in the hall of mirrors

Oz

A busy, successful two weeks: seminar in London, then here on my home turf; attending several student concerts, one quite inspired, the other beautifully produced – amazed at the capability of our kids, and wish I could have participated at that level at their age; and then tonight was a fine Late Thanksgiving – four Americans, a spouse and a best friend, a vast dinner with too much food, and laughter and stories and talking and playing records, and even harpsichord-playing, until three-thirty in the morning. But that's not what I'm writing about tonight....

•••

Earlier this night of the full moon, not having heard anything about the Australian elections, I was playing Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for The Rabbit-Proof Fence – that noble/tragic film about the mistreatment of Australian aborigines; most of the score is pleasant enough, but the final track, 'Cloudless' (which I suspect I've mentioned before on this blog), is glorious. A circling pattern that cross through sad minor chords and back out from them, a mass of aboriginal voices rising over a long time to a great peak of sound – not quite tragic, but full of feeling and a great presence, an immense calm sorrow that seems to contain a vast amount of time and the strength to keep going.

And I was running over, in my head, the memories and arguments about my Australian debacle from six years ago: for some reason I have told the story again, twice, this week, to colleagues who had never heard it – of leaving a high-paying but boring job in Hong Kong, for an ideal life in the ideal world of Sydney, only to be sent away because of being HIV+. And thereby losing the only partner I've ever lived with, the only substantial savings I've ever had, the only hope of a successful and lively career – indeed the loss of all kinds of hope. Because what was really awful about the situation was that I had reconstructed my imagination around a new and happy future: the little house in Woolloomoolloo, the boyfriend working in the garden, the musicians and composers in a new glass building, the sun, the happy people in the streets. That I would be happy, in the wonderful land of Oz.

Which means, of course, that when that was gone.... I don't know if you do this yourself: that when you are upset or confused, or even when you remember being upset or confused, you stage arguments, speeches, theatrical confrontations, in your head – something I've done from an early age (I remember doing it while mowing the lawn, up by the pine tree at the top of the front yard, and wondering whether it was a bit strange of me to do so – especially with such impassioned speeches, such accusations, such drama).

That was what this was – replaying what happened to me in Australia, and what I would say if I were there. The joys of self-justification.... Then tonight I hear that, finally, six years later, Australia has finally dumped the evil Howard government that deported me. Good news, I suppose: but it seems very distant – it sadly no longer has anything to do with me, although I e-mailed congratulations to my beloved John, now living happily with another partner.

It is a bit like a subtle novel, when characters remember something terrible or wonderful at a great distance, and they are more sensitive to the size and meaning of that thing than they were at the time – like Van remembering Lucy's suicide in Nabokov's Ada, perhaps.

Sadness, remembered griefs and hopes, a dazzling full moon....

A puzzlement

I've realized something a bit peculiar about the London responses to my presentation about music and AIDS.

One of the questions – really a sweeping statement – was from someone who said they had a friend who hadn't liked to tell people he was HIV+. (Amusingly, I could figure out from his elaborate circumlocutions that he was talking about David O.-S., who obviously didn't care what people thought – he just didn't want to bother with their preconceptions and prejudices.) Somehow that seemed to the questioner a significant point: why would these musicians want to go public with HIV status, with identity positions, with emotions?...

Then I received an e-mail from another participant that asked the same question in a different way: and claimed that this would be the most significant concern for most listeners.

The question seems to me utterly beside the point: what does it prove that you know someone who does not want to disclose their status? It's clearly a personal choice, appropriate in different circumstances; and analyzing whether there are social pressures on both sides seems a bit unnecessary, as most of the psychological and social literature (and in fact practically every newspaper article or television documentary) points out the same thing. Does disclosure make these more public figures (and my own public figure) problematic, or does it discredit them, or something?

It appears that, for these Londoners, disclosure is a bit shocking, or a bit shameful, or a bit ridiculous, and needs to be explained. Faced with all this data, and all the complicated cultural and aesthetic questions that arise from it, their first response is: but why would you discuss all this in public?... and they keep returning to the question, as a dog worries a bone.

If I were back in Hong Kong, and the Chinese were asking me, I would think to myself: ah yes, a face culture, a shame culture, where public image is so important – no wonder they are bothered by this. But it seems so peculiar – this isn't, after all, Victorian or even Edwardian, it's twenty-first century London – doesn't it seem odd to you, that they can't let go of this trivial discussion?...

In Train

Headed home on the late morning train – pretty crowded but I can still manage a pair of seats to myself. (Hmm, that may be a fairly selfish choice; but I’m feeling tired/wonky enough (gastro again) that I think I deserve some space to myself (especially after the shared bathroom at the hotel – which is sometimes less pleasant than others – for this trip it was definitely a hardship)).

Reading Lady Montagu’s letters from the early 18th century – and how wonderful they are: spiky, funny, observant, with a slight edge that combines grandeur and satire. She is a sort of like a confident, wealthy, aristocratic version of Jane Austen a century later: a woman who blithely and calmly breaks all the rules of women’s behavior for her time, and uses politeness like a small dagger….

It’s also fascinating to see how different the various cities and towns of baroque-era Europe are: probably the most bizarre so far is Vienna – as she tells it, their clothes, habits and even their approaches to love affairs are so startlingly different than those of contemporary London that they could be on the other side of the world, or in another century. And, rather bizarrely, the Viennese court balls sound like a nightclub: men pay a gold ducat, women get in free.

