in the hall of mirrors

Sweats

A recurrent annoyance for the HIV+ is the 'night sweat' – it's a sort of peculiar demi-symptom of nothing in particular, where you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night soaked in a cold sweat. I can't remember the details, but I think it happens literally over about ten to fifteen minutes – a sudden change in body temperature, like a miniature fever, then it's done.

I had always assumed that it represented some kind of physical weakness – i.e., your body is in a fragile state, with alarm and defense systems going on at erratic intervals, and this is a sort of immune system glitch. What is wrong with that, however, is that my immune system has been operating at a fairly high level for some four or five years – very nearly normal (though, admittedly, I don't know my test results since this winter's side-effect illness).

And yet, for the past four or five months, perhaps once or twice a month – including last night – I will suddenly waken, the sheets wet...

Very odd. I suppose it must actually be a symptom of the virus itself, rather than a side effect of an immune system having a rough ride. It does of course make me feel at home with the guys who have lived longest with the virus here in Newcastle – Steve, David, Bob and so on.

But it is always a weird surprise: and perhaps, over a few years when I'm being demanding, and calculating, over having a more exact expectation of my health and life expectancy (for which read: anxiety over the plausibility of completing studies at the Jung-Institut), it is a weird and confusing symbol.

Not of anything in particular – just, well, a symbol....

Baked goods

A surprisingly intricate, but entirely pleasant, encounter in the bakery area of Marks & Sparks, near the bus station... I was wandering around rather haplessly, my usual graying-academic look, with the relaxed but indecisive style I evidently have when presented with a huge array of possible meals. Although I don't eat much bread, I thought it would be nice to have a loaf of something hefty – something with seeds and such – and so was scanning the shelves, and having to move around a slightly older woman (50s or 60s) on a ladder, who was moving loaves from shelf to shelf. She had glasses, and was wearing the store uniform, but seemed relaxed, like someone's mother or grandmother working in her own kitchen.

She and I engaged – some humor, some banter, some where-do-you-come-from, some what-are-you-looking-for. It must be a good place to work – she was completely relaxed about stopping what she was doing and talking to customers (and in fact other people working in the store would occasionally, politely, ask if I needed any help – also in a relaxed manner – they must have a good manager). The speed, the rapid changes of topic, persona, rhetoric, and relationship that older and more experienced people can indulge in for their own social amusement – we were both having rather kaleidoscopic fun with each other, moving from the breads to the Battenberg cakes and their status as unhealthy temptations... anyway, I did buy one (as usual, it was gone within about twelve hours, whatever I promised at the time).

Hey, it was out of my control, she handed it to me and said the more gracious equivalent of, 'G'wan.'

A fine passage of the everyday made lighter, more enjoyable....

In between

Trying to catch – somewhere between the things I did in town today, and the many things I didn't do – the list is long at the moment of research and marking and administration – and sleeping and waking and working on the sofa, and the light, as the days are long – which might be why I think more in this way: because of the long light –

there is a sort of European-ness, or no, that's almost too specific: it's the existential sense of thinking/existing across an array of similar but different time segments and thought patterns – hearing about Schütz and thinking how much I used to love some of his works, but I only owned LPs so that must be a long time ago, something like the late seventies or early eighties; am I in a place where one goes to a corner and buys a CD, or one where one goes online and tries to download tracks that recall the past –

and reading now about Jung; a cross-wise glance at another self, at a range of other selves, arranged either in time or in the imagination – you know that both are possible at once, don't you? – it's sort of like those kaleidoscope mirror mechanisms, or like a program that arrays a photograph in variations across the screen, or anything that repeats fragments of an image in different directions, and if you move your head just an inch you're looking at a completely different set of images – that metaphor is this shimmering array of pasts and presents –

some of which existed, some nearly did, others didn't but might as well have existed – hearing certain recordings and doing certain work, different apartments, high ceilings of large, dark rooms in Berlin and the eerie fog of an early morning Hong Kong skyline – and is there a clue or miniature betrayal of the fabric of time in the strange fact that this morning an I Ching coin throw gave me exactly the same reading as yesterday's? an odd occurrence, or possibly a clue –

tonight the coalescence seems to be among elements of study, of work, that are particularly, even peculiarly, German: seeing myself working on or listening to certain musics or books (you see how hard it is to clarify, given that the points that kaleidoscope outwards are not the usual objects or thoughts or identities, but their larger and implicit structures) to selves that are sitting up in bed reading in a German night, or sitting reading here in England, or California, southern Australia –

