in the hall of mirrors

City, city!

A trip to London: good – the weather was unusually pleasant, I saw wonderful people (Chris, Alfred, Sophie), hung around in bookstores and bought books.

Not so good: the usual – transportation (waiting half an hour for an underground train that never came because practically the entire line is cancelled on weekends – London is frantically, and rather late of course, trying to clean things up for the damned Olympics), crowds of tourists, the huge and incomprehensible directions in stations.

Weirdly enough I think it may be three and a half years (is that possible?) since I’ve been down to London. Visiting the biggest cities has become too unpleasant to bother (all right, except for Berlin, which is so well-run and inexpensive these days – a shame they can’t fix the weather, isn’t it).

Oh, and another thing to add to the not-so-good list: I think that any room with a shared bath, especially in large cities, is moving to my ‘unacceptable’ list. Life is too short, frankly. (And why is the wifi in this inexpensive hotel so poor and undependable? – I know, the answer is in that first adjective, isn’t it.)

So: a possibly too virtual trip, with books and reading taking up more than half the time (which could, at least theoretically, be done anywhere – though of course used bookstores around Russell Square are a greater pleasure than those at home, or most places for that matter). I wonder if this is where travel, at least of certain types, will eventually go? – if we all get mesmerized by dancing images on screens (and I’m among the worst for doing that – another reason it is becoming almost a demonstration of my survival instinct to want to move to a warmer climate, where I will get out more), then perhaps actually going places will seem less and less worthwhile. For everyone.

And therefore: away with the chaotics of London. Except – then I wouldn’t have had a wonderful hour talking to Chris in a Greek restaurant, or a relaxed (and healthy) home lunch while catching up with Alfred – note the really beautiful balcony on his sublet apartment – or a couple of great hours gossiping and repairing the world with Sophie (and why don’t I get to see her all the time, that would make for a better life). And even the purpose of the trip was successful, and really enjoyable – an intelligent and articulate response by St. Paul's School boys to my bizarre disquisition on the implications of graphic scores? As pleasurable as it was a surprise, and an example of how this sort of thing goes when it is done right (as it wasn't two weeks before at another lecture in a different city). So the good parts were made up of people, both those new to me and old friends of sterling quality.

Well, I’ve said it before, but on different grounds: we all need to get a big house in the countryside, with amusing friends to live there, or if they choose to visit. Not, of course, a plan that this world’s economics and systems will encourage: but we can dream….

Resonances

Hearing old popular songs....

Yes, it's true, I didn't identify very much with popular musics when I was younger, especially the best-known for the most part. But they were everywhere, and some were wonderful, mysterious, eerie – the other day when I was lecturing about trends in the late 1960s I mentioned acid rock, and found myself somehow trying to explain the fascination of 'In-a-Gadda-da-Vida', which my brother played over and over one summer in the early 1970s. I still remember lying in the living room couch reading (Out of the Silent Planet, of all things), summer sunshine coming through the window, and this fantastically charged music pouring across the room....

And the same with Joni Mitchell – my eldest sister was so fascinated with the Clouds album in the late 1960s (and perhaps also my middle sister – there were points where I can't completely separate their likes and dislikes; they shared a number of talents and fascinations, and even an old book where I wrote down poems in rather clumsy attempts at calligraphy has small drawings by both of them scattered throughout, on different pages). I never had the same reaction to the early Joni Mitchell, because the voice was almost too light and girlish ever to mean much to me; but it certainly made my reaction to her eerie remake in 2000 of 'Both Sides Now' that much more powerful: like the final chapters of Proust, you suddenly look back over decades, overwhelmed by the complexity of change and memory.

And tonight, at the end of a television show, the score became Henley's 'End of the Innocence' – one of those wistful songs that fascinated and mystified a later me, in a darker year, where time and life seemed completely insoluble, and the time given to solve them all to short. Because I was the youngest child, because I was only eleven in May '68, because so many songs and news bulletins passed so mysteriously before me, all assuming that I understood things that seemed like half-open doors – all those possible meanings of time, passion, change, growing up, even loss: though none of it was clear to an eleven-year-old, or really to a thirty-two-year-old –

because of all that, some of those songs seemed to ring in huge spaces full of enigmatic faces and secrets and futures and illuminations: beautiful and strange and scary paths where I could only intuit fragments of what might happen, as one traveled further along each one. And some of those songs still seem so remarkable to me: when 'The End of the Innocence' came on the television, I couldn't help my reaction....