Most of her best writing is too leisurely to quote bits of it; but at Ratisbon she discovered a place where every family argued with every other one, and during her brief visit she was expected to join one side or another of every quarrel – something she politely refused to do. Her explanation of this bizarre village ended wonderfully:

“I know that my peaceable disposition already gives me a very ill figure, and that 'tis publicly whispered as a piece of impertinent pride in me, that I have hitherto been saucily civil to every body, as if I thought nobody good enough to quarrel with.”

In a letter to her sister, she satirizes the problem of describing travels, and the features you’re supposed to pay attention to, when you secretly think they’re boring:

“This is also a fortified town, but I avoid ever mentioning fortifications, being sensible that I know not how to speak of them. I am the more easy under my ignorance, when I reflect that I am sure you'll willingly forgive the omission; for if I made you the most exact description of all the ravelins and bastions I see in my travels, I dare swear you would ask me, What is a ravelin? and, What is a bastion?”

Pretty good, eh... I think, after all these years, and despite being an American, that I’m beginning to understand the theory and structure of wit….

•••

As Lady Montagu passes beyond the borders of central Europe, into Hungary, various Balkans and finally Ottoman Turkey, satire fades as her fascination with true difference rises: and she discovers a need to be honest, and even cautious, in describing Europe’s old and dangerous enemy. Quite a woman: as exact as any noble warrior....

In a hotel room, after midnight

London. “City, city!”, as cries Tom Rakewell.

It’s been a pleasant if tentative weekend: having achieved a successful research seminar on Thursday, with the grand old man of musicological modernism Arnold W. in attendance (astonishing that he would be there – it couldn’t have been my topic, so I myself must have been the attraction), I went shopping (mostly for books), wandered around, got tired, thought of going to gay bars but didn’t feel quite up to it. The attractions of London: with which I couldn’t quite bring myself to grapple. (It might have been an easier way of having fun to meet Patrick in Manchester, where he says he’s ‘bashing bears’ at the Bear Bash.)

Actually, the great pleasure was three hours, yesterday, with Sophie. Although today I had a similar lunch with Adam, noted London writer/networker and charming, kindly gossip, there were elements of that second meeting that were a bit too narcissistic and grasping on both sides. With Sophie, on the other hand, although I can’t help wondering how many annoying tics I exhibited (talking about myself, talking while eating, etc.) the experience was more honest, alive. When I found the restaurant I was in a bad mood, tired from not sleeping, embarrassed over feeling rather ill the night before, sort of wanting to flee London; but with Sophie all was intelligent and affectionate amusement, even to wandering through a record store and sharing giggly comments on the apparent and real achievements of the artists represented there.

I continue to claim, though it may rank people in an unfair hierarchy, that there are people in one’s life who are simply wiser, more supportive, more deeply honest (emotionally, intellectually, etc.) than others. I think here of dear Trisha in Phoenix, of Susan H. in LA, and of Mitchell, of Terry, of David in that same city; and of people I haven’t seen in a long time, such as Bill in San Francisco, Laura now in New York, Jay who died last year, and of course V. who has made such an impact on this blog, and David O.-S. so recently gone. These are all people who have, I think, never lied to me, in any fashion; and more importantly people with whom I have practically never had a spare hour, over dinner or a drink or the phone, from which I didn’t come away refreshed, happier, ready to go on.

Why do such people seem to have a different status in one’s life than others? It’s not a measure of how much one loves a person, or of how big they loom in one’s life – there are others we care about who don’t quite have this status – it’s something a bit more abstruse, something suggested by Californian reincarnation fantasies of ‘old souls’, or nineteenth-century fantasies of ‘soulmates’. I often feel that I’m not getting enough of that kind of person: but I feel it in a greedy, rather childlike way – I want more attention, more support, from people who – one instinctively feels – can only spare me so much contact before they must go and do, well, their angels’ work on earth.

But perhaps this is a fantasy, even a mutual one in some cases: Trisha and I have long shared the joky promise that if, in another lifetime, we ever get this gender/sex thing sorted out correctly (i.e. that we come back not as a lesbian and a gay man, but as a pair of people with sexual orientations that actually point towards each other), that we’ll be lovers.

•••

Probably, when that happens, she’ll be the guy, as she is definitely the more take-charge and studly of us two. But think of the confusing combinations that could happen instead! – must make a matrix of possibilities….

(I've never used ConceptDraw before – this program is obviously designed for engineers, there are no human figures anywhere in it.)

Okay: the theory of this is slightly exasperating. If both gender and orientation are random, we have a one in four (four in sixteen) chance of getting it right. (Oddly, until I made the chart, I hadn’t been clear that each of the four possibilities is only successfully mated with one of the others… hmm. Strange that such an obvious thing would give me pause – I must be confused by all that queer theory.) And only one of the four is unsuccessful, without frustrating one of the partners unfairly – i.e. the combination we have now – and there’s a one in two chance of one of us being cruelly disappointed (i.e. if, say, I’m me and she’s a handsome, athletic, redheaded straight guy – all of which adjectives pretty much apply to her present life, except of course the last one).

… Should I have included bisexuality? – or transgender surgery? – oh that’s too many variables, Judith Butler will have to do the diagrams.

On the other hand, what if gender in reincarnation is random, but sexual orientation is not? (Hey, it’s my theory, I get to make the rules. And besides I have lots o’ trouble seeing myself as a lesbian, in any universe.) Then, we’re limited to p = f/s, m/g; t = m/s, f/g. (Yes, I’m slightly unamused at p = f/s, but hey it’s more possible than the deleted others.) And we’re then still one in four – only one, rather boringly normal, combination is successful; and two still lead to unrequited sorrow.

