in the hall of mirrors

Madness

A day of catching up, cleaning up, getting things done... toward evening, rather than getting back to my research or writing (sorry about that), I read the beginning of Lydia Salvyre's The Lecture, and then saw – unexpectedly – the last episode of season one of the television show Dollhouse.

The Lecture is funny, bizarre, ridiculous; an inept minor functionary giving the most clueless and ludicrously self-revealing presentation imaginable. Although thorough-going satire, it really is amusing and not terribly unpleasant – it doesn't take the nasty digs at existence, etc. that much modernist humor often does. Of course he's clearly a bit off-base, not completely coherent or in control. (And clearly it compares rather closely with Chekhov's monologue play, the one about birds where he talks about his wife – in fact the Chekhov might have been her model.)

But that last episode of Dollhouse – the infamous 'Epitaph One' – was arresting, appallingly realistic, vertigo-inducing, and so nightmarish as to now be keeping me awake. Because normally, in the broad world of the speculative arts – science fiction stories, novels, television, movies, even comics – when you have some sort of dystopia, some version of the world gone completely mad, you start there, or at least you lead into it fairly quickly, and we know that's what it's going to be about. And we treat it as sort of a parable, because that is easier psychologically....

But to start with twelve episodes (and yes, it's true, they should have used the original pilot – it makes much more sense than what Fox forced them to use) of personal relationships, close-knit problems, and a world where things are getting subtly, and a teeny bit, dangerous, just at the edges – and then to jump to an awful, apocalyptic extrapolation/result of that same context, one where everyone's minds have been blown to bits and existence has become almost impossible – is really rather frightening... and gives the feeling of being much too, almost unpleasantly much too, real.

As if this world, the world we actually live in now – the world where I go to the corner shop (not just a shop, or some set that resembles a typical shop, but the one I actually use), the world where I talked to my neighbor today, the world where I pay rent and walk down the street and e-mail my sister – as if this one could tilt over into disaster, madness, apocalypse....

Disturbing. But impressive.

And yes, I can see the slight, very slight, metaphorical resemblance to recent events in my own life.

It seems to be slightly difficult to get to sleep....

Dying / not-dying

Feeling well today. Then feeling very tired, so went and laid down. Then well again.

And talking to Alfred, who has more success and fame than I ever will, and who is thirteen years older. After having been treated yesterday by Jambo, my acupuncturist, who is twenty-eight, full of life and presence and direction. I feel somehow bracketed.

I've spoken before of my bad habit, over the past twenty years, of expecting to be dead soon – of AIDS, of course, if not just generally... – but there is also my bad habit of having always-already given up on myself, of thinking of myself as older and more hopeless and resigned than I am, than I need to be. Alfred, for instance, is unavoidably and almost even annoyingly sturdier and more optimistic, more youthful, than I am... I actually allow myself to be, no, I make myself into an old man.

My dream several days ago was of a big, dark music conservatory, a place where I was a serious student of the clarinet, where it was raining. A serious, respectable dream, I thought at first. But John, my analyst, pointed out that, although the dream is very respectable and not shameful or unhappy, it is in its way pretty bleak – just as my current work, my research, my teaching duties, are all things I don't much enjoy, just things I feel obliged to slog away at. Indeed, as an analyst, he is quite different than Mitch was – if Mitch encouraged me in grimly facing the worst (appropriate in those years of short lifetime expectations), John wants to know why I'm not enjoying my life more. It's an annoying question, and I really can't answer it – at least I can't answer it and still sound intelligent, in charge, in control.

An obvious problem – one that I'm seeing for what is not entirely the first time, although John insisted that I look at it a lot more than I have, more than I am comfortable doing – is my fatal, miserable willingness to be older than I am, more hopeless, with less to do, less before me, less hope. And, of course, why would I have hope, if all my tasks and work seem so mundane, if everything I set myself to do is essentially so boring? Even in these pleasant summer days, warmer than usual at these latitudes, I fret, I look backwards, I sigh at my usual despair and diffuse, uncaring use of the hours of the day. Frankly, who would want another twenty or thirty years of that?

I was reading Edmund White on various older writers and artists (Art and Letters), and it's true that many of them seem younger, more hopeful, than I am. A few are admittedly more hopeless... but those are the ones we know were seriously messed up (Bowles, Genet, Kafka, etc.). I'm neither of those – neither really deranged (okay, that is good, right?) nor particularly optimistic....

So, I can look at: my dreams. My thoughts. Me: and the limitations of my not very successful life, now dwindled to that of an academic living alone in a small foreign city. But, when viewed from outside, it seems so – well, silly: that I would turn those limitations into a good reason to truly, seriously give up, to cut off my hopes and stop living.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to be a person who is not dying; or even, and this seems to be what John, and Jambo, want me to be, one who is, at least more thoroughly, living....

