in the hall of mirrors

Foolish scientists

Last month, when I was reading a lot of science fiction writer Greg Egan (in between visits to V. in the hospital), I was getting caught up in his characters – and not always agreeably: as Egan has a lot of interest in 'hard' science, his people tend to disdain the humanities, religion, emotion, and idealize science as All. I kept trying to parse this in a way that would either make Egan foolish or wise, but his writings remain in-between – he knows how confused his scientists get when they try to impose their scientific training on the more difficult aspects of the universe around them, but he also seems to think that any 'cultural' response to the world is simply outdated. Or almost, anyway; it's ambiguous territory in his work, and I suspect he is still (after five or six novels and a lot of stories) working out his position on all this.

It's related to that silly Dawkins book on atheism – which was so sharply parodied in episodes of South Park last fall – the absurd pretension that, not only does a modern scientist know better than anyone the depths of the universe; but also that, even within the limitations of modern scientific training, one can somehow pretend to know the 'real' truth behind all sorts of absolutes. It's the true absurdity of atheism – although I do tend to be uncomfortable with institutional religion, as well as with people who are certain enough of their beliefs that they need for me to agree with them, the certainty that there is 'nothing out there' is of course the most ridiculous belief of all.

I know all of this is fairly obvious, but – I'm always particularly amazed by the part of scientific reasoning where one goes through the process of saying: we can only know what we perceive under modern, accepted conditions; and we can only accept what we can extrapolate, both forwards and backwards, inwards and outwards, from those conditions; and therefore everything not extrapolated from those (obviously culturally limited) conditions is not merely unknown, but by definition nonexistent – which always seemed like the most ridiculous myopia, the most incompetent kind of thinking, especially indulged in by people who pride themselves on their ability to think. It divides the world into Mulders and Scullys – either we are so desperate to believe something that we distort everything we see to support that belief, or we are so skeptical that we distort our perceptions just as much to exclude any discourse that doesn't fit the basic tenets of our undergraduate textbooks in chemistry, cosmology... and, of course, medicine.

Seeing The Fountain, a movie from 2006 where Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz are tracked through three story lines in different centuries, brings all of this up again. The movie is a lovely poem of pictures; it's also unfortunately a rather silly tangle of ideas – the future images are interesting, but the story set in 1500 where Isabella is besieged by the Inquisition, and sends an unknown conquistador to find a tree/fountain of life, gets exasperating in its counter-historic clumsiness. Oh well, too bad, another oversimplified fantasy.

But the part of the story that occurs in the present, where a scientist is trying to find an instant cure for brain tumors to save his dying wife (yes, okay, quite nonsensical on its own – he's going to find just the right drug for this kind of tumor in the few days that are left before she dies? – the stuff of oversimplified daytime television movies) keeps Jackman stuck in a predictable but rather two-dimensional position – he is so frantic to get back to the lab to operate on monkeys, so that he can discover his miracle cure, that he doesn't actually spend much time with his wife, nor is he willing to listen to her when she talks about dying.

Okay, sure: obsessed with a cure, he's also really really bad at facing reality, and almost petulant in the face of the obvious need to simply spend time with her. It makes sense to some extent, but is so utterly childish – and quite stupid, really: it's not only his insistence on being the Enlightenment-style master of reality (mankind as in charge, surgeon as savior) but much more the fact that he doesn't even seem to realize how much of reality, of time, of love, he's missing out on: because he doesn't want her to die he doesn't want to face her dying, which means of course he misses out on all that there is left of her life.

Aargh. Stupid scientists.

When I turned from working on the sciences to go to the arts – around when I was sixteen – I did it for different reasons: actually, I did it because I wanted to work in an area where things seemed more mysterious, where I didn't feel I could find answers easily. I've always dug into places where I wasn't already able to intuit the final outcome (avant-garde, graphic scores, maps of time and perception); had I stayed in the sciences I might have had a better financial time of it, because frankly I would probably have been more skilled at my job; but I think I might have been a bit bored, especially with a daily world that had a visible 'end' to it.

But worse, far worse, if I had ended up being one of those guys who simply Didn't Get It – who simply couldn't accept that the universe is big and complicated and impossible to quantify, who thought that death and people and feelings could somehow be reduced to something manageable....

