in the hall of mirrors

Oppressive traditions

Last Thursday, I gave a lecture supposedly about defining research to our postgraduates – academic, composing, performing and what all. I got my feet a bit tangled around the whole question of why a creative or performing artist should know about history, tradition, the music that has gone before (always a tricky issue, and one that raises hostility in some of the creative students). I said, I think – if I can remember just what came out of my mouth amid a welter of slightly conflicting intentions – that you wouldn't want to create work that had already been done (I didn't say the damning phrase "and perhaps better"). Aware that I was on thin ground, I moved on quickly....

Listening today to the Pop/Rock/Alt[ernative] genre tracks on my iTunes (they're bundled together because, well, for me it's rather hard to tell the difference – I tend to change my mind as to the distinctions from day to day; and the truth is they're only clearly different if you're a polemically aggressive journalist for Rolling Stone), I heard a song by Hungry Lucy called 'We Won't Go' (from Where's Neil When you Need Him?, a tribute album dedicated to Neil Gaiman and his works). A lovely, eerie song; associated with Gaiman's Wolves in the Walls, I think; and sung by the kind of little-known band that he loves (this is a bit like that chic-alternative cluster of science fiction writers from parts of the Midwest and Northwest who tend to bring alternative rock into their stories and novels).

Nice. But while listening to it, I kept thinking – ah that's lovely, sounds almost like... her voice is a lot like... the song recalls.... It must be maddening for any creative musician, but especially for the pop artist: the trap of history, the way anything they do sounds almost like something else. The endless avalanche of digital media, of preserved history, of remembered and discussed and loved and hated music, must make anyone trying to write a song feel as though they're mummified inside someone else's pyramid.

Not to mention our large gang of free improvisors – it is impossible not to notice the implied, sometimes desperate, background need to improvise your music, just so that you can't be accused of doing things that were done before. A predictable shift, as our Western/Teutonic aesthetic system of originality/individuality collapses under the weight of our own increasingly accumulated histories – until we become a culture that recalls the classical Chinese, or Egyptian, in their rigid, past-oriented hierarchies. (And maybe that's why there are so many right-wing powers these days – conservative governments abound, and the Vatican today decided to honor those who died in the Spanish Civil War – but only on the fascist side.)

Of course writers live out the same problems: wasn't it Dorothy Parker who used to say of Robert Benchley – her brilliant, funny colleague of whom they had such high expectations, who is now so competely forgotten – that he couldn't bear to be in libraries, in bookstores: the sheer mass of books, of people who had bled their lives out on the page, about whom nobody cared any more....

Perhaps I need to be a bit more careful in how I talk to our students. Or, at least, leave them a way out.

October

The weather has been doing very October-ish things the past few days – windy nights, rainy sidewalks covered with leaves, that kind of thing. This morning there was a bright sunny wash over everything, which was nevertheless golden – exactly like the proper light for late afternoon, but at ten in the morning; it was some sort of presage to a cap of gray clouds (and I mean a cap here: clouds in northeastern England are usually fairly stormy and complex-looking, but for some reason the past two days we have had utterly flat, dark gray cloud covers, which look from beneath almost like enormous round disks).

Slightly odd dreams, in that warm winter bedding that's so much harder to abandon: dreams with a tangle of elements from all over – real and imagined, past/present, things that can't fit together in the real world – but all apparently smoothed into a tale of safety, of escape, of freedom. Staying with my eldest sister in her New England house (she doesn't actually live in New England); talking to Trisha H., who then plans to visit, as I extend my vacation in this house for weeks, and weeks; investigating a local gay club, whose intricate elevator and stair systems lead past rooms with translucent walls where I can see the shadows of violinists practicing classical music; and then going outside on a vast roof, to see sugar maples, and other (nonexistent) trees of autumn New England, which have somehow gotten 'sugar' attached to their names....

What odd wish fulfillments are these. But all elements of a world that is safer and more pleasant than the one I've got.

