in the hall of mirrors

Maintenance

I tend to be disturbed by the times when practically everything there is to do in a given day, in this city, in the world seems to be a kind of maintenance – keeping things going, repetition – except for the things that are timewasters.

Maintenance: I do tend to keep the apartment neat, I make dinner, I wash the dishes. I put books in order, I organize the next lecture – which is similar to previous lectures in previous years (the university tends to force us to work this way, demanding extensive paperwork for any change to the curriculum, which is insane of course but oh well, if we're a bit crazy it helps us fit into their system better). I answer e-mails, but frankly they are astoundingly boring – taking the trash out is actually, faintly, more interesting.

And I also spend far too much time on timewasters: television, solitaire, books that I've read before. And the things that don't look like timewasters – the articles I'm supposed to be writing, reading something new, actually doing anything – don't seem particularly interesting at the moment, and are ultimately extensions of other large-scale patterns of maintenance or timewasting (i.e. cranking out more academic papers that can be collected into another set that someone tries desperately to sell, multiplying ideas upon ideas, etc.).

Even things that I don't happen to engage in – raising children, etc. – are of course large-scale maintenance functions: keep the race going, create more beings, then keep all of them going. I've been excited, intermittently, over the past two or three years at studying at the Jung Institute, because I'd like to work especially with older people, helping them (and me) continue to grow, which would hopefully lead into spaces of understanding that would actually be new, at least to them (and me) – but of course that can happen at best seldom, and most of that work is also merely maintenance, continuity. Same old same old.

I realize this starts to seem, well, slightly schizoid... I wouldn't characterize myself as schizoid, but I suppose we all tend to drift in one direction or another. And of course I could go read some Deleuze about repetition – but that sounds like a terrible idea; after all, disturbingly enough, he committed suicide, after a long and successful career.

Creativity? Yeah sure well. Sometimes faintly interesting. Better for people who can actually do something that seems to go somewhere, but still kind of a hamster wheel activity.

Sensate pleasures – food, clothes? Tainted at the moment by atrociously early Christmas advertisements that are already being shoved down our throats. Adorno was right.

I'm not really trying to be terribly, well, negative-existentialist – I did read a lot of existentialist literature as a teenager (Grove Press published a lot), but it has always seemed rather silly to me, to create a philosophy that leans towards nihilism. It's really just self-aggrandizement... Sartre wouldn't have made his own nausea such a big deal if he couldn't have put his name on it, like a designer label.

It's winter I suppose....

Bored now....

Is something happening? No?...

No....

Spinning

After Mom's death, recovering from what is apparently irritable bowel syndrome (sigh) and someone breaking into my office...

At the analyst's. My dreams have no particular focus; I can discern an echo, like an invisible superstructure, of response to Mom's death around the edges, but otherwise there is not much to work with.

He finally says he thinks I am avoiding having any feelings about Mom's death.

I explain that it is entirely reasonable to not have any strong feelings about her death; that she died on another continent, and it was not an experience that was very real to me.

And that she has been barely 'there' for about three years in any case, and we all said good-bye some time ago.

If we said good-bye at all, anyway.

And besides death and dying have been so familiar to me for years, what do you expect anyway.

And on top of all that I haven't been feeling very well, and besides in any case I explain.

After I've been justifying myself for about half an hour, his eyes are glazing over slightly....

At least I got the point, if on a cognitive, and slightly embarrassed, basis.

Came home and pulled out Verena Kast's book on death and mourning, I've been meaning to read it anyway, she teaches seminars I've attended in Zürich.

I've now been reading it for two days; it is quite articulate, very intelligent.

Not entirely surprising material, but it clarifies a lot of things I reread, trying to remember them, somewhat like people learning Kübler-Ross' five stages (which are an oversimplification but oh well, I should simply memorize them anyway, at some point).

I carry the book with me a lot and read it, but admittedly don't read it for terribly long.

It seems only two or three pages at most before I mostly feel as though it's time for a nap.

And yes I know this is a different kind of cognitive, processed response.

Well, what do you expect.

It's a kind of spinning....

Airports (II)

I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them for the whole flight. They look like something you could travel on, they look like... well, a sort of heaven of course, certainly a complex landscape of hills and valleys. Since we grew up near Dulles Airport, perhaps Saarinen's famous building helped out a bit (we were between Dulles and National Airport, now disgustingly renamed after a dreadful president – one of the symbols of the greedy decline of America, for me at least).

