Having been back about ten days, and having done only administration, plus many chores; and lying around a lot the past few days, sleeping; I start thinking...
cycles: the hours that make up a day, and how we move through them; the days of a week, a month; the school year, with its enormous contrasts (greater than those of business people, which reminds us more of the passing time). And, unavoidably, the huge, different or not sufficiently different, parts of one's life.
Of course I remain highly self-critical about my own management of all these cycles: I still have a terrible (and I mean: terrible) tendency to waste time, to use it, at all of these levels; there's no doubt about it, when I face whatever judgment there may be at the end of my life, even if it's just the one of diminishing awareness as my heart stops, the economy of my use of time and energy has been poor. Wasteful. No other judgment can really be reached.
So I concentrate on the hours of a particular day to try to make that work better, or I give up on the hours of that particular day because it's already a dead loss so that I can perhaps handle the next day better. A few days ago I went ahead and organized a Real Holiday – ten days at the beginning of August, in Sitges with Susan and Rob – all justified by months of conversations about the Mexico trip (that was no holiday) and the summer (requires a holiday). Having made one, though, I can see how now my summer will be broken up in a way that will just preclude any serious work getting done... except that of course work can always get done, if only I don't waste the time.
The day wasted, the week wasted: the summer wasted, and then another semester to waste. Then a year off perhaps, to waste, and whatever years spent at this institution to burn, to flake away to ash. Then....
The truth is, this whole problem of time was vastly easier when I thought (honestly, half-hoped) I was going to die soon (since the late 1980s). I thought then that I had wasted so many days, weeks, years, but I could easily say: aha, well, if only I'd lived longer I'm sure I would have gotten it right. And as I stopped believing that, it simply became an easy way of fooling everyone else – if indeed everyone else was fooled, which perhaps they weren't: if I'd died in the mid-1990s, I know people would have said it was with unfulfilled destinies snatched away from me; but would they have actually believed it?
All of the above is easily subsumed into the ironic smile of the older person, of the ones who juggle with life and death (which is true of everyone at my age, actually, though some of them don't seem to know it).
One cycle which does seem to grow and enrichen is the cycle of dreams: one reason I'm sleeping a lot is that, when I went to Mexico and Washington, I tried to move the time of my thyroid medicine, which I know is a mistake and leads to the thyroid hiccuping, therefore more sleep, more somnolence. (See, again: something that's not my fault...) And so there are days of sleeping the morning away, and afternoon naps, then nothing done in the evening – but all actually filled, with growing, changing dreams.
The sadness of a rich dream life when there is no real life, though – according to mental mechanists and behaviorists my dreams mean nothing, they're merely psychic garbage; but I prefer to turn to my other soothsayers, the Jungians, the mystics, the fantasists, who think a rich dream life is important, and worth developing. (Dunsany was such an active, amazingly accomplished man – yet so many of his writings are drenched with the idealization of dreaming; in spite of all the trappings of his lively external life, was all the stuff in his life that really mattered simply what happened when he shut his eyes?)
In any case, my dream life moves onward. Today, a period of sudden weakness brought on by drinking hot chocolate in the morning (I've noticed that can be a real mistake for me – some combination of the theobromine and sugar with my thyroid medications gives me a woozy period later in the day)... heart hammering, feeling very weak, putting everything down and lying on the couch... and giving myself over to it, as though drunken or drugged, really enjoying it, for once. And thereby passing into a dream that was much influenced by seeing handsome Aussie guys on the Gaydar website today, and thinking again of what a life there would have been like: suddenly my weakness was transformed, I was in my apartment in Sydney (?) with a mysterious man waiting for me at the door (??) and my casual, familiar but kindly roommate concerned and helping (???)... the substance of the dream unimportant, but a whole life lived in a dreamscape made of whatever I liked.
No wonder I resisted waking, coming back into this mere cycle of a day that is already mostly wasted, as opposed to the cycles of a more active, more loony, more enjoyable life in my dream-soap-opera-Australia, with my dream-friends, in those dream-spaces....
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