in the hall of mirrors

Sitges I

Apparently I do have wifi here – at the moment, at least. For blogging, convenient; otherwise a little dismaying, though – it means that e-mail can reach me here. Oh well: once in a while a pleasant e-mail does show up, among the noise and work and spam; and at least there is not a television here, at least not one I would bother to watch...

Alchemy

There is a definite physical transformation that begins on arrival: or perhaps before, in the stress and chaos of air flight (Newcastle to Barcelona is a short flight, between easy airports; but all flights are innately characterized by fussing and waiting and following nonsensical orders). It’s a kind of annealing – the weather is so very hot, at least compared to what I’ve been living with (about 30° Centigrade, about 80° Fahrenheit, and it will stay up there most days that I’m here) that my first afternoon is spent lying sweating in bed.

At first unbearable, exhausting: then there is an adjustment, one relaxes (not only mentally getting into a Spanish who-knows-and-who-cares-what-time-it-is mind set, but also being pushed there by the effect of heat on the body) and passively changes: molten, impurities rising through the mix and burning off into the air, the fan constantly stirring a surface of boiling metal, until your skin begins to change, to become more like Spanish skin, dark and all of one piece; until one is forged into a solid, new substance, as hard and pure as the floor tiles, as the marble hallways, as the blazing air; and you develop some of that relaxed energy that is native to this country, and you are transformed: maybe, into gold…

•••

Good food

It starts with roasted almonds from the grocery: startlingly good, strong with arresting flavor. Then the first dinner that evening, once coolness sets in: small fishes, anchovies, chorizo, garlic, all my favorite tapas at the funky little place down by the water that was the first place I ever ate in Sitges, six or seven years ago now.

It’s not only southern cooking (though, of course, consider the taste of herbs in Greece, which makes every dish you’ve ever eaten elsewhere seem like it was cooked in dishwater; and the utter perfection of everyday Italian cooking, their ruthlessly high expectations, and shock at how badly most other people eat). In Switzerland, in dull Basel in fact, I remember a hotel breakfast that happened to include yogurt and butter that was so amazing it made you wonder whether Swiss cows, when they travel, deign to talk to their brethren in other lands; and of course good, dark German bread makes everyone else’s seem like Wonder Bread.

When you come into an environment where the food is startlingly good, you can’t help but think, with a sort of pleased and generous embarrassment: good Lord, you should see what I’ve been eating….

•••

Small houses

It is strange that my dreams are so often structured around – really structured by – moving through complex symbolic spaces, rooms and buildings about which I can remember many impossible details, but which of course I cannot draw upon waking. That's because, when I am awake, conscious, 'normal', I have an distinctly clumsy sense of space, of architecture – I struggle with architectural picture books, trying to get some sense of the space shown from one picture at one angle: while what I really want is to turn around, to walk through it – to see, okay, that chair is there, so that's really an unusual sort of atrium, which now that I finally grasp the whole is really kind of cool.

But although those dream spaces, magically created and even more magically understood only in dreams, are often huge, monumental; yet when I imagine my ideal homes, they are always complex and small, made of odd tangents and curves, no boxes, and nothing at right angles. Hobbit holes, those are good; and Art Nouveau spaces of the more radical kind; and... (but mostly these places don't exist, they would take too much complex carpentry, like the hopelessly expensive relics of the furniture made by Hector Guimard).

And small, peculiarly designed houses, that seem to have grown rather than been built. Like the streets and houses of Sitges: the winding unpredictability, the almost plantlike growth of paths winding up and down....

leaving again!...

Off to Spain tomorrow – so depending on wifi access, I may be offline for ten days.

Sitges, and of course Barcelona; with Susan and Rob, and seeing Chris, and possibly Dennis.

Sun, stunningly handsome men, fabulous fish and garlic and chorizo, little streets, shorts and sandals; a little apartment of my own in the middle of the beach town. Chocolate liqueur from the Museu de la Xocolata, a dinner at one of El Bulli's imitators. Shopping in the old town of Barcelona, walking past Gaudí and modernismo. Late nights, long days, beautiful things to look at.

