in the hall of mirrors

Limitations; and, The Great German Novel

Even among these pleasant spring days, various small pleasant encounters, and the sense of positive direction I've developed in the past six months (related to Jung and analysis), I keep being made uneasily aware of limits, barriers, walls.

A sense of shortened time, news of health concerns: will I really have to inject myself with that miserable medication for eighteen months, starting this coming winter? It's something I've done twice before, never for longer than six months – and both times I was much sicker than I am now. (As Susan said of me in 2001: "we could almost see through you" – an alarmingly beautiful metaphor, making a sickly, darkening thinness into something transcendent, something ghostly).

If I do have to do these toxic, depressive, tiring medications, studying in Zürich will probably be delayed for a couple of years... do you think I'll finally get around to it when I'm fifty-five? Fifty-six, perhaps?

Sixty-two... or sixty-eight. Who knows. And, of course, how much of my current job/work/research will I be able to maintain for the two years I can expect to be perpetually tired; and will I even be able to manage these train trips down to Manchester.

I had an eerie dream of a nice restaurant, where I'm waiting to get a table, while a long line of people goes past me to be seated; and there are tiny insects in the carpet, which I can see moving around; I am barefoot and repulsed by the prospect of them crawling up my leg, fleeing across the room... my analyst suggested this dream might be a reaction to my medical news: those almost invisible insects as tiny defiling illnesses, and of course the long line of people are those patients who are allowed to try the new, less toxic medications. Because they don't have complicating factors: scientifically sensible, of course, but still exasperating from my angle.

In any case, whatever I imagine, this evening I had that weird and somewhat shattering physical experience – one that happens to me every few months, where suddenly I will burst into sweating, weakness, exhaustion, for maybe twenty or thirty minutes or so. I stumble around putting on lighter clothing, finding a thermometer, getting a towel so that I don't sweat on the sofa cushions... the very portrait of the fussy, overly anxious person in a momentary crisis.

This was after a tiring day on the train, going down to Manchester and back for analysis; somewhat stressful, especially on that home stretch where, no matter what I do, I can't seem to avoid the heavy traffic between Leeds and York. But still – I shouldn't have been so tired, so stressed, that I would have some sort of crise (to be terribly 1890s about it).

It's strange: perhaps this is a bit like a 'hot flash'? – I don't have a fever in any case; and of course the traditional night sweats associated with AIDS generally only happen when you're asleep. I don't think these things are serious; but unfortunately they always feel serious, at least for a time – the abrupt crisis of the body, the sudden failure of systems. The sheer weakness is amazing...

or perhaps the whole thing is a neurotic symptom. Could be, I suppose.

***

I've been reading Musil again; and read some Cabell today. Arcane, complex thinkers, who embedded the materials of essays into their novels. And strangely I seem to understand the characters, their emotions and justifications, far better than ever before – which tells you how limited my understanding has always been: even a few months of reading psychology is making me more sympathetic to a wide variety of selfish or unfair impulses and the reasons for following through with them.

However, although the Musil is much more readable for me than it used to be, and at points I've actually enjoyed it, I find myself rebelling against the idea that this is the Great German Novel, to be set alongside Ulysses and Proust. It's just too awkward, and not in a good way: the slow movement around an obviously ridiculous political committee, characters sharing their often loony pseudo-philosophies with each other, the slightly distasteful erotic passions of rather heartless, self-centered people – it is intelligently done but not striking enough. Yes, Musil was intelligent, yes he worked very hard at being a writer; but it seems that one has to give him, too often, the benefit of the doubt.

So: what are the great German novels of the twentieth century? Admittedly, I like Mann much more lately than I used to; and some Hesse is wonderful. And there are the crazed novels of Germanic decline, like Musil – von Doderer and so on; all impressive but exhausting, a long catalogue of the many horrible ways in which people can go mad. Böll and Grass are simply too miserable. (I won't count Kafka here: yes, he's writing in German, but he's not really German; and what he wrote weren't exactly novels, not in the sense I'm thinking of.) Arno Schmidt is impressive but unreadable – I do like difficult literature, but I draw the line at some texts (just as I love Ulysses but can't be bothered, ever or at all, with Finnegans Wake). And I know about Bernhard and Handke and all, although it's hard for me to get more than mildly enthusiastic about those Beckettian fragments. But none of them are quite... well, they're not Ulysses. They're not Proust. They just don't quite have that amazing impact.

So: is there anything German I'd put up there at the top?

Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil. It's years since I tried to finish it; the sheer poetic density made it like trying to wolf down masses of the richest Sachertorten. But it's one of the only major German works I know that seems entirely and utterly admirable....