Winter pleasures

A rather tired day, as a result of the usual gastro problems. (I've been impressed by my secretary Jane's recent adventures with a homeopath, who has hugely reduced her long-term allergies – I may try that myself.) To brighten myself up, I did various at-home things:

Henry James, Washington Square. I'd never read this short novel all the way through – over the past week, mostly on the bus, I was actually getting fascinated with it; I suppose as one gets older the Jamesian aesthetic gets considerably more attractive (long, complicated sentences; intricate relationships; and the sense of what time does to people). I was surprised to find myself actually experiencing suspense: as though the winding path towards a fairly obvious ending was as exciting as any action movie. Strange: it means that perhaps it's time to finally launch into his longer novels – if I've read any of them, it was so long ago, and so duty-oriented (a shame that so many powerful writers end up with their work turning into a demanding task – for instance I never have the patience for Conrad, or Meredith), that I've forgotten everything that mattered about them; but maybe now I would enjoy Golden Bowl and suchlike. Have to watch it, though: the inevitable, Jamesian, fall of dreams and loss of hopes might be a bit hard to take....

Kaidan, or Kwaidan, the Japanese movie (on my computer). Gorgeous, slow, fascinating: so many beautiful pictures, so many eerie turns in the tales. Since it's basically four ghost stories, it reminds me of how peculiar Japanese ghost stories always seem to me – although I'm finally getting used to some of their basic principles: ghosts are really, physically, dangerous; they prey on living beings with an arrogant, aristocratic hauteur that suggests samurai culture; and the transformations can be anticipated, as they almost always fall into certain patterns (fox into woman, badger into warrior, black hair, white skin, distorted faces; and of course beautifully appointed houses that are seen to be rotted ruins when daylight touches them – all homes for the ghosts that drove the capitol from Kyoto hundreds of years ago).

Such a wonderful movie – the ending so wittily inconclusive – but my favorite passage by far was the climax of the third tale, 'Hoichi the Earless', when the long-dead clan of the Heike recreate their haughtily beautiful court to listen to Hoichi tell them their own epic story. There is the amazing use of red banners – torn, rotting; whole; changing from moment to moment as the ghosts remember different times, or as they gain or lose power with the dawn. Such beautiful, vast pictures – touched with cold, of course: all of the memories of Dan-no-Ura (the famous place of the final battle of the Heike and the Genji – sort of the Japanese War of the Roses, except considerably more violent and tragic for the losers), all the formal arrangements of seated courtiers, are slightly blue, and the acting seems to come as though from a deep well – but then of course: they are all seven hundred years dead....

Candles and incense. The bowl of joss sticks next to Hoichi reminded me to burn some of my own incense; the picture of my fireplace, with its background of tiles that were an inexpensive 1930s imitation of the arts and crafts style, with the two candles and incense smoke wreathing upwards, was as beautiful as anything in the movie.

Dinner was also somewhat Japanese: there was leftover rice, with too much soy sauce in it; so I mixed it with leeks, cherry tomatoes, and eggs, and baked the whole into a small meal, with some roasted pumpkin seeds on the side. I should cook that way more often: vegetables, small things, in small combinations – I am usually too impatient and too hungry to eat that way, but it's certainly better for me. And, as with most real Japanese (restaurant) food, I feel a lot more alert afterward.

Then, having finished the almond butter turrón from Barcelona, I opened the last of the egg-yolk turrón. If you've never seen this, it's basically a sweet made from egg yolks and sugar, all roasted into a dark golden slab of candy – actually, I don't know if there are any other ingredients in it at all; in any case it's pretty wonderful. V., last year, had warned me that the egg one doesn't keep forever – since I bought it about two months ago now, it should be fine for another month I think.

And reading stories, in comfort on the couch. Naturally the movie led me back to Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan stories (I assume they transliterated the movie's Japanese title with the W, because of the Hearn stories?) – which, for all their slow movements, are really enjoyable now. (Try them on Gutenberg.) And another book of old stories I found in a charity shop last week – Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara (excerpts only I'm afraid – the whole original is apparently ten volumes of Sanskrit – thank goodness for Penguins). A lighter touch than the Japanese tales, and more comical – though it has a lot of peculiar moments (and can they really say those things about Parvati? – they seem to verge on heresy – of course that's what's so nice about polytheism: you don't have to like your gods).

And that's how I'm spending my winter night.

Orange

Late this afternoon I orchestrated a lecture-discussion on research for a wide range of postgraduates – not the densest lecture (in terms of content) I've ever given, but successful I think, especially as I'd been worried about the rather vague theme and large audience. I was satisfied, and pleased with myself afterward; went to the nearby rather scruffy Italian restaurant for a glass of wine, some homemade pâté, a pizza, profiteroles...

And came home to an increasing headache. Panadol, water. Bed. Wakeful with intermittent headaches.

