in the hall of mirrors

Redewendung

On Skype this evening, I was waiting for a prospective student to come online and tell me about a proposed project... he forgot or got the time wrong (this student keeps having trouble remembering which way the time zones run – I suggested he get a computer program to explain it to him...).

Hans-Rainer was online, as he often is, so I talked to him for a while. We traded war stories of past and current HIV treatments – he's had some really rough spots in the past couple of years, as have I; but we're both doing well at the moment. At one point he was waving his new medications, one after another, at the screen, a bit too fast for me to decipher the labels (Skype is not, alas, perfect).

As it happens, I really, really like Hans-Rainer – and I have ever since meeting him in 1994 in Berlin, when he was an ehemalige Ossi, boyishly excited that he could wear a leather jacket, and driving one of those East German cars he had had for years (if you could call it driving – it was like a tiny cardboard box of a car, and he would have to lean forward and keep it going almost by sheer tough willpower). During the year and a half I was an exchange student there, he would visit from time to time – and there would be entire weekends when, whatever we had planned to do – some fair or trip or something – we just wouldn't ever really get out of bed until he had to drive back home, an hour out in the country.

So, well, you see how it is.

And yes, I do keep wishing we could end up in the same place. I've even hinted... but that was at points when he had an on-again-off-again relationship with some boring guy who lived near him. (Admittedly I've never met this person – I just happen to know that this other guy is boring. Call it intuition.)

The picture is a bit old – we're both much grayer now – but you get the idea.

Now, Hans-Rainer is definitely aus dem Land. He's learned a good bit of English, and always makes a point of showing it off; but he is more comfortable in German – and it is definitely a country German; he'll often throw off some phrase or saying, and I'll have to stop him and get him to repeat it and, bit by bit, explain it. (Sometimes it's simply impossible to figure out – proverbs in foreign languages can be fairly incomprehensible; Lafferty made fun of that in his science fiction stories of the Camiroi, having an alien translation machine attempt to explain incomprehensible translations such as "It's that or pluck chickens", and finally giving up.) A fairly long process...

But this time, after a few explanations that involved getting up, walking around, and gesturing, I got it. The Rede itself was something like – excuse me if I've gotten this wrong, this is from memory, and I've probably got the cases wrong – "Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen."

Pause, rewind, wait, did you say Hemd?... okay... and I actually started to laugh as he was still gesturing about the Taschen. "The last shirt (that you wear) has no pocket (to keep money in)."

It's a more visceral, immediate country-German version of our own: 'You can't take it with you'.

...

I really shouldn't wait for Hans-Rainer, should I?...

Sturgeon's Law

Various versions of this law appear in different places, including different final words... Ted Sturgeon's version was something like, "nine-tenths of everything is crap". Or crud, or inessential, or... well you pick.

Having lately bought some books online, without seeing them first, I am feeling the sting of this tragically universal law.

And if you have never seen my apartment – or office – I'm one of those people with rows and rows, and rows, of massed, ordered, organized books, CDs, LPs, magazines, DVDs... other media... papers on the floor...

So I do rather take this law to heart. Given my acquisitive habits, I don't know whether that makes me the biggest fool in sight (watch out for the Fool-Killer – this one's too big for me!) or just a bit self-aware....

And, of course, given my terrible habit of not getting things written quickly, I think: does this mean I'm agonizing over just adding to piles of crud?...

Ah well: bring it on.

Feeling

Last night I watched Weekend, the 2011 film of an encounter between two guys who clearly need each other. Fairly heartbreaking, and very, very well done indeed – writing, acting, all of it. They go through the usual chaotic mistakes of a hasty encounter between strangers, then as they realize they want to spend more time together try to connect more honestly – but with a time limit. The best things in the script are the amazing moments where they hit something very deep – glancingly, exposing themselves almost by accident, as things they mull over in the private back stages of their minds come out into the unexpected intimacy of meeting somebody you like (and have sex with).

I was thinking of a poem by Mark Doty that I first read just a few weeks ago – it startled me, conjuring up some of the more heartbreaking encounters of the 1980s and 1990s (well, for me, mostly between 1977 and 1997):

 

Theory of Beauty (Tony)

 

Somebody who worked in the jail house kitchen

cooked up some grease, burnt it black, scraped

the carbon from the griddle. Somebody made a needle

from the shaft of a filched Bic, ballpoint replaced

 

with a staple beaten flat; then the men received,

one at a time, faces of Christ looking up through

streams of blood from a thorny crown,

or death’s heads looming over x’s of bones.