I'm so glad I spent that time with V. in the hospital. I'm so glad I don't think I know for certain where she is now, or if she is anywhere at all – and so glad I don't know where Reid is, and Jay, and Bill, and all the others. And so glad I don't think I know where I'm going, after I die, either.

Such a relief....

Inevitable

On TV, late: the episode of Sex and the City, fairly early on (season two), where Big threatens to move to Paris. Fights, unhappiness, chaos.

Of course, having seen season six, with its lovely and surprisingly satisfying ending, we know that Carrie will finally end up with Big again – and we will even find out his actual name, which is otherwise concealed up until that last scene of the entire series – and he will come save her from confusion, loss and unhappiness – ironically and cleverly, in Paris.

And it is all made inevitable by the fact that this is clearly the guy for her (Aidan was an indulgence, Berger a faiure – can you tell I liked this show? – and a host of others merely temporary mistakes); and if he wasn't ready for a full relationship in season two, he finally will be by season six. The happy ending is inevitable, because it merely takes him a long time to realize what he needs to do – up until the last episode – at around the same time she realizes that he realizes, etc. etc.

I'd love to be part of an inevitable story – one that must reach some useful resolution, where everything makes sense, where there is some kind of return, some completion. Where time forms an arch of some kind, where events circle around in some way: where they don't merely meander in rather formless curves; and where the great distance travelled from anything familiar, from anything that you think you want, is merely proof of how right the ending is – I want to get the job in New York and discover that my future was always there, or have the guy from my past show up on my doorstep (the right one). Or maybe, I become the person for some younger man that an older man once was for me – I end up smiling, putting my shades back down over my eyes, in the sun, saying words that I didn't understand twenty years ago, to someone else, who in his turn doesn't quite get the cosmic joke.

Inevitable... yes, I know the problem with narrative inevitability: it's based on the exclusion of fragments of real life, the removal of that which just happens, which is why it's not realistic.

I still want to be part of a story – and a good one too: not one of those dismal modernist anti-narratives that just trail off like they're....

The Expert

Today I returned V.'s library books to the university library; chased by a student who wanted to chat, I just pulled away and said it was a difficult day.

Difficult especially because one of our first-year students committed suicide last night; a sweet kid, one who had had problems with depression and anxiety, but who hadn't shown any signs of them in class or his work lately. I was supposed to meet with his family today – they cancelled at the last minute, clearly too overcome to discuss the matter with any more strangers.

I suppose I am, have even practically presented myself as, a kind of expert on illness, death, loss: Nachiketas, the boy who makes friends with death. I do know the right things to say, what to do, I can fairly dispassionately see what people are going through and carefully maneuver around it, handle whatever shock or pitfall they are on the verge of at a given moment. A bit like a doctor, not quite like an undertaker.

Of course what's silly here is that I haven't learned for myself the best and most direct lessons from death. V. had clearly learned them – that people die, things go wrong, so: you work with what you've got and put energy into each day, because you won't have all that many of them. I, unfortunately, tend to indulge my tendencies towards laziness and passivity – even knowing that there is really nothing for me in life but getting work done, I still coast, leave it unfinished, leave projects in their fantastical unwritten but imagined states.

Ah well. At least I'm an expert at something....

Lose an hour

Normally I am annoyed to lose an hour in spring – and elated to gain one in the fall.

It's not just getting to sleep late (my schedule is such that usually I could do that anyway), but the larger association with how I manage my life – I'm kind of full of the White Rabbit's "I'm late, I'm late", about everything that matters to me. (Yes, I know: frantic yet slothful – what can I say, people are contradictory.)

Not so annoyed today, however: the longer days are coming at a point when there is more time for me to concentrate, and the general feeling of well-being may translate into finishing projects. Even the ones left behind by V. are not too daunting (I'm going to get other people to help, frankly).

And as I'm up so late, while my computer finishes processing a mass of video data (I could leave it alone to finish everything, but of course it's sort of an attractive nuisance), the idea that it's 4 am rather than 3 am doesn't seem such a big deal....

And the whole weekend is suffused with a solitary pleasure (no, not that one – get your mind out of the gutter): re-reading, for the umpteenth time, Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror – what a dazzling world, what a pleasure. This was the first of his 'Vergil Magus' novels, which were based on the medieval legends that transformed the Virgil of the Aeneid into a magician (it occurs to me that one of my postgraduates, the one working on Renaissance hermetic magic and music, would love this – perhaps I'll find him a copy for a graduation present when he finishes). Davidson had huge and dazzling erudite fun mixing facets of Imperial Roman and Renaissance Italian cultures in the way implied by such legends, not to mention playing etymological games that are sometimes intended to seem 'real' in our own world and sometimes not. And it's such a grand adventure, with such fascinating comrades....

