in the hall of mirrors

On the second day of Christmas...

December 26, 1995 – San Francisco

This evening something rather unexpected happened... I had been exchanging gifts at the largest department store in San Francisco (you'd think Lars would know that I wear a medium shirt by now), and dragged home, fairly tired, on the subway. My regular train didn't come, so I took one which puts me out of my way about five blocks; during the walk, along a quiet residential street with a few streetlights, I passed a Victorian house with two men sitting on the front steps, drinking what looked like eggnog. One of them hailed me – "Hello, how are you," or something similar – and I paused for just a second; then he said, "Do you play the piano?" I was surprised, but said, Yes... and he said, "My friend Carl, used to be a piano teacher, he's pretty sick, and he'd like it if you'd play something for him."

Here I felt somewhat caught out – I'm not much of a pianist (let's face it, I was a singer who banged out a few things on the piano, at the very best). But I could hardly refuse... so he led me into a rather strange drawing room (bourgeois and fairly well off, but with odd hand–made decorations with lots of glittering things, and various religious symbols scattered around), and I put my jacket and shopping bag on a chair and sat down to an electric piano... I said, well, maybe I can play one thing, but I probably won't remember anything else. He told me, that's fine, Carl's in the next room, and he was a teacher; so it doesn't have to be perfect, he just wants to know that the piano is being played.

I was feeling somewhat trapped – not by him, he was perfectly nice, but by my own limitations at the instrument... anyway, I banged my way through Couperin's Les baricades misterieuses, and most of one of Chopin's Nouvelles études (the one with the 2–against–3 stuff), which are practically the only pieces I can get through without the music anymore. The situation felt safe, but odd, as though I had fallen into an O. Henry story – and my own rather frantic self–criticism was the biggest concern of all. (Electric pianos seem so different – was my left hand really that heavy? And why do the pedals seem rather strange?) I stopped and looked over the controls for the volume, etc.; the man asked me if I had been brought up Christian, which I answered rather evasively (I always do).

Then someone – Carl, of course – began moaning in pain in the next room. ("Pretty sick," in my neighborhood, usually means: dying of AIDS; the "pretty" is a modifier indicating extremely sick, in pain, close to the end.) The man rose rather calmly and said, I should go be with him now; feel free to keep playing, if you don't mind; if you have to go, I've left something on your jacket for you. I couldn't think of anything else from memory, but fortunately the Bach French Suites were on the piano, so I hacked my way through several of the slower minuets. Then I thought, well, I guess it's time to go. When I picked up my jacket it had a rather unusual handmade cross on it, fashioned of Mexican coins nailed to wood, with a large rhinestone in the center... I put it down on the chair; I didn't want to be ungracious in not accepting the gift, but I really don't care much for decorative objects, and I tend to be rather allergic to Christian symbolism – so I thought he wouldn't mind too much if I left it behind.

And walked out and home, thinking: music really matters, sometimes...

Snowstorms

Not real ones. It is colder, and there will be snow, but we haven't seen any yet.

But I kept thinking of one of Peter Altenberg's postcard poems, the one sung in the first of Berg's wonderful but rarely performed Altenberg-Lieder:

Seele, wie bist du schöner, tiefer, nach Schneestürmen.
Auch du hast sie, gleich der Natur.
Und über beiden liegt noch ein trüber Hauch, eh das Gewölk sich verzog!

Hmm, don't much like the translation in the CD notes – let me try; these texts should be short and neat:

Soul, you are more beautiful, deeper, after snowstorms.
And you have them, just like nature.
And over both a breath of mist, till the clouds blow away.

Good days, bad days. They told us in those 1980s seminars that, if we really lived our lives, they would be like roller coasters – good things would happen but also bad ones.

Sometimes I think I'm just not very good at life – it goes too fast. A good excuse, though: this is what other people are for, aren't they? – which is why you should have someone to come home to, someone who says, so how was your day?

But I'm not doing too badly. Life keeps happening....

[Painting by Turner.]

MacNew

Sunny, fresh, active, much going on in what feels like a fast lane. How is it possible to experience renewal and excitement and freshness in January?... ah well, stranger things have happened, I suppose.

I have a new office computer, one of the new iMacs – Intel chip, utterly immense screen, high-resolution, stylish, and fast as the dickens (no, this time I don't mean the Dickens). And a charming little remote control that clings to the side.

It arrived and I set it up in the same few hours that the Net was frantically reporting on Steve Jobs' keynote, where he introduced the iPhone and iTV. The iPhone, though I am not foolish enough to be an early adopter, is astounding and very impressive indeed, if the Net video is to be believed.

As I bought my first Macintosh in 1984 – their first year (though I bought the second model in existence, the 512K) – it is pleasant to me to see the company doing so well, and generating some of the passionately well-made and imaginative technology that they wanted to from the beginning.... I know it's all terribly bourgeois/capitalist, but if you have to make products and money and such, you might as well at least make them well.

In any case, I'm having fun with my new toy.

In the quiet night

Morning: green tea, hot chocolate; a strong English breakfast at a nearby café (I didn't eat the blood pudding though, it just seemed... optional). By which time I was oddly shaky: so much caffeine and sugar and strong food, and my body was getting a bit overwhelmed... so some afternoon sleep.