 

But Tony chose, for his left shoulder, a sign language

glyph, a simple shape, though hard to read;

he had to tell me what it meant. He flicked

his lighter and spilled flecks of dope on the towel

 

across his lap, brushed his bare stomach as though

he might have set himself aflame. He said,

It stands for Love. Then what seemed indifferently

drawn, hardly a sketch, became a blazon

 

that both lifted and exposed the man who wore it,

as he fumbled with the lighter, too stoned to fire

the pipe he held, using it to point to the character

on his arm, making plain the art of what was written there.

Balance

Almost too faint, too evanescent, to write about –

You know how it is, when you go through a day, or more, on what seems a different pattern:

today was busy, one thing after another. Up early for the delivery man to pick up my passport renewal, rapidly reworking lists of compositions for an article I will write this summer, organizing our usual Thursday presentation to the medical students, looking through new books in my office, rehearsal for concert in two weeks; and two quick Skype calls, to Chicago and Zürich, to structure plans for things I need to do this summer. While incidentally managing to reach people I'd despaired of ever reaching.

Somehow, I simply seemed to be present for things: after several days of dull work avoidance, abruptly just walking right through work, projects, ideas, plans –

and aside from such a day, such fluid processes, such a sense of easy achievements simply happening, there is also a peculiar, faint dislocation: as though the universe has shifted half an inch to the left on its foundations, as though the laws of physics have been slightly, but permanently, altered. E now equals M times C, to the 2.03rd power.

This is something that happens to all of us from time to time – a sense of simply walking through things, as though one has somehow, without fanfare, been awarded mastery of the Tao (or perhaps, more accurately, one is suddently walking in line with the Tao). Like the point where someone learns a martial art, and it becomes so fluid they can do it without work, in a graceful dance that does not pause.

I suspect it has something to do with analysis, with complexes shifting or disintegrating, with some of the things my mind flings up against various tasks suddenly disintegrating, as a result of some unexpected change just behind consciousness –

It is this that makes Buddhists. It is this that makes Taoists.

It may be, also, that it is this, that makes one think: one's analysis is working....

Issuing a retraction

I find myself uneasy with one of my previous blog posts.

A few weeks ago, I was in New York. Frank Oteri wrote a blog entry on our conversation; he was upset that I had given up on composing. I defended myself...

but the truth is, although I thought I was clear on my stance and the reasons for it before I sat down to write that post, by the time I finished writing it, I didn't quite believe it any more. Justifications kept going clunk (rather than ding... reverb), reasoning seemed to circle, there were holes in the argument....

So, with my analyst in the background, repeatedly hammering away at the need for me to be creative (at times almost mockingly – we have had a few rather sharp exchanges in the past three months; which of course suggests that there is shadow stuff floating around in the analysis, perhaps on both sides), and in a spirit of cautious investigation, and partial retraction, I'd like to revisit Why I Don't Compose, And That Isn't A Problem.

At least, insofar as I can do so....

***

1. Music, and composition, are good things.

2. However, they are not innately better than other activities – creative, artistic, whatever you prefer. (Admittedly I've pushed the opposite of this argument in some of my published papers; but I was younger, and/or trying to make a particular kind of point. The aesthetic traditions of either dismissing or enshrining music, or any particular art form or intellectual or social endeavor, are familiar (think of Kant, Schopenhauer, even Nancy)... but they are all fairly self-serving; and all of them are founded on reasons that are as easy to disprove as – well, as my argument in that earlier post.)

3. Composition is no longer plausible for me. (My skills were never very good, and what there was has faded a great deal; any musical creation, at this point, might not be as bad as are my attempts at drawing, but once you've said that you've said all you can.)

4. It's fine for Frank to defend, valorize, glorify music: he does so with passion (rather than logic), which is an entirely good reason to do things in life – but which can only make it important for him (and for those who already agree with him), not necessarily for anyone else.

***

All right, so: that's really all I've got. Any more extensive reasoning about why I don't compose starts to clamber out across soggy, swampy logical holes and self-justifications.

