in the hall of mirrors

Transitionals

The unhappy weight of guilt around productivity has let up somewhat: since Mitchell has kindly started giving me my marching orders – literally telling me what chapter to draft next, and send it to him – and Melinda, going a bit outside the normal range of activity for a therapist, has chimed in asking for the same – I am getting some work done, and can remember once again how everyday, how easy, it really is to do what I think I am supposed to do, with my life.

So, when I lost the past four days to, first, a cluster of things to do for other people – a report on a doctoral thesis, a recommendation letter, a chain of minor administrative discussions; culminating with M.'s slightly anxiety-producing discussion with me of what he wants me to take over in the fall, which is definitely more than I wanted to take on – and then a big system crash and rebuild (two and a half days, basically) plus erratic stomach problems – it was all annoying but not depressing, not terrible, not merely Another Example Of What A Failure I Inevitably Am. As it usually is.

Although last night I looked through the supposedly drafted chapter, amazed that it was really just notes: and realized I needed to get up today and write out paragraphs, so that I would have something to send to Mitchell and Melinda on Tuesday.

In the night, this evolved into its own kind of panic – a dream of wandering through my neighborhood, then a few blocks away to an area I'd never seen before, with beautiful houses, sandy earth, and warm, dusty weather, where I discovered various castoffs and started to take them away. (Is that what scholarship looks like to my inner selves? – well, I admit, as today I need to go through a pile of secondary sources looking for the necessary points where somebody has talked about my current topics, it's not an inappropriate image.) And then, as I climbed a stair behind a house to another level, the dream turned dark and hopeless, as the things I'd collected were lost, and I was in a scruffy wasteland of urban trash.

Just a dream: but I woke aware that I was frightened of the possibilities of failure, yet again.

So: coffee, and attacking paragraphs, and cranking out – something. Some attempt to avoid, to hold back, to overcome, disaster.

•••

In two days, to Stuttgart for a week that includes Easter weekend, to work with Joyce on another long-delayed anthology. Stuttgart is, I think, the German version of Norwich – a rather isolated, boring town, pretty and well-off, but with a population that most of its compatriots treat as slightly ridiculous. I remember from visiting there in the early 1990s, an exquisite toy-like train system – a result of a highly technical town (home to Mercedes and BMW), lots of municipal funds, and a relatively small area and small population. Cute, to be frank.

Probably a good place to get some work done....

Turn of the wheel

Fortunas turns yet again, but upward this time: finally that promotion – after three applications in a row, and only about a year later than deserved, according to my figuring. (In Britain, where money and business control have taken over academe, that isn't bad – administrators here love to deny promotions in order to save money).

So that's good. Better title, more money, come August....

Making oneself crazy

... or should that be: making one's self crazy?...

In the interstices of watching these films, and scanning Joyce's thesis so I can report on it (the airplane and hotel for her defense in Paris are already organized – which reminds me: I also need to buy a flight to Washington to attend my eldest sister's memorial), I've been trying to read only books related to AIDS: easy enough in terms of finding them (they are all on four-and-a-half three-foot shelves – yes, there are a lot of them), but of course rather difficult in terms of finding the emotional patience to stick with them.

So, I made what seemed an easy choice: Hervé Guibert's Paradise, one of his last novels – which is, I think, the first Guibert I've finished. They are mostly quite short, and gracefully readable, in English or in French; but, well, do I have to explain why I don't always finish novels about AIDS?... okay, well, let's face it, they're mostly downers.

This one is very good, if perhaps a little too heterosexual for my tastes; but, although I expected the ending to be fairly wrenching, I wasn't quite ready for the chaotic skill and range of it – hugely disorienting and upsetting, really, not so much because of any individual passages (although they included torrents of images suggesting infection, sex, betrayal, death, and damage) as because of the entire dementia-ridden nightmare of disconnections: although it is not difficult to imagine the dislocations and inconsistencies of a novel that ends in dementia (at least not for anyone who became accustomed to Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs or a mass of writers since them), a skilled writer like this one can make you experience it, perhaps more than you would like.

(It made me think of my own drafted, probably-never-to-be-finished novel, and its considerably gentler dementia-oriented ending – which you can read towards the end of my long blog entry The Voyage to Europe; and that connection was actually rather encouraging, as it occurs to me that if I am incapable of writing a long novel, perhaps a short one would do. Well, maybe someday.)