Incidentally, the other night I had dinner with Spurious and his frequently-mentioned friend W. A fun dinner, although I managed to wreck my digestion for several nights afterward – and only recovered today (Bad Gut Nights are such a deep part of my experience, like dry skin, and dreaming, that they dictate my entire relationship to time and life). But what was really remarkable was finally getting to meet the infamous W.: Spurious is right, he does indeed say those smart but scathing, dark things, all the time. But what Spurious never mentioned – that I recall – is that W. has a charming, pleasant face and voice, plump cheeks and glasses: he is not the gauntly supercilious aristocrat that I had imagined... and that changes absolutely everything, the way an actor can change the meaning of a play just by looking a certain way. Here is this pleasant, amusing person, saying these dreadful things, but in a way that transforms their nature such that –

well, I finally understand the drama of their scenes together: it is not any kind of nihilistic black comedy; it's an affectionate, even familial, rather light comedy. You know: the way people say that Chekhov writes comedies.

So you see, Spring changes everything....

Awake

Early, gray but with enough light to waken me. Among various work, and things not done, and a few things done: still a certain drift, this frequent anxiety that my inept use of my own time puts my life in the category of 'unsuccessful, also ran, not quite sound.' Not quite a failure, certainly not a success.

Woolf's diaries again: so comforting, so everyday. She is also disappointed in her life, between bouts of exaltation – of course there are things that seem now almost humorous in their incommensurability: "here nothing but odds and ends", in the midst of writing To the Lighthouse (still my revered favorite of all her books), and meeting with Hardy and one of the Sitwells. Odds and ends from some perspectives, maybe.

In little things – plane fares, what to do next with the book, days when nothing gets done – I of course want to turn to V. Have a fairly childish, peevish sense of missing somebody that I want to be around, somebody I need to depend on. An odd image that has drifted into my mind several nights, as I'm going to sleep: of me carrying her – she was very thin, it wouldn't have been hard to do I think; though I never did pick her up – and walking towards – I don't know what.

Elsewhere

My apologies for this post: merely another whinge about wanting to be elsewhere.

But first: where am I now? At home; the apartment is pleasant and, on the side away from the western winds that are bringing us a last dose of winter, relatively warm. Small patches of snow in the corners of my downstairs neighbor's plant boxes. It is nearing the end of the term; vacation days are coming – but there is plenty of work to do (especially an article to write), and I am disinclined to do any of it. I will probably go make some food in the kitchen – something comforting that makes me feel as though I've done something useful (lentils with some clever combination of spices, perhaps).

Catherine, my dear downstairs neighbor, has gone to New Zealand to join the reality program Castaway. I hope she does well in it – she is smart and learns fast, but they have made it a bit tough for her by bringing her in alone two weeks after everybody else arrived. (Prediction: the other women, most of whom aren't as good-looking as she is, will immediately discover reasons to dislike her. Sigh.)

Probably reading too much Greg Egan (Aussie science fiction author; lots of brilliant ideas, many of which imply enormous change and alternate destinies) plus sleeping too long the past few days (my digestion was miserable today, which always makes me conk out); and my desire to move on from northern England (no news, and probably no movement for a year or two or three) and even the news that my application for a salary increase was successful (which doesn't please me as much as it should, as this was in place of the promotion I really want – all of which makes me feel trapped in a rather dull little rat race); plus, of course, the general lack of V.; is moving me to imagine and/or remember an alternate reality for myself.

***

All simple enough: instead of standing by this window, looking out at the rain that keeps transforming itself into snow and then back, I'm standing in an apartment in San Francisco. A neat, pleasant, light apartment, books strewn on the table and the pale sun of City afternoons coming through the window; neat because of me, not because of Paulo – he is of course a hopeless slob, but I've managed to keep him in line. (Necessary corrections to occupy this universe: I returned Paulo's calls, and he never met Christian.)