What Happened

I should probably try to put down the details of the stroke, before I lose track of them completely... they are in any case fragments, as I don't remember everything, and it was all fairly disjunct, bizarre, surreal... and unfortunately now some time ago.

Thursday night, June 18, 2009 – just about a day after the final meeting of the semester, I had gone to the third of four concerts of modernist music with Bethany, David, Richard & Felicity, and also Alfred, who's been visiting town this summer (I think they were all there that night). I had sat around at Alfred's afterwards, talking about things in general – the concert and hall, how hard it was to find his summer sublet, what to do another year to get a better and less expensive one, what our plans were for the summer, etc.

A taxi home: and suddenly, around midnight, I was very ill. I thought it was flu – maybe even swine flu: and then over four days of odd symptoms, some of which were flu-like and some of which weren't (there was a fever to about 103 degrees at its peak). On Saturday I actually phoned the NHS Swine Flu helpline, but they said I had only two of the symptoms, so it was probably regular flu. I did notice that the symptoms kept changing, in a rather weird and unfamiliar way, every day or so – I've forgotten most of them but it was all very strange.

I'd already told my dear Cathy, who was visiting from the south, that I was too sick for her to stay over for a night, so she had stayed with a friend. But she asked to drop by on Sunday, and I was feeling fairly well – so she came and sat and chatted in the afternoon; I told her about Derek Jarman's films, which I'd been watching to write about them. I was talking a mile a minute – I tend to feel that, especially in the past year or so, I am sometimes a bit manically chatty to friends, especially when I've been alone at home too much. (Yes, of course, I talk too much anyway – but I suspect I'm going to age into a garrulous, lonely old man, rattling on about lord knows what to people who could care less... ah well.)

And in the middle of this, as we talked, I suddenly lost it completely: I became dizzy and sick in approximately the way I had been on Thursday night, but much worse – very, very weak, I stopped her answering something I'd said, told her I needed her to help me to the bathroom – where I proceeded to throw up everything I'd eaten that day, and could barely hold myself up over the toilet.

Fortunately, Cathy is caring and very tough-minded; she was a bit shocked of course, but immediately wanted to make sure I was all right. At this point it was very hard to move: I sort of wiped off the toilet, very slowly but with all the determination of the fanatically clean (which I am, even in extremis). And she helped me stumble, literally, back to my bed – I'd burst into a major sweat, so she found replacement clothes, turned off the television and everything in the living room, and came and sat with me, just holding my hand for a while. I was fairly mystified, but far too confused, exhausted and shocked to think about anything in depth; and finally told her I would be all right, that I would just sleep.

All very strange; but it still seemed like some strong flu – a bit weird, but still a contracted infection of some kind.

Late Sunday night, I was still tired and weak but not completely incapable, and so had wandered around and eaten something, washed up a bit, etc. And was brushing my teeth, again around midnight – when my vision abruptly split and turned at about a sixty-degree angle: two views of the bathroom mirror, adjacent and unmerged, at a grotesque funhouse angle. And I thought: all right, this can't be good. I finished with my teeth, carefully put the toothbrush down by feel, and felt my way step by step back to bed; and slept, until at least midday.

On Monday I was exhausted, confused, and wondering what was wrong; but my vision was fairly normal, no longer split in half like a piece of 1920s cubism. By midafternoon I thought I should call the clinic and maybe even go to the hospital: while looking at my cel phone and its list of names and numbers, I realized that I didn't recognize most of them....

After an hour or two of stumbling around,  confused and tired but realizing I seriously needed to get some help, I thought that Melinda's name looked familiar – not her last name, which seemed incomprehensible and alien, but her first name, and fortunately there's only one Melinda in my phone. She is the clinical psychologist who watches over our HIV patient group; and I was fairly – yes, only fairly – sure that it was her.

I phoned her office, around 4 pm on a Monday, sure that if I didn't get through very soon I would miss everyone for the day – I still don't know how I got past her secretary, but I must have sounded very, very earnest indeed. And Melinda asked me a few questions, trying to figure out what was wrong... but at about the second one, I couldn't quite understand what she was saying, and said so.

At this point she decided: okay, hospital, now. Lucky for me.

I got a taxi to the HIV ward, where the young doctor keeping track of things – a nice guy, friendly and jokey, but someone I'd never met before – was dubious that I needed to be there – until he started asking me the basics: my name, my address... some information was available to me, but some simply wasn't, and I was having trouble putting ideas together. Names were largely gone, making coherent sentences was difficult, and everything seemed confusing.

This incoherence lasted about a day and a half, and was of course pretty frightening – although I was hugely relieved to abandon responsibility to other people, and sleep. That is, ultimately, the blessing of nurses, isn't it? That sense that someone else will make the decisions....

