The shot again tonight. And the doctor phoned to say the medication is having some effect – so now I don't know what will happen, what decisions will be made in February; but oh well.
The past two or three weeks remarkable for the sharpening, the intensification, of side effects: no, they're still not awful (as I've said, nothing like as bad as people with chemotherapy); but overwhelming, sufficient to keep me home.
Walking up and down the back staircase (one story only) twice, to take out the trash, leaves me so tired I have to lie down – strange; as walking around on the level doesn't seem that difficult. And the seemingly endless coughing.
Fortunate that January is always a lighter month for us, and this January an especially light one for me – although there are important administrative demands going the rounds. But I can't really focus on them – the past week or so I am so exhausted I just give up, abandon myself to the couch, like some febrile, tubercular nineteenth-century poet in a garret. This will be problematic, as some decisions must be made....
And remembering a few more dreams, long ones that seem to dredge up elements that cross over decades. I've had a number of dreams that include material opposing creativity and academic work – or, in my case, my younger self and its hopes, versus my older working world (where I encourage young people, rather pathetically, to do things I don't feel I can do myself any more).
Like the one in a large library the other night, a vast Denkmäler collection that includes a strange turn-of-the-century drafted opera on death and war – comments on my self-destructive focus on death, a fight with an anima figure, my long identification/obsession with books are all in there – but saddest for me are the aspects suggested by this prospectus for a stage work: because these were the kinds of things I wrote up with such excitement in my teens and early twenties, and they were even (embarrassingly) the kinds of things I brought to the Princeton interview, when they decided I wasn't worth accepting. (And they are not, of course, the kind of thing anyone bothers to publish in Denkmäler.)
Scenarios, ideas, fragments: the kinds of things film people still draw up (and those of us in the other arts look at them in amazement and say, is this all you wrote? Where's the craft, the Fortspinning, the working out?). When I'm baffled by my analyst's demands that I do something creative, this is what I'm fighting with – that I don't remember how to imagine things (the part of me that had ideas seems silent after many years); and that I can't believe that I, or anybody else, would care if I were to sketch out more such ideas, scenarios. Craftless fragments.
A strange conflict or limitation: but it is good to have such a strong light shown on it – perhaps a way through will become evident, a chink in the wall.
Meanwhile, I lose myself in almost drunken, sensual inability to move after the shot: once I let the side effects take over, and stop fighting with them, it is such relief....
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