And tonight: again, a few small tasks, answered e-mails and completed forms; no real work, and feeling as though after a mild illness. Big, slow music playing for hours on end, and a few candles burning. Very calm, expectant: as though preparing for something....

I know I should be anxious, pushing myself, about all the things there are to do, especially as the school semester starts up again. But I'm just not feeling that way: tonight it is as though I am living on a far island, and each day is the same as the next, and no one asks anything of me, there is no external world; and within those altered rules, today is simply a day for calm, for garnering reserves. A shame my 'real' tomorrow has meetings in it. But perhaps, at some level, today is neither a waste nor a mistake... I can't imagine how that could be; but I have the sense that, at some deeper level that doesn't take my projects, meetings, or work duties into account, it may be so.

[Another beautiful painting by Polish artist Jacek Yerka.]

Ideal

The truth is, for all my complaining, I have an ideal situation here.

The big middle room, all the walls covered with useful and intelligent books (the 'attractive nuisances' are in the front room, with the television of course). Comfortable, warm; big chair, good lighting. It's raining outside, which makes it all cozier – pleasant, that the rain is beating on a window two feet from me. The kitchen a few feet away....

Well, although I knocked out a few forms and recommendations today – about an hour and a half's work maybe – I didn't do the important things I was supposed to.

And that, despite the ideal situation... hmm... it seems that the only thing that needs replacing is me....

Epifanie

The Feast of Epiphany, the last of the twelve days of Christmas. The day when it all ends.

Today the tree came down... the small handmade ornaments (some by family, some from China and Germany when I was there, some discovered in various places) went into plastic bags, the whole holiday into a fairly small but closely packed box. The tree is in good shape – it's alive and potted (!) – put it out back and drenched it; I think this year it will last, it looks pretty healthy.

Woke up very early again, did useful things again, didn't sleep all day again. Very interesting, very unusual for me – perhaps the change in medication from, what, two months ago, is having a large effect on my energy, and reducing my physical and mental depression. That would be very nice indeed – I've been taking Kaletra in its original formula for five years; maybe the new formulation, which is supposedly making everybody happier (most patients haven't been taking it as long as I have, which may be why it took me a while to notice a difference) is going to give me some of that confident, take-charge energy I used to have, in the 1980s, in the mid-1990s, when I wrote so much and did so many things.

That would be great. What to do with such energy... well – I guess I should promise not to waste it – for instance – on being angry or frustrated. (Yeah, yeah, I know: see yesterday's post.)

Was in fact a bit of a Dutch housewife today – much cleaned and dispatched and fixed, ruthlessly and energetically plowing through things. In fact, when I took the tree outside, I took my work gloves and – you'll think I'm really over the top – sneaked into three neighbor yards to clean up trash. Ah, the delights of being obsessive. Anyway, they weren't going to get around to it, not in midwinter at least; and everything looks a hell of a lot better from all my windows.

Here's something else you can make fun of me about: it was in the middle of the afternoon, while clothes washed and the computer ran diagnostics and the iPod played Clannad (as I said yesterday, when they were Irish, not after they turned inanely new-agey – and I say that as someone who likes some new age music; but their desperation to imitate their long-lost sister Enya led them down some very tacky musical paths). An especially good tune, something really lively and – I snapped up into a relevé, did a half turn. Ridiculous, you say: a fifty-year-old academic, dancing in his living room. Well, nobody was around to see; what was remarkable was that the energy just came through me, almost pushed me into it, without effort – as it used to, years ago.

So maybe things are changing; maybe there are surprising things to be realized.

Uh, well, so... when did you last dance around your living room?...

Soothe the savage

Angry.

Exasperated, stomping around.

(And yes, I know, it's 'breast' not 'beast' – although you can see why the mistake is always made, 'savage beast' is pretty good there.)

Hard news, difficult news, and some distinctly bad news. Feeling as though the world is not friendly, not at all – several projects, so many of which have been on the brink of – well, not disaster, but crisis – have tilted slightly and fallen on my head. Not impossible to manage or to save, just – difficult. The world is demanding, and increasingly intemperate.

Which may be why I woke at 5:30 this morning, and started filling out an administrative form on the computer, in bed... still haven't been back to sleep, and now it's early evening.

All followed by actually bad, and highly resent-able, news this afternoon. Same news, from the university administration, as two days ago, just more definite. And, as happened two days ago, I broke off in the midst of doing something useful to stomp around and be angry. For the rest of the whole day.

Okay yes not very productive I know that so what's your point.

I was, though, calmed by hearing some fine tunes by Clannad – before they went all new-agey; you would think I would realize, after so many years of studying and teaching the stuff, that there are situations where one needs to play calming music.

I've also been reading stories by Tove Jansson – that recently published collection, A Winter Book (it would have been better, though, if it had included a lot more stories, as there are a lot that haven't been translated). Beautiful. And she is willing to acknowledge her own anger, her smallness, her tiredness, her jealousy – all very cleanly, with a vast honesty that allows her whole life to make sense.

