... as far too often I am working against myself and what I need to do, in the most strenuous manner... ridiculous.

Master of the dilatory, consummate connoisseur of avoidance, lord of laziness, powerful proponent of procrastination....

Aaaaaaaargh.

Idle thought

'Thirty-Two Variations on Mambo Italiano, in the style of Johann Pachelbel.'

Should be the hit of 2008....

Ecstatic

As George says in Sunday in the Park with George – simply but with feeling, when he turns away from his painting, after a huge burst of climactic music dies away – "It's going well."

I'm writing this article, having finished several insistent chunks of administration; it won't be done tonight or tomorrow morning, but I think tomorrow night, which I believe will be good enough. And that is wonderful.

I wish, though, I could put into this article the real reason that I'm writing about these pieces – Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, especially 'Someone in a Tree'; and his Sunday in the Park with George, especially 'Color and Light'.

It's really because I am inevitably weeping, happily, by the end of each song – although they are so abstract and allusive. This paper is really an attempt to explain why I cry when a song indicates that all our voices and moments, fragmentary and confused as they may seem in the everyday, actually come together in some perfect moment of being – why my experience of time and life, behind every kind of depression, anxiety, or loss, is actually ecstatic: as though everything that has been, however awful it may seem in the short term, is perfect, when seen from eternity.

It's much like the way I always cry at the end of Longtime Companion, when the three people that are left have that strange vision at the beach – the one where there is a cure for AIDS, and not only a cure, but redemption: because everyone comes back, including the ones we have watched dying throughout the film, and they are laughing and hugging their friends, until the vision fades and the beach is empty. I know people who think that scene is a sellout, but I love it; and, actually, these songs mean even more than that, because they aren't based on illusion, but on presence.

I can't really say, in this paper, 'I always cry here.' But I kind of wish that I could.

The moon is so bright, tonight....

Changeable

Up in the night (you know why) and saw the sky – very strange: the clouds like a dark orange against a dark dark gray, moving very fast, chased by the winds off the north sea. Looks almost like a weird negative. 5 am – well the weather shifting with spring, the days getting (too slowly but still noticeably) longer – no wonder the outside seems in a turmoil these days; a week ago the weather was even more changeable – bursts of hail, the only snow we've had yet, sunny, rainy, you'd get an entire selection in a day.

I keep zigzagging too: days when I am astounded at how much I've done, days when I'm amazingly useless. I was so embarrassed/exasperated at being "too late" for an anthology deadline that I did a remarkable amount of work yesterday – then today – and aimed at tomorrow, like an arrow: one last chance to make this deadline. Ginseng, brain-type supplements – I'm all worked up on one level, lazy on another.

So many things to do.

Wish me luck....

The Magic Coat

Pablo F----mann was his name – is his name, as far as I know. A percussionist, composer and graduate student at school with me in the late 1980s.

Handsome, coolly sexy: a slightly wolfish face, gray eyes, always a bit unshaven. He grew up in South America – and yes, I know what you're thinking, I always thought it too: German last name and features, Spanish first name, from South America? – oh lord it's an Ira Levin novel, and his father fled to Buenos Aires with Hitler's head in a box under his arm.

Anyway... Pablo was scruffy, no two ways about it. This was L.A., so T-shirts and ripped jeans were manageable daily wear. Despite his arresting profile and evident competence, no one took Pablo very seriously – he was smart, knowledgeable, passionate about his work, but not significant. (Yet good-looking... did I mention that?)

Perhaps this is kind of an 80s story... in any case, one day early in his final year, Pablo stalked in (there is no other word for it) in a handsome, quietly tailored jacket and tie; and over it all was a handsome, long coat, a charcoal duster, with all the deep unreflecting resonance of fine wool. Shades of darkness accented with deep winter hues, a touch of gray at his temples – he was transformed into a stylish and authoritative force to be reckoned with. For the rest of that last year, that was how he dressed – everything had changed for him, and in his wake, permanently, like magic.

I told you this was an 80s story – think of power suits, of yuppies, of shoulder pads, even of Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Although Pablo didn't seem ruthless or manipulative, just suddenly – confident. Professional. Dignified. And, as it happened, quite German. Not to mention way out of my league.