I can see myself refracted along different lines: just as solemn, just as gray-haired, having put my glasses down to look across a snowscape, or this spring evening; the long English northern day echoes across many others; watching myself work, read, think – and look up – outside the window it is raining slightly, or it is dry, or there is a wisp of late sun... if I were listening to a recording of Schütz (which I haven't heard for years) or reading Jacoby on narcissism or, as of course I actually should be doing, marking student papers –

the different selves: some more settled and successful than this one, but all of them a solemn man in his mid-fifties, grayish hair repeated in the steel color of his glasses, thinking or reading, until he puts them down by the bed; the quiet, solemn colors of a northern European academic –

and also, at these moments, the sense that if I could only step sideways into one of these near-selves that are so similar, I could choose an echoing number of presents, pasts, futures; the differences between them aren't vast (are there some of them where there is someone in the next room, or are most of them a man alone?) but have more to do with the linearity, the continuity of a life; and how disjunct or how smooth, how stressful or how calm the line of that line is –

whether that line crosses through various cities, various places: cool gray stone streets, tall apartment buildings, turning back into the room from a foggy day, awakening in a slightly warmer seaside town with a row of boats at dock –

If I just step sideways slightly, it all changes: or perhaps it doesn't –

Myst

In the summer of 1995, when I had returned from a year and half in Berlin, I moved into an apartment in the Castro area of San Francisco – one that was big enough to hold all my books (just barely as it happened), but which I could nevertheless afford.

I didn't realize at first that the combination of those two elements meant that it was basically a dump – indeed that it had recently been a very real, very serious dump, a crack-and-speed house that had a new apartment manager who was trying to get the drug dealers to move out. In between the broken door, the yelling and the police in the middle of the night, the guy across the hall disintegrating and ending up on the street, and the poor schizoid upstairs who refused to take his medications pounding on the floor with his fists at night for hours on end, I ended up doing part-time secretarial work for that manager – a young lawyer, friendly and viciously calculating by turns (although he never seemed to realize he was being the second; some of the stories of how his family behaved to each other, a history cluttered with lawsuits, fights and festive get-togethers, gave me insight into a very different kind of family life than the one to which I was accustomed).

In his quiet office, sitting by the phone and not having much to do, I discovered the game Myst, which had been released nearly two years earlier. I hadn't played many computer games, and I certainly got an unrealistic view of the genre from this one – complicated, poetic, science-fiction-y-and-fantasy-like, with a quiet, shimmering soundtrack that encouraged meditation over its puzzles.

It was a huge success, as everyone knows. Oddly enough most of the gaming industry, when they tried to imitate it, were blind to its chief elements – intelligent and complex puzzles, slow and relaxed game play, aesthetically pleasing artwork, music and ideas. Or maybe they just couldn't imitate any of that; perhaps it's like the film and television industries – when something beautifully done is successful, the industries try to imitate various elements stolen from it, while seeming to entirely miss the poetry, the sensuality, the richness of the original.

I haven't played many games since; despite buying the ensuing series of games by its creators, I didn't complete the others, as I remember anyway. But Myst, in that scruffy apartment building, in a daily life that had suddenly become more miserable and even more shockingly dangerous than it had ever been for me, was the most fascinating of private worlds in which to hide....

And now it has been ported to the iPad and the iPhone, and with all these new screens in the house I can get back to it once again – having even found the little paper notebook where I kept the notes and maps and puzzles. Of course the graphics are not as polished as they would be now; the game was never really upgraded, there were too many vast shifts in basic techniques of computer and program design over the past fifteen years.

But, like art works and books in other eras, the memory of the experience is comforting – there will be a future, I suppose, when the same subtle aesthetic pleasure is attached to the memory of new kinds of virtual escapes....

A Dozen Roses for John

In the spring of 2001, I was planning to move from Hong Kong to Australia. At some point in the previous months – John will remember more exactly, he knows my memories are never very clearly date-stamped – John and I had met at an Australian musicology conference. This astoundingly beautiful, very shy and earnest, and very well-dressed (he wears a suit far better than I ever will) man told me that he thought my writing and editing were wonderful – it was a bit dizzying to hear that from someone who looked like that.