Ultimately, I suppose my above reasons for not composing reduce to: realistic pragmatism; and the relativism of action.

After all, people do different things – plant gardens, correct accounting ledgers, teach children, build skyscrapers, fix cars... paint, write, compose. Make love. Hem dresses. Go for long walks. Bungee jump.

And while those things can be done in various positive or negative ways (are they generous, does someone develop understanding, is something made better, are they simply fun?), they cannot be lined up on a list of best to worst. Call me a relativist – and I am (hey, what do you expect – I'm gay, have worked in the arts, grew up in the seventies, and lived in California for two decades!) – but that's my stance.

***

Admittedly: the question of what I should be doing, in life... well, if it can't be composition... yes, it still should be creative; and it will be connected to the life of the mind.

But other than that...

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen – there will be no questions at this time.

Biochem IIa

[PREREQUISITE: BIOCHEM I; or permission of instructor]

I am noticing some other aspects of changing body chemistry, after the new HIV medications....

For several years, I have tended to get frequent bleeding, and clotting, in my sinuses. This has been worse since my 2009 stroke, and a subsequent three months of the dreadful medication Warfarin (avoid that one if you can); it's gotten so that it is perfectly normal for me to spit blood clots mornings, during showers, etc.

That recalls periods of frequent nosebleeds in the 1980s and 1990s... I occasionally tell my students the story of being the Emcee in a suburban Marin County production of Cabaret; one night, as I was nervously preparing my Solo Entrance (you know the one, on a darkened stage with one pinpoint spot, the scene that climaxes with 'Even the orchestra is beautiful!'), my nose suddenly, and definitely, started bleeding. Two tall chorus girls holding me up, another one rushing to get the stage manager to hold the lights and the orchestra to vamp... and the bleeding stopped: I waved them all away and went out to give what, at least from my light-headed point of view, seemed a properly, exceptionally macabre version of the opening scene.

As for that Warfarin – it is really a rat poison: it kills rats by thinning their blood so much that they die of internal bleeding. And now they give it to older people who have had any kind of stroke or heart problem... because it's very cheap, and keeps it all from clotting. I always have the feeling that the medication only gets used because older people feel ill anyway, and don't get to win arguments with younger doctors who might prescribe something else if they had to take the damned toxic stuff themselves.

In any case, just lately, my sinuses aren't bleeding: so, perhaps, my new medications don't have that side effect...

And then there's the psoriasis. I've had psoriasis since I was 18; it was far worse in the late 1980s and intermittently in the 1990s, in a way that doctors linked to a damaged immune system, low t-cell count, and possibly simply the presence of the virus. It hasn't been terrible for the past decade, but it doesn't go away either – at all.

Except, lately, it is noticeably thinner, lighter, fading – we'll see how it goes

And I suspect that my mood, and mental focus and processing, are much more positive/stronger also. Admittedly I am having headaches, fairly frequently; but as I've only been taking the new medications for just over two weeks, perhaps those will decrease or vanish. All of these changes might be happening partly because it's spring (well, sort of – we've gone back to temperatures in the high 40s/low 50s here); but it seems to be more than that –

perhaps the new medications give me a few minor reprieves: in addition to the major ones, of course.

The Manticore

So... during a time of relative quiet – home a lot, mulling around various work, making lists, and doing bits of it – last night a novel caught me: Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie; and caught me so definitely that I read it from about midnight to ten a.m. And then was of course groggy and headachey all day, but all right; it is good – lots of 'untrustworthy narrator' stuff, plus the immediate experience of wartime, which does give me pause (I've written at points about what some modernist composers did during the Second World War, and been quite judgmental about it – the Kristof reminds me that a generalized madness infects everything, and everyone does things that seem unforgiveable under such chaotic circumstances).

But that wasn't what I was going to, briefly, write about tonight... having been groggy/tired, got some things done, the sofa moved/replaced, etc., I found myself picking up Robertson Davies The Manticore as I went to bed tonight.

As the middle of his most famous trilogy (he's got about five or six), the Deptford Trilogy, this may be one of his most famous works. It is the record of a Jungian analysis undergone by a character in a tangled web of relationships – it is thus a way of working through the crises and changes of the entire trilogy, at least from the point of view of one part of it.