For years, I have complained about a lack of respect, a lack of success. It's been my own neverending story – at so many points in my life, and especially in the demotion and exile and financial collapse that landed me here, I've become once again the youngest of a large Italian family, pushed around, petulant, resentful, demanding. So you can imagine my response when the dean told me not to apply for promotion this year, with the promise-them-anything-but-give-them-Arpège rider that next year I would surely, surely, be successful. All I have to do is keep hopping when they say hop, keep cranking out too-hastily-written research, and do more administration than... well, you get the idea.

Last week, I bought a long coat. Italian-made, cashmere, charcoal black, it reaches to a little lower than mid-knee. I look like a softer version of Angel, or like Hannah at the end of Angels in America, when she has been transformed into a New Yorker – sharp, sleek, elegant, dark.

I wear the coat, and the atmosphere around me changes: there is a shift in the magnetic lines of force, in the flow of electrons. I open my hand and a pen leaps into it, obedient: weather patterns shift, light warps around me into auras of pale rainbow shades. Red sparks fly through the air, and when I walk into a room pencils float, and spoons bend.

And I look forward to – well – magic....

In Bel Air

Chic beauties, men in tuxes
run across the wet plaza
to the hospital entrance.

I twist sprung cords
to turn the blinds,
trying to see.

Perfect curves on rainswept autos.
Big smiles, fine suits,
fabrics night-blue, glassy.

My vision’s left is carved
inward by my arm,
skin dim with shadows.

Laughing, waving
to friends who lean out
from Mercedes windows.

The window won’t open.
The nurse comes in,
tells me to go to bed.

White hands, polished nails.
Sharp molars.
What could they want here?

Through this window:
clear, bright teeth like ropes of pearls,
diamond edges.

[Los Angeles, 4/4/90-10/14/92]

Train III: Impacts

Still on that train, but now in the other direction.

Last night, in a small movie theater on the Dartington College of the Arts campus, I saw Pan’s Labyrinth. Well, I practically had to see it – arriving one late and rainy evening, in a countryside school of the arts, with nothing else to do; and after an e-mail from S. that said, and I quote: “M. and I went to see Pan's Labyrinth yesterday, and you MUST see this as soon as you can. It's got your name written all over it.”

I kind of see what she means: fantasy, tension, the freedom of dreams versus death – although I wasn’t entirely prepared for how violent the film is. But then today, when I was explaining it to someone else, I slightly surprised myself by saying: it isn’t indulgent about the violence, just merciless – awful things happen in wartime, and the camera doesn’t flinch, it stays steady. So I suppose that kind of violence does make particular sense for me: the steady gaze, no matter how difficult.

Loved the movie, by the way. Very quiet and withdrawn afterward – fortunately for me I was alone in a town where nobody knows me, so I could just sit and think about it over dinner. Various thoughts – how could we not go in and stop the Spanish fascists after the war? How do we connect fantasy and brutal reality, or disconnect them? And: I’m so glad the film doesn’t reach a decision about all the fantasy; it leaves you to dream and wonder.

***

Another, different, impact today: the doctoral thesis I came down to examine, although in need of reworking, had wonderful stuff in it. And the charming, friendly guy who wrote it accepted our rather stringent demands for a rewrite; and afterward took me for a drink – he needed one, of course – while looking at me with such fascination, such charming admiration.

It’s always such a pleasure to have one’s work appreciated. But, even more, to have one’s work treated with – well – reverence….

***

Listening to various contemporary musics, including Paul Dresher’s monodrama Slow Fire (making notes for an article I need to write about it this year), some Kancheli that proved a little too overwhelming, and finally some Stefan Wolpe.

Last spring – March 2006 according to my CV – I was a panelist at a Cambridge series of discussions/concerts that included Wolpe’s daughter performing his lesser-known piano pieces. They were all impressive – Wolpe, in fact, was nothing if not impressive: the most powerful and intense of high modern serialists, but at the same time apparently uninterested in the outside world of success. He just wanted to achieve a precise, well-judged management of the notes, of the motives, of the musical material: and he did it so well…. Sometimes his works require a certain endurance, like a huge Pollack canvas or like a Beckett play; but the work is so fine, and it shows you what immense skill, thought, and hard, hard work can combine to create.