In any case, in May 2001, a few weeks after his birthday, I made him a CD with the above title. The song choices were all favorites of mine that I wanted to share – some of them still show up in some of my classes – and they covered a peculiar range of affection, satire, love, sensuality and sadness (plus a piece I'd written about, and was of course proud to include). I've just come on my own copy of the disc, with a shimmering rose-colored label and charmingly archaic fonts:

1 – Kate Bush, 'Under the Ivy' (1990)

2 – Lumin, 'Wild Orchid' (1998)

3 – Elliott Carter, 'The Rose Family' (1942/80)

4 – Ben Johnston, 'Amazing Grace' (1973)

5 – Pussy Tourette, 'I Think He's Gay' (1993)

6 – Sylvano Bussotti, 'Siciliano' (1962)

7 – Björk, 'Joga' (1997)

8 – Senleches/Xasax, 'En attendent esperance' (14th c./1998)

9 – Sting, 'I Burn for You' (1986)

10 – Dieter Schnebel, 'Schubert-Phantaisie' (1978/89)

11 – Bette Midler, 'In These Shoes' (2000)

12 – Stephen Sondheim, 'Good-Bye for Now' (1981)

They tell a remarkable story, at least to me... I lived with John for a year; when my visa and job blew up in Sydney, he told me to come live with him in Adelaide, which I did for a year.

He's still very beautiful, by the way....

Responsorial

Intermittently, over the past couple of years, I hear of the severe illness, loss of mental control, or death of a contemporary – not from HIV or related problems, but from, well, anything else, as it happens. As I am now in my mid-50s, this is becoming more and more a normal occurrence.

Unfortunately, at times I am slightly uncomfortable that my reaction – and by that I don't mean my own and real personal feelings, but my social, written or stated reaction – isn't stronger, more dramatically empathetic. I tend to give the impression of responding with, Well, so what else is new?

It's a weird side effect of nearly thirty years of HIV, HCV, etc.: this sense that illness and death are so unremarkable, so expected, that they are hardly real news, or cause for alarm. There are even the slightly bored semi-professional opinions that roll off my tongue to people who have been shocked at their own mortality – easy things like: make sure you write down all the medications, or: if you're in that much pain you should call and insist on an appointment today, or: oh yes, cremation probably is easier.

It must seem a bit eerie or heartless to my friends. I do know that at points over the past decade – most intensely with my sister Sandy's death, but also with the physical problems of other people as they pass by me – I have had a sense of irritation, of injustice: do you mean to say we, that is those of us with HIV, went through all of that, and we didn't win any points – any relief for the other people around us? You mean all of that just happened, and it wasn't any kind of redemptive... oh well, clearly an irrational underlying assumption that I don't take all that seriously. But it does pop up in the back of my head from time to time.

But then behind that irritation ('you mean to say that just anybody is going to go through all this, too, now? and it wasn't even particularly special that we all did it, so many years ago?') is this rather weak, disengaged response: ah well sorry you have a severe illness and might die in a year, and so how has everything else been going?...

It remains to be seen whether my responses, or at the very least my abilities to generate (real or apparent) social concern, will improve. Meanwhile, there is an odd sense of aging, illness and death catching up with the vast world of Other People Who Are Not Us, not members of this community of whom so many are gone; and also, probably, a selfish sense of being No Longer Special. Ridiculous, I know: but maybe it's only when these old attempts to make sense of things are exposed as nonsensical that we can really see, and let go of, them....

In the meantime, I guess I really should work on my ability to say the right thing at the right time. Hmm....

Anniversary 5

Five years of this blog, today... yes, of course entries are occasional, and they scatter themselves across oblique moods and memories, more than direct experiences – well, that's kind of how my life runs these days. But I'm generally pleased with it – the reflections are perhaps not as fragmented, as decentered, as the Swedish modernist cycle of poems referred to in the title.

Tonight we went around a yearly exhibit series here in Newcastle, 'The Late Show', where all sorts of galleries and studios are open late on Friday and Saturday. It's really amazing how many work and studio spaces are scattered along the west side of town – I knew about some of them, but it turned out that old building after old building, former warehouse after former warehouse, isn't dusty and unused inside, but remarkably full of artists – I didn't know there were so many of them. Some of the artwork was very impressive – some huge sculptures of fallen fruit and flowers; dark, crabbed etchings of small church gardens. I tended to respond especially to the intricate and the detailed, rather than the large and splashy.

