in the hall of mirrors

Writing and hearing

Working on a presentation about Derek Jarman's last films, for Wednesday. After much procrastination, aided by the calm, dull backwaters of the Easter holiday. 

And, amid brief frustrations as to exact dates, processes unrecorded, I realize I am enjoying myself: while making dinner in the kitchen, I say aloud to no one: But this is fun.

Strange, too, because my work on AIDS artworks often seems exhaustingly sad; but once I break through the resistance to the dark past, there is such vivid life in the emotions, in the art works. And probably the innate pleasure of making, which I forget most days.

But now I must also get ready for tomorrow morning's lecture; since I already know what I need to talk about, this consists of just re-hearing my class CD of examples. And I discover that they are, also, enjoyable (especially Jody Diamond's In That Bright World for voices and gamelan, always a huge favorite of mine; but they all seem interesting).

Which suggests that my boredom with my own work, my resistance to starting, has nothing to do with the pleasure of actually doing it...

Ah, the complexes and irrational patterns of one's own weaknesses.

Spring

And finally, here it is, what we've been waiting for. Nearly a week after Easter (and apparently this year Roman Easter and Greek Easter were the same day, which is in itself a fairly weird result of changing calendars and seasons).

A young father, slightly anxious-looking but in a light t-shirt, walks with a child on a plastic tricycle behind my house; the child falls and he stops, helps, wipes off a hand. In front of the house a car stops to pick up someone, radio blaring – oh well, not all the flashes of outdoor behavior are pleasant; I wonder if there is a generation coming, perhaps in fifty years, that isn't as fascinated with loud musics as are most people who grew up since the mid-60s. The radio is turned down after a few minutes, there is laughter, a car door slamming. I'm getting ready to go out, to meet Michael and Andrew in town, and meanwhile bringing the computer, to sit in a café and continue working.

There have been flashes of good weather, increasing during the week – Bennett and I went to the large garden store up in Northumberland the other day, and it seemed almost warm and sunny at the beginning of the trip, then chill and gray by its end. Then yesterday when I planted my bought herbs, it was pleasant in the morning, miserable in the evening.

But today the sun seems pretty solid, fairly well established in its presence... there is rain predicted later, but the look of things seems serenely springlike. Perhaps it's time to do just one more planter – there are now four planters of baby herbs, but I haven't done the seeds; although I clearly need more compost/dirt, and unfortunately my tiny strip of garden doesn't really have any extra soil I can use. (A shame that my otherwise very helpful/pleasant landlord decided to turn the whole thing into a deck eight years ago.)

And I did some work on the book on Gerhard yesterday; there will be more done today... this is really so easy, it's ridiculous that I didn't finish it a decade or more ago. And that would be a great burden shifted: it would mean that practically all research, all projects, that involved someone else's career would be gone – and I wouldn't take up any more: I am too flaky in my writing to have other people depend on me, and don't want it to happen again.

Possibilities seem generally easier, futures seem lighter and more casually bright. As noted in the Jungian literature, breaking through old problems, old complexes, isn't often about grand fights with horrible creatures, although one always anticipates and dreams that they will be. It is more often about things that used to seem impossible, or awful, or miserable, fading into relative unimportance over time and through change; they become either manageable or they simply stop mattering. Even better, it is about chunks of complexes that seemed knotted all in one great, terrible 'deathstar' of unhappiness or tension disintegrating into little pieces of things, each of which are easily handled. It is a bit like legends of dangerous beasts that come apart into smaller, more easily squashed creatures; and you wonder why you wasted years, decades, worrying about mere gnats, small pests that can be ignored or overcome without difficulty.

And sometimes the changes in seasons help, too....

Cornell

[By which I don't mean the upstate New York university, where my nephew – hi, Ben, how are you? – is finishing his freshman year....

Which brings us to a peripheral tale, before I even get into the point of this blog entry: I told my sister, and have joked to several friends (sorry, Ben) that, despite Cornell University's unhappy reputation as a place where geographic isolation and long, dark winters have established a notoriously almost Scandinavian suicide rate among the students, Ben won't have any problems – he's fascinated by sports, especially winter sports (a snow bunny, as we used to call them); besides, he'll be ecstatic to have a room he shares with only one other person – he has spent his entire life as a New York upper-west-side mouse, sleeping on a bunk bed in the living room where my sister and her husband live and work in close proximity. So he'll probably be the only Cornell freshman this year who is actually in a good mood because of his surroundings.

