Sleeping too much, drifting: probably my thyroid is off again. Since Duisburg: several busy days, mostly administration, and a conference day; a lot of floating anger about promotions, ambition, respect; all among the strange long days of Spring in the far north. Those are the more sharply defined moments in what has felt like a soft, bright fog of vaguely lost hours.
I've been reading a lot of Avram Davidson lately, as I've mentioned. Dense sentences, and a rich, complex experience of time and accident. But behind it all is the lengthy tale of Davidson's increasing irritability, his irascible and uncomfortable old age, his sense of failure, his constant complaining about money and success – all of which sound rather like the way I'm getting with age. Resentment as a way of life, and the entire sense of time as a narrative of not-enough....
And Gerhard and Kunsu have to sell the house in Kreta, and I wonder how they will manage their old age. And Laura will be visiting Edinburgh this month, and I'll get to see her – but will have to answer her questions about how I'm doing, in comparison to her relatively successful, streamlined life. And my eldest sister and her MRIs, and my younger sister and her shaky job security; and my mother in her nursing home. And Trisha battling with her business while setting her poetry aside, and Terry as perpetual freelancer who's currently doing well, but not forever; and A. who has moved in with K., and may be finally settling down at long last; and L.'s new Irish colleen, who is moving here, changing countries for her new relationship. R.'s rather arrogant successess, D.'s dimming prospects. Perhaps it's no accident that these friends-and-loved-ones are mostly in the arts, or academe, or other thinking-oriented lives; it's a tough and unpredictable world to live in. But all these people will get older, more fragile: somebody will need to take care of them – who will it be?
Lives, and time: that eerie sense that we all end up recreating patterns over and over – and some manage to break patterns; and some patterns are more welcome than others. One of the most valuable aspects of the academic and literary lives is reading biographies – that is, reading about people: one becomes very clear that most people who suffer do it to themselves – and most people who fail seem to do it to themselves too, though it's not always entirely clear how that happens. And success is unavoidably a matter of chance, a roll of the die.
It's sort of a fanning-out of my usual anxieties about myself, to think about all the people I know: how they will do now, how they will get through their days, what will they be like when they're older. And a smearing of quantum variations in possible universes: as though you can imagine the whole fan of possibilities opening out from each moment, and what each might entail. As though ambition, anxiety, hope, despair, are multiplied, but not into mere grayness, but into a vast swatch of hues: all pastel though, because the intensity of emotional focus on any particular career problem or a hope is leached out by all of its variations.
Strangely, this makes me feel even more helpless in relation to my life: with all of floating time and possibilities, it becomes even more difficult – no, not difficult: merely implausible, merely rather pointless – to focus on doing something right now, on engaging in some action. One of Tanith Lee's beautiful stories in Tamastara runs through two parallel lives, one of a boy, one of a girl, both with the same soul and born in the same moment; both have joy and great sorrow (the boy a beautiful drone who loses his looks in a bus accident, the girl a dancer who marries without love). At the end the whole story evaporates as the soul moves on: the two stories were parallel visions of what might happen if the soul chose birth then, but it doesn't – neither story happens at all, both are negated into vastness.
This is sort of how my life feels now: sleeping too much, a bright fog: drifting – in time....
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