in the hall of mirrors

Learning and insight

Another day of reading, study, writing – broken up by lunch with a pleasant guy who is recently diagnosed HIV+, who wanted to talk about what he is going through, plus our normal HIV patient presentation to the medical students.

Much study and writing is relatively continuous, work-like... but sometimes it is like a light breaking: much of what I was reading this morning was like that – a lot of 'aha!' experiences and a sense of 'I really have to remember this.' Mostly over a discussion of fairy tales, oddly enough – and some trying to figure out the problems with psychoanalysis and (or perhaps, I'm not certain, versus) Buddhism...

Where were the 'aha!'s? Ah, too long and chaotic. One moment that should have been obvious (I have learned this over and over) was re-viewing the aspects of personality types for me – I've always been comfortable with personality type theory, but for some reason I recurrently forget that, as I'm an introvert, certain functions are reversed from expectations (i.e. although thinking is what I use for judgment, and I'm judgment-oriented, that is all measured as external behavior – and I'm an introvert, therefore thinking and judgment actually come second to intuition and perception, though still above feeling and sensation – and sensation is the function most embedded in the unconscious – yes, it's annoyingly confusing if you lose track of the directions here).

And then a startling paragraph in CW 6, §807 – I'll leave it for anybody to look up if they're interested, and involved in the field.

Back to the books, preparing a Skype conversation with Saõ Paulo in half an hour....

With all due speed

Today I took the Metro out to Tynemouth with Michael, to have lunch, then see Andrew and Ingrid where they were selling prints at the Tynemouth Metro station. This station has a market every Sunday – with book markets four or five times a year in the summer months. It was only a regular market day, but there were some book tables – I bought two books, including Jan Morris' anthology The Oxford Book of Oxford.

Of course, as a self-conscious and intellectually defensive American, Oxford always induces a certain irritable resentment in me. It is so grand, so aware of its own power and worth, so certain that no one else can touch it... yet its style is unlike that of the arrogant lawyer- and scion-ridden Harvard, which is so much easier to hold in contempt. (Can you tell I went to a public university?... hey, UCLA has better weather than either... okay, okay.) So, one is left with envy. In fact, although I love Beerbohm's writings, I always have trouble with Zuleika Dobson – not only are its many in-jokes fairly opaque, but even a parody of Oxford pomposity from, as it were, the inside, shares in a great deal of that pomposity.

(Consider Beerbohm, then: "I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.")

But it's an anthology... and I always have time for Jan Morris. (Although Michael N. once irritated and worried me by offhandedly saying her style is  a bit overdone... but, hey, he went to Cambridge.)

Well, it is a fascinating anthology. (Yes, I know I should be studying, my first Jung Institute exams are in three weeks, give me a break.) Given all the garbage and nonsense being thrown at British universities by the aggressively and stupidly pragmatic merchant-banker-idiots in government, it was lovely to read the following passage.

It is from 1577 – William Harrison, Description of England:

"From our entrance into the universitie unto the last degree received is commonlie eighteene, or peradventure twentie yeeres, in which time, if a student hath not obteined sufficient learning, thereby to serve his own turne and benefit his common wealth, let him not looke by tarieng longer to come by anie more. For after this time and 40 yeeres of age, the most part of students doo commonlie give over their woonted diligence and live like drone bees on the fat of colleges, withholding better wits from the possession of their places and yet dooing little good in their own vocation and calling.... Long continuance in those places is either a signe of lacke of friends or of learning or of good and upright life, as bishop Fox sometimes noted, who thought it sacrilege for a man to tarrie anie longer at Oxford than he had a desire to profit."

That sounds about right to me: after twenty years, we think it's time to check on your progress....

Light

Is it Vermeer, or perhaps Caravaggio, who is called the best painter of faces glowing from candlelight?...

Candles are rarely used at night these days... but as I walk across the darkened apartment on a moonless night, an iPad shines up, showing me the way, illuminating the room.

And Montaigne is on the page facing upward – that is also light....

Dislocation

I have had about a day and a half of being really enraged – by an e-mail that felt like a dismissive insult, and from someone that matters to me... and at the same time still getting work done: finishing off that paper on figures of death and transcendence.

Today we met for our usual HIV+ patient presentation for medical students (some very good-looking ones this time, and they were all charmingly engaged and wide-eyed).

Beforehand, M. was in an irritable mood himself; it turns out he is suing the local HIV charity for treating him badly – of course he is a hothead, and accustomed to fights (and I mean real fights, prison fights and knife fights and gang fights, not just being annoyed with someone). After listening to him for a few minutes I stopped him, said I didn't want to hear it – not the ideal response, perhaps, for someone studying to be an analyst....

but no, my own analyst has said that choosing to be an analyst, or any kind of therapist, does not mean you are expected to listen to everything that anyone wants to say to you. In fact I like my analyst's brusque story about telling people, "I'm not paid for this."