And it is wonderful: dense, rich, tough to the point of being painful, but heartening – I'm a bit curious as to whether I had read this before I did my Jungian analysis 1987-92; I think (though I'm always pretty bad at remembering sequences of events) that I tripped over it while I was actually in analysis.

In any case: although there are passages that literally make me think: oh, I really have to remember that for my fundamentals exam this summer (and no, I promise I won't use the book as a study aid...), it reminds me of why I want to become an analyst – the complex battle with the self, the density of memory and understanding between analyst and analysand, the richness of technique, and the importance and difficulty of feeling.

As well as the fact that, every time Dr Joh. Haller points out that her patient is primitive in relating to his feelings about what has happened to him, it reminds me: that's exactly what my analyst John keeps pointing out about me in the last few months...

... sigh. It's always easier to see this when somebody else is doing it.

Biochem

I have been negotiating a large turn of the great wheel of my HIV care... after twelve years on the same regime (Kaletra – which includes a daily dose of that hideous, damned, nasty Ritonavir, that everyone hated so much in the late 1990s; Efavirenz/Sustiva, and Abacavir/Ziagen) – a regime that has become archaically dusty: apparently hardly anybody in Newcastle is still on these old medications – I've been moved over to some New Stuff.

Experimental, designed for long-term survivors: I'm keeping the Sustiva, but changing the other two for  Maraviroc and Raltregravir. (Don't those two new ones suggest that the pharmaceutical companies are having trouble coming up with names?... if the first one sounds like a clumsy science fiction character name from a 1970s television series, the second grates, with that weird 'ravir' suffix – a badly spelled variation on the more etymologically correct, and more familiar, 'rivir'. But probably pharmaceutical staff don't have, you know, real educations.)

Without going into too much detail, I will say that it has absolutely altered my body's patterns of tiredness, elimination (!), food and chemical processing, energy... all of which is frankly weird after a decade spent aging on another pattern. On the good side, this is obviously far less toxic: it's already much more convenient – I don't feel as though I need to be near a bathroom at all times....

No, I said I wouldn't go into too much detail. All right then.

But as a result, I'm clearly going to gain weight, and appetite. Energy, too – which is great: is it even possible that a general shift in mood could be happening so quickly, only ten days after changing pills?... Of course, as everyone knows, the combination I've lived on, ever since the fall of 2000, is depressive. Among other things.

But I will suppose I will need some exercise, and a lighter diet: or I'm going to look like an aging hippopotamous.

Well, okay: more like one, I mean...

Not so wrong after all...

Trudy, my student and friend from ten years ago, has grown from a Hong Kong pianist into a New York publisher/performer/gourmet chef, and friend to many people across several artistic communities. Her husband Frank, whom I met for the first time a few weeks ago, is a composer/journalist/intellectual – one who can connect to a vast number of styles and works, who knows people and pieces and performers and histories, and is constantly cross-connecting them to each other.

While Trudy was making magic in their kitchen, Frank and I wandered around their apartment (which is in an eerily well-preserved Art Deco building way uptown). It's an apartment that actually contains more books and records than mine does – we traded cheerfully boastful tales of how many obscure and complex and brilliant things we could pull out of various shelves. (It is faintly possible that other, more normal, people might find this tedious; but we don't care about them of course – we share the collector's mania, which seems Completely Sane to those under its spell.)

Among the rapid-fire discussion and excellent food, I grabbed an opportunity to bask in telling the tale of My Last Composition (Frank is cheerfully encouraging to artistic vanity – a valuable quality in someone who spends so much time with artists of all kinds). And I said that it was, truly, my last work – that 1987 was the end of a lot of things for me: and that writing those last miniatures, just before I finally took the HIV test, was putting something to rest that couldn't possibly continue.

Frank is, however, devoted to creativity, especially in music and composition, as he said in his blog entry.(An incredibly complimentary blog entry, by the way: I am torn between pride (Look, a New York composer/critic said I was cool!) and embarrassment (of the kind exhibited by Churchy in Pogo – I can't find the picture I'm thinking of, where he gets simultaneously embarrassed and excited by praise, but here is an example of Churchy's style)).

