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I am disoriented by the awareness of great chunks of time: time that is going by too quickly, time that is long gone, time that is frozen.

Why, for instance, in these sleepless early mornings, should I remember the amazingly loud tropical birds outside my Hong Kong apartment? And my unease when I woke because of them: anxieties of things to do, responsibilities, people. Or my pleasure when I woke because of them, the weather, the sense of possibilities, excitement: it is all bound together, caught up in the frantic calls of those strange birds, I can't even distinguish those old feelings one from another.

During the afternoons I continue to destroy time, after freezing it solid, by repetitive games and passive television watching. At points this week that has created a frantic misery, an existential anger: I am arguing with ghost figures, wrestling with forces and needs I can't visualize, can't conceptualize.

I am remembering no dreams. That is strange; and I know that I am dreaming, but there is nothing available to me on waking.

I cannot, of course, bear what I have made of my life when I think about it: its tediousness, its aimless fragmentation; its many rich experiences that I allowed to peter out into this experience of vast chunks of past, all only partly remembered, all disturbing me with their inappropriate demands.

But it is disorienting and difficult that even when I don't think about it, I still cannot bear all the moments, at the moment: that my life actually feels, in a textured, material way, fragmented, unhopeful, dislocated.

I suspect that I am frightened that my unconscious, that my dreams, have nothing to offer, have no help: that they don't know what to do either. That it's all a howling wind; that everything deep within me is as confused as everything that is on the surface.

I am amazed and disturbed and disoriented by time and memory; at their call, at their mercy.