Perhaps we should be happy as we are.

Perhaps I should have gone out to a gay bar!...

The Voyage to Europe

[Fragments for an unfinished novel, 1992-4]

Venice by Gondola

The sophisticated traveler will develop a passion for the dramatic curves of the great black gondolas, which seem to cut into the stone façades of this ancient city. But be ready for the high prices which, when transformed from millions, from billions of lira – lira like masses of insects, swarming, clawing – can be as much as ninety American dollars. A charming smile may help to bring these prices down; such smiles are easy when dealing with the stunningly handsome men who row these long, beautifully shaped boats. But the first-time visitor to Italy must be careful, be careful... Not really an argument, a subtle disagreement expressed through no common language, he didn’t understand, he thought it was a promise but it was just an idea, and not even an idea formulated in my head: my body thought of it, the muscles of my thighs, and it flowered into a smile – my body refuses to recognize its own dangers, to recall its international epidemic status – Stepping onto the gondola itself requires a certain skill, even for the sturdy, well-prepared traveler whose arm is steadied by the powerful fingers, the intensely demanding grip of the gondolier. It is important to sit once one is in the gondola, so as not to tip the boat, not to rock, to fall into the black waters, sinking to the bottom of the canals where gold plates used only once by the great doges of this wealthy merchant city clink and are scratched by the stones, the gray stone that is everywhere. I cannot look into his eyes again, I don’t know how to take back the body’s invitation: how will I ever pay for this trip? The long sweep of the poles as they wave back and forth, creating triangles that diminish and expand with the water’s reflections, are among the glories of this popular tourist attraction. Perhaps a penny beneath my tongue. When passing the great plaza of the cathedral of San Marcos, the attentive traveler will notice

_____

The fever is draining me, visibly reducing my visible presence, distilling my body into something sharper, more detailed. Perhaps gradually revealing that other body, the dark one that lies beneath, the one that is exactly marked with a widely known constellation of symptoms. Since I haven’t done any work for days now, I must watch the projects pile up on my desk, the gradual proliferation of chaotic details delivered to my room by the answering machine, the mail. One project is very late: I must send letters to my various acquaintances and unmet connections, saying, I’m sorry, I’m not there on the continent, I’m not calling you or visiting you because I never arrived, I was sick instead of going to Europe, for the first time, ever. Instead of going to Europe, going to Europe, going to Europe.

•••

[Fontainebleau/Paris]

I was scheduled to give a lecture at the Château Fontainebleau, the summer music school just outside of Paris. Bart arranged it as a special favor; I was going to stay in his suite for the night – hoping that low rumors wouldn’t follow me, as Bart is known for his predatory instincts – and then I would spend a few days in the exquisitely gray city. A friend supplied the addresses of city dwellers I might be able to stay with; their replies to my letters were subtly haughty, precisely but obliquely cutting with the fine edge of Parisian discourtesy: please tell us exactly what sort of establishments you would be interested in, or: we prefer visitors who can properly appreciate opera and ballet, or even: please send us a recent photograph.

But to walk alert, electric in the City of Lights, to stand under one of the great glass shopping arcades left over from the Third Republic, or to weave along the walls of a discotheque, marvelling at the subtly varied collection of cool, bored faces with high cheekbones and pouting lips. To hear the dense, poetic resonance of the language’s sounds, that must be the best of all: listening alertly in a land where a simple request for directions sounds like one of Rimbaud’s prose poems. Pretend that, on some quiet back street, it’s possible to find the little girl lying dead behind the rose bushes, to touch her white forehead, then suddenly withdraw: and then it would all come clear, everything would be understood.

The truth is, I need to see Paris, especially because I can’t imagine it: these clouds of surreal images, the long chains of alexandrines, just don’t fit with the abstract chill of these photographs, where city buildings like huge granite symmetries mercilessly dominate the flowering trees, the filigreed iron fences of cafés. At one time, I wanted to visit Paris with someone else: David, perhaps, if we could have squeezed a few last romantic sensations from the drying gourd of our past. More recently I wanted Peter to take me: I would make him hold my arm with his great, blond hand, forcing him to act as though we’re in love, since, of course, love must happen to any couple that travels to Paris. No, I can’t see Paris, and I can’t see us there.

It’s easier to envision the château, the riches of the land more neatly contained for the pleasure of a single very rich personage. The great blue fountains and the vast gardens intricately carved like chessboards for alien cultures: triangles folded into hexagons into webs of great circles. And the Hall of Mirrors: haughty echoes of overblown gold fixtures reflected how many times? like an endless stasis experienced all at once. It must be a remarkable –

No, wait, I’ve made a mistake: that’s Versailles, there’s not a hall of mirrors at – so then what is at Fontainebleau? There must be a listing in the red Michelin book, the one with the beautiful leather covers.

No, nothing.

The other guides don’t mention it. A slightly dizzy panic hits me: is the name misspelled, is the château in Belgium instead? I thought I would get to go to Paris, I thought it was all set up and all I had to do was pack. No, no, wait, I will say this much: I refuse to die before seeing Paris. I absolutely and categorically refuse.

•••

[Fever/Heat]

It’s not the heat. It’s something else. It’s a lot of other things, and then the heat comes down on top of them, melting their edges together, welding them all. When I keep the room closed up the heat doesn’t really get in –

No, that’s not true. The heat starts here, it comes from me and goes into the thermometer, it comes from me and drenches the sheets, gives my body the ability, or the command, to lie without moving, calmly arranged as flesh modelled over the sweaty sheets, the dimensionalization of flat wetness up into the air. It all comes from me and flows down me like slow waterfalls. I’m generating the heat, I’m causing this wave of baking weather.

