in the hall of mirrors

Damaged house

The middle of the night. Jung on Nietzsche, speaking of the problem of creativity and how one falls into inflation – as soon as you look back at what you've done with pompous satisfaction – I am the one who did that! – and so the creative moment dies and you fall into a false self.

Especially so familiar as the entire balance between what I've been for decades, between creativity and being versus looking back on creativity or being, is so heavily tilted toward the latter: as I'm such a tiresome case of someone who has been briefly touched at moments by fire, then has spent years after thinking about it. No wonder I am so angry at others who seem to be doing things wrong, so despairing at the point of doing anything at all.

It is like living in the house of myself: but there have been so many storms, such wreckage – the place is so damaged, so ruined; it is ridiculous to spend time picking things up and wiping them off, as walls creak and corners rot, windows crack, wind and rain blow through the hallway. Like dusting a table in a hurricane, trying to ignore the impossibility of ever fixing the crumbling, rotting, rusting mess of it.

I would be so happy to simply open the door and walk out – in some sort of Zen abnegation: but I don't know what to walk out into, and I remain so tied to myself, so unwilling to have the sheer guts to walk into nothing. Even though I can see what is here, I'm not fooled: I can see that there's nothing at all here that I really need, or care about – the collected detritus of what I have been for more than fifty years is not even worth dragging down to a charity shop, it should just be left behind.

But I can't just walk out the door, I don't know how –

Mind / body / split

Body first, as I've been yammering about it so endlessly for several months: got up to wash the dishes and take a shower before bed; but was shaking with exhaustion after finishing the dishes (there weren't many of them either) so came back to couch; about fifteen minutes before I could sort of function, even lying down.

But, on the other hand, mind: very clear-headed the past few days – was earlier jogging through an abstract, rewriting it, assertively; reading a bit of Ashbery; and added a stanza of Bacharach parody to Merrie's on Facebook.

Okay, so: what's going on here? I don't get it...

oh well. More couch time I guess.

Abandon

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....

Erasure / release

I have a large, well-organized personal library.

[Pause and drum roll.]

Many academics and intellectuals do so, of course, but I am a Collector – certainly in my department I have the largest and most strictly organized library, both in my office and at home, of books, CDs, DVDs, videotapes, LPS, and other media (although Bennett has some collectors' books that are out of my league – I've always gone for functional rather than collectible; like Vanessa when she was more fragile in her last years, I don't like resting heavy hardbacks on my stomach while lying in bed).

The gentle, cheerful Fred Hammond, organist and Frescobaldi specialist, had me as an (erratic and frankly semi-incompetent) research bibliographer when I was a student in the late 1980s at UCLA. I once heard him tell another professor, you know Paul's got a book collection nearly as big as mine – it's a bit worrying....

I've been proud of it, pleased with it, have found it useful, blah blah blah etc. (Yes, okay, I have basically identified with it, as a treasury/representation of my own self-image and life intentions – probably from about the age of thirteen until, oh, say, early this century. And in some ways, until... well, until now, or some time in the distant future. And I have stressed out various friends, moving companies, landlords and office managers with my massive moving/packing/shelving demands; ask my beloved friend the poet Trisha Harper, who saved me in San Francisco in the mid-90s by striding through the door and taking over the packing when I was disintegrating in frantic uncertainty.)

But over the years, when I am in worse health, or when I start to move things around, or when I consider finishing that damned will I've semi-drafted several times, I realize that at the very least it is time to get rid of certain things – the LPs, cassettes, and various minidiscs, most of the videotapes, both of the LDs (!) and the LD/DVD player (for something newer of course, that doesn't give off those annoying clicks).

Having bought a new television, I look at the complex system of nine large components that face me on their intimidatingly formal black metal six-by-four-foot rack, demanding to be reconnected through the now-ancient tuner (it's got tubes, I'm not kidding!). The system was fine a decade ago, but now – well, things move fast, life changes, the world and its technology changes, and frankly I haven't touched any of my antique media for years, it seems.

(And having written that, I realize it's oblique code that admits: and I have changed, far too much to drag all this around with me.)