Ahh....

... a good night

Last Wednesday, after a long day, I went out with Patrick to his favorite pub; we talked to acquaintances of his who turned out to be charming, intelligent and friendly, went on to a club, and stood around on the outside balcony (recently expanded for the newly exiled UK smokers) until closing time at 3 am.

P. kept commenting that it was so strange that I was so cheerful, talkative, involved, and above all awake. It was almost – slightly – embarrassing that he thought this was such a change but, as I told him, I used to be this way all the time; or, if not all the time, at least much of the time. When I was younger... I often went out to restaurants, bars, clubs; and sometimes I would indeed get tired and go home (I've never been a power partier – both a matter of physical energy and a low boredom threshold for many people and places), but often I would enjoy myself and stay up late.

Perhaps I'm thinking about it too much, but I can't help but wonder: after a day where there was some coffee, and tea, and champagne; and a fairly healthy dinner; should I be pleased – excited – interested, at least, that I was so energetic for so long, without feeling ill or miserable?... and of course I'm fairly sure this is all in the context of, not only the bright thrills of a warm midsummer, but also the gradual detoxification of my body that seems to be happening in the wake of the reformulation of my Kaletra last November.

Friday: a brief drink with Bennett and Merrie turned into a light dinner, and more drinks, and talking, talking, talking. Much fun – they're always interesting (and they kindly let me tell story after story about myself, which always makes people seem even more interesting). Home after 11:30; and still not really tired....

Then last night, dinner for all three of them; though I didn't go out late with Patrick (after midnight?), I could have – and I wasn't completely wrecked, exhausted, irritable, by the time everyone left.

The biochemical roots of energy, of behavior: I know, of course, how vast these can be – from HIV medications, from interferon and an anti-depressant I had to take with it, from thyroid failure and wobbly metabolism. It's just rather strange to think: is my experience of the past years not merely affected by my medications – but entirely contingent on it? What if I were – to some small extent – occasionally – to become young-ish again, happy-ish again?...

A vast, and for me pregnant, question.

Prismatics

Late at night: reading this very interesting dissertation on phenomenological time and Busoni – the prisms of time, a mysterious way of seeing and thinking time and hierarchy that de-hierarchicalizes everything... it is like Ballard's illuminated man in The Crystal World:

“... when my recovery is complete I shall return… with one of the scientific expeditions passing through here. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jeweled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.”

It can be disturbing, and wonderful, to dig deeply, in an almost Castalian way, into what one knows and thinks – and there are so many pieces of music, of art, that respond so well to this particular way of thinking. And I know them so well: there is almost a sense of vertigo – that time period with Stravinsky in it, with Hofmannsthal, Wolpe, Antheil, with a Paris, a Vienna on the verge of something amazing and intricate – something that was wiped away when, instead, the world wars became important.

Perhaps, when one is unafraid of the distant and possible conclusions of any thought, this is where one should be going. If I were a better artist, scholar, scientist, I might have ended up living there.

Facets....

Gimmicks

I'm reading a PhD dissertation for tomorrow's defense (okay, those are my American terms for it – for you Brits: a thesis for tomorrow's viva) on Busoni (not Bussotti – I work on Bussotti, and am in fact one of the few people writing in English to do so – and incidentally people often seem to think I mean Busoni by mistake... oh well; and I assume that's not why I was asked to examine this particular topic).

All about time, complexity, form – all big problems with Busoni, as everybody always seems confused about the structure of his major works; but one thing we all do know is that he was one smart cookie, so it can't be that the form is confusing because it's simply a mess (as is often the case with the lazier Liszt or the sensualist Wagner).

So I'm listening to My Favorite Busoni, which remains, always, the first act of Doktor Faust. The weirdness of Mephistopheles, the bizarre voices of the spirits – but most of all, always, the electric and haunting Easter music, the rising Credo that has so many traditional sacred elements, but which is so ecstatically transformed by all those unexpected harmonic changes into something that really feels, well, transcendental; and is even more poignant because of the contrast of that voyage upwards with the malevolent argument in the foreground, between Faust and Mephistopheles.