I work part-time for Apple; we live in a heavily, trendily computerized household. (Necessary correction: I got some computer chops at some point in the 80s, having realized that music was a bit of a dead end.) At Christmases I help my sisters with their Macs; sometimes the world seems a bit too digital, a bit too variable, too unstable and unreal; but it remains pleasant, a constructed reality that works for both of us. And we feel in the midst of change, near the center of what is happening right now, where the culture really is: not on some distant periphery of unimportant makework.

There is money, and not much debt (my only debt is student loans, and I'm nine-tenths of the way through paying those off); and there are friends, casual dinners in favorite restaurants (of course there are people who now matter to me whom I've never met in this alternative; but instead I don't lack for friends, and have had to say good-bye to fewer of them). Australia never happened, Hong Kong never happened – even Los Angeles and Berlin are places I have only visited (I don't know much German – just what was left from a year's study long ago – but have enough Portuguese to chat with the in-laws, and fairly good California Spanish). Travel for us is a rather bourgeois pleasure (I haven't grown through travel, loneliness, and the repeated necessity to start over again and pull myself out of various disasters; but am, nevertheless, not entirely shallow; and less susceptible to depression).

And Paulo comes into the room, limping as always, curly black hair and warm grin: a sweet, sexy guy, and the one I managed to figure out I could love (in time, rather than too late); rattling on in his charming, boyish fashion about his new idea for Palm software, one of many that has made him a guru in the computer world. A hug....

***

Lives like slides in a projector, flashing past: as production assistant in LA, in the film industry; as research scientist (that one branches away from 'reality' around the age of sixteen); as....

Here, the snow is thick and swirling. A story by – was it Leiber? – about the need to be careful when leaving the house during a storm: because the storm is actually a shift in realities, a turbulent blend of the interfaces of different universes, and you could end up – anywhere.

Against Research

All right. Having included a rather irretrievably assertive statement about getting research done in V.'s eulogy; and knowing that she would be annoyed with me if I let our projects slide too far; and having indulged myself about as far as I can this weekend (drunk to her memory, a lot, on Friday night; slept and ate a delivered pizza Saturday; started to recover and marked some papers today, but didn't do anything else really), I guess I have to have A Look At This Research Thing.

Especially in V.'s absence: I have of course always carried plenty of internal feelings and ideas (mostly rather useless guilt of course) about not writing enough, but over the past couple of years V. was the person who kept me honest from the outside – so, in a way, everything devolves to the internal. Again.

And therefore, naturally, the list of negatives comes up:

a. 'Publish or perish' has devolved to a situation where a lot of boring nonsense gets published, and none of us has time to get anything right.

b. Scholarship is kind of boring anyway. Brilliant insights, yes, they're worth writing – but there aren't enough of those, and they aren't encouraged in scholarly discourse; and as for documentation, only historians really like that. But I'm not much of a historian.

3. I don't have any ideas left. Too passive – I'm really a reader, and a watcher, and who cares about that?

iv. Most musicology is boring – especially writings on classical musics (predictable rehashing), avant-garde musics (obscure, nobody cares) or popular music (the Internet and fans do a much better job than we ever can). Why add to it all?

e. My best work is all just nice sentences – which means belles-lettres – anyway; and in a non-aristocratic consumer culture, belles-lettres are simply a useless vanity.

VI – years of hacking away in these kinds of work has made me somewhat better at them, but definitely bored with them. How do you change paths when you're stuck in a job-oriented institution, and can't simply move over to something you find more interesting?

G. etc. etc.

Memory of V.

[Read today at V.'s funeral, after other remembrances by H. and one of her French relatives.]

With Vanessa, the sheer range of enjoyable things to remember about her is a bit daunting – so much hard work, so much fun – writing, shopping, dancing – talking with people from all over the world.

The endless drive she showed in her research, her teaching, her projects: she was so involved, so energetic. She seemed always to be making passionately, and politically, committed articles, talks, symposia, concerts – she was always in the midst of things, always doing so much with so many people who could hardly keep up with her. I was always about six months behind her on the book we were co-editing, but she would push me back to work without rancor, gently but quite persistently nagging until I got back on track. She was instantly kind when we lost the thread – Ian talks about how she would sit next to him, rest her head on his shoulder, and say, “you okay, sweetie?”.

