in the hall of mirrors

Stages

The cloud of minor changes this month, anxiety over illness – three weeks of pains starting each night that turned out merely to be neuropathy, which, as I've explained to friends, is as though a dashboard light glows; but it doesn't indicate engine trouble, it just indicates that there's something wrong with the dashboard light – worry over the upcoming Jung-Institut semester (my analyst pointed out that it doesn't make sense for me to study there if I'm going to turn it into a burden); working on two articles, one on images of death –  and the general sullenness of winter...

changes no greater than those of shifting winter lights, glinting and sometimes stellating, but always limited to a palette of pale whites and blacks and grays.

I am surprised, and pleased, that my sabbatical starts a bit earlier than I had expected; and that it seems possible to put some things aside and get some clear air, space, time.

Somewhere among all of this are many flashes of memory, some of them coming to me in rather large chunks – memory tied to musician friends because I will be writing about them, memory tied to AIDS because of the death article,  and a frequent rapid turnover of, well, various experiential processes... and the added background confusion of dreams: at the end of last week's analysis session, two and a half pages of dreams ended with this rather abrupt fragment:

"Banquet/restaurant (?). Various tables, a reservation list, I’m making sure that I’m on it – I tell them that I’ve discovered that I’m dying, therefore I want to get a table now because I only have so long to live…"

Strange perhaps because despite the intermittent appearance of many travel dreams over the past few years – airports, train stations, waiting rooms – that I have become accustomed to recognize as death dreams, with their crowds of people known or unknown, changing schedules, delays and deferrals, uneasiness or serenity, I've never handed my analyst anything quite so... well, blunt.

I had written it down because that was what I remembered; but after reading it aloud to him, I couldn't quite meet his eyes for a few minutes – embarrassment of a kind, a sort of irritation at the naked demand of the dream?

I think he was a bit startled too; he did urge me to enjoy going to Küsnacht again – which could be interpreted in several ways....

But I wasn't going to write so much about that; that is perhaps merely background to what I was thinking tonight, when I got out of bed and opened the computer.

Somewhere among the books on memory, time, death, and dreams, I started to get sort of gestalt flashes of the Los Angeles apartment in the late 1980s or early 1990s – a big party that we had there, when Paul P. was my roommate, and we'd invited all sorts of different people. An amazing party, because we did the rather daring thing of asking highly contrasting groups of people – people who worked with me, friends from a leather bar, a real hodgepodge of the many people who were around us in those days.

It is strange to look back that far, a bit over twenty years ago: the crowded surroundings of my life, at least part of the time, especially as compared with the much quieter, emptier life spaces I occupy now.

Such contrast: again, like summer and winter – and suddenly the different parts of my life are represented as spaces filled with, or emptied of, figures – and with such different colors: greens and blues and reds, or grays and whites....

Sherlocks

Two Sherlocks in one week: the first episode of the second season of the brilliant BBC television series, and the second Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie film. Interesting as narrative that the film jumps to such a late place in the SH canon (Moriarty over the falls! that was originally the ending of everything), while the television version seems to be setting up a longer, more tangled line of work. Both have very different ways of making Sherlock Holmes post-[hyper]-modern, both direct the skill and energy in different directions –

but they do have something distinctive in common: much more than any previous version, or for that matter than most spy or speculative fictions, rather than emphasizing the complexity of the solution to the problem (which is present of course, but happens rapidly as though taken for granted, at least by SH himself) they emphasize the speed required to solve the problem, and the complex anticipatory and multiply directed actions required to survive the tangle of events.

This is sort of like the impressions that cyberpunk created; and of course it is the post-[hyper?]-modern world. I used to think that increasing transparency of government and corporate actions enforced by rapid information retrieval would lead to less public evil or repression becoming possible; instead we have a weirder world where we know perfectly well that extraordinarily illegal or immoral things are being done by people in charge, because we can see the tail ends of their actions, but we can't quite stop them. Except, of course, occasionally.

As though the attraction of these hyper-Sherlocks is not that they can resolve everything acceptably, but that they can create for us a fighting chance with evils – that they can catch some things, that they can raise the tension, that they can make life at least very difficult for the sociopath, for the greedy, for the selfishly controlling.

And maybe they can even make the whole game so difficult that some of the 'enemy' simply gives up in frustration...

Well: one can hope.