Which brings up my problem in relation to other favorite modern operas: Wagner's Das Rheingold, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, and Doktor Faust – the problem is, I always like the first scenes, the bizarrely experimental parts, best; and then I have trouble staying awake after they evaporate and the main body of the opera gets under way. Morning on the Rhine, anvils in Nibelheim, the Voice from the Burning Bush, Aron's coloratura with flutes, and of course Busoni's Credo – I always seem to like the gimmicks, the unexpected tours de force that makes you smile at their wit, even when they appear in the midst of doom-laden expositions.

Of course it's not always the first acts, though it often seems that it is. When I arrived in Washington two weeks ago, the final scene of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites was on the radio when my sister picked me up at the airport. I managed to impress her by immediately knowing what was playing, but then blew it by admitting the truth – that it was the only scene I really knew, and that the rest of the opera (long, rhetorical scenes apparently made entirely out of French theological recitative) dazed me with boredom; something I can definitely attest to, since I've seen it on stage at least twice, and was practically unable to keep my eyes open until the end. Again: it's the gimmicky ending that brings me to the edge of my seat – the thumping bass under the shifting, unstable sacred fragments, all cut to pieces by chops of the guillotine.

Frankly, my limitation worries me: real, respectable Wagnerites generally like Die Walküre best, but I can never stay awake through the whole thing – it just seems like endless competitive love duets (not to mention the fact that it's so utterly, unavoidably, heterosexual). When I say I love the Ring cycle, I mean the weird, cartoony bits – Erda, the forest bird, Norns and dwarves and dragons, and horses leaping onto pyres. The 'normal' musical passages just leave me cold – as cold as does, to be even more dangerously honest, most Haydn, most Beethoven (aside from the symphonies) and most Schubert.

If you want my attention, give me gimmicky composers: give me Gesualdo, Biber, Berg, any day. Scelsi! Nilsson! Sorabji!

The ultimate question is, I guess: can my taste be rescued? Or even justified?

Ah well: I guess I'm just your typical postmodernist, restlessly sifting through the detritus of the past, looking among the wreckage for amusing baubles that are still unbroken....

[Photo from the Berlin Staatsoper production of Doktor Faust, which will be repeated next May... it might be fun to go.]

Cycles, dreams

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....

Fragments from traveling

Air France (I)

I hate Air France. I mean really: they have screwed up every flight, everywhere; and of course they are associated with the dreadful De Gaulle airport, which I think is actually worse than Heathrow (if such a thing is possible). And they really don’t care…

[6/25/07]

•••

Getting it wrong

Getting it wrong in Mexico City, Norteamericano style… the taxi from the airport, an ejecutivo model I didn’t want for twice the price I should have paid; tired and confused right off a flight, I am an easy mark, unable to distinguish pesos from dollars from pounds. And ultimately: getting stuck in this luxury hotel in this empty business neighborhood. What a clueless approach to the city – how could I have come so unprepared, how could I be such a turista?

Worse, in unpacking, I can see that I have dressed entirely horribly – i.e., I have dressed the way I dress in Newcastle: fatly, ungainlily, dowdily. (Why did I fling that pair of pirates away when I finally packed? They would have been ideal; and nobody would have dared accuse me of wearing clamdiggers.)

Ah well. In this entirely artificial hotel in an entirely artificial neighborhood (note the building in the picture, called the 'Washing Machine' – you will recognize it as such), the answer is actually clear: I have my paper to revise, I have several intelligent and exceptionally thoughtful books to read – I can just hole up here, in this room. Madness, you say – coming all this way to sit in a hotel room… but perhaps that is the nature of luxury hotels: you don’t really get to touch the city, the people, around you. It’s not even an option.

[6/25/07]

•••

Room Service

On the second night, in my room: not interested in going out, needing to work on my presentation and V.’s eulogy (which needs to be revised for a different audience), I order room service. Not as financially irresponsible as you might think – green tea, soup, and a quasi-sushi (didn’t want anything heavier) for about £10.