On that concert, it was kind of unexpected to hear an early piece (literally called ‘Early Piece’, from 1925; sometimes it appears as the second movement of his first sonata, but it was written on its own). It is a delicate but sinewy, evanescent but sturdy, exploration of hesitancy, by someone not known for hesitancy: the notation is odd (I have a note to myself to find the score) because it is precise where you don’t expect precision: the careless, fragmentary beginning is spelled out in exact note values with varying meters – almost like the mysterious, wonderfully Webernian beginning of Mahler’s Ninth, except written out exactly.

As though Bach were to write out, with utter and meticulous respect, the most fragile moment of Chopin, rubato and all….

***

My bring-along-to-read book was Sontag’s Where the Stress Falls, a late collection of shorter essays. Some good bits on egotism, that are almost too perceptive – all written in other contexts. It must have been on her mind over the years:

“Homage to others is the complement to accounts of oneself: the poet is saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of his or her admirations.”

***

Well, here’s a fourth impact, a lot less metaphorical: the melted cheese from my railway sandwich hits my sweater on its way to my jeans. Yuck. And then the crowds leaving the train crash into each other, and me, on their way out….

Frankly, I prefer metaphors.

Time to de-train….

Train II: In transit

The countryside of the south: greener, more crowded, but gentler and more civilized. The truth is, I’d probably be more at ease down here, rather than the raw, chilly north where I’ve landed. The sheer density of people seems to soften things: making, I’m sure, more crowded resentments – but also, always, more alternatives, more alternate paths, to allow one to get away from what is unbearable. Maybe that’s the answer….

Another answer, which has lately been appearing in my imagination: as we write and rewrite this grant to work with and in South Africa, I think: what if, in four or five years – assuming this grant is successful – I were offered a job down there? Especially in Cape Town, which could be the replacement for all my failed dreams of life in Sydney. Just think of it….

***

Stopping in Exeter. I think of the strange image that Exeter people, and especially Exeter girls, have in the British popular imagination – trashier and more inane than any colonial would expect from anyone growing up so near to London. And in such utter contrast to A., who is herself an Exeter girl – but all charm, like those-lovely-people-next-door, full of sweet British middle-classness, a peaches and cream complexion, and plump, friendly pleasantness. Nothing like the alley-cat stereotype: the example that disproves (?) the rule…

[CORRECTION: two weeks later... V. has told me that A. is not from Exeter, but Essex, adding: "As far as I know we don't make fun of Exeter girls." Ah well: my grasp of British geography, as always a bit shaky – do you know, I still don't really get the difference between Birmingham and Bristol?... they're both in the south somewhere....]

***

Along the southern coast of this island, we ride, look long at the sea: a calmer, less northern sea than the one off Northumbria – one that would be a bit easier to live with, I think. Boats. Bridges. Houses nestled in small harbors along soft hills and inlets. Fields outlined in hedges – that schematic of cultivated land that divides spaces up into fields and meadows that can become such easy friends. The northern lands are dramatic to visit but, unlike my colleagues who have grown up there, I haven’t been able to discover any real comfort or affection for them – it would be easier to live here, I think.

And, of course: a southern, quasi-tropical ocean would be even easier than that….

Train I: Discourse on Disappointment

A train, from Northumberland to Devon.

I often feel as though my head is clearest in travel – on trains, on planes, are the times when I see everything whole, and in its largest and most realistic context.

So far I’ve done some work on the paper that was due last month; listened to music; tried to communicate over my mobile phone, through a sporadic network connection, about a grant (with rather disappointing though not surprising results); and read more carefully the thesis I’m supposed to examine tomorrow.

Some of those activities are pleasant. Some are interesting but bring up past problems – the thesis refers to work of my own which is partial, unfinished (should I be doing that book too, the one on graphic scores?); and the paper that is overdue worries me greatly, as if I have already missed a deadline it will be a sad and embarrassing situation (unlike other projects, this one could pass me by completely, and that would be disappointing in relation to the friend for whom the project is a celebration – it would be sort of like not getting around to buying someone’s Christmas gift, with plenty of warning and no good excuse).

Over the past years, probably ever since 1977 when I made my first huge mistake in working/writing, this has been the endless, intricate story, the story I always return to: that work which is such a delight when it is completed is also unfortunately tied by a variety of threads, many of them invisible to anyone but myself, to past disappointments, to embarrassment, to confusion, to not doing what I meant to do.