But I am bothered by my anger, because to me it doesn't make a lot of sense: I have spent so much of, let's see, the past thirty years at least, exasperated and resentful at all the different ways I have been Done Wrong. It always seems to leave me in this same mad impasse – I know that something unfair has happened, but since I'm always-already defensive and egotistical (youngest of family, etc.) I suspect my own reactions, my own viewpoint. Is it all mere narcissism, mere infantile rage? Am I never to get out beyond the adversarial, in my career, in my work, in too many of my professional relationships?

And worse, and more confusing – since I'm a child of the 80s, I'm accustomed to knowing that the cold, the manipulative, the ones in the power suits, are the ones who always win – not the ones who are honestly angry, and are so uncontrolled as to show it. It reminds me of that dreadful lawyer I worked for in the mid-1990s – the one who was so glad to be my friend, and who manipulated paying me, following through on promises, and everyone else, with such vicious, dishonorable cruelty – when he told me about his family, I realized that they all treated each other like that. Imagine it: growing up in a household where everyone was looking to stab everyone else in the back all the time – well, sometimes my career feels a little like that.

Stomping. Round. In circles.

Be glad you're not my downstairs neighbor.

[Painting by Branford Hansen - Red, 2005.]

Morning; and teaching

Bright, windy, very clear: beautiful.

When I came here I was told that what I experienced (as this was the coldest place I'd ever lived – Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Adelaide – except perhaps Berlin of course, and this is probably even colder if less gray) as 'cold' was locally known as 'fresh'. I'm usually fairly sarcastic about the word, but today I must respect it – it really is the right description.

Windows open, not just one but three, in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom – the heating will have to work a bit, but it's worth it for the air. I can already breathe better – the air is not so dry, not as baked by heaters. I'll never be an outdoorsperson, not in the north certainly, but perhaps I can come to a milder truce with this northern weather, at least on a day like today.

And also metaphorically, it helps to clear the air in the apartment: I've muddled along from reflective and vague over the holidays, to increasingly irritable, suspicious, even angry over the past two days. Two sets of mildly bad news that made me feel ambushed, plus the impending return to students, administration, teaching – the world has felt oppressive and unwelcome.

S. said in an e-mail that she was having "teaching anxiety dreams" – including one where she had to teach a huge, unresponsive first-year class about Dufay. (She is both vastly experienced and exceptionally capable as a teacher – I wish I were half as good as she is – yet she has these dreams, when the semester is about to start....) I sympathize, although my recent dreams haven't involved teaching – but they have included batches of my postgraduates scattered through the landscape, in situations where I was doing something foolish and ridiculous in public, which I suppose is my current version of those dreams.

We rarely talk about such anxieties, but they make sense: facing all these young people, with their hormone-driven emotions and rebellious chaos, not to mention the automatic contempt of the young for those of us who are, unavoidably, older, tireder, less pretty than we once were. The problem of sitting in authority over them, and the reality that their adulation isn't much easier to deal with than their occasionally vindictive resistance: I can't help thinking that the pettiness of academics results from spending too much time trapped with the immature. Just the weight of all their overblown, desperate feelings can be a burden....

And something my colleagues rarely complain about, but which has always bothered me – the endlessly Sisyphean rotation of the school year: just as one gets to know and like students, when you're at a point where a few of them are actually interesting to talk to, they leave, and one faces new batches of insecure, fragile, sometimes resentful neophytes, and you have to waste so much time simply getting them to start listening to anything at all. And the rotation of topics: having to talk over the same things over and over, always beginning at the beginning, year after year – not getting to move on to the things that interest you now, or the interesting bits that you can reach only at the end of weeks of teaching... I find that exhausting at times, and don't know why more academics and teachers aren't maddened by it.

All exacerbated by the 'administered-society-modernist' pattern of teaching in limited segments: the two-hour seminar, where, just as things get interesting, the clock shows it's time to send everyone away – a repeated and predictable frustration. (I know, I sound like that joke about the the two old guys complaining in the cafeteria: the food is so awful here – yes, and such small portions!; but perhaps if we had all the time in the world, those masses of neophytes wouldn't be such hard work.)

But the air flows through the apartment; and I know that, as always, when things actually start happening, they won't seem so bad....

The Move

This is actually my own favorite of all my poems, though it has not fared well in workshops. Perhaps I like it because the language and images are both exactly what I meant, and yet startling, even to me. And perhaps others dislike it because it is merely peculiar for them when I express an extreme response to something simple....

Unplug the dusty telephone connector:
arrange this shift in the stars’ patterns
Sharp edges grow from space divided in two

Find the pink receipt for the rental truck.
I stand in the next room, not listening:
the piano movers take away their ancient gift

The embedded tearing hooks of years.
I turn slowly widdershins
in this room that all my muscles know

dusty shelves, the brown chair, clouds of papers
begin to change:
I see them grow more deeply grained, more solid,
they fling at me the space they occupy,
have occupied.  Hard-won,
they thought
safe: reproach me
with all that should have happened between us.

dark flash lightless lids

I pull coldly away,
pick up the first box of all my books
and step through the finally open door.

[Los Angeles, 10/8-16/92]