in the hall of mirrors

A good day

Despite my pathetic worries, and Kit's critique, Gay Pride in Newcastle was pleasant, and it was good to see everyone. My energy faded to nothing after about an hour and a half, but I expected that; and so went home, having greeted and hugged a number of people, picked up a few pamphlets and whistles, met a new alternative healthcare practitioner, and eaten noodles with chicken.

Oh, and having, while eating those noodles, sat on a bench listening to a brash Northern lad talk about his dysfunctional Irish ex... and agreeing with his friend that he shouldn't take the Irishman back. He will, of course, that was obvious; you just can't tell people what to do.

It did start to rain just as I got home, so perhaps those who stayed had a slightly more annoying time. But I enjoyed it.

All summer in a day

The symptoms remain a bit strange, and it's strange how they come and go: why would I be so tired after a stroke? It's not as though it involved any work.

Just shaved and showered; it was almost all I could manage, and I'm shaking from the effort of standing, of focusing on using my hands to wash my hair. But tomorrow is Gay Pride in Newcastle, and I really want to go – though it will probably be raining through the whole thing. It's so seldom that anything gay and festive happens here....

One of Ray Bradbury's eeriest stories, 'All Summer in a Day', involves a class of young schoolchildren on Venus and the shy, lonely new girl, who is an object of jeering and fun to the ones who grew up there. Bradbury emphasizes that the sun only shines on Venus for an hour or so, once every ten years; that time is about to occur in the story, and the class writes about it beforehand – the new girl's poem being the saddest and most poignant, as she is a recent transplant from Earth. The other kids, teasing and fighting, shut her up in a closet, and then the sun comes out, and they are all so entranced that they forget all about her... until the hour is over, and the endless rain starts in again. Whereupon they remember to let her out....

Adorno's Dreams

After last night's brave and admittedly somewhat demented post – not that I discount its ideas and feelings: I think I really could crack my behavior, my limitations, open, if I had the energy and courage, which I may yet be able to find – I put myself together today to go to the pharmacy and the office. Did necessary errands, picked up my now even vaster cache of medications, and took a taxi home after less than an hour in the office, as I could hardly stand... and am now still physically drained after some hours of sleep, shaking slightly when I walk, or pick things up.

But still able to read and type, of course.  No research today, despite yesterday's wild vows; but headed for bed, I picked a very strange book that I bought last month off the shelf.

You see, I regard myself as something of an Adorno expert. Not like Paddison, or the terrifically irritating L. G. (initials only in her case) – I am not someone who wants to explain every aspect of Adorno's ideas, or take them all entirely seriously; but I'm also not someone who wants to dismiss his work because of its idiosyncrasy, nor someone who regards it as outdated or repressive. I spent years trying to 'get' Adorno in the late 1980s and 1990s, and still regard him as a central intellectual figure for my world and, in an odd way, an intellectual friend; but a friend as Benjamin regarded him as a friend – as someone who could be misguided or overly driven in his conclusions, as someone to whom one would say in exasperation, Yes, but surely you can see that you're exaggerating the difficulty of....

Of course the great intellectual and emotional tragedy of Adorno's life was Benjamin's suicide in 1940; because it appears that Benjamin was the only person Adorno took entirely seriously, the only person whose challenges he felt deserved a carefully considered answer. For Adorno, almost all other humans were to some extent fools, dupes, madmen or weaklings; and when Benjamin died, the only person who could disagree with Adorno and yet be taken seriously by him died, finally and forever. It's hard not to see the shattered postwar Adorno as grieving not only for Germany, for the Jews, for political freedom, for cultural freedom, but also grieving even more deeply for the only person he ever really respected.