I’m not sure how others deal with this: it can’t be alien to everyone – think of Debussy, who despite his many fine works also had an enormous pile of unfinished scenarios, of works that were aborted at various stages. He must have worried about, been anxious about, these things – I suppose if one experiences one’s own creation or activity as abundant, it wouldn’t matter; but for those of us who don’t feel abundant, it becomes merely another mistake, another lacuna, another way that we have disappointed the universe, or it has disappointed us.

Melinda, when I was seeing her in therapy, brought up that idea as central in my life: being disappointed. Disappointed in places, in things, in people. And of course disappointed in myself. She was pointing this out, of course, with eyebrows subtly raised, as though to say – you can see that you’re doing this to yourself, yes? And therefore that you could stop? (She was also, more obliquely, pointing out my cruelty to others when I regard them as disappointing, inadequate, inept – but that whole area of discussion is no surprise; I used to rationalize it by saying that I was harder on myself than on anyone else, but that’s not such a great justification in the world outside my own head.)

The question for me is – is that pattern inevitable, or innate? Is this merely a function of my personality type (INTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale; and certainly INTJs are known for never being satisfied, especially with themselves)? Is it a function of all the mistakes I’ve made, of all the ways that I have not been what I intended, the ways I haven’t been what, perhaps, God intended me to be? – after all, I was given many gifts, but I haven’t used many of them efficiently or well.

Or is it just a feeling that I can grow out of? That would be best of all, wouldn’t it….

The cloud of doing: perhaps not unlike the cloud of unknowing. I really struggle with my relationship to that cloud: within the cloud-of-doing are so many bright things but so many dark – and I just don’t get it some times: how does everyone else endure the dark bits? Because I can’t believe everyone else simply launches, confidently, into their next project, without worrying about the similar projects that have gone wrong, perhaps years ago.

Maybe this is the way that I’m too weak to succeed. Not really sound: as they would have said of me, if I’d been at Oxford in the 1860s….

And maybe this is all rooted in an awareness of how much life, and the things in it, can mean: and disappointment that they so often don’t – the distinction between, on the one hand, seeing the subtle patterns of our existence so as to change their shape, or to see the possibilities out beyond them; as opposed to the less subtle patterns of playing computer solitaire, or of negotiating the half-hourly changes in a television program schedule.

***

My mother is getting much worse, apparently, since the holidays. Less able to take care of herself, and the people managing her are impatiently demanding her transfer to another room, another level, of the building where she lives. My eldest sister is finding it difficult to manage the situation, even with the telephoned help of my brother and younger sister, as this has also collided with the death of her father-in-law, and the resulting tangled stresses happening in her husband’s world.

It is strange to me that my mother would devolve so quickly after my father’s death, now six and a half years ago. It is as though she simply couldn’t think of a reason to care about her day-to-day life, once he was gone.

Is she disappointed, too? I think I get a lot of my anxious disappointment in things from my mother – we are too similar, especially in that way. The truth is: my father’s well-grounded and intelligent optimism kept her going year after year; but now that that’s gone, the whole structure of her life appears to be disintegrating, vanishing into a pool of unconscious and undirected presence. Does she dream, does she remember, inside her head? What do her days mean to her now?

And after a lifetime of her and I being disappointed in each other: what can we do to help each other – especially given that, at least in this, we are more alike than anyone else in the family? Which means: I should be the one to help her somehow; because, to a large extent, I’m the only one who is able to.

Maybe not so much in the here and now: I’m not there physically (they are all five time zones away), and even a visit in the spring would just be a passing connection. Like some of our phone calls over the past few months: there are moments of whole and deep understanding, with a greater calm between us than there ever has been – and I don’t think I’m imagining those moments; despite her increasing inarticulateness, she really seems, at points, to entirely ‘get’ my expression of a satisfied day, of loving her enough to call, without the old anxieties she used to overlay on every situation.

But in some eternal, almost archetypal way: the way they used to say that so many of our fights with our families (for which read: parents) were rooted in our inability to allow them to change. That we had to be angry at them because they were a certain way – and, even more importantly, that we tend to insist that they stay that way, so that we can stay angry at them. So that everything between us can stay their fault.

She seems to have already let go of a lot of what she put in the way of our relationship. But that gives me a huge challenge, of course: can I let go of the things that I put in the way of that relationship – and before she goes, not after, when it’s all too easy and doesn’t matter so much?...