But I disagree with Frank. Yes, all right: creative practice, composition, music – all are certainly admirable things; and I'm glad to say that my last composition did show some honest craft and self-expression. In fact I'm frankly proud of it – when we clean up the recording my students made a couple of months ago, I'll put it up in this blog, together with a pdf of the score, and the story of how it came to be written.

But I stopped composing for a good reason. For one thing, my skills are not up to producing the works I wanted to write: I heard/imagined huge sweeps of sound in my head (heavily influenced by the Penderecki and Ligeti I listened to such a lot) which I couldn't really write out without getting lost in a vast tangle of technical problems and dropped temporal stitches. Training might have bypassed some of those limitations – and it's true, all my life I've never really learned any skill with real precision. I generally don't have the patience for real craft – even with words; and I'm much better with them than I ever was with notes.

Ultimately, musical composition for me was tied to a painful egotism: I needed to write things that were important, I needed to write things that were great – it was grandiose: ultimately mostly a channel for the worst (i.e. most inflated and unrealistic) of my own narcissism. Writing words has never been as tied to the inflated ego side of me as music was: I'm pleased with, even proud of my writing, especially when it's good, and I will fuss over it, and get into heated arguments with editors; but if it isn't good, that doesn't become a poisoned arrow struck into the heart of my self-worth.

Annie Dillard, in one of her essays, talks about teaching writing classes. She mentions prospective students who may think that they want to write, but who really want to, as it were, wear a cap with 'WRITER' printed across it. She asks those students a peculiar question: Do you like sentences? They generally stare at her, bemused and at a loss... but her point is: if you enjoy sentences, words, clauses, and putting them together, then you might be able to write. And if you are able to write, you might have some success at it.

But if you just want to be seen as a writer... then you're doomed from the start. Writing because you want praise for being a writer – the chances of any kind of success are so minimal, and if you don't actually enjoy putting all those damned sentences together... well, go find something else to occupy your time. Because all of the energy, all of the drive, is skewed from the wrong point, chaotically scattered out across egotism, rather than focused in on itself.

So, although I wrote several small pieces that I liked between the late 1970s and the late 1980s; and although I think my last work was quite honest, transparent and well made; it is clear to me that, as a composer, I wasn't enjoying the notes enough. Instead, I was flailing around with inflated fragments of my ego. A pointless process, and one that could only lead to disappointment....

***

So: I disagree with Frank, kind/encouraging on the one hand, and artistically courageous on the other, as his position may be.

Creativity is good. Because I'm studying at the Jung-Institut, that is driven into me all the time – as it is in my university job, in a music department. And it is good, personally: self-expression is good for the soul.

But at times, certain kinds of self-expression, especially if they're too heavily tainted with inflation, or with the demands of Art with a capital A, just don't work for a given person. We can't all do everything: and some channels of self-expression will be productive for some people, but useless, or impossible, or hopelessly damaged for others.

For me, composition was about a youthful passion for recognition, for fame, for glory. It didn't even make much sense, really – I had other abilities and ideas that I wasn't exploring, mostly because I had my eye on this frustrating, egocentric tangle of actions. If I did it now, perhaps it would be free of all these things – but it is years later; the skills are mostly gone, and they were never very good in the first place.

On the other hand, I like writing words. I'm pleased, and proud, to be studying to be an analytical psychologist. I'm glad to be who I am, at this point in my life; and glad that whatever happens with words, ideas, or psychology, doesn't seem to impinge directly onto my sense of my own value. But that person can't write music – he's forgotten too many of the details, and whatever skills he did know.

And I can let go of all of that, without any real loss. There are, after all, other things....

NYC - WDC - NYC

A trip to the US: going through New York to get to northern Virginia, for my mother's memorial service; and back to New York for four busy days.

From the beginning, the sheer ease of things was startling: the flight to New York, the early landing, an almost unbelievably efficient and relaxed JFK – I almost didn't recognize it all...

The memorial itself was emotionally calm, rather than sad. A lot of memories, endlessly discussed by the family staying at my brother-in-law's (which immediately morphed into a crowd comfortable with each other, as though we hadn't lived miles apart for years); plus a surprisingly large number of neighbors and relatives coming to the cemetery, dinner at a restaurant, and back to the house afterwards. Arlington Cemetery was, as always, a calm arrangement in grays and whites; gentle humor and remembrances floated among a lot of people who hadn't seen each other for years.