The sort-of-sushi – actually a kind of miniature chirashizushi, but with smoked salmon; the soy sauce thickened and drizzled around it – seems like the kind of thing that someone who had never seen sushi, but had had it described to them, might make. Pleasant enough, but an odd mistranslation – cuisine from a globalized culture that doesn’t quite exist, yet.

Ah, but the soup: that was a wholly different, and a wonderful, matter. A beef consommé, and a good one – but the amazing transformation when you dumped in what the menu simply called “traditional local garnishes”, i.e. half a lime, chopped cilantro, chopped green pepper, chopped onion. Wowee. The lime juice and cilantro are electric, the pepper sharp as tacks – the whole is still basically beef bouillon, but now utterly changed, exciting – and so easily too. Must remember to try this at home.

After the green pepper, of course, I need to turn up the room’s air conditioning. So that’s what that’s for….

[6/26/07]

•••

Promises

The whole problem of this trip is the big, broken promises it represents: promises from months ago, not to anybody else, but to myself – my promise that I would have quiet, peace, reserve, time to focus on writing this year; that I wouldn’t fritter my time on travel and conferences and other people's demands.

Promises hugely broken after V.’s death: and possibly foolishly broken – it may be important to publish writings associated with V., but presenting a Powerpoint for her is probably not so important. At this conference I am reminded of the disparity between the effort required to go somewhere and talk about one’s work, and the resultant impact – it’s crazy, really. If you’re not invited, and won’t have adoring throngs coming to see you (which has actually happened to me, though not lately), you really shouldn’t go: it’s too draining, it takes more out than you should give. It’s bad economy, in all the things that matter more than money.

I think the anxiety, the irritability, the underlying anger that keep showing up during this trip comes from that simple, terrible thing: that I made promises to myself, and I broke them. There’s no answer to it: you can apologize to yourself, you can say it won’t happen again, you can beg for forgiveness, you can say that circumstances changed – but the effect of those broken promises is just too vast: it makes everything else, whatever it may be, taste like ash.

•••

Contact and Exposure

The past couple of months have included increasing numbers of contacts with important people from my past: a long phone conversation with Mitchell, along with a promise of more conversations this summer; wishing Trisha a happy birthday, and the possibility of seeing her in a month; another birthday call to David, which led to him calling me after midnight one night, followed by a rambunctious, cheerful conversation; and seeing my beloved Laura in Edinburgh, more than ten years after I last saw her. The kind of people you immediately start with again, as though the intervening years didn’t even happen, except as fodder for catching up; the kind of people who make the day easy, who only raise a deep regret afterward, that they aren’t around all the time to talk to.

Then, in this explosion of travel, some people who have not been quite as far away, but who matter a great deal to me: Anahid, Freya, Fred at the Mexico conference, among others; my sisters, brother, mom, niece in Washington; Jenny, Sophie and a crowd of colleagues in York…. really a dazzling array of wonderful people. But I’ve always said that my friends, and I include my family in that at this point in my life, were the area where I was really amazingly lucky – the area where, in fact, I have nothing to complain about. Except that, of course, they’re all – again – so far away; I’ve moved too far from too many people who are good at making life easy, making the day pass happily.

But the phone calls are comforting, and important, especially after the deaths of Vanessa and of David O.-S.; although I realized, as though in passing, what was exceptionally tricky about those deaths – both Vanessa and David were sicker than I was, were, in fact, closer to death. If, in some undefined but somehow self-evident Our Gang, we’re all familiar with and unafraid of illness and dying, they were definitely the ones closest to the ultimate end – and now that they’re gone, I can’t help thinking: ah, I’m the one who’s closest now.

Not a threatened feeling: being a member of that club, a citizen of Death’s realm, is not a problem; but it makes me feel more exposed – as though there is nobody to share war stories with, nobody to soften the blows, by sharing them….