Orff returning

An intelligent documentary on Orff, the Nazis, his vanity and painfully late repentance on the BBC, called 'O Fortuna'... it had a particularly striking ending, where various voices of people who had revered him or been betrayed by him spoke one after another, without comment. A sort of Olympian point of view: I liked its avoidance of simple accusations or denials – clearly this was a life layered with both incredible selfishness and also awareness, and to appreciate that without a simple reduction to one or the other was powerful. An especially remarkable coda with children who had cerebral palsy, being taught Orff-Schulwerk with patient affection by a dedicated group of teachers, emphasized the ambiguity – because of course those children would have been among the first to be 'disinfected' out of existence by the Nazis....

It did remind me of those intense Latin, Greek and medieval works of his that I haven't listened to for ages. Even parts of Carmina Burana were like old reminders – but Catulli Carmina and the Trionfo di Afrodite, the other two parts of the trilogy, have passages that still strike me incredibly deeply: they feel inevitable, powerful, even archetypal, and so familiar that I can hardly believe that it's probably twenty-five or thirty years since I've last heard them. (There are so many there's no point in mentioning each one – but, for instance, the eerie 'Ju-cun-dum' on a single note, repeated with shifting rhythms like a sensual incantation, is utterly memorable.

I'd also forgotten how magnificent the penultimate cadence of good ol' Carmina Burana is, with its hugely ecstatic, glittering paean to Aphrodite, which after a split second falls such a distance to land in the merciless recap of 'O Fortuna'. I can imagine coaching the chorus not to move, not to turn the page early, not to anticipate the change – if they can be sensually, transcendently joyful in that cadence, the fall would reflect the inhuman vastness of the universe that underlies the whole work.)

Some years after I'd heard those works, probably in my late twenties, I also bought the DGG recording of his final work, the 'play for the end of time'. Although a lot of the work is for spoken chorus, reflecting Greek traditions, you never forget that spectral final quartet – four viols senza vibrato, playing a directionless counterpoint that eventually evaporates into nothingness. The narrator in the documentary treated it as a gesture of abnegation/acceptance, of Orff unable to really resolve his life, but showing that he was aware of the mistakes and contradictions; if the work falls into an abyss of eternity, of time and space so vast that anything merely human vanishes into it, perhaps that's a kind of forgiveness, or at least a sense of the triviality of life's triumphs and errors.

I'm not absolutely sure that's what this is, though such an interpretation makes sense; it is an interesting reflection on central problems of the Nazis, of Heidegger, and even of Jungian ideas (at least when they are, in my view and the views of most Jungians, misused) – the concern that too much interest in the infinite or the archetypal leaves one open to powerfully charged judgments, where the vastly inhuman becomes attractive through its sheer power....

Magus

Avram Davidson, in mid-career, wrote The Phoenix and the Mirror, a beautiful fantasy novel of a complicated, wheels-within-wheels task laid on his character Vergil Magus in the middle of his life.

There is a sense that Vergil, the hero of one of Davidson's largest projects that was never finished, was someone with whom he deeply identified – this was not exactly the Virgil of the Aeneid, but a complex intertextual/para-historical game of reviving the Middle Ages image of that Virgil as a master magician. So, strangely – but with incredible density, as Davidson collected and revised detailed materials for many years for a planned series of nine books – we have a linguistically and materially realistic portrait of this Vergil: a Vergilian world where the facts of everyday life, habits, religion, and government are derived from the height of Imperial Rome, but where there are also strange medieval inflections and interpolations that pass without comment.

The Phoenix and the Mirror is complicated; there are dreamscapes and twists and turns in the plot, hints that occur almost in passing (Davidson being one who didn't think he needed to explain things to you, that you were paying attention and had a good memory and weren't thrown by arcane circumlocutions), and they all land in a strange but satisfying ending: we are reassured that this Vergil, wise, knowledgeable, kind but strong in purpose, has to use all his intellect to survive the tangled machinations of an age where many have intricate knowledge and power, and use them to devious or unpredictable ends.