But where should it all go?... all right, some things can simply be thrown away – but such care was lavished on these objects, and they are in such good condition (I say with a defensive pride I've had for many years). Libraries? For a few things, perhaps – no old media though (they won't want them), and my university's library doesn't have vast space available. Students, ideally? – special ones maybe, who would be interested; but those will be rare I think.

So I write notes and try to plan and see what can be got rid of first, what should just go to the trash –

Because life might be a bit lighter; and because some weightlessness would be good, I think.

I'm never going to be someone who could walk barefoot through the desert, or move to a small, quiet room with just a few things in it (though if the latter were forced on me without me having to make decisions myself, it might not be unpleasant).

But, at least, there needs to be – some lightening of the burden....

The dull world

So: the news from the doctor – the medication doesn't seem to be doing much; a final decision in another month or so, but probably this was all useless. Which was kind of expected anyway.

Annoyingly, since early December, and more so since Christmas Day (which was, itself, fun, at Michael and Andrew's), I am more trivially but sourly, tiredly, ill; the chain of colds and flus that everyone seems to be having (but I seem to be having more, rather than less, than usual); the unpleasant aspect of food, the tiredness of getting up... the sensate world seems dull and tarnished, a smeared mirror that won't wipe clear. I've thrown out several meals when they were cooked, because they smelled suspicious – which may well be just my distorted senses: I know I ate one bad meal last week, but in general many food smells seem unattractive at the moment. I try to come up with something to eat each time I am supposed to take pills... such a lot of food in the house, you'd think it would be easy; but nothing seems quite right.

Yesterday, after I'd thrown out a pizza on the day after it was ordered, and some tired vegetables, Katya, the Bulgarian woman who cleans for me (and who has tended to become quite protective of me) brought some pieces of cheese pita – she didn't call it that of course (that's the Greek name for it) but I can't remember the Bulgarian name she used. (These foods cross a number of countries – the truth is, in the wake of thousands of years of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Muslim/Christian/Balkan/Slavic/Greek wrangling, it's impossible to disentangle the origins of foods, or of musics.) It was kind of her, and very well-timed – I heated it in the oven for a few minutes, and enjoyed it; it felt comforting and quite safe, compared to some of the weird and toxic auras that food around me seems to have developed.

Of course a part of all this is the fact that I've taken the medication without the usual required antidepressants – which actually kind of upset the HCV doctor, he looked surprisingly concerned when we informed him of that decision. But I've managed, and I prefer it – it's actually worse to have that wrapped-in-cotton feeling.

Apparently an unnecessary addition, after all the coughing and tiredness and weight loss, is some sort of bacterial infection – upper respiratory? – something opportune that popped up between viruses. This week it has given me even more, dryness, coughing, and a sour taste that won't go away no matter what tooth-brushing I do, no matter how much fresh water or juice I drink. Clearly an antibiotic is the answer – hopefully not one with yet more digestive side effects; or would I care? – but I missed going to the doctor today, and apparently they no longer hold weekend hours; and this certainly isn't worth an emergency room, so I'll go on Monday morning before class.

So: dull, the sensate world full of sour, metallic tastes and smells, and that oddly torn muscle in my right hand....

I have been re-reading, for the umpteenth time, Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth, the first two books of five – and I've moved from the malice, fairy-tale joys and tragedies of the first book to the more intricately grand tragicomedy of the second, where Death faces down those who have stolen the draught of immortality. The bitter ironies of this part of the tale suit my mood – once Simmu has valiantly made himself into a hero and stolen the dull, gray liquid of immortality, he drinks, and he and all the many grand and brilliant people he has gathered around him drink; but they are merely human, and ill-suited to immortality, so that their energy, their purpose, drains away. They become dull, bored in a gloriously silver city at the end of the world, where they can do anything... but care less and less about doing anything. They become dolls where the clockwork has stopped....

A cruel tragedy, and one that is brilliantly told, with satire and sensuality leading to a dark sense of what a 'dead end' feels like.

Although of course that battle between lives and Death has nothing (or little?) to do with these trivial illnesses, the tone resonates... the sense, in this strange winter of bad weather and dying birds and fishes, that misery is not grandiose: it is just, well –

a bit miserable.