On Tuesday I had an MRI; that is the brain scan where they basically put your head in a vise, and for half an hour a machine bangs and clangs and jerks, with you in it. A remarkably stressful test – afterwards (I noticed they waited to tell me this) the nurse mentioned that some people would start screaming or get upset, and they couldn't keep them in there. I was all right with it, although by the twenty-minute mark or so I had definitely tensed up, thinking: okay, this really, really needs to end, and soon.

Then came the results: you've had a stroke, we think it's a side effect of one of your HIV medications, you seem to be recovering – there were small clots across a number of areas of the brain, but almost all of them seemed to be clearing away. There were traces of dead brain cells here and there, but no really big patches (thank goodness brain structure includes so much internal duplication).

And then ten days in the hospital... after only a day or so I had recovered my spirits and energy, with a vengeance; when people from the department dropped by – plus Patrick, looking big and worried, who brought me a little stuffed version of Shaun the Sheep – I was talkative again, almost maniacally so. I told jokes, stories, retailed the whole list of weird symptoms. I could see my colleagues were visibly relieved that I was recovering, although I believe Felicity managed to figure out that I couldn't remember some of their names offhand. At one point while I was telling The Whole Saga to Bennett and Merrie, I realized they were looking at me with a slightly disgruntled amusement – and as much as I know my friends care about me, I was suddenly sure that they were both thinking: so, didn't this slow him down at all?

It was a few days later when I got considerably more tired; and a bit frightened, and intermittently tearful – apparently this is normal with strokes, where brain function, emotions and exhaustion become weirdly erratic. As it was explained to me, it's sort of like a system crash (and what did we do before computer metaphors?).

I got home after about ten days; I was increasingly depressed and worried for a week or two, then I started to rebound, unfortunately after pushing away everyone who had been visiting (I think I confused them a bit; nobody could quite understand the chaotic changes of the post-stroke brain, which doesn't work like a recovery from a normal infection). A patch of vision was lost: I now have a blind spot on the upper right, in both eyes – because it's not in the eyes themselves of course, but in the brain. I now can't legally drive – but that sight may return in the next few months; and in any case I haven't owned a car since 1992. And I've still been a bit confused over proper names, especially those I first learned in the past five or ten years – whenever I guess I am always right, but the name itself seems, well, vaguely unfamiliar.

But that seems to be all – which is very, very lucky, indeed. After years of worrying about exhaustion and death, it is entirely and unpleasantly new to worry about becoming incoherent or incapable – I don't much like it; and all of the post-stroke pamphlets start with sentences like, When this happens again... but they think that, in my case, a change in medication should lower the probability of it happening for many years. I am properly grateful, of course – none of my relatives have had such a thing before their late seventies; and I'm still assuming I'll be gone by then anyway (current life expectancy for someone my age who has survived this long with HIV, on stable medications and with good test results, is somewhere in one's later sixties).

I wonder what the prospects are for uploading brains into computers these days?....

If I remember more details – yes, I know, you've probably heard enough by now – I'll come back to the subject.

Meanwhile: a round of cheers for the heroic Cathy, the quick-thinking Melinda, the lovely and intelligent nurses of Ward 25 (including the very cute young guy in the blue short sleeves), the various doctors – all my friends who visited me in the hospital, and the ones who sent cards – and, of course, my good Paddy; and, above all, Shaun the Sheep....

Alternative histories

Last night's dream: a music conservatory, walking between buildings in rainy autumn weather – I am a student working on my technique, talking with others – serious, committed and reasonable, as I never actually was in school... a surprisingly detailed, and strange, setting. Like another life, one that might have happened.

Today I was working, yet again, on the film scores chapter of my book on music and AIDS. The Velocity of Gary, a surprisingly inept but colorful translation of a play to the screen, which involved a number of fairly famous actors – a fragmented (and sometimes quite striking) view of a scruffy street life in downtown New York, chaotically strewn with hustlers and drag queens. Another possible life, filled with passion and despair.

Although I frequently (and while, unfortunately, whining too much) imagine various aspects of my life having gone differently, it is strange to imagine really huge dislocations: what if everything were different – what if I'd gone off on a sharp angle at some early stage, such that not a soul I've known would be a part of my life, not a cityscape I've loved would have been a setting for me, nor any of my smaller goals or experiences or homes... what then? What if I were entirely unrecognizable to myself?

It is amazing to think of – and not entirely improbable: more than most, I have blundered through my life, through many places and situations, without a clear sense of where I was going or how to get there. A few sharp turns, no sharper than the turns that I have actually made, could have landed me in vastly different settings, in worlds that would be utterly other.

I can't help wondering: and – would that have been better?....