Davidson was so badly treated by publishers over the first book (although it is now respected, they wanted to pulp the first printing because it seemed impossible to sell) that he changed publishers for the second, which also had low sales despite being nominated for a major award. The third manuscript was left among boxes of papers – tons of papers, detailing notes for a vast array of scenes and activities – and only saw the light of day as a small-press hardback a few years ago; the other six books were simply never written. Clearly Davidson planned on different crises and episodes from this Vergil's life, and only completed the first on Vergil in middle age, the second on a young man on his first great adventure, and a third between those two; with some short stories that outline him as a boy and as an old man. Davidson also wasn't patient with publishers: when the smart thing would have been to ignore their reactions and push on, he was so infuriated by the ill-treatment of the first two books that the whole project gradually lost the impetus to complete it.

I read the first book as a teenager, and was utterly fascinated but confused; only now does it (mostly) make sense to me. I dug up the second (a library copy, not cheap) some years ago, and bought the third as soon as it was released in 2005.

All of which is prelude to saying: when I first tried to read the second book, Vergil in Averno, I was impressed but utterly lost; I simply couldn't follow what was going on after thirty or forty pages. It reminded me of the first three chapters of Joyce's Ulysses – I've always been hugely proud that I read Ulysses as a high-school independent study, inspired by the kind and tough-minded Mary Hollingshead, who believed in me enough to hand me this difficult adult book and see what I could do with it. (I also remember how Steve Tucci, my friendly but mentally uncomplicated lab partner – co-captain of the football team – picked up Ulysses one day and said he'd heard it had dirty stuff in it. Whereupon he opened the book and tried to find some dirty stuff – and soon retired, utterly defeated by the style). Those first three chapters of Ulysses come before the book gets into the razzle-dazzle textual games of later, more playful chapters; the first three are thorny, difficult, intellectual, and not really fun – I'm still not sure how I got through them at all.

Vergil in Averno is similar, in some ways, at least at first: a dense, nightmarish landscape of a dirty, smoky 'Very Rich City' where Vergil has found himself, the language is intricate and elliptical, cultural and technical cross references fling themselves in all directions, and the atmosphere is dark and claustrophobic. Because this is very different than the tasks-within-tasks of the first book, or the Odyssean sea voyage of the third – this is intentionally about an evil city filled with evil people, which is experienced as a nightmare that cannot easily be escaped. Vergil has to work through the project he has been asked to complete – to come up with a plan to improve access to the ancient volcanic fires that give the city its grotesque character and major source of income; but he gets little help and much hindrance, especially from rich brutes who seem not only incapable of understanding sophisticated plans but are in fact capable of little but cheating him of his fee.

And it gets, intentionally, ugly – there is a disturbingly eerie passage as early as the third page where Vergil is taken to see the torture dungeons (as in another city you might be taken to see the municipal gardens), a sensually erotic vision of a handsome young man who at first seems pitiable as he is being tortured – and then Vergil realizes he is merely working hard as a torturer, naked and muscular and focused on pulling a system of chains that are causing agony to a fat old man. The disturbing inversion, Vergil's disorientation and confused repulsion, are a wonderful way of creating a sense of this city where power and money barely even pretend to do any positive good.

Given how impossible I found it a few years ago, I was surprised this time that I found the book so readable – yes, I needed to slow down and keep my balance in the denser sections, especially the pseudo-dream/pseudo-magical hallucinations that take over two-thirds of the way through the book. But I could follow it, and read it over three days, fascinated and appalled by the nasty traps that were set, as well as by the sense that this younger Vergil was still not in command of his powers or his own self – he is trying to focus, trying to understand, but has never faced anything this deadly or complicated.

(Perhaps I am more alert, perhaps more reading and writing and my Jungian commitments have brought me back to thinking or working harder – and in any case thinking and working hard seem more interesting to me these days than they did for most of the past decade or so; perhaps that's all it is. An inspiring possibility: that even at my age I can change, can wake up, and life can get more interesting rather than less – that I could learn to be more aware of things, rather than simply assuming that my limitations were set long years ago, and not subject to change.)