But this isn't about Ben, or that same university where the brilliant Judith P. teaches, this is about...]

Joseph Cornell.

Today Michelle and her husband took me to the big Tyneside swap meet, then to a pseudo-Edwardian tea shop for lunch (pleasant but almost maniacally fussy, if you were paying attention – there were handwritten instructions everywhere, evidence that someone had a lot of suppressed rage at the uncontrollable sloppiness of all those damned customers); then ending in one of the used bookshops where Michelle's husband John has old and friendly/professional connections. We had tea, gossiped, looked through shelves, and John told us all about the recent launch of a new translation of a 1920s work of German decadence by his small publishing firm.

Meanwhile, I found a large Thames & Hudson book from 2003 on Cornell, with many beautiful photographs. It was a little pricey – £25 – but in excellent shape, and when asked for advice Michelle agreed that they were excellent reproductions. (And Michelle would know – like my sister, she has had a long and energetic career at the crossroads for a vast array of visual art projects.)

I've always been, in a way, potentially interested in Cornell. If you've ever read William Gibson's Count Zero (1986, the second of his excellent Neuromancer trilogy), you will remember Marly – the young New York art dealer whose reputation and gallery have been ruined by her predatory boyfriend and his forgeries; at the start of the novel she is hired by an unknown patron to discover where a stream of beautiful, mysterious collage boxes are coming from, and who is the artist making them. The boxes are clearly based on Cornell's work; Gibson's descriptions of them are extraordinary – we see things through Marly's eyes, and she is a sensitive and intelligent art lover. She sees such depth and redemption in these small boxes – a sense of time, of loss and of forgiveness – Gibson writes about it so beautifully that you want to go away and live with these small collages.

It's a bit like the way that Rita sees the beautiful small, stolen Cézanne in Paul Monette's The Gold Diggers (1979) – his second novel, long before he wrote the AIDS poems and memoirs that made him famous in the late 1980s; the incredible depth of her response to a tiny painting was both ecstatic and instructive, especially for me, who am a bit of a dunderhead when it comes to visual art. (I count myself fortunate that friends who love art, like Michelle and my sister, usually forgive my passion for art nouveau.)

And since I am a bit of a dunderhead about anything visual (hey, there's a word you don't see in print often, and here you've got it twice – are you appropriately grateful?), I feel as though I still don't really get Cornell, but I have always wanted to. The hope was that this book, with large, clear reproductions of many works (and lots of writing – a bit heavy-handed, but you know how art critics can get; they have to justify hugely expensive works as transcendentally worthwhile, so they tend to overwrite even more than music critics) would help me have a bit more insight into what's going on here...

It's a start, anyway. I begin to get a sense of the resonance of history involved, the way small objects that once mattered to someone long dead have been rearranged so that their memory trails are illuminated... I'm sure that Bennett, who has a surer eye and deeper interest in people like Man Ray and other Surrealists, would have something to say about it (he and Merrie are out of town for Easter, but perhaps I'll show him the book when they get back).

And speak of memory... there is a Voyager CD-ROM in the back flap of the Cornell book. You may remember Voyager – in the 1980s and 1990s they tried to create a number of art- and music-oriented CD-ROMs; the medium basically died because, as someone said, "what's the good of a dead website?". I still have their Laurie Anderson CD-ROM, though I doubt I could find any computer that has the software to play it. Those CD-ROMs were a part of my life, too, at one point – my friend the energetic composer Cynthia Woll (she must still be in the LA area?) was working with Warner New Media, which hoped to give Voyager a run for their money.