•••

Air France II

Did I tell you that I hate Air France? Well, they’re even worse on the return flights. What a huge mess – the Russian blonde girl behind me, the Saudi guy in front of me: we have all made friends, talking about how utterly awful this is, waiting in this endless line for people to figure out where to put us, since all of our connecting flights have been missed. Indeed, I have never caught a connecting flight through Paris – they are always missed: how could they possibly handle things this way, doesn’t the company itself collapse? And I dearly wish it would.

Although Fred told me in Mexico City: if you decide to cross airlines off your list because of their horrid incompetence, you will end up with none left. Probably, sadly, true – and it reminds me of airlines I’ve really come to despise: United of course (I wanted billboards with a new slogan: “United Airlines – We Apologize For the Inconvenience”), British Air (which at least can only screw up on short trips, for the most part); and of course Air France. (I thought Continental was simply beneath consideration; but Jenny disagrees, as she says they are actually excellent with disabled passengers – which is good to know, I guess.)

My great story, with V., about Air France: that, a couple of years ago, she and I are traveling to a conference in Montréal (and how would you get to Québec except via Air France?). On the way home, we land at De Gaulle, and of course they screw up, and we miss our connecting flights. But the next flight is twelve hours away; and we are summarily dumped by airline employees who aren’t interested in what we’ll do for the intervening time; and, unexpectedly and importantly, the usually hyper-organized V. has not brought extra dosages of the medications that keep her digestion from making her utterly miserable. She didn’t plan on an additional twelve hours, and she is starting to get very unhappy indeed.

You should have seen me: aggressive, obnoxious, valiant. I began to pose as V.’s husband and demanded, in French, of every person in sight, that my wife, who is ill, as you can see, needs a wheelchair, a quiet place to sit and wait, a bottle of water. It was difficult to get any attention at first, but we were ultimately successful – and got vouchers for rather dismal but much-needed sandwiches from the pathetic shops in the terminal. (Since the French don’t really do sandwiches, or fast food, they are especially poor – they’re unable to distinguish quality anywhere below the level of gourmet food, I suppose.)

The story is simple, but V. told it herself, to everyone, when we got back: it was a bond between us, and something that made me unexpectedly proud. It’s a pride that is probably familiar to most husbands, most fathers: the pride that you have taken care of someone, that you have fought back for someone who needs help. The wonderful emotional elision of one’s own anger at a stupid situation: it is all transformed, because the anger has shifted to be applied for the sake of someone else – and you become, not a complainer, but a hero….

[7/5/07]

•••

Fragments

Things I should have written about, had I had the time to think straight:

our blithe arrogance about other currencies – ha, we said, you may have dollars, you may have pesos (sneer and twirl mustache), but we have pounds.

the great days out in Mexico City, with Freya and Fred; the vast and chaotic market where I bought cheap and weird gifts for everybody, the chicken mole, sitting in the chic all-kinds-of-gay-and-gay-friendly café with the manager who loved us as customers, and Carlos taking us to Mexico City’s original gay bar. The torrential evening rains, every summer evening, that ruined my watch: as though I had jumped into a swimming pool.

the eerie disjunction of people seen at Dulles Airport: no, I don't mean the denizens of many nations, I mean the locals – because this is the interface between Northern Virginia, a wealthy suburb of Washington, part of a network of the most educated people in the country (although that education is mostly political, practical, engineering and law being more important than the kind of useless arts I do), and the 'real' Virginia, which has people who look impossibly rural, even genetically primitive. I've noticed this before, but the weirdness of the yokel in a passing truck, in relation to my reserved, articulate sister and her cool gray car, is startling.

the first morning and evening in Virginia, my mother fragile but happy, my younger sister energetic and constantly laughing, my brother rather grandly cheerful, and my eldest sister, who has been through a lot lately, her face relaxing into a smile: and their blithe spouses – the sheer, and loving, enjoyment of this evening, the rediscovery of how much fun we can have together.

the picnics, with all the family but especially with my mom, and how difficult and changed she is – but at the same time not different at all: though she cannot remember simple words, is lost and old and fragile, her anxieties follow the exact patterns of her life; in a way, she hasn’t changed a bit.