Then thinking, about 4 am: oh, Panadol isn't good for the liver, and that matters, because... well, casting backwards a bit:

***

For some days my shit has been a bit orange (sorry, there's no good way to say that – I typed "feces" and then thought, oh please). Orange means an increase in bilirubin, and that means my liver is going into overdrive, a little bit anyway. Wine? Pâté? Panadol? All things that the liver really, really hates. The signs of a cranky liver: the dry, yellowing skin, the headaches, the general sense of toxicity. Because I haven't been paying attention, maybe my hep C is going to act up, and maybe I'll have to do interferon again, and that makes me very sick and depressed, and maybe....

There is a passage in the middle of the second part of Angels in America where Prior, who has been wandering the streets of New York in search of the truth about Louis, lands in the Mormon Visitor Center and becomes frantic, panicky, as he starts to have difficulty breathing: he demands of Hannah, whom he's just met, to see if his forehead is hot – he starts moaning: I've overdone it, oh no oh no...

That panic from the sense that you've thrown away a period of good health, that the careless feeling that you could get away with a bit of alcohol or indulgent food has suddenly gotten you into a serious state (or, of course, not so suddenly: you know that it happened gradually, that there were signs, but of course you were too foolish or forgetful to remember certain constraints, certain needs, and now the situation has changed from apparently normal to abruptly critical) can pull you up short, remind you of mortality and health and things you've been blithely ignoring.

And, casting backwards a bit more:

***

In Los Angeles last week, both Susan M. and Susan H. mentioned at points how glad they were to see me looking so well (if not precisely svelte) – both of them referring darkly to my appearance when I last lived in LA, for six months in 2000 to teach for a semester – Susan H. said she could "practically see through me" then.

I was bothered by this, because I couldn't really remember being particularly ill: okay, I have a poor memory for some things, but you would think I would be able to recall that time more clearly than I do. I quizzed both of them about details, trying to recapture a period of disorientation, of illness, of panic: did they remember how I looked, could they give me more specifics? And so – how many bits of data could I collect, and how many would it take for me to recover some kind of experiential, some kind of gestalt, total, general, memory of being ill in that way?...

Which made me cast back further:

***

The last two days in LA, I was free to wander around, shop, see friends. I spent a lot of time in Westwood, at first delighted with its warm, cheerfully indulgent atmosphere, then increasingly uneasy at those signs of loss and fragmentation that I remember from even ten years ago, before the disintegrating world of the Bush administration: closed shop windows, going-out-of-business sales, all signs of LA's shaky economy.

At one point I had a few flashes back through my memory, helping me piece together a few fragments of that time in 2000 when I lived there: UCLA put me up in an apartment on the west side of Westwood, up near the university; near a number of restaurants, food shops – but I suddenly remembered that there were weeks, even months, where I didn't have all those choices, because I couldn't walk any further than the restaurant across the street for dinner: because I was so tired, so unwell – I actually learned the shuttle routes across campus at one point, because the only way I could get to my office (only four, five blocks away?) was by bus. Although I can't remember exactly how that felt, how I looked, how thin I apparently had gotten, the idea that I couldn't walk very far is startling to me now, and suggests some of the flavor of whatever memories, experiences, are now lost to me from that time.

And another fragment of that strange autumn returned on another street corner: I had started a new HIV medication – Kaletra, in what were then large orange gelcaps; and after a few days my skin itself (and other things – see above) had started to turn orange also. I thought, strangely enough, that the dye had somehow gotten into my skin – something the doctor thought was quite funny when he heard it; it wasn't the dye, of course, but my liver going into massive overload, and spreading bilirubin everywhere. Diagnozed with hep C, I was told I would have to inject myself daily with interferon. I remember sitting at a small table in a corner of the plaza outside the coffee shop near my apartment, helplessly crying, and trying to hide it, while I drank coffee in the bright, pleasant sun – horrified that my health had deteriorated to the point where I had to inject myself daily: as though that symbolized being really down-and-out, as though the bag of needles and vials I had just been given, sitting innocuously on the ground next to my chair, told me exactly how hopeless my body's situation had become.

***

My sister, a quarter of the way around the world from here, has weathered some difficult and probably frightening (though she would never admit to fear) medical procedures this week; the e-mails from her husband, and today from her, short but overflowing with relief, reflect a recovery from that same kind of panic.

But now, for me in 2007, in this time zone, it is 6 am: my headache is mostly gone. I'm sure I'll be all right, this time: perhaps there will be fewer glasses of wine in the next weeks (it's not as though I drink much anyway), and perhaps I need to drink more water – get some exercise – watch the fats, and all those other things that put the liver into an ill temper.