Well, M. did stop telling me about his lawsuit; fortunately he likes me, so he puts up with me being direct. (I don't know what I'd do if he were ever really angry at me – I'm not actually made for violence. As is pretty obvious.)

And then we went in to the students, and talked through our stories, our pasts – I did my 'set piece' (I've done it so often it's like a baroque aria, except probably the form is more modern) about Christmas in 1991, and telling my family about being HIV+.

Came out, walked with M. a bit, excused myself to buy some food, went home... discovered I was still angry; handled trivial paperwork at the desk. Then fell asleep watching a new (new! that alone is a surprise) episode of The Big Bang Theory (which, I don't mind saying, I like a great deal).

And somehow it got mixed up in my head: California, Pasadena, and science and scientists; here and now, my life, their lives; and perhaps all this anger....

When I woke I had a sense of dislocation: am I a young scientist in Pasadena, am I an aging musicologist in northern England? Is it warm or cold outside? What are my concerns... what part of my life am I living – and which track did I follow?

As you may have noticed in the blog, these kinds of dislocations aren't that unusual for me these days – being on sabbatical (and thus out of contact with daily demands), paying attention to dreams and memories, and responding differently to frustrations, to imagination... the present and the past seem oddly flexible: not necessarily in their reality, but in how they are perceived, how they are remembered.

All that combined with a slight sense of exhaustion from being so angry... (and even that felt like remembered anger: as though this was not the first time I have been angry at this person in this way. Hey, it's called a complex).

But these strange portals of time and perception and feeling do seem to be open, lately: as though I could move through them and experience it all differently....

Perhaps my urge to go to sleep tonight is merely a wish to return to, to explore, some alternate space, some earlier or nonexistent time.

Well, I may as well indulge myself in that....

Six years; and recent weeks

Blog Anniversary: since 14 May 2006. It is now six years....

How different life is now than it was then: yes, still in Newcastle, same job, same apartment, still living alone. But the inner world, and my memories, expectations, hopes, feel so different...

I suppose I feel more... I don't know. More aware of the past, of places, of various people – without being quite so attached to them. Anger and fear at daily trivia fade into mere irritation; I recall and connect differently to the past (55 years! Four continents, working and living on each! A number of cities, a number of homes – the places I loved most I remember; at some point it would be interesting to make a list of every home I've had). And somehow people seem both more transparent and more whole, in a way... obviously a shift in my perception of them.

There is of course the reserved coolness of being on sabbatical: at times a bit like one of those ancient Chinese or Roman exiles, to a country villa – everything is slower and calmer, the cities are far away.

•••

Admittedly there have been points of contact: last week our students performed David Lang's Are You Experienced?, a post-minimalist work for electronic tuba, narrator and ensemble. Our tuba player, the wonderful Alex Dawson, organized the performance at my suggestion (after all, how often do you discover that there is a virtuoso tuba player among your students). His solo, a burst of amplified, melismatic madness, was quite wonderful.

As for me, I did the narration. In rehearsal, I had discovered that, even after spending time on it, the text doesn't come into clear dramatic focus. It's not really a character so much as it is a collection of composed feelings – compare dreams, hallucinations, where identities flash into and out of being.

(I suspect, in fact, that the entire work tends to be composed in terms of moods, of feelings – rather than the closely focused development of a them (Reich), shifting key signatures and harmonies (Adams), or the subtly elided expectations of the best Glass. It would explain the success of Lang's more focused tour de force, Cheating, Lying, Stealing, a remarkably uncomfortable work based on painfully irregular rhythms; when I teach it in class, I talk about  some of the disturbing darkness of the late 1980s and 1990s, of a world Adorno would have recognized.)

Which meant I could focus on performing feelings: the visceral, the highly charged, the not entirely conscious. Overlapping scenes and lines and musical moods shift from panic to anger to a creepy sort of reassurance – but the kind of reassurance a serial killer gives his victims. (I didn't say they were nice feelings, mark you.) My miking – excellent tech by our department technician (who incidentally just won a well-deserved University award for being fabulous) – was very responsive to closeness and breath; I realized I could really chew on the mike for the last movement, which becomes slow and dark and dreadful. Most remarkable was the sense of abandon in letting the final growling whispers grind through the speakers. As I told a friend, I was channeling Vince D'Onofrio – a far, far better actor than I'd ever hope to be; but a powerful model of a big, dangerous man with enormous energy and focus, all of it held in reserve.

Quite an experience: and I probably did a better job than I usually do of letting the visceral out – all of this Jungian work has reoriented some of my sense of where parts of myself are living.

