A little bit in the way
Many people, of course, either through a mis-fit in a family situation or by advancing age, become the slightly awkward one in a social/familial nexus: the peculiar aunt or uncle who doesn't quite fit in, who has their amusing side, but really is just a bit in the way at times. I guess this is more typical of gay men and lesbians, especially those who aren't in a relationship – I wonder if that's one of the most powerful arguments for a relationship? – and of course also of aging parents who are now alone, sisters who never got married, and other such peripheral persons.
It is fairly unhappy-making, if not entirely a surprise, to see that status settling over one's life: people are happy to see you, up to a point; you are dismissed or forgotten occasionally, but not in any big way of course. It's just that there is no convenient group to fit you into, no comfortable track for you to travel – you become a bit of a burden, a bit of a problem, a bit of an exasperation. They don't want to include you in everything – there are people you, well, just wouldn't fit in with, places you probably don't want to come along to, really. And from your side, you realize you're talking too much, asking for too much attention: after a certain amount of isolation, one reacts with too much eagerness, too much neediness, and that makes it even harder for others. People can't help, even when they have great affection for you, obliquely expressing their impatience about all of this: you get dismissed or sidestepped, there are small barbs of mockery and distancing, there is the subtle expression of an evidently understandable desire to get you out of the way.
It's worse for gay men of my generation: since so much of our network of relationships died (literally) in the past twenty-five years, we often tend to end up even more isolated. (This may be, in fact, one of the things that worried our parents when they found out we were Not Like The Other Kids.) And of course I've mentioned the problem of traveling too far for one's social circles to keep up – with the best will in the world, it is hard for people to remain interested in maintaining close connections when there are continents in between; one meets people in different cities long after, aware that you have grown somewhat apart, and that a few hours of each other is all you can really manage to engage in.
C., an acquaintance who keeps sending me (among others) e-mails and pictures while he travels around the world, is an interesting case in point – he is usually cheerful, and in fact opulently muscular, and I think he would never admit to feeling a bit alone, a bit isolated by time or by distance. But all of those e-mails, all those pictures – and of course he is traveling by himself – does he feel a little bit anxious when he goes to bed at night, does he wonder what will ever become of all the things he wants to tell someone, all the things he wants to share so much? Does he wonder what life will be like when he's forty, or when he's fifty?... and even slightly worse for him, that he's a schoolteacher: being always around the young can do weird things to your social patterns.
Ah well. As an increasingly peculiar old uncle, I can see what it's going to be like for me in the coming years: and my sympathy for my mother in the past few years, though she had so many utterly socially solid years with my father before he died, has increased – I see why, now, she mutters; and I see why she looks distressed at times, and annoyed at others....
•••
The trouble with traveling is the same as with moving, with moving on, with changing – that you continue to take yourself with you, wherever you go.
Three showers in the past four hours, moving through the furnace of the night.
Trying to think if I want to go wander around the gay bars: my shyness of this is ridiculous, I know – they are what they are, I am what I am – but there are a complex tangle of associations there going far, far back, to being a rather nerdy and asocial child, even to my psoriasis, which is not going away this week whatever I do (including blasting it with sunlight, which usually helps; and strangely often my body concerns have less to do with AIDS than with this ludicrous, but unchanging, skin disease). Even when I know this is all ridiculous, it's also very, very familiar: this is, after all, what I have always done when faced with people, when faced with the world.... I wonder if 'get a life' has implications for reincarnation. And a way of starting over, with new problems, new habits.
•••
The description of the young Italian Count's handsomeness at the beginning of Henry James' The Last of the Valerii, which he keeps returning to, adding touches to in the manner of a painter (which in fact the narrator is), has a curious power. I know of course that a lot of what James intends is to invoke an ancient Rome that is still somehow genetically present in this man; but he also brings in the power of southern European men when they are really fascinating – the intensity, that charged quality, which is so extraordinary.
When the Spanish have it, of course, they are far less flippant and casual than the Italians: they smolder – to have that intensity caught in the light....
•••
After midnight: twisting auloses in Micus' music. This ancient coast, the power and intricacy of it, the richly spiced darkness of it: far too vast, too intense, for a mere, helpless, colonial to ever really grasp – to compete on it, even to survive...
We sink: we drown.
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