She seemed to know simply everyone: she wasn’t only part of every network –across the university, and across several disciplines, continents and time zones – at times it seemed as though she was the network, she was what held us all together, flashing around the room, meeting everyone, and introducing them all to each other. She recently finished an Internet center for her students that was so successful and so obviously beyond the call of duty that even the University administration was impressed. I honestly don’t know how we’ll stay in contact without her – the mass of e-mails from North and South America, Australia, the Caribbean, and across Europe, telling us how much fun they’d had meeting her at one conference or another, how lively and interested she was in such different things. Her blog has a photograph of her hang-gliding in Rio, when she was there for a conference two years ago – and that, as her mother-in-law pointed out, says it all.

One of the Latin Americans gave her a fine compliment, especially from a Southerner to a Northerner – that “she could not only talk the talk, but also dance the dance.”

Because she could dance, and she did have fun: she enjoyed a wide variety of things, most especially luxuries – chocolates, liqueurs and good wines, rich foods, bath oils and lotions – she taught me how to get through northern winters, strewing candles and essential oils in her wake. The sheer indulgence of shopping with her, or the movies and restaurants we went to in groups she pulled together with an organized barrage of e-mails; or just wandering among shops where she knew just where she wanted to go, and in what order. Picnics in the tiny back yard, where she and David would produce a variety of cocktails for a day-long marathon of fantasy or vampire movies, and you’d realize you should have eaten less of the first courses because there were always more. She bought wonderful things for friends, too – the impressive gamut of professionally organized Christmas presents; as Anne sadly pointed out, who will buy such birthday presents now?

And her clothes: transforming her thinness by making it an excuse to wrap beautiful fabrics in layers and scarves around herself like a model, using her own palette of oranges, pinks and browns, which she sometimes set aside for a dazzling creation in white silk embroidered in blue: a flash of southern France, of the Caribbean islands, brought to Newcastle, and Middlesbrough.

Lastly, an aspect of Vanessa that was remarkable, and one that, if you’ll allow me, I know something about: facing her own health, her mortality, without flinching. Of the people I’ve known for the past twenty-five years, including many dealing with terrible illness, Vanessa was among the most clear-headed of them all. She handled hospitals, surgery, doctors, and an obscure condition nobody understood with a firm hand, not allowing them to get to her, to stop her from living her life. It seemed as though illness and death were just – a thing: a difficult thing, an annoying thing, but not an important one – less important than her life, than the people she loved, than her work – far less important, in fact, than this lively, demanding, strong, affectionate jewel of a woman.

When we lose someone who matters, we try to keep a little bit of them with us, to keep us going, to remind us of what they gave us. The little bit of Vanessa I’ll carry around will tell me, when things get rough, to keep my head up; to get some work done; and, above all, to enjoy the day, and all that it gives us.

Wakened

Lying on the couch, supposedly finishing V.'s eulogy for tomorrow's funeral, and fixing shoes, shirt, etc., but – instead – actually sleeping the evening away... well, I was sleepy all day, I didn't get to bed until late last night then spent the whole day running around after students. H. called on my cel phone, woke me up.

And I had that strange sense when someone has taken you from a dream where everything made sense, where you were having fun: and the odd feeling of being surrounded by swirling, luminous, feather-soft, liquid-wet, perfect fragments of some place where you were just standing... the fragments themselves seeming to have some meaning that is receding just out of reach....

Oh well. I should get up and do some of these things. Need to iron shirt and jacket a bit – no, I'll do that in the morning.

Back to...

Brighter

It's that point in spring, at this northern latitude, when the days start getting longer startlingly fast, and I wake at 6:30 am with the day already begun and sunny; and the students cheer up. I predict a relaxed funeral for V. on Friday as a result – something more like a wake, which is a good thing.

Also a good thing because, in the wake of V.'s death, I'm trying to do several presentations, trips, complete some research, that we were doing together. I'm already acutely aware of how much I'd depended on her to make sense of all the difficult bits – as I said a couple of days ago, I'll have to 'internalize' her to make it through everything. All this increases my research activities, but of course I'm also feeling physically/mentally better the past few months (the difference is undeniable), so I'm fully capable of this. Lazy, intractable, a bit skittish from past failures, but still capable. V.'s going to need to watch over me a bit I think (you hear that, my dear?).

As for the funeral: frankly somewhat worried about what to wear. Note to self: if you lost some weight, you could wear all those nice clothes that sit in the back of your closet....