It was really fairly crazy-making: and wonderful, and impressive – far more so than Collard's shallower egotism, in fact. But it was definitely a rapid and uncomfortable descent into the maelstrom: a kind of reading, thinking, and in fact remembering that I tend to avoid these days.

So it's nice to realize, yet again: I can handle it....

•••

But, after some hours of restless sleep while stormy winds beat the windows – and I don't mean sleep at night: finishing the novel at midday led to an afternoon of avoidant, depressive unconsciousness – I woke around dinnertime, had some tea, and put on a CD.

And how beautiful, how wonderful a piece was given to me, to make me feel better, more able to get back to work, to living: Robert Sessions' beloved piano miniatures From My Diary (1940), which I used to play back when I had a piano in the house. (Yes, I agree: it would be good for me to have a piano here – we'll see.) I suspect that many music students know these works, as they were examples in some popular music theory/history anthologies; I wonder if those other musicians remember these tiny, amazingly human pieces with as much affection as I do.

Best of all: the lovely, shimmering space outlined in the first miniature, between the pedaled bass and the answering quasi-harmonics of the treble....

•••

A small addendum on Guibert, after reading what others have to say about him online: it may seem ridiculous to complain of Collard's egotism, compared to Guibert's – very well, Guibert spent his entire life writing about himself, photographing himself, trying to meet important people to aggrandize himself, etc. – but Guibert's egotism doesn't bother me: it's not only more skillful, it is also not so shallow – Guibert is obsessed with himself not because it [he] is himself, but because that's what he knows best. Though it is amusing to see how irritating his self-obsessed success must have been for other Parisians (Duras hated him, and threatened to leave a major publisher unless they stopped showcasing him), it doesn't seem terribly important – he is an interesting writer, and of course nine-tenths of the successful artists of London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and other major cities are guilty of the same self-advertisement, the same manipulations, the same 'planned' friendships....

Les nuits fauves

I'll admit it: Savage Nights (Les nuits fauves), Cyril Collard's famous 1992 film about being bisexual, HIV+, and careless – by which I mean: really fucking careless: having sex with someone without telling them – is at least as exasperating as it is impressive. Does that make me a fuddy-duddy?...

Lots of drama about rebellion and being independent... and French quasi-intellectual messing around, complete with cigarettes, fights, threats and existential babbling. But, unlike Gregg Araki's The Living End (same year, similar concerns – and a film I dislike even more than this one), Collard's character isn't too young, dysfunctional and screwed up to know what he's doing. This is an educated young man, talented, capable, comfortable, who just wants to pretend he's not positive – without caring much about anybody else.

I've always been concerned that Foucault, whom I so respect, may have acted a bit like this....

Although I confess, I absolutely love the scene where, when a group of skinheads are attacking an Arab, he cuts his hand and threatens their leader with infection. And they back off – HIV becomes a weapon. And I can go with the ending... though I'm not sure he earns it (at least not – and I know it's cruel of me to say this as he died soon afterwards – not within the film).

But the infection bit... it reminds me of a creepy guy I know in Darlington, obviously wasting (and thus self-evidently with a non-negligible viral load) who justified not telling the many guys he had anonymous sex with that he was positive. Fortunately, he is by far the worst example I've known in twenty-five years; unfortunately, since I laid down the law to him, he no longer even talks to me.

Maybe it's the cheap justifications that repulse me so: if you're lying to yourself and to other people, and they aren't even the same lies, how can you expect...?

Stupid, stupid people.

•••

Later, after a drink: I'll admit, though I still think Collard was narcissistic and manipulative, he did indeed get to me. He's managed to make me feel careful: it's the old trope of Avoiding Life – which also assumes, Latin-style, that Life includes violence, stupid fights, threats, and doing incredibly vile things to other people – but now I wish I had a bit more of that left in me... aargh.

Of course, when I was younger, I was willing to allow awful things to happen to myself: but not to other people, there I drew a heavy black line. Perhaps that's why I ended up alone.

This will pass.

•••

And still later – and perhaps rather obviously: because, for years now, I don't have new experiences, I just revisit old ones by reading old poems, stories, writings; because there is no motion in my emotional life; and because I talk to medical students, in charmingly reasonable terms, about my experiences over the past twenty-five years, but obviously that's not the same as actually having those experiences; therefore going into these films, these songs, these novels, is actually creating new feelings: because even if I have had these ideas before, feelings are obviously not re-felt in the same way that ideas are.