Actually, no: my condition is causing it, my diagnosis. But then it’s also true that those who manage my condition, who make the diagnoses – really, the man who replaced my last doctor, he’s a famous researcher, so big and classically handsome and also remarkably insensitive – they say, or he says, he and the tests say, they don’t know what I’ve got at the moment although the general context, the viral condition that prefigures all my body’s actions is probably author and creator of this fever, but the fever itself is nameless. It also has another characteristic of being nameless –

Give it up. Floating here among the damp white clouds of sheets, I can think whatever I want. Panic and irritation are attenuated, is that what I mean? that is certainly the right word, they are not lessened but they are strung out, vastly lengthened, so that in going from one stage of each emotion to the next there is a long, slow leap, as in a film where someone jumps the great gap between two crumbling, yellow cliffs, and the camera suddenly slows: you get to watch time happen. You can see what’s coming because the next stage comes into view so slowly, so clearly articulated – the thoughts cross gracefully over: now I am moving from a quiet irritation sharpened with long-term fears into a subtler, slower phase of grief, grief which has little to do with anything happening here or now since it is really a mere side effect of the past, it’s about someone else’s illness. Later, staring deep into the ceiling, I will slowly leap from that old grief into pure sleepless presence, the kind of state that is most easily recognized when it is over –

No, I won’t either: I suddenly hear the mail falling with a great scraping and clattering into the slot next to the front door. Stimulus and response: I can think about the probable bills, or I can choose to worry about projects unbegun. The mail may include yet another of the endless letters from Europe asking where am I, or giving instructions, not knowing I can’t use them, and dates and places...

Yes, when I finally get up I will write back to all of them, although that may not be for a few more weeks. I can design the letter in my head: I’ll say I have been ill, but then say that it wasn’t serious, yet in such a way that no one will quite believe that. And perhaps for some of the haughtier business connections I should make some other excuse. I should say when I’m rescheduling the trip, but as I don’t have any idea when that could be –

I must be charming, amusing so that they will still put up with me when I do arrive, when I need places to stay and to go; I’ll start with something about how I’m doing, how the days are here, even the weather, I’ll say: It’s not the heat. It’s a lot of other things, and the heat comes down on top of them, melting their edges together...

•••

[Avignon/Doctor]

[The itinerary is difficult to settle. Aside from the obvious cities – Paris, Amsterdam – and the personal favorites of my imagination – cool, bright Copenhagen, or the stone mysteries of Venice – I also want to visit Avignon, which has a particular resonance for me... I think that for most people it must be merely a part of the relaxed beauty of southern France, something not too expensive but near the Côte d’Azur; and of course, everybody has to remember the bridge...]

The clinic is so quiet today, I suspect I’m the only patient. My doctor is in a good mood and wants to hear what I’m doing, so of course I begin to talk about Europe, babbling away while he plays with his disposable needles and plastic bottles. He’s enthusiastic, but becomes more so when I mention that I want to go to Avignon. He laughs and digs into his wallet, pulling out a handful of photographs. As he sorts through them, I can peer across his arm: there are various groupings that look like they might be families – so then he’s not gay? Unless maybe he is, but there are other family members from –

He finds the one that he’s searching for and holds it up, his bushy mustache quivering with suppressed laughter. I control my recurrent, and unfortunately inappropriate, desire to give him a hug, and look at the photo: it’s of him standing on a broad stone pier, part of a larger structure, his hands waving and one foot in the air – best of all, utter glee on his round, cheerful face. “What’s that supposed to be?” He shuffles the photos back together: “That’s the bridge.” I still don’t get it. “At Avignon!” I start to laugh, remembering the children’s song instinctively before I can translate the words in my head to explain what he’s doing in the photo. His blustering laughter follows mine...

After he listens to my chest, his large, gentle hand on my shoulder, he goes out of the room, telling me to wait. He leaves the pile of photographs on the desk; I go through them and pick out the one taken on the bridge at Avignon: he is really such a thoroughly pleasant-looking man, so affectionate, I’d love to spend more time with him. I want to put my arm around his shoulders, talk animatedly – I didn’t get to tell him why I want to go to Avignon, what my own Avignon looks like. The Palace of the Popes dominates the landscape, a vast stone building, acres dedicated to the grandeur of the ambiguous popes, the ones who weren’t approved by Rome; [the French tourist board still does son et lumiére things on the vast walls after dark, red spotlights cutting across the black shadows of the towers.] Perhaps that’s how I choose my favorite places, my favorite times: not in the search for great or noble art, and certainly not looking for junky monuments like the Eiffel Tower; but instead searching out the knots in history, the places where pleasure and fear were sharpest, the junctures where disaster loomed, and sometimes fell.

The Palace, a glittering, arrogant, impossible place: teetering on the brink of Hell, the playground of schismatics and their flatterers. [That part of France had been wealthy two centuries earlier, a flowering of complex poetry in Provençal, a language that is no longer written; they say women ran businesses, proud, well-educated women; but all of that was wiped out in the civil crusades... So the people of the countryside must have had a dim recollection of wealth and power, they must have been so excited to see it return, even if in such a local fashion. Vast wealth poured through the Palace and the town for much of the fourteenth century, money and plague germs, and the subtly profound poisons of cultural collapse. The hedonism, the enjoyment of complex passions, you can hear it in the bizarre music of the time.... It must have felt so strange, waiting from month to month over – how many years? – for the news from Rome, or from the battlefield: has it been decided, are we under a Pope or an anti-pope? Heaven or hell, instant answers for everyone, at least when they would finally arrive.] I want to walk those corridors, blasted by centuries into bare stone, and try to discern in the long curves and sudden angles of the buildings that subtler art of sensuality on the brink, cryptic laughter while death lies in the next room...

