in the hall of mirrors

End

Having moved the computer to my desk in the middle room (actually I should keep it here, as this is much more of a 'work area' than the front room and couch, where I have spent far too much of the past five years) – I can see fireworks: the municipal celebration of New Year's Eve, the end (or perhaps, more traditionally, the verge of the beginning) of a year.

The top half of them, anyway, not covered by the bare winter trees and small row houses.

The fireworks are impressive, even from this distance; their energetic celebrations and implicit social contract make me feel a bit ridiculous, a bit ashamed – over the past week I have increasingly slept during the day, read part of the night, felt poorly. And even missed several doses of medications: I'm usually pretty good about them, but in midwinter and under the mark of depression I tend to lose track – I have missed perhaps three or four doses over the past week, which is of course not acceptable, at least not for any length of time.

Reading Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections – at first I was rather put off, then became fascinated: his memories of his own introverted confusions in his teens, and the resultant neurotic physical symptoms; it really turns into an engaging story, and one that reflects all too plainly my current depression/anomie/mild illnesses.

And I was reading sections of current technical (medical and psychiatric) textbooks on HIV/AIDS, downloaded from one of those illegal Russian websites: reading, especially, about the biochemistry of HIV depression. Depression is something most of the authors take for granted with HIV; it's apparently very common indeed (50% to 85% of patients, depending on what your defining factors are). Most of the writers are much more concerned with dementia and its biochemistry; depression is a side issue, with some of them prescribing minor stimulants for it (none of which I've ever heard of).

Of course, over the past year, I've become increasingly dependent for any successful energy on tea – especially exquisite, tangy green tea – and, very occasionally, coffee (though my stomach can't really stand it). And therefore, the obvious conclusion is reached: among my various resolutions, I should make a point of making them happen by drinking tea, regularly, in the morning.

Rather than, for instance, staggering from my bed to the sofa at 11 am, and sleeping until 4 pm, without eating or taking medicines... as I did today. Yes, I know, you don't need to tell me.

N.B.: I can't imagine how 'self-medicating' turned into such a negative term, unless it's the panic generated around AA, NA and associated programs. Given the tendency of doctors to allow non-life-endangering problems to drift... sometimes until they become quite real... it seems to be a survival need. For some of us, anyway.

***

And those resolutions, tame as they are – for the purpose of recording them in (horrible, accusing, demanding?) public – so that I can't pretend they never happened:

(1) To work DAILY on research projects.

(2) To get exercise at least once every week – moving towards twice a week if possible.

(3) To prepare classes and meetings beforehand whenever possible.

Signed, with a legalistic flourish,

Me

***

A later small addendum: I note from various casual messages on Facebook, as well as from certain comic strips, that there is leftover anger and exasperation in the US aimed at 2008 – that people are ready for the year to be over, because they almost blame the year itself for so many disasters. As an American living abroad, I don't feel that way myself about 2008 – this was a year when I put myself back together psychologically, more than I've been since 2000 – but I do understand.

However, admittedly, some of the horrors of the past year were visited on the country by its own structures – why was Bush ever elected, and why did people let him stay in power even after the illegalities of the 2004 election were obvious? Why did so many allow the financial and industrial powers to continue to operate scams that have been floating about since the 1980s? Perhaps because of the smug assumption of being a chosen land, of being immune to consequences. Like a twenty-year-old: pathetic, really... I hope that most Americans understand that these miseries did not come from some chance-driven, external force.

All time, all space

Home from a pleasant Christmas lunch at Ian's – excellent food – and sitting in the living room, with the tree glittering. And a beautiful strophic folk song by Chris Wood playing; and pulling out the tarot deck, to do one of those bottom-of-the-year readings. And seeing on the computer news of the Marshall Islands, where climate change is starting to strike: people flooded out of their homes – the islands of the world will be the first to weather the storms.

And, somewhere among these tiny fragments of experience, I suddenly am given that eerie Olympian awareness of time, space: of sadness and joy, of many, many people, and places. As though I see myself dealing the cards on my living-room carpet in the light of the tree, and it all slows down, as though in a film: and time slows and moves choreographically, as I become one of many tiles, many spaces and movements, weeping and happiness.