That's the really tough part about doing this work: wading through new feelings, about AIDS....

Jarman

In the midst of watching all these AIDS films, a left turn, sort of: before sitting through Derek Jarman's Blue (I've never actually seen it with the blue screen throughout – which may hardly be necessary – but perhaps it's a good idea to do it), I thought I would see something that didn't require quite so much work: his film based on Britten's War Requiem (1989). I read the screenplay a couple of years ago, around the time that we performed the oratorio here with a mix of students and professionals, but I had never seen the film – this is a fairly okay DVD dubbed from a videotape (only one scene is practically ruined, the scene often shown in stills of the drag whores representing Britannia, which for some reason is completely overexposed).

Strange, messy, crazy: well, avant-garde – but actually seeing the film version of War Requiem is indeed more coherent than reading the screenplay. Perhaps not as many things are explained – although I don't have the screenplay to hand, I remember it is one of those that includes many notes, descripitions, and interpretations, as it's sort of a working document combined with a transcription – but, in actually seeing it, the emotional coherence of scenes is clear. (And it's nice to see a young Sean Bean, and a few startling scenes by Tilda Swinton; and the ending, with unexpectedly simple but overlapping gestures of care and memorial, over the gorgeous music of 'Let us sleep now/In paradisum' – sublime.)

I've always struggled with Jarman, since trying to endure the glacially paced Sebastiane years ago in San Francisco; he is always so chaotically strange – I mean I love the avant-garde, but let's face it, I like my experimentalism neatly and carefully calculated. (I'm never very enthusiastic about live albums or videos, either.) Jarman, on the other hand, is perfectly happy for the screen images to crowd on top of each other, drawn from different sources, different technologies, different patterns – he likes the messiness of them all, perhaps especially in this case, as they contrast with the polished craftmanship of the Britten. And, finally perhaps, I am a bit more in tune with all of that – this would still never be my favorite film, but it certainly is a striking one.

In fact, I have an urge to go see my recently acquired copy of his Wittgenstein – even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm working on; but it might be wonderful....

Spring

It is very late, or very early, depending on your preference – just after six a.m.

Sleep is for some reason impossible, I don't know why.

The other day an IKEA catalogue came in the mail, with 'SPRING' on the cover. I laughed, hollowly – all right, I didn't do that, I don't engage in bizarre dramatic gestures when alone, but I certainly had the same thought process as one who laughs hollowly, if you know what I mean. Despite the March winds, which I know as well as anyone must presage the breaking of the ice (if you're in Russia, anyway), it hasn't felt like spring at all – and it still doesn't, not much.

But those winds; and the birds outside; and the days are longer – already about twelve hours at this northern latitude.

Spring is wonderful, of course – warmer weather, longer days, better mood, healthier skin – but also a little nerve-wracking, because of course it indicates more time has passed when work should have been done. But I'll admit that, despite my usual insecure obsession with productivity, the fragments of work I've done lately make me feel rather comfortable about the future.

So perhaps we can start to accept the concept, the possibility, of spring: mostly there are only rain on the windows and wind in the chimney, but the signs of change are definitely present...

and... maybe that's why I'm sleepless....

Framing the past

Having finished watching Parting Glances, I can see – yes, it is a good movie; but I don't think I missed so much, walking out on it twenty-odd years ago. An interesting and touching slice of a certain kind of life, and the party scene is indeed great fun; of course from my current point of view they are all so young – this is a film about, perhaps, 28-30-somethings in the midst of becoming whatever they are going to become. (Except the argument in the stairwell with the 20-something, who is so excruciatingly young as to be merely annoying.)

All of which carries me back, through the music, the behavior, the ideas... into the past. I couldn't watch any more AIDS movies (I'll do Les nuits fauves tomorrow, but not now; and I'm still putting off Longtime Companion and Philadelphia, yet again), so I put on whatever was on television – which happened to be Clueless (1995). Which, though it is the blithest and ditziest of comedies (despite some unexpectedly edgy bits – did you remember the mugging, or the kid throwing up in the pool?), itself constitutes a certain nostalgia, a certain memory – perhaps its innocent concentration on the life of a sixteen-year-old, and one whose every whim is automatically paid for and handled, makes it very much about youth and memories of happiness. As though its then ultra-current 1995 instantly became a cherished memory, just through being framed in a certain way.