I wrote five or six full texts for music CD-ROMs for WNM in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before they tanked. And they tanked for such a peculiar, nonsensical reason – the head of the division was great at getting projects started (Cynthia had the materials for forty or fifty discs waiting at the end), but terrible at finishing them, so that only two or three discs ever appeared. You may have seen the discs they did manage to get out the door – Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was the only one where I'd contributed that reached the public. It was remarkable to be attached to the entertainment industry through an arts angle: at a time when money had been gouged out of all the arts in America (I managed several dance companies in their closing days, as theaters vanished and government funding was taken away under Reagan and Bush), Warner, up until it finally collapsed, had enough money to run forty small theaters, twenty dance companies, a host of bars where there was a piano and a lineup of singers... certainly the best money I ever earned for professional work. In fact, we were paid the kind of fees that writers and artists should get, but rarely do.

I even remember the emotional collapse of the CD-ROM genre for me – it was my own response to pressure, I suppose: having to write screen texts designed to appear every 10-20 seconds for a recording of Wagner overtures. The problem was that Wagner is incredibly repetitive, and also incredibly manipulative: to come up with coherent things to say during the endless climbing and falling of the Tannhäuser overture drove me half mad – I remember wandering the streets of West Hollywood at 3 am, unable to go home and face that impossibly demanding computer screen, that lush, twisty, irrationally demanding music. That was the time when I went, in fact, from loving Wagner to being disturbed by him: that awareness of how controlling his music is stayed with me, making me permanently distrustful of it and its association.

And so I've come up with my own memory box, filled with tiny, disparate scraps of the past, with memories of strong feelings, with images of people I haven't seen in twenty years, with remembered loves and fears and losses... perhaps I can understand Cornell's work, after all.

Making

A tutorial with a smart but thus far undisciplined masters student, where I was quite definite about the draft paper he'd sent me – I thought it was chaotic and touched on an unmanageable array of topics, and said so. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind, and went home to rewrite the whole thing (not a stressful prospect for him – he may be scattered but he is highly productive, more than I was at his age, or in fact ever).

Much like O., another smart masters student, he is (or has been) a composer, also – so that the entire network of questions around creativity, freedom, and what all this work is about becomes important, but also harder to answer. Is writing a critical paper like creating a work of art? – well, yes and no: although admittedly my own writings have been very speculative, in bizarre forms or containing peculiar material not common in scholarly rhetoric, I do hope that I have tried to focus on material that has some meaningful relation to the subjects at hand, that helps and interests a reader rather than merely indulging a writer. But it does make me wonder if I'm being too hard on my more creative, although admittedly sloppier, students....

At one time I was enchanted by the idea of making: making music, making compositions, making writing, poems, stories. Great operas, novels, art. Creating things that would somehow... well, I don't know just what they were all supposed to do; but they would do it with fantastic power.

Then I discovered I wasn't much of a composer: a handful of small works, a few worth hearing, and no prospect of developing the talent or ability to write anything much larger. I was better at poems and stories, but still not good enough to have a creative career; and I abandoned those fields, content to have done a few pleasant things in them, and comfortable that I would never be a great conqueror of materials and visions – that I would never really be a maker.

My recent interest in becoming an analyst is somehow linked to all of this: I don't want to worry about things that have been made, not any more – not by me, and not much by other people. I want to go back to the people themselves, and their existences, thoughts, dreams – these things seem more real, more important, more alive than the things that are made. Because made things, though they may have incredible life in the process of being made, quickly become merely records of experiences: we may have experiences when we re-play them, but in themselves they are memories, echoes, not realities.

Or at least that's how I feel at this point in my life. I hope that I'm not just being hard on that creative instinct – the one that also drove Michael, the one that drives many of my colleagues – in order to justify my own abandonment of the field....

Through the gate

The last section of Ravel's Ma mére l'oye (Mother Goose – it is also at the end of the suite) is 'Le jardin féerique', the fairy garden.

This finale is built on strange, quasi-archaic contrapuntal lines, which have a sort of hieratic grandeur in the way they don't match neatly. About halfway through, everything evaporates up into little, high sounds that gradually fan out and down, filling the orchestral range again; and then the saddest, loveliest passage goes by – the treble falling and the bass rising; then the whole builds to a big, noisy conclusion.

Before that last trite cadence, those two lines crossing against each other: they have the sense of a vast door opening into another world... I have a piano transcription of the suite, and playing those bars in the middle of the last page of the score is always an incredibly mysterious, beautiful experience.

As though something incredible is waiting for us, just on the other side of – ...