But that is a rather grand overview of his story... and almost all of Adorno's books, from the brilliantly canonic to the flippantly sardonic, have found a place on my shelves. At one time I identified with him, perhaps too much (as he probably had ten or twenty IQ points on me in any case, not to mention better training of course, along with his intricately messed-up personality); and my work, although it has fallen far from his in material and ideas, barely conceals its deep Adornian roots. I do feel lucky, and blessed, to have had accidental meetings in my life that caused me to take Jung seriously rather than Freud – it has kept me from the malevolent, despairing cynicism that I read in most of the more Freudian or Lacanian intellectuals, and I'm grateful for that. (Think of it this way: who could bear to have both AIDS and Lacan in their lives? Impossible, or at least insane.)

So... the publication of Adorno's Dream Notes induces a strange mixture of responses – exciting, disturbing, fascinating, and even faintly funny. That this most fiercely guarded of men, always on the offensive with almost everyone, would write down his dreams and consider baring them for publication – it is amazing in several ways. It also has its sad side – the dreams are almost all dark, the frequent sense of danger and loss and collapse testimony to the fact that Adorno actually reduced the darkness of his world vision in his professional writings. (I am grateful that some of my own dreams are more golden than black, that there are sometimes bursts of love, light, and almost utopian flights, that sustain me through whatever the day may bring.) But, to someone who has spent as many years 'involved' with Adorno as I have, it is like listening to an old friend, exhausted and somewhat disoriented after a major illness, saying strange but resonant things in a tired whisper – one feels concern and even pity; but it builds an even deeper three-dimensional sense of his extraordinarily rich personality.

Such that one could almost – but no, it is still almost – love this tragic, brilliant man....

Braw

Fragmentary entries on Lars' blog about writing, about finishing his second book. A friendly flag from Patrick on Facebook about finishing his book. Both times I'm interested, impressed, glad for them, and then – envious – am I the jealous Iago, the Loki of these dramas? Or worse, am I merely someone more pathetic and dim in the background, someone who doesn't quite cut the mustard, who fills in the rest of the cast, someone who can never finish the book he's supposedly working on....

Somewhat disoriented, somewhat angry, and then somehow a kind of rebirth: the past couple of days I keep imagining, sensing other ways I could be, could think – the freedom of summer colliding with the raw crack in reality that is the stroke, a sense of starting over and hang the consequences. New selves are imagined, new responses come to mind unbidden: perhaps after the stroke my mental pathways are flimsier, more easily crossed and broken and remade, who knows. If so, that's grand, just grand – they were traps, all of them.

Thinking, wondering, I do the dishes, a bit more roughly and quickly than usual, then stagger into the shower: yes, I'm still fairly weak and my hands are shaking, I'm veering from side to side a bit, but I take my shower, wash my hair, again faster, more roughly than normal. I'm wondering if I can reinvent myself, at least a bit, at very least somewhat: or maybe even, a lot – could I be more like some imagined, stronger, more heroic self, battling my way through all this, rather than moving slowly and pathetically, too cautious, too sad to get anywhere? Could I grab this book in big, juicy chunks, could I just write the damned thing and to hell with fussing, with anxious imaginings, with wasting so much time in a pallid, vertiginous lotus-land of computer games and trivial television?

Somehow the Jungian studies of the past year are giving me a theoretical grounding for this: that such male energy has always been available, but in my daily life I ignore it too much, I fuss and control and worry, making sure everything in the apartment is neat and clean before I can do any work.... But what if I took it, or more accurately took myself, more rawly, attacked myself, wrote whole pages, whole chapters out of the energy I can sense, can almost see? Thinking of it in transformational terms, in terms of the possibilities of my Jungian analysis rather than in terms of my own history, I seem to know more deeply, to realize: the truth is, everything can be broken up and revised, renewed. I didn't break myself up in this way when I was in analysis years ago, but that's because both I and the analyst thought I'd be dead soon – it was all retrospective then, a matter of forgiveness after funerals. This could be different, and I thrill to realize that it could be possible: to break up my sense of myself, my habits – I don't need to fit whatever I do tomorrow into yesterday's pathways....