So much time, so much space: everything has such depth and beauty from that point of view.

But, I suppose, how could we ever live here?...

Happymerry

Early Christmas morning: between four and five a.m., briefly awake.

At the back of my mind for the past few days: the differences between holidays with family and friends, as opposed to alone, especially among the single and the older (like me of course). Alfred visited for two days, to the 23rd; he is a bit older than I am, and fairly famous, fairly well-connected. But because he broke up last spring with a partner after an all-too-brief period, he is roaming alone, searching for some place he can start again – and experiencing the bad timing of an economic downturn. He is handling it well, and is now off visiting another friend over the crucial days; but he also seems a bit at a loss, and feeling the isolation, the uncertainty (and yes, I'm undoubtedly projecting); and perhaps he is hearing in his head the silly, irrational questions that become so familiar for anyone who lives alone, such as the ones that start, Does anyone care what happens to... ?....

He told me news of Tom Disch – I hadn't known Disch committed suicide last July, after his partner died and his landlord started to evict him. Disch, who was a brilliant writer – especially when he wrote 334 – became increasingly bitter in his later years, as shown by his books from The Businessman onward, and his blog; he finally felt there was just no place for him, no alternatives and no places to go.

Then there's Geoff, on the other side of the world, leaving a slightly sad status update about having no presents. Other Facebook messages indicate that people are either with loved ones, or without; and that there is a certain avoided contrast between those classes. And, perhaps, most of all, there is my mother who, at eighty-six, won't get any visits until the day after Christmas; I tried repeatedly to call on Christmas Eve, but got no answer, as happens rather often. (And yes, you're quite right, I do feel guilty: in general that I am so far away.)

I, of course, am accustomed to all this for myself, but I do always need to manage my rather high expectations, which come from an exaggeratedly sentimental attachment to the holidays. It wasn't a bad Christmas Eve: a large lunch at the nearby Italian restaurant, where I was the only person alone.

And I'll also admit to a slightly willful avoidance of people connecting with me: I realized, today, over that lunch, that I don't want to ask people to spend time with me over the holidays – because, frankly, it's embarrassing. Somehow one wants them to want to spend time with you, to burst in, perhaps even with presents... ludicrous, I know.

I'm not sad, though. Except, perhaps, for mom; and then only in a general context of wondering why we have created this cultural/economic pattern that leaves people living alone, in apartments, in small houses, in rooms – especially on this day, of all the year....

Don't forget Foucault

I was startled into guilt yesterday by reading Edmund White talking about Foucault... and I suddenly realized, with an unpleasant start, how long it's been since I read anything by Foucault – or anything substantial about him.

I have a lot of already-prepared guilt ready on this topic, because my postgraduate seminar on cultural theory has been disintegrating a bit over the past month – on the day we were to read/discuss Adorno and Benjamin, who are old favorites of mine, two of the four were sick; and then the following week the other two... and through it all I've been stumbling in my choices of what to give them to read. The articles I chose for the first weeks were pretty good, and the last weeks I think are well planned; but these middle weeks... I think I was hoping for inspiration to come to me, and to be frank it hasn't. Not to mention that this small group is already chaotically varied in their interests and backgrounds....

Yeah, yeah: kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.

Well, I've chosen three articles for the next class at the end of January; but one of them is not really cultural theory, even broadly defined, and the third isn't a great choice. Therefore I'm not quite happy, and haven't sent the assignments out. I was going to do so on Friday; but I suppose none of them are going to read anything in this holiday week, so if I take a few more days it won't much matter.

In light of the above... maybe I should give them some good classic cultural theory. Uh, Foucault, perhaps?... I do love and respect his work; for me, he's the most honest and productive of all the whole post-structuralist gang, with Lyotard and Deleuze close behind. (I'm also aware that next fall I have to teach similar topics to a large undergraduate class, which I haven't done for several years – so I'm going to have to think at a larger level about what I currently know, remember, and can teach, in any case.)