After a few years I noticed I didn't have so strong a reaction, and they had become just clouds. But I kept watching, wondering why that ecstatic amazement had gone away, and trying to respond. There was certainly something resonant about the things I was imagining at the time – my poem Airports refers to something very important to me, though it probably just confuses other people.

More significantly, there have been many airports (and some docks and even bus stations, just for variety) in my dreams; it seems that they have come to mean, for me, death and some sort of transition – there are dreams where older friends such as Susan and Philip are solemnly leaving and I am full of anxiety, trying to stay behind; there are others that are more cheerful, with strange airport shops and crowds, but just as mysterious, where people old and young are lining up with me to board.

All of which means that tonight's airport dream comes as no surprise. I have no dreams that clearly show my mother as a distinct person, now just over a week since her death (although she has appeared in many dreams before her death, recently even in one where she is talking to her own mother); but there is a sense of her and/or her death in the background, as the context for the dream. And in this one I'm trying to stay on a plane home, though I don't have the right ticket, and odd things keep happening among the people who are gradually boarding....

...

Mom died on Sunday, very early in the morning. There have been papers to sign; my sister and brother have of course handled lion's shares of the complex work involved – contacting relatives, banks and newspapers, filling out forms, cleaning out her room, etc.

I'm apologetic to say that I mostly feel a certain dim relief. It feels as though she hasn't been 'there' for about three years – not comatose, but it seemed that her memory, personality, her self pretty much disintegrated some time ago. My brother and sister discussed the details of how she was acting – she seemed more awake and responsive when my sister was there, for a while, and that is when I got to see her through a shaky Skype connection, about every two weeks.

So it's not as though she wasn't there at all: not without reactions, small near-smiles, changes in the eyes and facial muscles. But they seemed the reactions of an extremely young child, from very, very far away – it became confusing to decide who you were communicating with, or whether you were communicating at all. (And, of course, especially the past three or four months, whether she was recognizing my face and waving hand on a computer screen as an actual person, or if it was just blobs of color moving.)

All three of us, plus spouses and my brother-in-law, have been watching the same things happen, and obviously trying to figure out what they mean for us. Impossible to know, I suppose. And, of course, I wonder if it is insensitive of me to be so sure that she wasn't 'there' enough to matter – that any loss to her, or to us, happened some time ago, and this is just the end of a mildly sad coda to her life. (Only mildly sad because, fortunately, she was not anxious for long during her mental decline – this is the crucial difference between Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia; because I do know that one of the worst experiences of my mother's life was taking care of her aunt when she had Alzheimer's, a really tortuous experience that went on for what seemed like a long time.)

It's hard to know. I suppose that having seen a lot of illness and death, and thought about it in a fairly introverted way, makes me assume I would understand what is going on with someone else – especially someone as important to me as my mother – when she's near the end, and also then when she's gone. But it does seem like the vast clouds of unknowing that surround mental disintegration and death are just as opaque as they ever were: not only are we unable to follow at the end, it's hard to feel that you are sharing any part of the experience.

Maybe what my sister did – sent out a collection of photographs of my mother at different points in her life, some of which I've seen, some of which were new to me – is the best way to connect: connecting of course to a younger woman in the midst of life, but someone one can at least intuitively understand.

In any case: I do have a sense of the parts of myself that come from my father and my mother – and there are surprisingly large parts of each. The combination of those parts darkens both of them a bit – I am sadder, more easily depressed than my father; and although I share my mother's passionately well-meaning anxiety that she was doing the right thing, taking care of her family in the best ways possible at all times, I do tend to lose forward impetus and a belief in action more easily than she did.

Perhaps the reality hasn't hit yet: after all, and this is unfortunately a familiar situation for me, living far away means that the verbal news of someone's death has a certain imagined or abstract quality.

But, given that my mother and I tended to be so close at some levels – sadly at levels full of anxiety: I felt that I was always one of her biggest worries – there is still the sense of the lighter-hearted, smiling Greek girl, the shy youngest of three who discovered she was beautiful in her late twenties, who had a passion for caring for people.

So perhaps my sister's collection of photographs is the best thing to do: to focus on that awareness of eighty-nine years of life....