Reading the book was fascinating, and satisfying – even the realization that some characters would return in later parts of Vergil's life (you meet his large gruff foreman from Phoenix as a street urchin in Averno, and realize why years later they would trust each other utterly). And, if you look up Averno online (as I did), you get a hint of where the ending might be going – and that is indeed where it does go: the surprises of the first and third books are here replaced by the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy, where what will happen is already hinted as early as the first page, but it is still fascinating to see the story get there.

A powerful experience, a powerful tonic, to believe again in books and stories and thinking and understanding: and to see what it can be, to become a magus....

•••

A later, Virgilian appendix: given that I've always found the Aeneid even less interesting than the Iliad – yes, both have beautiful passages that I've read out of context (most recently in amazing 'recomposed' excerpts of the Iliad by Christopher Logue), but they're both so much about packs of men, like wolves, in wartime, which interest me not at all – it's a bit weird that two favorite works of mine are about reconstructed Virgils. (I'm much more of an Odyssey/Ulysses person – the Odyssey is endlessly fascinating and exciting, partly because it's not just men hacking away at each other and then justifying it for pages on end.)

One of these reconstructed Virgils is of course the Vergil Magus series, the other Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil: also insanely dense, as much as the densest poetry, but written as endless and nearly paragraph-free prose across three hundred pages or so, it as amazingly beautiful and also very, very hard to remember or to follow (some years ago I made myself a task of reading ten pages a night in bed – beautiful writing but I was constantly forgetting what the point was, because the endless internal monologues, memories and dreams are so interwoven that you can't easily remember where the heck you are). Given how nearly easily I just read Vergil in Averno, perhaps I could take another stab at the Broch, however.

Because, certainly, it can be worth it: some very complex literature (and other art) seems to lead upward to something more and more aware, deeper, well worth the extra effort. (That doesn't apply to everything difficult of course – intermittent combinations of modernist complexity and nihilistic deflation do result in some books that, ultimately, don't seem worth the energy. And no, I still can't deal with the tangled misspellings of Finnegans Wake – I hate 'unspelled' writing, can't get into it, any more than I can stand much microtonal modernist music – and don't plan on trying to do so; which is why Banks' Feersum Endjinn is also scratched off my long list.)

So it's a bit weird: these two rich images of Virgil, images I strongly respect and identify with – and yet I've never really had a shot at what he wrote. (Which would have to be in translation anyway – no matter how much it might be possible for me to, as it were, experience increasing rather than declining mental powers, there's no way I'm ever going to learn Latin at this point.)

A bit strange, I suppose: to look at many of the mirrors in this hall of Virgils, yet never to have seen the original....

Alternatives

An unusual analysis session today... I had five or six dreams for us to discuss, three fairly substantial and complete, three or four more fragmentary and partially remembered.

All the dreams had familiar elements and settings strewn through them – a southern California parking lot and a suburban office building, a southeast Asian grocery with dried fruits and a mysterious dinner, a bedroom with a small boy and his older sister reading books, a long bus trip through the desert hills east of San Francisco, and so on – even, in fact, a strangely supernatural thriller centered on a footballer and his friends in northern England. But I couldn't quite make sense of them: I couldn't really intuit myself or the people I knew, or my past, in any of the fragments... we had a bit of a discussion about various mechanisms of dream transformations (which aren't unfamiliar to me, but for some reason in this set of dreams I continued to feel bewildered, disoriented).

And John suddenly tied it all up, not five minutes before we needed to finish: he said, well, clearly, these are fragments of your turning points from the past – confusions, problems, changes – and you're going back to reconstruct them, but while changing the endings. Sort of like alternative history fictions, or parallel universe science fictions... and, by the way, you've been dreaming them approximately in the order they actually happened, haven't you?....

Of course I love such things: I'm always interested in stories and films that have alternative-history aspects, especially when characters go back and try to alter their pasts – even when those alterations end badly, as they often do. (Think: The Man in the High Castle, The Butterfly Effect, a host of television episodes, etc. etc.).

So interesting, and so peculiar – and perhaps not as desperate as it might all seem at first: that I would try to heal my relation to my past by starting to tell all the tales, again, and in order: but through telling them differently....