White reminded me of how many other theorists have criticized Foucault, although frankly most of them are people I trust less (for instance, Habermas – who I continue to think is only famous because he was Adorno's student; and why didn't Metzger become famous instead, as he was also a noted Adorno student? – well, because Metzger writes mostly about music, and also because he's gay). Silly old Baudrillard, who had one brilliant idea (the simulacrum thing) and spun it out into an entire career, complete with entire books restating a few things in admittedly seductive prose, published a book titled Forget Foucault – but here I think he overstepped his bounds, being jealously, resentfully nasty about his betters.

No: don't forget Foucault.

And I won't, either: I'll go look for some things for the students to read....

Nights of power

The solstice is soon: Sunday, at a few minutes past noon this year.

And Imbolc, Beltane, Samhain, and the rest... nights when the winter wind is sharp and powerful, or the spring starts to appear, or the supercharged midsummer night takes over –

David kindly helped me to put up my small, but brightly lit, tree, and, for the first time, light my fireplace. I will put up photographs – but tomorrow; it is too sleepy, too deep a night, tonight, to bother with computerized detail.

Music is playing: the intense passions of Chris Wood's folk fiddling and antique English images in the poems – that sense of power, of deep resonance: when, as Hugh Lupton's beautiful writing points out, we are embedded in time that circles, that reaches strong points in the year and fuses with the past there.

When I was young, I most dearly loved the now slightly archaic style of British Arthurian fantasy: not only Tolkien and Lewis, but also Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Lucy Boston – all writers who were sensitive to this kind of midnight power, this feeling that the great forces of good and evil that have ruled, or tried to rule, this isle, and through it this world, are given their strong times, their years, and even their great cycles.

It all comes together in the eerie last stanza of the opening poem for Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, which I – oddly – quoted to the people who shared my taxi when I first arrived in a green, rain-drenched Northumberland six years ago:

She is not any common Earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare.

Perhaps that was one of the things that distracted me from making a sensible start in life when I was young: I was waiting for the magic to happen, to catch me up, and sweep me into the depths of a story....

Questionnaire

In trying to recover from the dismay and depression that resulted from yesterday's meeting; and the sense that my work is going to be taken even more out of my control; and that as a result I'll never, ever get out of here...

perhaps it's worth copying in yet another writing exercise, this one from a different workshop, that had a very apposite result. It was a nice exercise – well worth doing; you may want to do it yourself, to get you through the full moon. It is also good to do near a birthday – as it is about time, age, and the future.

Proudwords was the annual Newcastle lesbian and gay literary festival; its funding disintegrated and the whole imploded over the past couple of years, but when I first arrived it was impressively healthy (mostly because of massive participation by women – there weren't ever many men, and they weren't central to its operations until the final year, as a sort of stopgap after the lesbians all left in an elaborately multi-directional huff).

In 2006 there was a Proudwords-sponsored series of evening writing workshops, where I met the lively and intelligent playwright Tess (who, incidentally, has been talking about creating some workshops of her own). She and I, among others, were at the final workshop of this series on March 28, 2006. The exercise was unusual....

***

Part one: imagine a photograph of yourself in twenty to thirty years. Look at the photo, and answer these questions, in the present tense.

Where are you?

I am in San Francisco, in the garden behind a house, in the pale spring sunlight. I am looking relaxed and a bit weak, but in a comfortable enough way.

Is there anyone with you?

Although I'm alone in the photograph, there is another garden chair beside me. Someone has just left the chair....

Describe your face and expression.

My hair is completely gray, a sort of iron-white; the wrinkles around my eyes are relaxed. I look a bit sad, but calm enough.

What are you doing?

I am looking into the camera, amused and expectant. I can't seem to help posing a little bit, looking up from the book that is on my lap.

How are you dressed?

I'm wearing a worn denim shirt over a deep red t-shirt. I'm also wearing old-fashioned black jeans; but, in the spring sun, I'm barefoot, shoes carelessly pushed aside.

What is your hair like?

My hair is much as it's been for decades – brushed to the left, a traditional semi-military haircut that makes me look a bit like my father.