If you click on the picture, you might see that my father and my mother are actually in the canisters that held my father's developing fluid (for photographs). Back in 2000, when he died, it seemed right (in an admittedly affectionately odd way) to use these canisters as burial urns – we used one for my sister a few years ago (she's around the corner from my parents, about two rows away), then a third for my mother. Chalk it up to family peculiarity; hopefully the cemetery managers won't find out.

Back at my brother-in-law's, an afternoon and evening spent talking about everything under the sun... My sister had made a mural of photographs from my mother's life – I've seen perhaps half of them before, but many of the earlier ones were new to me. I remember one from the early 1930s, that she didn't use – my Greek grandparents with their three children; although her elder sister and brother look as assertive as they did throughout their lives, my mother looks, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, remarkably shy, frankly frightened. Later pictures show her shifting back and forth between shyness and cheerfulness, until the point – perhaps in her late 20s? – when she became strikingly beautiful for a time, when she began to look generally cheerful and happy with her life.

Driving back to New York, we were quieter, basically worn out. But from Sunday midday until Wednesday afternoon, I made a remarkable number of visits, personal and professional and mixed – and everyone seemed remarkably cheerful: people looked well, seemed busy, and were ready for spring, for new projects, for enthusiastically diving into any number of things. I was frankly surprised at how easy it was to restart where we had left off, after not seeing many of them for a decade or more (though in many cases that problem was smoothed over by Facebook – it's really useful for those of us who live far away from our pasts).

Mary Jo: hours of talking in her beautiful kitchen as she made a meal, packed to go away for some weeks to an Equity show outside the city, and took pictures of us on her roof (which will someday be reborn as a roof garden). Dinner with Trudy, and her husband Frank and a friend-composer Eric who flew in from the Left Coast – Trudy's fantastic curry and salad, plus a rapid criss-crossing discussion of everything happening in musical New York. Lunch with Libby in the sunshine, talking about her daughter, her husband, her work at Yale, and connections I could help her with for their archive.

Then waltzing off with Laura to the last big event to be held in Merce Cunningham's studio before it closes forever – seeing Pauline Oliveros get a prize, bumping into Carl Stone, and unexpectedly meeting Rhodri Davies, a young grantee composer who lives about five miles from me, right here in northern England (he's now invited to come speak to our students). Then a relaxed late Italian dinner back at Laura's hotel, where the staff have obviously decided that she is their favorite guest (understandable, as she often stays there, and is pretty lovable – as are many of the people mentioned here).

A visit to Meredith Monk's office, then walking over to her studio (well, I got confused about which address was which) went extraordinarily well – I finally met Peter (and got a pile of CDs and DVDs and reviews and such), then a long talk with Meredith over tea in her studio, which was sunnier in the spring light than I'd ever seen it. Lots of materials, lots of plans, getting to work there too, after letting that project slide for too long.

A relaxed Italian lunch with Melanie, who is away from her Irish home in New York on a grant, brought me through the NYU music department – and lo and behold, Suzanne, in a high-fashion pair of shoes (how can I describe them – sort of a silver techno-glitter?), and Michael, both of whom greeted me as a long-lost friend (though I haven't seen either in at least a decade). A last dinner with my sister and her husband, who put up with me for nearly a week in the midst of very busy schedules – sleeping in their crowded living room... we went to Ethiopian, which I'd been craving for a few months, and even had a choice of Ethiopian beers. (And then, after Ethiopian beer, decided we needed to test the meme of the Peep in the Microwave, only to be defeated by accidentally buying – I kid you not – sugarless, diet Peeps. Bummer.)

And a final busy tour of the Manhattan version of the Jung Institute – rapid connections with an amazingly helpful librarian (many photocopies); chatting with the pleasant Swedish women who run ARAS, the vast image archive; and a brief word with the guy in the bookstore, who sent me back with a query to refer to Zürich....

All very professional, cheerful. Even, generally, exciting: a confident moving-into-the-future that I've missed too often in the past decade.

I guess this all sounds like boasting (sorry about that). But, after so much whinging about being far from things, about feeling ineffective and forgotten by the wider, busier, more successful world, it was frankly startling – this, after all, is what success feels like....