the weird nature, both completely familiar and unbelievably alien, of the Virginia suburbs: the clothes, the humid summer air, the vast houses, the shopping malls, the Fourth of July fireworks – and above all the pleasure of sitting out on my sister’s porch with her family, a pleasure which seems to come from a hundred years ago, as though it’s a memory of a part of my life so distant that it feels like the czarist childhoods in Nabokov novels.

the strange 2001: A Space Odyssey décor of the terminal at De Gaulle, now worn, so dull and hermetically sealed from the real Paris – the reduction of possibilities to so few, and so grayish-white; the nightmare of ill-kempt modernism, of Mies gone so very wrong.

the retroactive discovery after I get home, pleasing, annoying, and rather telling: that after a week of looking for Mexican chocolate all over the capitol – in discs, for melting into milk – I actually bought it on the way out, in the sweets shop at the Mexican airport, without recognizing it. A stubby cylinder, that I assumed was a chunk of cooking chocolate – not apparently what I wanted but absurdly cheap, and better than nothing: if I’d looked more closely I would have seen it was actually wrapped discs piled on top of each other – and they are indeed amazing as hot chocolate, raw and strong and full of cinnamon; but I have only four left. If I had slowed down enough to pay attention and realize this was what I’d been seeking, begging for, all along, I would have bought ten cylinders – and had it all the coming winter….

[6/25-7/5/07]

A beautiful light

The light, not yet dusk but getting there slowly in this far northern clime, is beautiful. It's been a real summer for weeks on end, which is rare here.

I'm not completely incapacitated, at least not for blog-writing, but have been in a sort of reactionary hibernation after traveling – although I've been back for eight days now. Traveling itself was chaotic, with bits that were wonderful, but which went by fast enough and with enough stress around them, that I could hardly pay attention at the time; but in reflection they are really giving something back to me, a pleasure I didn't notice while in transit.

I wrote some fragments while traveling – I won't put them here, not yet; and I won't try to lengthen them into anything solid, but I want to go through and make them at least basically sensible. Not really a travelogue this time: more like a few brief postcards.

But I can say that, in line with all I've said in the past couple of months about stirring feelings, the shift upwards in health: and now, having finally recovered from a long school year, and this trip; somehow, and more than ever since I landed in northeastern England – and even during the anxious year in Australia, and perhaps the time in Hong Kong – I'm peaceful, expectant, and happy.

Waiting for something to come up on the horizon: life, maybe.

... plugged in...

Okay, this is basically way too cool for me to get away with it, but I'll go with the flow...

After two weeks of too much travel and stress, intermittently interrupted by enjoyable things with people I like (and love), and even too-brief fragments of relaxation, I'm on the last night of the conference in York... we're in the bar; most of the soft chairs in the upper room were full, so we (with permission) dragged a metal table and chairs into the side hall, where the jazz group's sound is a bit muted (something that we all, this late night, need).

At this table: my dear friends Jenny and Sophie, and Jenny's husband Steve, and the brilliant Bill (Jenny and Bill just put on this conference, and are a bit giddy and in recovery as a result), plus The Famous George Lewis, trombonist and improviser. Very cool, eh?

George is copying CDs on his laptop – for no less than famous improviser/cellist Joëlle Léandre, who's drinking in the next room (and why didn't anybody tell me before tonight that she is a lesbian?); so I pulled my laptop out to hear Jody Powell's 'In That Bright World' – a gorgeous piece for gamelan (which was on the gamelan concert last night, but unfortunately they blew it – clearly as a result of inadequate rehearsal).

So I thought... well... as wifi finally seems to be working on this trip for me (it never has before) and I have been connected practically the whole time, I might as well fire off a blog entry... the kind of entry a Really Cool, techno-savvy, plugged-in musician would write when they were in a bar. With famous types. And a jazz combo. Oh, and: with headphones.

You might as well enjoy it – I don't stand at cultural/technological nexuses very often....