The doctor comes back into the room to tell me my new T-cell count, and to explain why it doesn’t really mean anything, and why I shouldn’t worry. I’m still holding the photo; as he is turned toward the sink, washing his hands – and what did he do, was touching me anything, that he has to wash his hands? – I slip the photo into my backpack, almost without thinking. On the way out, I ignore my backpack, not opening it for anything, no one will see what I took, I won’t open it until I get home, shut the door, pull the shades.

•••

Dear William:

Thanks for your cards. I particularly like the one you sent from Florence, but it didn’t say on the back where the statue was. I don’t know what Hercules might have done with Cacus (and who was he anyway?) but they look awfully friendly... well, you’re right, it’s a beautiful statue, very erotic. You’re lucky to get to see it up close, so don’t complain about the crowds.

I don’t know when, or if, this will reach you – depending on the Italian mail system is probably a mistake, and I know you’re off to Prague on Monday. Probably this will fall into a drawer at the hotel, you’ll never come back and they’ll ignore it, the edges drying out and fading until some old woman peers at it and tosses it into the trash... imagine: my letter thrown into a can of Italian trash, shiny chocolate wrappers with the ingredients listed in the Tuscan dialect, worn-out shoes in fine, thin leather, all covered with lots of marble dust.

Yes, I’m very sorry I didn’t get to go, too. The whole money thing just got too complicated, I was trying to turn out a script every week and I’ve never done that before. When I was handed the Wagner project, it was like hitting a stone wall – or like hitting the side of a stone castle, one of those Bavarian things of Ludwig’s. I totally freaked on the third night, went for a walk at four a.m. up north of me, past Santa Monica into the nice-ish houses in that part of West Holly and thought about Wagner and What He Means to Me. Didn’t really think about it, it was more of a slow-motion fit, I remembered the time when I was a Wagnerite, a perfect or real one; I was sixteen I think, I bought the entire Ring cycle – you may remember, if you cared at all in the mid-70s, that Solti recording, it was the first complete one I think. I played it with my best friend (who collected snakes and spiders, but was kind of cute), and we talked about everything. Well actually: not about feelings, or about sex in any way – but, I know it was a very intense and very confused/ing time.

Sorry, what am I dithering about? No more rambling. The doctor says I’m fine really, this fever is nothing in particular. Actually, he has no idea what it might be, but he seems to think that’s good – they’ve tested for everything (some very messy blood tests by tired phlebotomists – see there and I spelled it right too).

I haven’t checked your mail, and I assume Putz is okay in the kennel. If I get dressed and out of the house this week, I’ll make sure they’re doing everything as promised. If you don’t get this letter, you’re probably wondering what’s up. Of course, you can’t expect to just leave a beloved pet behind for six weeks and not run into any sorts of problems – actually, I’m not too wild about my kennel. But it seems as though some people, so many people I know, get to go to Europe so easily, as though they would go to Club Med, they come back and tell me all about the food and the bathrooms and fuss about it all. I don’t mean you would do that, of course, I just mean this is rather strange for me.

I’m going to take some aspirin now. Make sure you take lots of pictures and send me some more postcards – and if you don’t get this, I’ll try to remember and tell you everything when you come back – if I remember – if any of it matters at all – or if any of it seems at all interesting to you, after you’ve been in Europe for six weeks!

Hope you’re enjoying yourself,
P.

•••

[Library/books]

Considering their endless complaints about space (and money, and patrons), it seems odd that the library would have this vast lobby, a nearly empty foyer fashioned in cliches of chrome and glass. I shouldn’t have worn these boots, they squeak no matter what I do. Crossing that vast marble floor, or perhaps it’s just granite: marble is for the really wealthy, or for classic European buildings erected before the rise of the bourgeoisie... the squeaking is particularly annoying because it’s not a matter of the boots being too new – they must be a decade old, Frye boots bought at the end of the seventies, at the very end of the time when they were stylish. By an effort of will I ignore the sharp, regularly spaced noises I am producing and steer towards the reference desk, which is barricaded behind rather intensely innocuous electronic pillars. Behind the desk, a large, blonde woman with a pleasantly round face is watching, or perhaps listening to, my progress...

I ask her if it might be possible to look through the section on travel, countries, languages and such. Certainly, she says, do you have a particular country in mind? I guess that Europe would sound too vague, so I say: well, how about – Finland? I must have sounded too jovial or odd, somehow, she looks at me with suspicion, as though wondering if I’m making fun of her. Before I can speak, reassure her of the seriousness of my desire to examine anything on Finland that she might have available, she turns away towards her computer screen. Waiting, I settle into a dark green fabric chair and look around at quiet people arranged around formica tables, happily separated from each other by rows of identically bound reference works. When she turns back to me, it is to give me a present: a flimsy printout, a list of titles and call numbers under the heading: Finland. She turns briskly back to her terminal, avoiding any further or unnecessary contact.

The elevator ride is short and flattened in affect: beige and dirty chrome form the complete universe and all its details. When the doors trundle open at the fifth floor, though, the sensuality, the richness of the space flowers outwards: entering the green-blue depths, I step out between shelves filled with books, books filled with such rich, far-off tongues: umlauts and accent aigules glittering in gold on leather spines, or neatly sans serif on contemporary paperbacks... I cannot resist, I slowly, gently reach out to touch a large book with a title in some impossible pseudo-Cyrillic language, and caress its spine...