 •••

This week there was also a memorial puja for Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, the guru who made such a difference in my life when she visited Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She died thirty days before this ceremony, in mid-April of this year; she was the kind of person it is hard to imagine dying – that boundless, generous, almost preterhuman energy. There is an odd resonance with my mother's death last fall, as with my eldest sister's several years ago; I suppose, finishing this at the end of Mother's Day before I post it on the day after, it is indeed true that everyone has several mothers, and several fathers.

Ma had some of the elements of that tradition of 'mad' Buddhist teachers – unlike the usual Hindu or Buddhist or other Eastern religious, who tended to act calm, quiet, reasonable – cool – Ma was one of those who exploded with a chaotic, sensual, often hilarious energy. She tended to toss insight, strength and advice at people so fast and so hard that they would lose their footing almost immediately, and have to listen.

Not polite, not reasonable: but utterly real... hmm, maybe I could learn that from her. Yet again.

... double vision...

It is years since I've seen this...

A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir... and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you by the end. As do manyof the other characters – even ones whose names you don't learn; even some who pass by on the screen without any lines at all.

I hadn't seen it in years. And then never straight through, as tonight...

But hey: I'm trying to finish a paper for the Jung Institute on the personification of Nachiketas and Yama, that is to say Death, in the Katha Upanishad. And preparing an exam for the Institute where we have somehow ended up with me being quizzed on healing and Buddhism (why did I not choose a more material, or more everyday question for that topic?). And then of course I always wonder if I'm sufficiently in touch with (insufficiently in touch with, overly concerned with, confused by, obsessed with) death and illness – in the now nearly twenty-nine years since Reid's death. Or perhaps in the twenty-five years since Mitch told me my HIV diagnosis over the clinic desk. Or in the twenty-four years since I met Ma Jaya Satai Bhagavati – I use her full name with respect, as she herself died last month.

And most of all of course in the months since my mother's death, the several years since my eldest sister's, my father's... My aunt's, my uncle's. Memory, change and loss resonating out like rings on the water, then bouncing back, breaking and overlapping rings on the water.

In the film, at the beginning when he has survived a plane crash, the noise of the plane, the roar of engines, or perhaps it is just the sound a seashell makes – the roar of eternity – is behind everything. There is a sense of strange and utter clarity, of ruthless reality, with everything slightly slowed, slightly strange: Bridges is afraid of nothing, nothing at all. Walking through death, through life, as though not quite sure where the feet are landing. Allergies, appointments, family, plans... going home... all entirely unimportant.

Not that he is against those things, but... they are all behind the haze of a slight roar....

I have been a bit dizzy myself the past couple of days.

There is this strange double vision: fussing over doing things, putting things in order, the anxiety of demands and wants and needs... and having all of that vanish with a faint roar of engines, a muffled feeling...

This thing: the thing of having some awareness of life and death, of time and no-time. Of dreaming as much as waking, where one's dreams may be more important than anything going on out in the world. The double vision occurs when one doesn't quite lose this contact with (forgive me if this seems arrogant, you may put it into the subjunctive if you like) eternity, with death, with nothing – and yet also walks through life, talking to people, doing things. Putting medications into bags, as I am doing tonight (although admittedly the film has slowed me so much that the pills I started putting out at about 7 pm are still not quite put away, nearly at 1 am).

Another aspect of the film that gave me a shock of recognition: the people who were on the plane telling their tales to each other, to various people, the frictions and resonances of them. Reminds me of the HIV patient group, which is a bit exasperating these days: many of our group members have gone beyond wanting to explain their experiences to medical students – indeed the ones that remain are mostly people who are teachers or therapists in waking life, and therefore are more accustomed to reiterating lessons. Even lessons that are attached to the deeply emotional.

Even when they want to move on, at some level, to talking about... something else.

I wonder if I ever understood before tonight, or partially understood, what really happens, when Perez reexperiences the crash and realizes she couldn't have saved her baby; and then at the end when Bridges makes his final, wild, personal... experiment: and then when they both cross back out of the limbo of standing and chatting with Death, so easily and comfortably – when they walk back into living: actual, real living. A shock of course, to come back: but the shock of being alive....

I never had such a dramatic event, of course. But it is true that the past few years have been a slowed-down version of this process for me: coming back from perpetual limbo, from a familiar wasteland of death – or, at least, partially back – to these studies at the Jung Institute, which are inevitably and unavoidably predicated on working towards something. I know I've felt, in body and mind, returned to living: not particularly amazing living, but real and concrete living, nevertheless.

I also know the reason I haven't come all the way back: I remain alone in this, even with my lovely friends, and the various good and real people scattered about the world. Living alone, it is hard to come completely to earth – especially for someone who hasn't spent a lot of his life completely on earth: it was perhaps all too easy for me to emotionally vacate after 1983, after 1987, after 1992, 1996....

Well: I do know, this is what I have to work with. We will see what I can do with it.