A couple of weeks ago – Saturday – D. and I went to see Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell. Based on books by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about being down and out and drunk in London in the 1930s (and died in his fifties, predictably of deterioration after a life of drinking), it's an ensemble piece with a few solos and a lot of duets – the flow of it is gorgeous, the structured ironies, the dancers who are both being individual dramatic characters and also things that float in patterns – from what I've read of Hamilton so far, very much
like the original books in its point of view.
Chunks of my own life have been spent in underworlds – the worst still seems to be 1995-7 in the dilapidated apartment building in San Francisco, where death and drugs were everywhere, the hall carpets were always sticky, and men in other apartments would have psychotic breaks and end up on the streets, or die and we'd need to call the police – but they had a different tone: I don't think I've ever been all that anxious about exposure. In fact, I've been – for some, annoyingly – outspoken about being gay: which, I now realize, was a choice balanced on a knife's edge – it might have gone the other way. The other night I was reading Ina Garten's autobiography, where she is surprisingly (laceratingly) critical of her mother, who projected her anxiety into a rigid set of controls and pressures – the point where Ina tells her mother, I don't care what you think of what I'm doing next, is an eerie triumph, and sets up her approach to the rest of her life. But not everyone would have done that, of course.
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All this is in a shifting frame in my daily life – the last two years of weakness has mostly boiled down to sleep apnea; I now have a small, neat machine next to my bed, with a tube leading to a mask that comes apart for cleaning. It's well designed – the pamphlet explains that I got the Elite model, which was released in November 2024 (which naturally made me wonder: when will they tell us about the Elite Platinum model?). So, I'm lucky here. It is somewhat like scuba diving or moon walking – you aren't going to really like the mask and pumped air, but you don't have a choice if you want to have some life in you. And I have had more life in me –not every day, but on a number of days in the past few weeks, I wake early and get huge amounts of things done. Friday was like that – I could conquer the world! – and I did indeed do a lot. Still not back to the book, or the website, but I did get around to telling the lawyer to finalize the will, which is a relief.
So: a lot more energy, some optimism. The mood of the last six months, when I was thinking: okay, if I'm older and weaker, that's okay, I can handle it – isn't really gone though. It occurred to me in the spring that I often seem to forget the visceral experiences of long periods of illness, of which there have been four or five in the past decades, and I am surprised when one appears again. This time I seem (for now at least) able to hold them in mind: to think, okay now I clearly have some recovery time in store, so I need to be patient with that; and it's good news that most of the medical checks had healthy results – the minor lung damage is real and won't heal, so I get out of breath when walking, but it is less significant in relation to the apnea.
(Another thing about the apnea machine – a startling number of people around me also have them: not only the guy who delivered my groceries two weeks ago, but the woman who lives two streets down, and one of my former colleagues, and two or three other people I've spoken to over the past few weeks. And yes, I know, this also indicates that I may be the only one who always tells all – but we knew that, didn't we.)
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Last week I also had a brief, odd treatment for vertigo – The Epley Maneuver (does that sound like a military thriller from the 1950s?). The middle ear is the culprit, obviously – when he turned my head and made me lie back the room absolutely swam, and I said: that's it, right there! There may be some recurrence or blurring with other conditions; but I seem to be past a period of unexpectedly dysfunction days when I didn't want to go near the front stairs, as they seemed frankly dangerous....
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The Bourne performance was a matinee – I blended in with the other elderly, walking slowly and carefully past rows without comment. D. is younger – early forties – so he stood out a bit. I had some of that sense of being too wobbly to go out in public, but I also saw that wobbliness reflected in other audience members – I suppose I must get accustomed to being part of a distinct class, as I saw in Zürich last February: The Elderly.
When D. and I were sitting in an outdoor cafe after the performance, it was still afternoon, and a distinctly warm day (warm by local standards – M. and R. in Palm Desert would mock these temperatures, or look bemused at them, or both). Crowds of northerners on a hot day, in trashy beachy wear – to be honest the city looked like a mess; we talked about the dance, but also about how dismaying it felt to live here, among this and these....
That night, on an odd impulse, I went back to read Neil Bartlett's Mr Clive and Mr Page (in the US called The House on Brooke Street), which fascinated me decades ago. Weirdly enough my memory was very distorted from the actual book; I'd remembered it as two men living in a London house as master and servant, with the narrator unable to articulate their relationship, simply because he didn't have the concepts or language. An interesting idea: but not actually what happens – Mr Page, who narrates, clearly knows what he's talking about, but is intensely avoidant/controlled/panicky about using Dangerous Words, or in fact any definite terms, even polite ones; and Mr Clive is more chaotic, a young man just inheriting what should be a fortune.... it really is a remarkable book, I read it all night. It's clear that some online summaries are by people who misunderstood what was going on – an intense climactic scene of chaotic violence is entirely inside Mr Page's imagination, and is more an expression of his panic and rage than it does with any physical violence in the world. Some readers think that scene actually happens, which... well, it seems clear that our era of increased visibility has left some younger people unable to understand what covert living is like.
That was reflected in the dance piece, too: I think The Midnight Bell, which has been running for some years, might have suffered from younger dancers who don't quite get how endlessly tense the lives of the two gay characters must be. There was also the oddly cheerful performance at the start, which didn't fit – in connection with the story and the rest of the piece, I think we were watching an understudy who didn't understand the role – fortunately that role was relatively brief, despite its centrality in the original book. But more importantly the two gay men were simply not as scared as they should be – they were clearly acting as though the situation was tense and complex, but I don't think they quite grasped how terrified they would be that someone would see them.
My favorite bits were the wonderful older woman, a thin dancer who was playing the lonely woman who gets robbed and mistreated, but who stays with the same man – her desperation, her sense that if he was gone she would have no one, was sharply outlined in the simplest of ways. She also played the diva in the strange and wonderful scene where they all watch a movie, which gives them heightened versions of their own lives. Then there was the chunky older businessman who is thrown aside by a younger woman – his heartbreak was absolutely believable. Then there were the amazing passages when the dancers moved in a sea of parallel movements, with a sense that they were all locked into the limitations and disasters of their down and out lives, and only we could see the larger patterns... All the performers were excellent, in fact (though that opening bit was dubious) – I just think some of the younger ones don't quite get the real danger of these lives in the 1930s.
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I was supposed to go on a trip to a beautiful hotel in Scotland with the long-term HIV+ group, but it was canceled at the last minute; what seemed mystifying has gradually been explained – the charity is being blocked by the government, because some members were tagged as legally problematic a few decades ago (which consists, disturbingly enough, in having been known to be HIV+ – once again, people these days don't quite understand things that would have been legally dodgy just thirty years ago). They have unfortunately decided to close down the charity – a legal fight would be expensive and protracted, and apparently some government idiot is uninterested in seeing reason. (I know anyone reading this will also have an opinion, and questions – if I'm not explaining it entirely clearly, let me reassure you: it is clear that the guys in charge have really done all they can.)
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But it's warm, I'm feeling better – increased energy – no trips planned until the Zürich conference; but hopefully I'll feel well enough to travel in September and October, to do whatever I want. I keep thinking: the only thing that isn't happening is writing the (current) book, but that's not news.
So we will see: what is August, now....