What is in the background?

A green, battered trellis and a few plants are behind me, one flowering plant climbing the trellis.

What are you holding in your hands?

I'm holding a book, an old hardcover book with irregularly cut pages, with a brown cover.

What single detail in the foreground is most interesting?

There is a mug of coffee on the arm of the other garden chair; it has a hand-painted, multi-colored sun on it.

One thing in this photo is surprising – what is it?

It is surprising that I am there....

***

Part two: imagine that the photograph has been taken, and write about it, before and after....

Since I came back to San Francisco ten years ago, things have moved slowly, rather quietly. After the war years, shifting economies and climates left the city itself slower and quieter – as Reno and Santa Rosa boomed, San Francisco became a backwater, an archaically unfashionable refuge for a wave of aging gay men and women, hippies, and tattooed ex-punks, dreaming away the now warmer days. The rising waters took back large parts of the western suburbs, but the hills around the old, now mostly submerged Castro are still home to ramshackle Victorians, small boats moving from hillside dock to hillside dock.

It was a jump, at least a slight one, in the continuity of our lives when I came back here to find Paulo. It was after I'd heard that Christian had died; and after I rode out the war years in London, occasionally having to defend my legal status as an alien from one of the countries at war, flashing a tattered passport that seemed to protect me less and less. I'd become increasingly determined to return to San Francisco, and Paulo's loss galvanized me into action: I would indeed go home, where I hadn't lived for thirty years, and see if, by any luck, there was space in his life for me.

We had approached each other warily – years far from each other in different worlds, and without youthful sexuality to pull us together, made any close connection seem odd and almost unnecessary. But I had become more easy-going over the years; and, after we fell back into our shared enthusiasms, he invited me to stay with him indefinitely – at first as roommates....

The day after

On a sharply disappointing day, when some bitterly familiar bad things happened – yet again – and I left early, missing the department Christmas celebration – while at home, avoiding everything – the television has a rerun of a favorite musical/dramatic passage: the final episode of Sex and the City.

There are three exceptional passages in the show: the eerie, long passage of disintegration and disaster in the middle – to the hip-hop 'La Belle et le Bad Boy' – then the healing/moving on passage, with a repeated 'clinking' percussion figure that suggests an Olympian distance and a universal connection, both at the same time; and finally the ending, using 'You Got the Love'. All three tend to fuse the multiple stories wonderfully....

A favorite episode: and one that helped cheer me up...

and then Anne put a birthday present and card through the mail slot. Definitely cheered.

Exercises

The Newcastle writers' group meets every other week or so; we try, during lunch time between teaching, meetings, and various demands, to just write for an hour, share it, and recover a little bit of ourselves.

***

October 5, 2006 – write a poem.

Postcard from Newcastle

The blackened rusted red

of these buildings,

dark green of trees,

covering sky soft, fibrous greys,

a page of handmade paper.

***

October 30, 2006 – respond to a picture out of a 1938 book celebrating Elizabeth II's coronation. I chose a picture with this title:

The Children of George V and Queen Mary

They look like the Tsar's children, just before – well, you know.

Actually, a bit sturdier, a bit happier – not quite the fragile solemnity of Anastasia and her bigger brothers and sisters. But what if things had happened differently – what if we were looking on this picture, its relaxed smiles and sturdy tartans, with the nostalgic grief of a post-revolutionary era?...

"When the rebel forces caught up with the royal family at Balmoral, they were enraged by the resistance and losses from the Northumbrian campaign, and thus in no mood for clemency. It is perhaps unfortunate that Scott, rather than Sandringham, was the first of the rebel leaders to reach the castle; as Scott had lost his entire family in the Whitsun Massacre at the height of the riots that followed George's attempted resumption of the throne, soon after the assassination of the second Elizabeth, he had blamed the royal family for all his woes.

Under such circumstances, the murder of the children and their retainers was perhaps to be expected. Although the Central Committee is no longer entirely under the control of the Reichstag, memorials and monuments are still discouraged to this day – despite which, it is said that each October 30, under the vigilant eyes of Party sentinels, wreaths are placed in the field to the west of the entrance of the now-abandoned castle."

