in the hall of mirrors

Retrospect

I continue to be slightly... what? – unclear, disoriented, mildly frustrated? – about my previous post, about my feelings on Christmas night.

There was a lucid sense of time and the year, of eternity and life and death, of change as perfect and inevitable.

And, quite honestly – and this is rare for me – I had a sense of my own life, death, successes and failures, as simply not terribly important: not in any negative or cruel way, but I think in the way sought by Buddhists, Taoists, and the more arcane branches of most religions.

I realized as I finished writing it that it was quite real, and I went to bed treasuring it, though I was already fatally certain that morning would bring me back to normal anxieties and desires, and the constant greed for life to be more important, more successful, more pleasurable. More, always.

I know that some people (mostly those in such religions already mentioned) think such understanding is crucial, though rare – and that many others would treat it as anathema, as nonsense, as some sort of disguised depression or delusion. But I think the second of those groups is simply too attached to the external world – they have mistaken the biological demands of the living body, or the social/affectionate demands of other people, for necessary forces; where they are merely very common – good things, but not thereby the only or ultimate good. Then of course you have another side – as a depressive who reads too much I might be more susceptible to the tired, and poorly named, 'existentialist' pose, that would claim that nothing means anything anyway. I certainly don't mean that – perhaps I'm lucky to have seen plenty of Grove Press and French thought when I was young, because such a negative 'existentialism' looks as silly to me as, say, the current world of American politics, just to pick one example of many.

But you can already see I'm overworking it. Two days that included a train down to Yorkshire for analysis, a session that was productive but tangled, murky; discussion of two dreams with oddly violent characters in them, and an argument over experiencing feelings related to recent deaths; a sleepy, cold ride home, and much of today sleeping on the couch. A time of blurry retreat, of wondering, of wandering rather aimlessly through inner territories – of not particularly wanting to get back on the wheel of social/working time (a not uncommon feeling for me), and trying to justify all this by being alone with my – well, not my thoughts: my feelings? My dreams?

Looking at a closed door: but not completely closed, light still leaks around the edges.

And what would be the point of having it open?

And what would be the point of going through it?...

This Christmas night

A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing this for long, and I know he will create more complex things later – but already it is a bowl that has its own definite nature.

And today a Christmas day, slow and quiet during the day, then pleasant talk and stuffing myself with ham at Michael and Andrew's, with the other Andrew. (It's like those passages in the New Testament where the text says: with the other Mary... passages that give a startling sense of the concrete, of seeing vastly important things as they happen.)

And here at home, sleepy, the tree small but glowing with colored lights, and delicately ruthless neomedieval carols by Richard Rodney Bennett playing. A sense, after a glass or two or so of champagne and wine, after a quiet but satisfying day, of the deeply serious strength of this time of year: as existence shows its bare but still living branches, and the dark earth and moonless night show their natural power – a power that is always there, but is inevitably obscured by the confusion of surfaces and flashes that interrupt during the brighter and more social parts of the calendar.

These notes, these lights, seem to weave small patterns against the vast sky – but the patterns themselves are ancient, are echoes of the sky itself: they reflect something that reaches down through the core of winter, that touches the life that grows out of this coldest time, and starts again to take root....

Solstice

Last night, exceptionally strange dreams: psychotic, then sociopathic, figures – strange flashes of ruthless danger, violence. Not frightening exactly, not a feeling of nightmares, but certainly alarming – perhaps more alarming on waking: to write about them brings one to a stop, to a point of shock.

Of course, in Jungian terms, some kind of serious shadow stuff... the unabsorbed and inchoate materials of the unconscious. Above all, strange.

During the day, a surprise: the usual triennial doctor's appointment, and he wanted to talk about new medications – new HCV medications to be started at the end of March, and as a result new HIV medications. I insisted on lots of detail, but strangely enough it all sounds good – and yes, I know, especially from events of the past year, these things often have side effects that are less amusing then you're ever warned. (The perpetual annoying thought process: we didn't want to tell you about the side effects because then you might imagine that you had them... hmm.)

But this actually sounds good: a possibly bumpy month-long transition, or possibly not bumpy at all as a celebration of Spring, to move to easier HIV medications (no Ritonavir, oh joy unbounded!) and generally more successful HCV medications.