But actually, the amazing experiences for me were in some of the privately rented studios and workrooms. My love for living spaces, which crosses through so many of my dreams (there are more dreams of rooms, buildings, streets with peculiar architectures, in my inner world than a lot of other kinds of symbols) was awakened by a few of the rooms – some studios overlooking the Ouseburn (a small tributary of the river Tyne) had different levels of work spaces, sitting spaces that looked out of windows, and even lofts where it might be possible to sleep. Although it's probably only allowed to work in them, not to sleep, a few had been turned into wonderful quasi-homes – whether the artists slept there or not, they could have, and that was wonderful.

Best of all, a particularly large basement studio on the side next to the river, with tables and bookshelves lining the river side, a large printing press in the lower area, and chairs and spaces that were both work-oriented and comfortable. For this evening when there were people walking through, candles everywhere, the room cleaned up, prints on the walls – but the upper level, with the tables and windows, not open to just everyone: a sense of subtle privacy – as though the woman who lived there knew it was beautiful, but also knew that it was hers. Like an amazingly resonant, peaceful, hard-working place to live... quite a dream, really: that deep sense of quiet and calm concentration, of awareness, of sensitivity to things, and to the spaces they occupy.

[The picture is a tiny caravan/trailer – not a studio, but it has some of the same balanced, real feeling to it.]

Spring bits

So, oddly enough, it has apparently been the warmest April on record in the UK. I keep wondering – does that include this area of the Northeast or not? – in other words: even though April had great weather, it appeared in short patches between remarkably cold weather – is this just part of my ongoing struggle to adapt to the norm in my now nine-years' home, or did Newcastle actually not have as good an April as, say, London?

From whence all UK news flows, unfortunately. Under a conservative government the London-centric point of view seems even stronger than it did before – I sometimes mention to students that Anglo-American education frequently points out that French culture since the eighteenth century has been bizarrely Paris-centric, but we often neglect to point out all of the industrial and capitalist developments that made London equally self-regarding. This always seems weird to an American – even the overblown power of New York doesn't drain the 'provinces' of the US, financially and culturally, as much as those great European cities do their hinterlands; and it always seems odd that London institutions have so much trouble noticing provinces that are two or three hours away on frequent train lines.

But I didn't mean to drift onto that old topic. It's spring, and relatively warm, and lovely and all that. Mildly sunny; last week spent some time sitting outside at a pub with some of the extended families that surround Michael and Andrew. I haven't planted major new herbs, but some have come back and they're looking quite lively.

The last four or five days I have gotten astonishingly little substantial work done, though I've sat in the middle room with the window open on the sunny back yard. I have felt vaguely but not intensely guilty for that – hmm, implies different feeling/complex structures coming into play, that's good. And, weirdly enough, editors seem to be giving me more time, rather than less, on several projects.

But that looking backwards – really a rather good thing: as though parts of the past are more easily accessible, remembering old selves but without much worry about whether I did enough or was good enough at the time, etc. Thus clearly less neurotic – hmm that's a change I guess.

These days of laziness have had a lot of reading in them, including some that goes back to my early teens; I managed to unearth an old hardback copy of Dangerous Visions, the radical science fiction anthology from 1967 that ended up being so influential. I don't know quite when I got hold of it – it couldn't possibly have been 1967 (I was ten years old?...), but it was probably before I was fifteen or sixteen, so let's say around 1970-2. One of the strangest and most striking stories is also by far the longest one – Philip José Farmer's 'Riders of the Purple Wage', a long, experimentally Joycean, semi-pornographic, spectacularly allusive/punning/crazed chunk of future shock. It's remarkable to think how hard I worked to figure out what was going on – not just because of all of the sex, either; it may have furnished the groundwork for reading Ulysses during my last year of high school, which cemented the hold of modernism on my mind.

Amazing to look at this again – and to see where so many of my loonier, Deleuzian or Joycean or Derridean or just out-there influences originally came from. (Not to mention, of course, the casually cosmopolitan, countercultural information that a blithely polymorphic sexuality had a lot more possibilities than might appear in an upscale suburb of Washington, DC.) Reading the story (well, novella, or near-novel) is a bit like chatting with myself from forty years ago – a mutually peculiar, but not at all unpleasant, conversation....