But it is like a flash of warning, of memory, a reminder of a larger world of illness, danger, crisis: orange, that warning color.

[The poster I found online, from Mark Rothko, great artist and pathetic suicide, was painted the year I was born. Talk about casting backwards....]

Homebody

Having wakened with griping gastrointestinals (as has happened most days over the past weeks), and nothing I absolutely had to do at the office (I missed an academic presentation by Spurious – but he'll forgive me, it's not as though he won't have an audience), I spent the day lying around in a work-free environment.

Of course I am so peculiarly made that this included moving books around, copying CDs, and putting music in order... what can I say, my contribution to Asperger's is that I enjoy putting my books in order. And it's something that I could push much further today – because since Patrick and Catherine helped me put up shelves in the box room, I can do some serious reorganization.

It's always nice to see books that have been out of sight for a while....

Notes from California

An enjoyable, if too short and rather fragmented, trip to Los Angeles – saw dear friends (and missed a couple who couldn't get in to see me); met a lot of new academics among the old ones; and gave, if I say so myself, a good presentation of a sexy topic.

Almost everyone in LA looked tanned, relaxed, attractive....

•••

On the stereo is a CD, the first of a set, the Cold Blue Complete 10-Inch Series. This was a set of 10-inch LPs (a witty if not particularly practical size) of young composers from the Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts, in the far desert enclave of Valencia) gang of the 1980s – Peter Garland, Barney Childs, Michael Jon Fink, Chas Smith, Daniel Lentz – mostly students or associates of Harold Budd. Not many of them continued famous – the Cold Blue label didn't have much of an afterlife either – but they made delicate, shimmering musics while they were in their prime; it is a sort of intellectual refinement of new age music, a good example of what John Rockwell called the 'neo-impressionism' of the 1980s. I still own several of the old 10-inch records – I'll give them to our library, I think – and it is nice to have them rereleased in toto.

I wrote biographies on some of these guys for Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music & Musicians in the late 1980s; some of them I faxed, or wrote letters asking for information. Others, like Fink, lived near me in Los Angeles (he gave me the scores for his lovely piano pieces, like uncynical Satie, which I still have in my office); or the strange and imaginative Chas Smith, who lived with his 'pedal steel guitar', elaborate tattoos, and plumber's truck over the hill in the San Fernando Valley. The only one I saw often, for a time, was Lentz, who was a friend of Laura's – rather unfortunately, to be honest; he was the unhappy, obnoxious alcoholic of the bunch, accustomed to heckling guests at dinner parties and pushing his girlfriend around (she sang on this record – and has since left for a happier life without him); but he did indeed write beautiful sounds.

For me, these musics, plus the more musically sophisticated side of commercial new age music (i.e. William Ackerman, Philip Aaberg, etc.) have vast resonance – they mean, for me, the hopes and pleasures of being a Californian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the days seemed to shimmer with light, and the streets seemed always filled with cheerful, social people, all different, and many of them very unusual indeed. Like a LeGuin cityscape, or a utopian vision from a Sturgeon novel.

These delicate, isolated, gentle notes are a (utopian, nostalgic, fantastic) kind of healing music. A good thing, that...

chemical bodies

[A draft of a short panel presentation for a Los Angeles symposium on musicals. Rather on the speculative/bonkers side – in the tradition of Adorno and the post-structuralists – but then I like that kind of thing....]

Here we sit, in the unnamed capitol, or at least the largest marketplace, of accelerating physical transformation: from facelifts to liposuction, Botox to retinoids, street meth to Prozac, Viagra to steroids. The culture of chemical and surgical alteration is increasingly ubiquitous, and has been long in coming – in the mid-1990s the doctor at my Los Angeles HIV clinic continued giving me testosterone injections even after blood tests showed that my levels had returned to normal, because it would cheer me up, and make me slightly more like the opulently handsome patients who, instead of shriveling and dying, strode grandly in and out of his waiting room. A few years later, on having to start injections of interferon, I was offered a range of antidepressants to counter the side effects, then cautioned about the side effects that would come from them – and of course we all have colleagues, family, friends, taking antidepressants, antianxieties, and other behavior modifiers.