I think I'll put Musil back on the shelf, for an indefinite period; at least I got about two-thirds of the way through the first volume, and I can see there's a great deal of the same ahead. I'll take Broch down from the shelf... and try again to challenge myself with five hundred pages of overwhelming, indigestible beauty.

Christos anesti!

Greek – whether ancient or modern, two wildly different languages – is beautiful but so intricate, so incomprehensible: for someone like me who considers himself fairly familiar with a variety of Western European languages, it seems alien, unrelated. And yes, of course it's Indo-European – but from such a distant branch....

My mother's family, and her relatives; the chatter in Greek, the food, the close family relationships. Dark hair, dark eyes, and (let's face it) very strong features... and Greek Easter bread, baked with the eerie sweet sharpness of mastikha, an unmistakable taste unlike anything else; and many, many red-dyed eggs. Not to mention, of course, my uncle Gregory's (my middle name is after him) infamous red wooden egg, which he would palm and use at the slightest provocation in egg-bashing battles.

And of course the Orthodox Easter ceremony, walking around the church three times, startled by the drama of the call and response:

Alithos anesti!

...

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.

Hilarity

Marie-Louise von Franz on the puer aeternus... I'm reading it because my new analyst mentioned it to me, rather pointedly. The book is a bit embarrassing, because it is too much on the mark in many places. However, it is also brilliant, fascinating, intelligent as she always is. (Was: I would have loved to have known her.)

But I am simply moved to comment: near the beginning of chapter five, when she is starting to talk about the inferior function (i.e. thinking in feeling types, or the reverse) and about people trying, however clumsily, to use their inferior functions – she retails an increasingly hilarious satire of ineptitudes, told with her usual mordant rapid-fire style... it's really quite wonderful.

Now, you see: psychology can actually be quite funny....

•••

And the next day: the beginning of her book on projection is sinus-clearingly brilliant, electrically sharp, like a halogen light on something difficult. Though I confess not agreeing with every decision she makes...

And, peripherally, I remember something rather odd that I said in one of Tess Castleman's seminars in Küsnacht: that the importance of dreams in our lives is undeniable – because whatever their source, it is as though we all spent several hours, every single day of our lives, in a movie house where only surrealist and avant-garde films are shown; so of course their impact will be immense....

Dreams of buildings

[The writing group exercise this week: list two buildings or places; list words associated with them; and what is unusual or unexpected that happens in those buildings?...]

I am always enchanted – literally: mesmerized, ensorcelled, under the power of, unwilling to leave them – by buildings that flow. Ancient buildings made by hand, to no regular plan; curved spaces, irregular corners, wood and plaster (or even, sometimes, metal) that seems to melt, or seems to have melted once, a hundred or a thousand years ago, and frozen again.

It's about a humanity in them, a sort of organic life: it's why, despite disparaging remarks from my sister and most other respectable artists, I love certain kinds of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Modernismo. Guimard, Gaudí, Mackintosh... what I wouldn't give to live in a house like that.

Which will never, of course, happen – the older houses are museums; and nobody carves like that now, it would take too long for anybody in the modern age. Nobody would shape the branches and leaves of a Guimard chair; nobody would even bother with the plainer ornaments of a Frank Lloyd Wright table. Costs too much, ultimately; workmen want to get in and get out, that's the way it is.

And those strange handmade houses of the seventies – wooden or earth, often eco-creations or hand-built, out in the forests – I was a bit young to get to live in one of those. It even seems hard to find them these days....

So the only way to indulge my passion for rounded corners, aside from occasional museum trips, is in my dreams. Those dream buildings: not only are they often complex, asymmetrical, sculptural, carved; they also have the advantage of all dream things – they can change shapes at will. In fact they can actually flow, not just appear to do so: as you turn your head the wall melts, a winding wooden staircase, with small windows that let in the late afternoon sun, leads in large, increasingly irregular curves down into a small room with a rocking chair and a double shelf of books. And perhaps if you look out the window you will see that this room is out on a hill, a steep one, and you look down into a valley filled with trees....

But then there are those other buildings in dreams: high, intricate ones, with many windows. Buildings with some symmetry, but a strange and complex one: they lean over, literally over, as parts are cantilevered out into a twilight lit up with flashes of lightning. And as you climb there are more rooms to traverse, and your goal seems to move further and further from you. Their green-gray stone keeps metamorphosing, at first when you are not looking, but with increasing contempt for your opinions about the appropriate behavior of granite and steel, in front of your face: mocking, they multiply, overlap and expand, while sirens and explosions wail up from the dark streets far below.