•••

[Fever/cold]

On a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle. On one side write ‘feed a,’ then drop down a space and write ‘starve a.’ On the other side of the line write, similarly, ‘cold’ and ‘fever.’

I can never remember the correct matching of these terms, the original form of the sort of proverb one snatches for in the twisting, endless depths of an illness that has gone on too long. The great armature of medicine lies outside this experience, metallic and huge, but ineffective in helping one to try to cross from moment to moment, the space between the realization that the pain is eased when you turn onto your left side with your legs scissored slightly apart, and the return of that pain in a modified but no more acceptable form a second, a few seconds, later. The length of seconds is called into question, also.

The day is so remarkably, if dimly, beautiful – the cab driver who took me home from the clinic yesterday, chatting, happily driving while leaning half out of his window, said: hey, it’s really gorgeous. I had that slightly painful sensation of missing out again, of being trapped in the dim grey wrappings of illness while the real world is having great fun just outside, just down the street. But no, lying in bed, not having to do anything, I can see it quietly now, there are such beautiful trees and ivy outside my bedroom windows, and the mild wind keeps it all in that stirred, more vivid state: nature presented in its more organic, more chaotic, form, which is always so comforting because human control is shown to be both impossible and unecessary.

Starve a cold, feed a fever. Now one of the problems of managing this distinction is that, as is not often enough pointed out, when you have a cold, you have a fever. So which were those old wives talking about? There are fevers without colds, of course. The fevers of various infections, like the one blazing sharply across that strange triangle over my left hip – why should that triangle be so clearly articulated, doesn’t that suggest something very specific must be wrong? – or the many others, earaches when I was a child, even certain respiratory infections that are nevertheless clearly not colds. So we can deduce that the class of illnesses named colds, identified however they are – I suppose congestion, coughing, etc. – are set apart from all other fevers, which are then distinguished from such colds under the general name of ‘fevers.’

No, that doesn’t seem quite right to me, either.

There seem to be so many zones to be concerned about: a vast series of different spaces, problems, solutions, things to be done, all intersecting in a highly randomized space, one generated by various desires and promises, but a space whose coordinates cannot be resolved under a single system. To start simply: my feet are cold. They are, at the moment, the only part of me that is cold, in thick cotton socks, under the soft farm-made blanket given to me a few months ago; if I could get up, of course, I would add the wool afghan over my legs, and that might solve the problem. But the rest of me is, at the moment, rather comfortable; if I don’t move, nothing very painful happens. A pleasant stasis holds me, allowing me to really listen to the leaves on the shutters...

‘Feed a fever:’ you know, that really must be wrong, the proverb would never put the two assonant words on one side of the equation, the whole proverb would collapse, overbalanced. Loud buzzing, varying rapidly in volumes and approximate pitch, plows across the room, cutting through the sounds of the breeze and leaves: I believe that must be my third fly in two days. One of them left, miraculously, by itself; one I batted out of the air in a rage, while I was tired and barely able to stand at the bathroom sink, then stared in astonishment: without my glasses and hardly able to lift a glass, I had nevertheless managed to knock the damned thing to the ground. I grabbed a tissue and smashed at that fly, this is the second one we’re still on, noticing and trying not to notice the small blob of yellow gunk that came out of it as I dropped the whole mess in the trash. Although similar gunks are unpleasantly familiar from the past few days, after the strange products of coughing flung into the sink, after the rows of various specimens at the doctor’s.

The tiring, distancing part of all of the different zones is not, of course, the spatial one mentioned above: the calm awareness and adjustment around what parts of the body are comfortable, what parts are not, is merely a problem in extremely local management – although, okay, I admit, Monday night and the two nights before, at the peak of all this week’s fevers and aches, the problems seemed terrifying in the intensity and unsolvability – but now, during the day, it’s not all that hard. And the spatial understanding of the things I need to do, mostly, gratifyingly enough, in the other room, nearly out of sight – yes, those are worrisome, but only if I focus on them; it is clear that I’m not capable of doing anything about them today, and making the big decisions, telling the landlord, surviving the ensuing explosions, those are all things I can’t do today anyway.

But the temporal zones, the divisions in time, are much more frightening: not easily delineated end to end, they form great but fuzzy rectangles containing chunks of my life. I cannot manage any of them from this bed, of course not, but, how can I explain this? The panic comes from knowing how many zones there are, and seeing how unpredictable the universe’s general support for them is. It’s sort of like, the network of relationships around getting out of bed, clutching across my chest with both arms to hold it together in one piece against the storm of coughs, moving a few yards to the bathroom, choosing the aspirin or antihistamine or Tylenol and performing the correct operations with them – those are complex but visible relationships, and I can tell when I am finished, when I can turn back towards the bed, or when something goes wrong, when the thermometer is broken on the tile floor. But my bigger promises, the things I must present soon that aren’t even written, the things I’ve promised to write that aren’t started – and will I have to move everything into storage, where am I going to live? I don’t know what to do with all of those.