Well, we'll see – holding the whole thing at a slight distance from myself, considering – but at the moment let's count it as...

good news.

Types

Today was Steve's wake: of the 'eldest set' (and no, we don't have a term for ourselves – we are simply the members of the local HIV patient group who have lived the longest – generally from fifteen to twenty-odd years since diagnosis), he is actually the first, or perhaps the second, to die in nine years. (I'm not quite sure whether our 'original' straight man is alive or not – he left the group some years ago, and we've lost touch since then).

So, it was a bit strange from that point of view. The oldest soldiers, those most acquainted with illness and death – but we haven't been called to it, not yet. It is merely that thing we have lived with for a remarkably long time, that has changed the shapes of our personal universes.

It was not, however, an especially dark or sad day – Steve wanted a celebration, no dark clothes, etc., and that is basically what he got. Those struck by sadness were generally younger, or further from the orbit of the AIDS community; and the music and conversation managed to pull those who had been sad during the ceremony into something happier and more social during the wake. Which is how it is supposed to go, I think.

But that's not quite what I was going to talk about... I remember, as a common occurrence years ago, waking from a nap, or simply thinking back, after a social event, to suddenly realize something about the particular people I'd encountered that escaped me at the time. Of course this is often a sudden flush of embarrassment, or perhaps a startled sense of having missed the deeper point of someone's conversation; but it was always, for me at least, imbued with a sudden astonishment – look, it says, the world is run by many different patterns, and there are some that you never seem to notice the first time around.

Of course this relates to Jungian personality types, or at least my view them; they've always been a favorite aspect of Jungian theory for me – as I tend to be a fairly well-defined type myself (according to Myers-Briggs' simplified system, an INTJ), it both reminds me that the universe is not based on my values, and helps me to relax and accept behaviors and feelings that I don't instinctively understand. It's way of keeping my balance in a complex world of people, as it were.

So when I had a sudden sense, after a long nap this evening, that several encounters today involved crossed wires between different types – a hug that lasted strangely long, someone telling me the extended and Rabelaisian story of his life, a woman expressing cheerful resignation with her marriage as she drove a car through the snowy streets – abruptly made sense: that I had received signals and tales that were like messages out of other people's internal universes – I suddenly realized that, years ago, especially in San Francisco, such belated recollections and perceptions happened more often for me.

I suppose it's natural: we tend to self-select the people around us, and, depending on our professions, end up being grouped with people who have comparable values and perceptual worlds. Especially academics, of course: there is no question that there are various personality types among academics, but certain types are commoner than others – and, for instance, the passionately sensate and feeling types I encountered today would be rarer in a university department than in other businesses. And though there are more dramatic differences with some students, they are of course so young and malleable – it is difficult to remember just how different they might grow to be, while trying to teach them my own perceptions.

But I suppose I was also recalling something that lies beneath many of my memories. I miss San Francisco a lot, of course, as I say all too often: there is a sense of lost joys, and I have been deeply angry this year that I couldn't get accepted to a major conference that took place there – losing the chance to have such a trip paid for felt like losing one last bite of the lotus, one last look at Paradise.

But it's also true that San Francisco was full of people, including my dearest friends and lovers, who were very different from me: it tended to draw the sensual, the kindly, those who took more joy and understanding from everyday physical and emotional pleasures. I knew at the time that I was unusual there, but that that dramatic difference was extremely good for me: as though, to put it into fairy-tale imagery, the cold, skilled magician, with all his sorceries but with little happiness in his heart, were exiled to an island of gardeners, hunters, fisherman – and lovers, dancers, painters: people operating at a very different angle from him, but who could teach him to relax, to tan in the sun, to tend the nets and the fields, to dance around bonfires when the moon rose.

And today's wake was a bit like that: stumbling over those very different worlds, again – and realizing that perhaps this explains my increasing coldness and sadness over the past decade: because, exiled from that livelier world that is so unlike me, I become too much like myself – and my self, on my own, tends to live in a small room, engaging in complex but repeated patterns; in a space of rote and abstract diagrams, of hazy memories, and a smell of dust.