***

March 6, 2008 – a response to a casual comment at the end of a session:

The brief version of War and Peace:

"Franklin looked out of the window and said, 'Ah, I see that the war is over. Splendid.'"

***

August 19, 2008 – some haiku written at the end of a session, when I'd run out of steam for the assignment – clearly was thinking a lot of Buddhism that day:

Waking from a dream:

it tells me things that are like

waking from a dream.

This book off the shelf –

page suddenly full of light:

I know what is next.

Fresh gray water shines,

drops across the window panes:

fallen from pure world.

***

November 25, 2008 – write someone else's experience – which in my hands turned into a demented parody of British aristocratic memoirs.

"When I was a little boy, Nanny Jane often said to me, 'Oh Master James, you do say the strangest things!'. I remember her telling me this one sunny day on the south lawn, between the French garden and the maze. 'Why, with your clever ideas and handsome profile, you could surely be a famous actor!' Years later, at a luncheon where my guests included the Duchess of Northumberland, Orson Welles, and Mussolini – I think Gielgud was there too – I regaled them with this amusing anecdote. I could see how deeply impressed they all were – indeed the formerly lively conversation stopped completely, and all had thoughtful expressions, as it was borne on to them what an exceptional artist I might have become. It must have been a bit later, when Welles was casting a movie to be titled Citizen Kane, that he so wanted me to play the great Randolph Hearst; but I had promised my Mimsy a cruise to Malta, and I was forced to say no. It was soon after this that Wells became increasingly subject to depression; I have always regretted failing him in his hour of need.

But back to cheerier times. My father, the handsomest Liberal of his day, brought me and my four sisters up to the highest ethical standard. 'My children,' he would say, as we gathered for our morning meal, 'you must never –' and here he would pause until the servants would return to the kitchen – 'you must always – oh bloody hell, is that gardener out with Daphne again?'. For we could see our mother, the most vivacious beauty of her day, far down the East lawn in the pleached alley, evidently convinced that she could not be seen from the house. Some days she never came to breakfast at all! But fortunately, Deborah, Delilah, Desirée, and Maude knew enough t0 start chattering blithely away at my father, distracting him with various questions, requests and demands. Poor Maude – these habits would stay with her until they got her in such trouble at the Palace, in that fatal argument with the young Charles, which ended so badly for the then Shah of Iran. But I digress...."

***

December 4, 2008 – write about the snow.

I should have brought a map.

I never can remember which street is which around here.

DeKalb, I can see the next is Edison... maybe they're in alphabetical order. Which would mean... oh, five or six blocks.

And oh, here we go, I'm glad it's not further – snow. It looks so....

It's so delicate, falling out of a smooth gray sky. Beautiful.

I always love this. Wonderful to see, and it makes everything so quiet. No sounds, really, except my feet of course.

Even they get quieter....

Did I say Edison? But this is Betancourt –

am I going the wrong way?

I'll retrace a bit...

no, that's silly, I can see my prints, they're in a line.

So they're not in alphabetical....

Huh. Coming down a bit more now. Streetlight as if behind a curtain.

I think... doesn't that on the left look familiar?

Familiar-ish. All right, over just a block, I'll see if there's a sign...

Or someone to ask.

Actually, it's been a while since...

Cars? Certainly no people.

You'd think more people would stay home in this weather. Lights in houses?... no... huh. If I lived around here I'd have a fireplace.

Well, not around here. Looks a bit... well. At least it seems very quiet...

Deep footprints. And snow sticking to my boots... well it's not slushy at least.

Glad of this scarf.

Now there's a building you wouldn't want to live near – talk about gutted....

Well wait: I haven't really been watching street signs but – Vifilsma- – Vifil-smarkt? What kind of a name is that?...

Must be annoying for them, spelling it all the time.

Not really a problem, though, I guess – two houses, and those couldn't be occupied....

I do wonder if I should just turn around.

All right, this is – the sign's just gone. Jeez. Vandalism.

I wonder if – there are still miles of town to go –

Well since I turned right back there – no, wait....