All that is merely prelude, of course: an accelerating biotech industry, operating almost invisibly behind the medical industry, has already started developing astonishingly powerful innovations of body, and mind, modification. Though we are accustomed to correcting physical problems and defects and repairing biochemistry and neurochemistry when it seems to go awry, the border between correction and modification is already extremely porous; cosmetic surgeries and Viagra are only occasionally used to help those suffering from actual problems, and body modification will soon, and increasingly, be a matter of taste. Taste, desire, imagination, self-image: when gender construction, as well as the body’s energy, shape, and movement, are increasingly a matter of choice – as were tattoos and piercings for what may seem to our grandchildren the primitive trends of the late twentieth – the sheer fluidity and intricacy of those choices will change everything.

[show DVD – Volkswagen commercial, breakdancing Kelly – 1:00]

It’s too bad you didn’t see this wonderful, disorienting, and faintly disturbing commercial on television – Volkswagen made this ad for its Golf GTI in 2005, and it played across televisions in Europe; there are of course copies on YouTube, but they are in disappointing resolutions. The dancer is ‘Elsewhere’, aka David Bernal (a Santa Ana lad who became famous for his breakdance skills in popping, locking and liquiding); the video was constructed by giving him a suit like Gene Kelly’s original, choreographing him to move along the same directions and distances but in a completely different manner, and then digitally mapping the older actor’s face onto the younger man’s body. The music for the commercial, a remix by UK electronica duo Mint Royale, became popular enough to be released as a single later that year.

This shimmering, popping body, all flexion and energy, makes Haraway’s cyborgs, and even Butler’s performing bodies, nearly, or about to be, obsolete: increasingly the boxes that hold the body, and of course gender, are dissolving, eliding – naturally this has been happening in waves of cultural change over decades, possibly centuries; but once again the change is speeding up, the distinctions dissolving. This goes beyond the transformation of the body’s image, or the mechanical transformation of the cyborg body: this is the body that functions as its own processor, which may be out of the control of the person who seems to be in charge of the brain – this is thus beyond Butler because even performed gender implies a certain agency; this is beyond agency, a body that has its own (ecstasy- or speed-fueled) movements and flexibility, beyond anything the person stuck inside can dictate to it… The chemical body is subject to changes that are invisible, unlike the cyborg body; and the chemical body is not performed by any agent of identity or personality, it is performed by chemicals – the location of agency shifts, vanishes, behind a series of scrims, and we literally don’t know what we are doing.

Consider another video clip: the eerie and unforgettable transformation of Kylie Minogue, as the Green Fairy, from Moulin Rouge in 2001. The CGI transformation of human into sprite ratchets up a step, her voice morphs to a masculine roar (overdubbed by Ozzy Osbourne), and she becomes a male/female figure of threatening, inhuman excitement, her body changing to represent the experience-altering wormwood of absinthe. This constellation of meanings connects to other aspects of the show – especially the overwhelming Can Can, where the film’s action takes hold for the first time, a fanned-out beam of cultural references distorted through drunken and drugged  transformations of space and sensuality…

Of course, the moving images I am using as examples are digital video transformations – merely examples of contemporary virtual technology, not examples of real chemicals altering real bodies.  But they point forwards towards that which will be more disorienting than any virtual reality – they suggest to us, they make us feel, the rush of changing chemical compounds, things that will make our relations to dancing, to singing, to romantic love, completely other. That will confound those of us who are accustomed to thinking of themselves as having identities, or even those who have tried to move past identities to have only experiences and desires – if even desires and experiences are contingent on changing streams of chemistry, where do we locate our selves?...

And equally none of this centers on the musical: it merely hits it on a side bounce, as it were, as the musical has not been culturally central for more than forty years now.  I’ve written elsewhere that contemporary television musicals, such as those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and South Park, as well as those in Family Guy, Xena and other shows, normally begin by displaying smug contempt for the old-fashioned, conformist, emotionally predictable world of the musical; but then each is gradually overwhelmed by the sheer power of musical-emotional technology, with its strong feelings that trump any televised cynicism.  But what I’m trying to get at here, looking at these voluntary and involuntary digital transformations of Gene Kelly, of Kylie Minogue, is a next step that is waiting in the wings – if the body’s shape and sound can be changed, how will we recognize the leading lady? If the body’s energy and flexibility can be changed, how can we still be impressed by the virtuosic dancing body?

So, as many of the outré theoretical pyrotechnics of the past forty years reappear, not in the mind, but in the body: body-altering drugs, bodies as simulacra, bodies without organs, because they have dissolved in rapidly changing chemical systems: we finally admit to ourselves that we have always been puppets of organic chemistry…. And, as Rent suggests through its junkie heroine who just likes to “feel good”, and then tries to hide with grandiose ensemble numbers: if the love interest is chemically altering her- or him-self – how can we believe in the romance, in any kind of love, in any experience at all; how can we take the emotions of the music or the plot seriously enough to care?