I am still shaking slightly after the shower, still finding it hard to stand and walk. But if I can hold on to, channel, some of this energy, even in the coming days while I'm recovering, slightly dizzy, slightly confused, maybe I can use it, drive forward with it, and write in chunks, write until I fall over exhausted....

And then I would be something else: and that is one of the men, the better men, that I could, possibly, be.

Luck

It occurred to me today: what if I've actually been lucky over the past decade or so? What if I've actually been moved out of harm's way?

An odd thing to imagine, of course. Especially as I've had such a long-running story about myself in terms of loss and disaster, over the past twenty-five, but especially over the past ten years – all my money and choices evaporating in Australia, ending up in this rather lonelier place far from my old friends, and with a range of added health problems.

But what if I was taken out of the way of worse, messier problems – America's financial woes and its health care crisis, worse mistakes and behaviors and disasters, bigger and more dangerous money and security traps? Other infections, other deaths, other losses, other traps?...

A strange feeling, and one that undoubtedly comes from years of reading science fiction, alternate reality fictions, etc. But one worth considering....

Clarity

I wrote a long, detailed e-mail to my department at work, explaining what happened, etc. I tend to be pretty open about medical concerns (which may be one reason I don't seem to get job interviews, who knows). Then I thought I should do the same for my family, and tried to re-use parts of the first e-mail – which is definitely the clumsy way to do it, but oh well, I'd rather talk to them on the phone anyway.

But somehow that made me think of clarity, precision... of how much we get things exactly right, and more importantly how much people are or are not paying attention to exactly what we say.... I may worry about the various e-mails and whether I said anything clearly; but then at the other end, the receiving end, everyone is busy or thinking of something else, and for heaven's sake who really reads a long e-mail in any case. Scan it and react to it, or more accurately respond to bits of it, to what you thought it said.

Because I still want to study with the Jungians – which I'm worried about now, of course; is it plausible to enter such a study program with several disparate medical concerns? – I think of this in terms of waking and dreams, consciousness and clarity, appearance and illusion. All the things we mean to say – but there are also all the shades and shadows, the screens over things, that seem to change their shapes and meanings: everything is always pregnant with time and personal history, resonant with the experiences that lie in us like sediment, many of which are dreamed or imagined, elusive fragments that grow into other shapes, other fields and forests.

It's sort of thrilling to try to be conscious of such density, of such multi-faceted variability, of all the things we really mean – but it's also a bit unnerving: to really register the density and multi-layeredness of existence, of thinking, of communication....

Of course it is also a relief, not to worry too much about any messages I send, because people may not concern themselves with every detail of those messages.

And then in another direction is thinking about: what do I understand, how do I understand it or remember it? Having had a stroke, and having recovered generally; but at the same time knowing that the stroke happened across several parts of my brain, and knowing the struggle to remember in the first few days after that crisis; am I really thinking in exactly the same way that I was before?

Which sharpens my understanding that I am never understanding or remembering in exactly the way I was on the day before, or even really the minute before: that it is all a complex, multi-layered dreamscape, changing shape and meaning, especially if you look closely at anything in it.

Sort of frightening: but also sort of wonderful – the sheer rich, changing density of what is happening to us, of what we are experiencing, all the time....

Sunny

Feeling a bit better today, less morose and apprehensive... so now I suppose I need to apologize to, and reconnect with, various people I've pushed away or ignored over the past week.

It still seems a bit difficult to reconstruct my expectations, my patterns, since the stroke... I have had some of this panic around hep C, interferon treatments, the burst appendix, etc., that is to say: a certain tragic paranoia about my health and longevity is always present, but it is usually put away in a box on an upper shelf. Then, when something entirely new and awful goes wrong, the box falls off the shelf and spills out, all over everything....

I dislike having multiple health concerns. There, I've said it.