Broken street lamp.

If there were a bit more light from the sky....

Now this is a blizzard.

Okay, headed back – there must be lights –

that way?

no, it's not...

It's just white. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

***

December 10, 2008 – today, in fact. Couldn't engage with assignment, and so wrote a tanka – in the correct form!:

Birds flock around the towers:

stripes of blue-gray, calm above the lawns.

Universities are made to seem peaceful.

Why do these swords always return?

[Later correction: today (December 22), my friend and former teacher Terry from Los Angeles sent out a Christmas tanka, and I was reminded that syllables are an important part of the tanka form. The above doesn't have the correct number of syllables – as many haiku translations don't either; because five- or seven-syllable lines are much more difficult, and thus unfortunately often more strained or affected, in English than they are in Japanese. So, when I said the above was written in 'the correct form', I meant the old rules that the first and second lines should be on contrasting subjects; the third brings them together; and the fourth goes off in an unexpected but not unprepared direction. So, I suppose, I should have said: it's in the correct form – but not the correct prosody....]

ego

My birthday: the twenty-fourth time I've been twenty-nine.

... yes, well, okay... I'm fifty two.

Saturday's World AIDS Day speech went well. Many compliments, many eyes on me.

Tonight's Kagel concert – well, we'll see, but – the rehearsal went well; and Agustín is asking for even more attitude, more theatrics, more... me.

Of course even performing this relatively short piece (only ten minutes) has fairly strongly obsessed my ego: I rarely sing these days, so when I do all my natural narcissism comes to fore. Everyone must come to the concert, and everyone must say how wonderful I am, and buy me a drink, and wish me a happy birthday... and I will fuss over clothes, tea, timing, placement. Everything must somehow put me forward, must feature me in a starring role.

Ha. It's not quite so bad, of course. But the sheer wash of egotism is interesting to experience – such wash of egotism being the main thing that drove me from the ages of about fifteen to, perhaps, quite recently (and it still drives me of course, but in an attenuated and fragmentary way). That wash determined what I chose to do with my life, what I hoped to achieve, what I spent time doing....

Funny: well, in a way.

Happy, happy birthday, to me....

All right: you can applaud now.

***

Later: afterwards....

The performance, although with many mistakes and an unexpected hoarseness that came into my voice out of nowhere (too long all afternoon without warming up, then pushing too hard I think), was a success. And especially an ego success: I'm sure nobody thought it was a musical masterpiece, but everyone seemed to think it was a theatrical success – people kept using the word 'panache'.

Actually quite good: a sense that I should do more of this kind of thing – that I do it well, in fact better than I did when I was young; that my game of playing the great egotist is, in a way, somewhat less hampered by my own egotism.

And a sense that some of the ideas I used to so enjoy – playing with language, being creative with ideas, performing bizarre works – are still available, and that I should spend more time on them.

Which might make for a more interesting life....

Heroes

[Speech for World AIDS Day March and Celebration, Newcastle. It was held on December 6, not December 1, this year.]

Welcome to our second March and Celebration, and thank you for coming to the Sage Gateshead for World AIDS Day. I’d like to thank our local percussion groups for accompanying us through town and across the bridge, and making such a wonderful noise.

I’m Paul, a member of the Patient Participation Team, the Newcastle HIV patient group.

Today is the twenty-first World AIDS Day; the first was held in 1988, after the United Nations named December first as our day to remember, witness, and celebrate the lives of people with HIV and AIDS. Every year World AIDS Day has a theme; this year it is “Respect and Protect.” Apparently this means we should show respect by treating people living with AIDS fairly, challenging prejudice wherever it occurs; and also that we should respect ourselves and our partners by practicing safe sex. And those don’t sound like bad ideas, at all.

***

I’ve been reading about something psychologists call ‘resilience.’ We all know what resilience is – the ability to bounce back, to keep going when things go badly for you – but the word has lately gotten more attention; this writer spoke of her clients and friends who had been through difficult times, who showed this mysterious but wonderful resilience. I suspect resilience is what makes people into what we call heroes – people who manage to pick themselves up and keep living, even after they are struck by terrible storms and disasters.