We will struggle to find our balance in a world where our very perceptions are endlessly modified, change upon change until we can’t remember where we started; but for another generation this may simply become their reality: and the strong theories of the twentieth century, the culture of suspicion, which is based on the importance of hidden meanings, will continue to dissolve; as everything becomes equally, endlessly, internally-because-chemically, suspicious…

[7/20/07-10/13/07]

Victories

My sister is far better, sounded remarkably cheerful on the telephone yesterday.

Friday I started calculating exactly what I had to get done before leaving for Los Angeles this coming Thursday; and panicked – nerves, anxiety, woke at 6 am to wander restlessly about, wondering how it could all possibly get done. (Especially as most of it is about students – responsibility for them is sometimes a bit much...) Did some of the CBT (cognitive behavior etc., not that other thing) work, and felt far better, quite level-headed.

Today, with Patrick's and Catherine's help, put together a number of IKEA shelves for the front room, moved all the boxes around, many things on the shelves etc. Which means the front room, for the first time since I moved here five years ago, is sort of manageable: still way too full of junk, but it's easier to get in there, things are more organized, and therefore in a few weeks I can start doing some determined taking stuff to the trash or to thrift shops, and reduce it all a bit.

As the front room is partly full of about twenty boxes of papers that represent my entire life, this is really a major move – dealing with the past and dealing with the present at the same time, making it possible to move through both memories and current needs, and feeling quite comfortable getting rid of a lot of the past that doesn't matter any more, and getting rid of things that I'm not using, because I can confidently feel as though if I should ever need them I will simply buy them again. If it were a dream, it would be a fantastic chain of symbols.

As it's reality instead, I'm quite pleased with myself....

Relative

Fragments of good things and difficult ones; much administration, many students (most of whom seem rather smart, charming, alert this year; as D. said, sometimes it seems as though changes in students are like the weather – who knows why they happen – which means, I guess, we should be grateful for good weather).

A seminar in Darmstadt, high modernism, and my favorite Difficult Musics of the 1950s and 1960s: and the students seem interested and as though they're absorbing everything. It might be actually fun to teach it.

Meanwhile: I remain internally mildly volatile, chaotic, in the process of unstable change, of unpredictable thinking....

M. said this blog was sounding "a bit bipolar" – I objected immediately: if I were bipolar, wouldn't I at least sometimes have the energy and euphoria of the manic phase?... as opposed to this fragmented but mostly low-to-middle-mood existence. But I suppose what he means is the energy of depression versus anxiety... which would be – a sort of poor man's bipolar disorder?...

•••

But all of this, activity and work, thoughts and responsibilities, fades into a rather pallid, two-dimensional unimportance in contrast to what my eldest sister is going through. Several years of diagonoses and tests, good and semi-bad prognoses, have accelerated into a bout of chemotherapy – and several attendant crises: liquid in the lungs, great difficulty breathing, a sudden hospital stay, etc.

The situation is serious, but perhaps not disastrous: I get the sense – from thousands of miles away, through the hearsay of her husband, passed on to my younger sister, and my brother and sister-in-law – that doctors are expecting her to pull through the panicky, painful experiences of this week, and hopefully to respond well to treatment – over time. My sister herself, always calm and articulate in the way of the take-charge eldest child, and her husband, whose ex-Navy toughness prevents him from even thinking of panicking, both tend to sidestep any expectation of catastrophe – but fortunately they don't sugarcoat anything either.

One thing that is obvious: that even if she will be all right, her physical experience over these weeks can't be anything but deeply frightening – even when your mind knows that things are being handled, when you have an experience like difficulty breathing, or (as in my first 'body shock' experiences around a failed surgery, back in the early 1980s) you have rapid internal bleeding and your blood pressure suddenly drops over a matter of minutes, your immediate physical experience is one of panic and an acute need to act, to prevent what feels like dying.

So, of course, I worry, fret, wonder if there's anything I could do.

It feels as though the best thing I could do with my time would be to throw aside all this teaching, this administration; a trip to Los Angeles next week, fussing about the projects this year – to simply drop it all, and go sit by her bed at the hospital. Not to be tragic or overwhelmingly sympathetic about it, but just to be there: maybe read some books aloud, listen, talk. Or just sit.

Frankly, that seems to be the only thing that would really make sense, these days....