It has been sunny, about 70%, which in this part of the world is considered balmy; people are walking around in pseudo-California wear (although their exposed bits are admittedly very pale). It looks like summer, like vacation; the nearby Italian restaurant is comfortable and relaxed, my favorite insanely handsome waiter has cut his hair exceptionally short (the look doesn't suit him, but he's good-looking enough that it doesn't really matter).

Actually, it's been sunny and warm for much of the past three weeks, unusually so for this part of the world – but of course as I had a fever, and/or was in the hospital, my sense of all that as pleasurable or attractive was fairly vague. In any case I was not as pleased about it as I am today, when everything has just a hint of that lovely California quality.

I wonder if it would be a good thing to go to Spain or Italy for a week in August? It would cheer me up; and of course my vacations in the past couple of years have tended to be cancelled or wrecked because of various illnesses, so nobody can say I don't deserve it. An interesting possibility.

I want to be back home in California, among friends... I want to live in Sydney with a boyfriend, and many mates and parties... I want to live in Sitges in an apartment near Chris, and go down to the beach to drink and eat slowly in the afternoon, shaded from the hot sun. I want an apartment in Las Ramblas, in Barcelona, from which I can wander through the little streets. I want...

Or... I want someone to share the summer with. Any summer, anywhere.

Babylon

Apparently ancient Babylon has been damaged by the war... no surprise. Yet more barbarians.

I've never been much at memorizing; the only passage I ever learned by heart was from Shelley, one quoted in Eliot's The Cocktail Party. I still remember it:

"... Ere Babylon was dust,
The magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Saw his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know, there are two worlds of life and death,
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live,
Till death unite them, and they part no more."

And, in typing it out, I realize that it means even more to me now than it did when I memorized it, nearly four decades ago....

Distance

A television commercial with rather gentle falling chord sequences on orchestral instruments, in long held notes: very like the wistful Northern California minimalism of the 1980s.

I wonder sometimes why it was so necessary for me to leave San Francisco, with no apparent way of getting back. I know why everyone died, of course – I landed in The City such a short time before AIDS began – but I remain confused about my own story: why did my first academic job take me to the other side of the planet, and then why did the Sydney disaster leave me so much poorer, with so few choices left? And here in northern England – it was kind of them to give me a job when I had been out of work for a year, especially in such a small and unimportant academic discipline where so many don't find jobs at all; but this city has never been home, not for a moment.

The shimmering, falling gentleness of certain musical phrases is so bound up with San Francisco, as it was not only characteristic of much of its music from the late seventies to the mid-nineties, but was also just right in invoking the clear air, the gentle, intelligent, idiosyncratic people, the small houses climbing the hills....

Twelve years since I lived there: and I still don't really understand what went so wrong, that I can't seem to find my way back.

Better

With cooler weather, I'm feeling a bit more normal: not energetic, but not as drained, disoriented, worried, as I've been for much of the last week.

There may be a slightly embarrassing unpredictability about my more volatile reactions which may be slightly out of my control... I do wonder if the stroke has had any effect on my emotions. If so, I assume it's temporary.

I will admit, although I keep emphasizing (rather aggressively) that the main remaining symptom is a blind patch in my eyesight (apparently I'm no longer allowed to drive unless it clears up? – but then I haven't owned a car since 1992), that I'm still struggling with proper names, phone numbers, and the like – essentially, more recently learned information. I keep hesitating with people's names – but when I guess, I'm always right, at least so far; it's just that all those names and numbers look unfamiliar in a strange way, as though they might just as well be something else.

I had an interesting time remembering passwords and such at the end of last week... I wonder if an aging computer-oriented population will lead to some unusual strategies?...

It's also irritating to handle minor treatment problems. (Why in the world do so many British-made medicines include lactose? Because only foreigners are allergic to it?...)

But I suppose I can fit another set of habits, needs, and mild annoyances into the ones I already go through for the illnesses to which I'm already heir....

Well, as you can see: I am still a bit grumpy. I suppose they call that continuity.