If we agree that ‘feed a fever’ must be wrong, then it must be ‘feed a cold, starve a fever.’ But the particular network of aches of shifting temperatures that has me glued to the bed is the flu, plus that other annoying, painful infection; does the flu count as a cold or fever? I can’t put it together – the distance between what I’m trying to figure out now and its roots is too great, I can’t hold the whole thing in my buzzing head – it’s like doing sums in your head but there are too many of them, you can’t remember if you rounded up or made a mistake, and the whole thing falls apart. Speaking of buzzing, that fly – did we say this was the third fly? yes – has left. All on its own. Leaving behind the lovely, shimmering system of green leaves, trees, the wind pulling them apart and pushing them together, and the quiet spiders who have lived in the space between the shutters and the windows since long before I ever rented this place. They make me a mere day-tripper, a renter, they won’t even notice when I’m gone. The ease, the pleasure, that is right around the corner, if only I can get there, get to it: of lying here and not worrying, because there is nothing at all that I can do about anything, at this moment: the freedom of giving up, the relaxation of hands that are tightly bound...

•••

[Dream/de Falla]

Carefully handling the LP – how quickly we lose our habitual skills, when they become outdated – I drop (no, place) the needle onto the beginning of the record: de Falla’s Nights in the Castles of Spain, the tangled, eerie impressionistic pictures of deserted castle gardens, midnight towers. But it’s disconcerting when the record begins with some sort of announcer’s voice, interrupted by bursts of applause, bravos, even catcalls: And now, in the celeberated recording series produced with money donated by Mrs. Dorothy Empfandingskeit, we present de Falla’s Nights in the Castles of Spain in the original version for two pianos and percussion. To my irritated disbelief, he keeps chattering as the pianos begin, but the music seems very strange and intense, tightly wound ornaments and repeated notes overdetermining a simple tune: I read the score with its dense tangle of small notes over this thing descending from D to A, but that sounds wrong, it sounds like a fifth, it should read E to A – and after about eight bars...

I awake, the room hot and confusing, air held in place, holding me down. The heating system must have gone on, with a vengence, I’m still feeling very strange, sick and confused, confused about being sick. Fever maybe, headache for certain, now what the heck was that thing, that dream of Nights in the Castles of Spain? That should be ‘gardens,’ besides Nights in the Gardens of Spain is for what, piano and orchestra, or maybe piano and chamber orchestra, there’s no two-piano version. Percussion – was that a Hammond organ joining the pianos on that melody, grotesque, Weill-ian? I have to transcribe this somehow, D’s next to each other and practically overlapping, tiny mordents – but the computer music program is too foreign, it’s been several months since I brought it up, I can’t remember how to use it; and it’s not made for this tangled, immediate density anyway, it’s only happy with clear melodies notated clearly. When I finally give up, I’ve got some tune sketched out, and space for two pianos and percussion – I can’t remember what this tune is, it’s some sort of standard schlocky Franco-Spainiana, and it’s definitely not de Falla...

•••

[I had, of course, various ideas to work through the plot, the body of the novel – and various frustrations with those ideas. But, at least for now, this is a two-part draft of the ending.]

[Dream ending/Venice]

I come back every day to the pensione, looking for a letter: he should have joined me here by now. He is evidently delayed; the days pass pleasantly, but I am still impatient. For some reason, I seem to be having difficulty remembering the color of his hair: the picture in my head shimmers, and I can’t remember if it is blond, a goldish color, or a sort of red-brown: and does he have a beard or not? I got so tired, so fragile, like some British Victorian type with neuralgia, before coming here, I probably just need to rest. But the people are friendly, their dark eyes become merry in response to my blundering questions. Outside my hotel, I can look deep into the canal – and perhaps it’s the weather, or some optical illusion, but the water seems clearer than it did at first, a deep blue with glints far away. And the water seems slightly lower, as though Venice is slowly, gently, rising out of the sea, moving towards the sun, drying out just a tiny bit, to save itself for future centuries. Botticelli might have drawn a great seashell to hold... no, it could never be large enough.

This morning, at the little stone church next to my pensione, there were two young artists, or perhaps more accurately restorers, working on the wall frescoes: a minor Last Judgment from the sixteenth century. The girl is always serious, her vast brown eyes and mussed hair contained in an austere but gentle expression of concentration; but the boy laughs and gestures, he speaks to her in rapid-fire sentences which must be jokes, to which she responds with a brief, absent smile. While I was standing, watching, he turned away from repainting a brown tangle of muscular bodies, caught my eye, and, winking, grinned: I looked at the painting to calm my heartbeat, amused in spite of myself, and could see that the blessed spirits already shone with more gold, and the damned ones had a certain passion, a life they didn’t have before: as though they mattered more, as though they meant something important. Even the edges of the plaster seemed less dilapidated, less old. I tried to say something about how fine they looked: “Che bella, che...” but then I stuck there, and I wasn’t quite sure of the gender anyway, so I simply gestured towards the wall. He suddenly looked serious and proud, and he burst into a long, tangled paragraph of Venetian dialect. I really must work on my Italian more; I’ll spend evenings reading the phrasebook, although it might not help much with Venetian. When I left the church, it seemed as though parts of the wooden door frame had been replaced, and so well that it was as though they’d never been missing: everything looks newer, a little sharper...

The days all so pleasant, drifting, but at night I can’t get away from these tiresome dreams: beds, plastic tubes, and the feeling that I can hardly breathe. Sometimes, just before I open my eyes, my bed seems wet, soaked with greenish canal water, and then I really wake up and it’s not true. [Nightmares left over from those miserable days when I was so sick, before it all went away and I came here...] Tomorrow I’ll cross to the Giudecca; that should be fun, although it would be more fun if I weren’t alone... I hope he gets here soon; I keep thinking of all the things I want to show him. But I suppose I can wait, with the days so gloriously warm, the cool nights listening to the lapping water, distant calls echoing from boat to boat...