I first started taking the idea of ‘heroes’ seriously about twenty-five years ago, in December 1983, when Reid, a boyfriend of mine, died after six months of illness. His many sicknesses were – terrible; back in 1983 they didn’t have many ideas of what to do when the immune system broke down. Reid, who had been stunningly handsome, a tall blond San Francisco bartender with a mustache and dreams of being a writer, had become painfully bloated, with KS lesions and rashes all over his body. He spent a great deal of those last six months comforting me, and comforting his friends: it sounds strange, I suppose, but we were a bunch of guys in their twenties who had no idea how to take care of someone who was dying. So, he took care of us: he told us not to worry, he told us things would be all right, and he told me to stop screwing around and apply for a graduate degree – which has carried me through much of my life. At his memorial a week before Christmas, a shy, plump girl who worked in his office stood up and said, “The day I started work, he asked me if I’d ever had sushi – and when I said no, he said, well, you should try it, and took me out to lunch. He always encouraged me to go further, to do things I was afraid to do. He was my hero.” I was amazed when she said that; but then, over the years, I’ve met a lot more heroes.

In Los Angeles, HIV tests were done at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center, as I discovered when I tested positive in 1987. One of the nurses there was a brash, rather loud guy, with a sort of frowsy beard. You must know this was when some politicians were talking about sending anyone who was HIV-positive in America off to camps in Utah – here, of course, they were talking about sending you to camps on the Isle of Wight – not exactly a favorite vacation spot. I was chatting with this nurse while he updated my file, and I noticed he went down the corridor to a different room to put it away. I asked him why he didn’t just keep the files next to his desk; he turned to me and said, with a strange expression on his face: because back here, they’re right next to the shredder. And if somebody comes to take these files, when they start banging on that front door, I can destroy them in minutes.

I’ve also known heroes who were more elegant than he was. Here in Newcastle we knew a handsome African woman who had an exquisite French accent; she always dressed beautifully, and became friends with the rest of the patient group, inviting us to her wonderful engagement party. Although she always seemed poised, happy, and gentle, I remember her telling a group of young medical students in a calm voice how she became infected with HIV after being gang raped in a Rwandan prison in the early 1990s. She returned to Africa a couple of years ago, to be near her children, to start a business, and to organize HIV clinics in her area….

Another hero was my friend David, a startlingly tall, gaunt professor of music. When I first met him in 2000 he had already had toxoplasmosis three times – that’s that bug that people with damaged immune systems can catch from cats, and it usually kills them; it had damaged his nervous system so badly the doctors said he’d never walk again, but here he was climbing up and down – admittedly slowly – the stairs of his Brighton house, asking me what he should make for lunch. David continued his brilliant career, speaking in his elegant and slightly arrogant Cambridge manner to audiences all over the world, while testing out practically every experimental drug the Brighton doctors could throw at him. He kept it up until last year, when he died sitting in his favorite chair, looking into his garden; I’m told that when they found him he had a smile on his face.

Fortunately we also have a number of local heroes – people who live out their lives in the face of AIDS, and who help those who have AIDS: sometimes they are the same people – especially the patients who do peer counseling in our HIV group; and then there are the social workers, nurses, doctors and consultants at the various clinics and health centres, in all of which we are actually exceptionally lucky here in the Northeast. Just two weeks ago I was surprised yet again by someone I know would be nominated for favorite local hero by many patients – Melinda, a psychologist from Newcastle General. She had organized an evening session where all the HIV patients could come and ask for what they wanted in their medical and social care, and in anything else, to a large group of doctors and health care workers – and she got them all to stay after working hours; sitting there, watching her go so far beyond the call of duty, with such calm kindness and resolve, I thought how amazingly lucky we are.

So, there are big things that people do, and little things: the resilience, the toughness and gentleness, that they show: and the ways that they are heroes, to themselves and to other people. As if those of us who didn’t even realize we were heroes suddenly discover that we are, just while going on with our lives….

Thank you.

[Newcastle, December 6, 2008]