I wonder how film scholars handle the endless backward-looking, the endless nostalgia, the idealization? – don't they get tired or confused about time and memory? As much as musicologists get tired of having their emotions jerked around by lively or passionate music, I suppose... or film actors get tired of seeing themselves eternally younger, prettier, and perfectly framed.

***

Another frame – the non-events of my day all seem determined to push me back into the past. Reading E.F. Benson's ghost stories is a pleasant diversion – not a very strongly flavored one, as they are not imaginatively eerie like those of M.R. James, nor of course as dense as those by the other James (no, of course I don't mean William). The truth is, the ghost part of each story is rarely that interesting; the pleasantest part of reading them is the exposition, with its comfortable prewar houses, leisurely days, and his rather obsessive fussing over large, well-appointed rooms. But the stories are amusing enough; and as I get to the end of a large omnibus collection, the last few show a little more work and imagination, and are therefore more interesting.

'Pirates', which he must have written in the early 1930s, is very simple: you can see the end coming a mile off – but it is still quite beautiful, much more delicate and subtle than anything he'd written before (perhaps because it is apparently based on autobiographical elements). A lonely, aging man remembers the house where he grew up with his large family, all of whom are now dead; he finally returns there, redecorating it to look just as it once did... and of course you can guess the ending. It's nicely done, though, and gracefully nostalgic (especially for an old guy like me).

These stories have a forward by Joan Aiken, celebrated and prolific children's author. She is a favorite of mine, but not the way you would think – I never liked her famous The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, finding it confusing (I didn't understand her alternate England with its similar but different history, at least not when I was young – why would anyone want a Victorian England with wolves and villains?). The one book of hers that I own, and still reread every few years, is Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, a wonderful series of comic fantasy stories that unfortunately apparently never gave birth to a sequel.

My copy is actually a school prize, given to me as – I quote – "Library merit award... for the most creative annotated list of books read during the school year 1967-68, Mamie H. Spruill, Librarian". I was eleven at the time; you get the sense that dear old Mrs. Spruill, a kindly, rather horsey woman with curly blonde hair, was trying to figure out the appropriate spin for giving me some kind of award. Her book was really a perfect choice, being both fun and peculiar; it may be telling that I'd handed in a reading list that was interesting, but not a winner in any of the normal categories – that certainly fits my later life and work.

In fact, quite possibly, the only teacher whose hopes I've fulfilled has been Mrs. Spruill. Some other favorite teachers from long past would probably not be too disappointed with me – the tough and well-named Mrs. Sargent who taught algebra, Mrs. Hollingshead, who had me do an independent tutorial my last year to read Joyce's Ulysses (my chemistry partner, a football player, kept trying to borrow it to find the dirty bits he'd heard were there), the egomaniacal Mr. Hoffman who taught me music (he later died of apoplexy, which was completely appropriate); and others... but I didn't do much with math, nor have I written great novels, and I don't sing or play much music any more.

But Mrs. Spruill hit the nail on the head: at least I still read interestingly.

Time, and its frames....

The tough stuff

I am watching AIDS films, while working on the book about music and AIDS: this may be the toughest material to pay attention to – most of the songs I will write about later are much shorter than the films, except of course the musicals, which are in their turn more artificial and therefore (mostly) not as affecting. But the films are, of course, naturalistic (or mostly so), and dramatic and tear-jerking, etc., so watching these is a bit like jumping into the deep end of this work.

(Or perhaps I'm wrong – because, in a different way, it will of course be extremely hard to listen to Diamanda Galás' music, or perhaps to hear a lot of difficult pop songs, or... anyway, this feels very difficult right now.)

Jeffrey (1994) is a comedy, light and funny and... but I cried through half of it anyway. If that one is so hard to watch, how will I get through something really tough like Longtime Companion?...

On the other hand, perhaps Jeffrey is difficult to watch because it's about fear and not having sex. With, of all people, Michael Weiss (pictured above)... sigh. This possibility is confirmed by watching the respectable but now rather clunky-looking documentary Absolutely Positive (1991) or the unfortunately schlocky, though admittedly realistic, It's My Party (1996), neither of which, as it turns out, bothers me much at all....