•••

[When the narrator has actually reached Europe, things start to go wrong: his friend vanishes, then reappears to announce he’s going back to America; the money starts to run low, and he still hasn’t seen Paris. And he starts to have fevers, high fevers that won’t go away; with a railpass and a credit card, he gets on a train to Paris, only to wake up ill with the train empty, stopped in a northern French city. Going in and out of coherent states, he decides to continue to the west coast of Ireland, the last land in Europe before the sea... but the dreams drift and confuse, visions of Paris give way to his original dreams of Venice, overlaid with the illusion of having actually made it to Ireland, all interspersed with brief flashes of realization of where he really is – wherever that is.]

night blazing hot, the crawl of sweat across my chest soaking into cotton, I half-turn, bang against the bars again, vast sharp sun pouring down on my chest, my feet in shadow, freezing. pains like a wave, I fall to my knees beside the canal barely able to breathe, holding on and not moving, roaring in my head, in my ears. it passes slowly, I relax and look up into the blazing air at fluorescent bars of light, feel the pulling plastic binding my wrist... hitchhike west from Dublin, ride, walk through deep green fields all the way across to Galway, take a ferry to the last island, the island of Connemara. look west: heather beaten down, ridge of rock, then deep frozen waters, blackblue to the horizon, walking, half-falling across long grass, down the hill, the end of all the land, broad waves whiten on impact – no, another, ach, ripping across the chest, grab ribs, hold together, tape twisting off my arm – rigid – holding, holding, can’t – rushing footsteps – and it crashes on the rocks, to bits, hold my head trembling, face half in sand... long long breath... and out... sharp light through lids, pale blue fluoresces, try to squeeze tighter – yes, okay. now. back to – gondolas, soft stone: but the light strange, so bleak – everybody is here, like they just ran out, by the lagoon, what are we waiting for? – look up, out to the ocean past Giudecca, a tall blueness, higher than, gradually seeing: it’s a wave, huge wave, we are all watching as it moves towards us, stately but so rapidly, thunder, blazing deep blue – can’t remember where, the color of his – all watch, open-mouthed, frozen, roaring wave now above us tilts – and forward – I reach out and grab his hand to steady our

[Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kiel, Irvine, 6/16/92-11/27/94]

Calm and troubled waters

A week of quiet – mostly: Reading Week, the week when we don't teach classes. I have gotten many small things done, and worked a bit on larger ones. I've retrieved a certain calm from the time out – inevitably I'm a bit dismayed to go back to classes and meetings, and especially a research seminar in London, for which I'm still (as usual) only sketchily prepared; but I don't feel quite as worn out, quite as irritated, by people's demands and things undone.

•••

There are people who matter to me who are having difficult times: one struggling with chemotherapy and serious side effects, one newly diagnosed with diabetes. Then there are others with longer histories, the two colleagues with multiple sclerosis, the one with breast cancer, the one with crippling nerve damage which may get worse and may even kill her eventually. Some of them come to me for advice – with others we just share an awareness of what our mortality means. I am struck again, however, by a certain rather peculiar resentment – just as Philip's death of cancer, Vanessa's death of polymyositis, and David's death of – well what was it, I suppose "complications due to long-term HIV infection" – just as they all left me rather peevish, so do the problems of these others leave me distinctly exasperated with the imbalances of the universe.

Very peculiar, I suppose: it implies that I had somehow drawn a thick line between those of us who have AIDS, and everyone else – and blithely assumed that the task was to make Those Others understand what suffering, illness, fear and death were about. Rather than noticing the obvious, which is that a lot of people are marked for suffering on both sides of the line – in a way I'm very lucky that my personal focus for misery was AIDS, because I can share that with a lot of friends; while those with more isolating conditions (MS, cancer) often don't get the advantage of shared troubles. (Or, let's face it, take advantage of sharing troubles: and though I suppose many hospitals now push cancer patients to come to support groups, many never do so.)

Another peculiar aspect of these instinctive reactions: I am so sure (still, even in the midst of this cognitive behavior therapy) that I have made such a mess of my life, that the deaths of others instead of me seems entirely wrong-footed, utterly ridiculous: why would anybody choose that the angelic Philip, who had a relationship and was so important to so many people, would die so rapidly and awfully? And Vanessa was so much more productive, so much more connected to so many people who benefited from her work and life; and David continued being brilliant through all his complex illnesses.

It simply doesn't make sense. And yes, I know: I already see the peculiar decision underlying such thoughts – that the blunders I've committed have made me superfluous to the world, a decision I think I made back when I was seventeen (if not before – I tend to have little memory of my life before I went away to college). And it's part of this therapy to notice such underlying beliefs/decisions, and to try to come up with something better to replace it; but it's so hard to argue against – when I get phone calls about my long-unpaid student loans, when I start struggling with the promotions committee yet again, when I face how little real work I've done lately – I simply can't make sense of it: why am I still here, and they are gone?...

•••

Working on this London seminar: my rather dramatic PowerPoint is already pretty good, but there needs to be more writing, more concrete thought. And the topic is difficult: it is the one about music about AIDS, especially works that suggest anger and paranoia – so I'm listening to all my music about AIDS again. Which I will have to do for the next year, at least, as I need to write the book on the topic....

And I'll admit: at points it all seems too difficult. It's hard enough to get past my procrastination, my constant sidestepping into other activities, my self-hypnosis into a daily state of inertia; but on top of that, if I have to fight with the dark, draining emotions raised by the material itself – can I really do this? Is it even sane to expect this of myself?...