***

II. Another chance

... Later, getting through Parting Glances (1986) has its own complications: when it first came out in theaters, I went to see it with my best friend Kevin, but I fled after the second scene when one of the leads cuts his hand in the kitchen of a friend who has AIDS. I thought, as it turned out incorrectly, I knew what was coming: a dramatic tragedy of infection... I was offended enough to skip out on my friend, the film, everything. (Was this shortly before my own diagnosis – which I remember perfectly well was April 1987 – or by any chance did I see the film after?...) And, despite having owned the DVD for several years, I've never seen it before now....

Welcome (back) to the 80s.

***

III. Monumentum pro 1986

Halfway through Parting Glances, at a point where I'm thinking: I seriously have to go talk to someone, do something, that gets me away from watching movies about AIDS – Patrick texts me that he and his visitor from Bristol are going out and I should come along. After a bit of testiness that he texted me so late (I know, I should be pleased he did it at all – but I depend on him perhaps too much for companionship, given how little I get from anyone else here), I shower and go out around midnight, eventually finding them in the main local gay nightclub.

And, for the ensuing four hours or so, proceed to have what feels at points like a quasi-1980s experience, mixed irregularly with fragments of twenty-first-century provincial Britain: the music, the lights, (some of) the guys. A massive steroid-built, tattooed behemoth bouncing across the floor like a medicine ball. Shy, feral Northern lads. A chunky, gentle-looking young man with a face one could come to love, trailing around behind a more sharply dressed pair of gym-builts (just as I am trailing around behind Patrick and Colin). Vast numbers of trampily arrayed, shrieking northern women. And, once, a remix of that peculiarly disturbing disco version of Barber's Adagio for Strings rings sadly across the floor, but everyone dances just as they do for anything else.

Finally, around four a.m., at a point where things no longer resemble 1980s clubs (when, in fact, people start to stagger a lot – northern Brits are not sensitive about motor skills, as they like to get really, really smashed), I gracefully take my leave and come home.

But, I'll admit: it was fairly, well, resonant....

Wind, rising

Here in northeastern England, a few miles from the North Sea, the winds of March – and of course of a number of other months, depending – can go on for days, even for weeks... at night gusts constantly tear at the chimney, and the faintly white clouds of the night sky, broken by a few dark patches, move past the window like an interminable avant-garde student film.

Continuing to worry about the long, free days of my research leave, during which, for the most part, I have nothing to do but write: ideal, almost – or they would be, if I weren't so inert, so hypnotized, so neurotically, insanely wasteful of this precious time. The only useful work I've done has been at Mitchell's behest: I begged him to help me with my procrastination, and lo! a casual command from his office in Los Angeles, and two days later I'd written a book proposal. Now, in a midnight phone call, he proclaims: bring me the head of John the Bap- – uh, no, bring me a draft of the chapter on film scores; in a week.

My initial reaction: it can't be done, not that chapter, I don't know what I'm talking about, it's too sketchy/improbable/chaotic. Then I start to get into it, list what I know and want to say: and, shortly after midnight, two pages of notes spring forth, groups of ideas and films and things that need to be said; there is probably a lot on this topic I don't know, but I won't worry about that. A pile of references from my four-and-a-half shelves of books devoted to AIDS, a bath, and bed by two a.m....

But now I'm slightly in trouble: my mind is moving so fast, working on this topic that I thought would be so opaque, that I realize I can't sleep: that, like the sky, my mind is being pushed by constantly shifting gusts of energy, of thoughts. The I Ching gives me 51, shock, thunder: images of vast dramatic change, a good if alarming stormy hexagram. But I really have to sleep, so a beta blocker (I've kept a bottle of propanolol around for years, ever since I first took them in 1997, just before my anxious overseas move to Hong Kong; as the mildest of anti-anxieties, they are useful from time to time) plus this blog entry, and now at four a.m. I should manage to get some rest.

Such a strange feeling: if the hypnotized emptiness of the weeks of my procrastinating, not-writing existence doesn't make any sense, this is its opposite that suddenly shows why that emptiness occurs – energetic work, even when it is not difficult, can have its own quality of vertigo, of change, of shock: of being torn apart, by stormy March winds....