in the hall of mirrors

An LA

Today was a day of minor but busy actions – a plane ticket, unraveling the resultant bank transactions, e-mails, laundry. No real or serious work, as too many days since Thomas went back to Munich – my fault of course... but this evening I was feeling utterly relaxed, physically and mentally, watching some TV...

and what has been strange about that, for me, this evening only, is the absence of anxiety over work to do: neither a sense of satisfaction nor one of guilt. Really: I just didn't care, at all. It was almost like being stoned, in some strange and unexpected way... in any case, certainly at ease, perfectly unworried by time and change.

For some reason I flashed back on one of the guys who was in the Los Angeles HIV-positive writers' group led by Terry Wolverton, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, over an important five-year period for me – a period when many things changed in the wake of my own diagnosis.

I don't remember his name... he wasn't like the ones who just came occasionally, or surfaced briefly; nor was he one of the ones who put a great deal of energy into the writing (and those included Gil Cuadros, whose book of poetry you can still buy from City Lights; but who died in the year of the advent of protease inhibitors, because his health was too fragile at that point for them to help; but he had published his book of poems, and they were good, and people cared that they were good).

This guy, whose name I have forgotten, had some sort of low-level entertainment industry job; he was at the workshop frequently but sort of noncommittally, was often funny but cynically, sort of emptily so; he was someone whose expectations seemed to stand at a zero point (unimaginable for me, with my tortured ups and downs).

I once met him at his home – I can't remember why, or how: perhaps I was picking him up for the group to get together, some meeting, some dinner... in any case, it is impossible to forget: a dully white Hollywood studio apartment, mostly a bed and a dresser and a large television, a darkened room lit only by the streetlamp near the window and the glowing screen, and hieratically, predictably moving figures on it, a minor Western film or something, in a room barely big enough to hold all of them. A sense that it had been that way for hours, would continue to be that way for hours, after I had left it.

A space with nothing in it, except the bed and the television, or more accurately except for their functions – because in LA there are indeed people who just watch screens, professionally and also to pass time, all of the time, every hour of the day.

And his apartment gave a strange feeling of – not squalor, not quite, but – the real, dingy, unimportance of anything but watching the screen: movies, shows, series, specials, late-night and later-night – he would know them all, have seen them repeatedly and with endless, unvarying attention.

(I, of course, am quite different – with my endless shelves of books, some with my name in them, some dense, some trivial; as I undress for bed I briefly open the window, by the bookcase where stand monumental tomes of the histories of Taoism and Buddhism in China, of arguably different collections of Grimm's fairly tales, of collections of stories on the top shelf, some of them read, some of them never... different?...)

And ultimately, he did not seem unhappy; but I have rarely been so disturbed by a view into someone else's life....

Magic, Inc.

Words from a favorite passage of a favorite novel came to mind today. In the midst of a modern, slangy conversation about a dangerous situation and what to do, the tone changes:

"Jedson said suddenly, 'White prevails over black.' She answered, 'Certainly.'

'Everywhere?' 'Everywhere, since darkness is the absence of light.'

He went on, 'It is not good for the white to wait on the black. It is not good. With my brother Royce to help, we might carry light into darkness.'

She considered this. 'It is possible, yes. But very dangerous.'

'You have been there?'

'On occasion. But you are not I, nor are these others.'

Everyone seemed to be following the thread of the conversation but me. I interrupted with, 'Just a minute, please. Would it be too much to explain what you are talking about?'"

An eerily beautiful passage from Heinlein's Magic, Inc. – I've always thought it was a shame he didn't write more like that one. Wonderful, not only because of the abrupt change in style to something hieratic – which reflects the oblique backgrounds of the speakers – but because of its calmly indomitable moral implications....

Last days

It is – probably – the second-to-the-last day of real summer; tomorrow is probably, as it were, the closing firework display of good weather. Pleasant that it will be a Sunday, after Rumana's big party tonight. Of course the weather forecast from Monday onwards, and knowledge of how North Sea weather goes, gives just a hint of William Ackerman's beautiful, but gently sad, piece for guitar and celli, 'The Last Day at the Beach.'

My houseguest Thomas has left – while he was here, I got some work done (completed a major grant application, didn't complete the article but will get back to it tomorrow; other things in the wings... oh, and impending teaching and administration: but some of the most anxiety-making messes are cleaned up, so it may not be a bad year; and I'm still considering whether I can finish my first-half Jung-Institut exams in February, or if it is necessary to wait until July. Heigh-ho).

He gave me a hefty set of kitchen knives – yes, I get the suggestion here (my knives are admittedly not great, and I seriously need to find a place to sharpen them). And a cat basket, as I have been repeatedly instructed by several people to go ahead and get a cat... I keep dithering about it, but hopefully there will be a Ralph II in the future.

The great concern/focus of the time with Thomas – for me at least – was: can I break some of the bonds of procrastination?... well, interestingly, I shuttled back and forth rapidly enough between completely stalling out, and getting back to work, that I could see the strange interface of mental static that boils and simmers between them. Quite odd to get in touch with one's own complexes, experientially.

Oh, and there were dreams: where, weirdly enough, I hovered around anxiously, as other figures (not recognizable as friends in the waking world) handled things for me with ease and dispatch. The (very Jungian) interpretation: that although my ego is still stuck and confused, unconscious parts of myself are moving and changing things: a kind of reparative psychology.

This is one of the great attractions of Jungian work – and I'm sure that for anyone particularly cynical or epistemologically locked into the waking ego, it must seem to be the aspect of Jung that is too much like religion, or like magical thinking, or simply yet another wish fulfillment. But there is a sense that one can, and should, let the unseen parts of the self act, to move forward – it is a great comfort, at least potentially.

And I am washing the new kitchen knives, and gorgeous music is coming from the computer speakers, and I will take a shower and perhaps go for a walk on one of the last warm days. And then the party, and people....

Turning points

The truth is: all points these days feel kind of like turning points.

Somewhere between August and September; between summer and fall. Between the expected weather for this part of the world, and this gloriously sunny day, when we sat out in a lovely Italian garden restaurant, and where the warmth and food were almost exactly like my memories of LA.

Between sabbatical and back to school, between stages of study at the Jung-Institut, between crucial points of applying for a research grant. Between various research projects.

Between waking reality and shifting dreams, between other people and myself... between memories of other people, and people who are here now....

Nineteen days ago, Thomas S. came to visit from München. He is a friend from the Jung-Institut, he has to write his dissertation, and has been panicked about it – our agreement: I will help him write it, tell him what to do next, keep him from getting lost, if he keeps me working. We both succeed and fail on a daily basis: but with the other one around, we can always get back to work the next day.

(Perhaps that's the true, deep part of this in-between-ness: I am in between ways of processing my own complexes around getting work done – I am absolutely not, by any means, successful, not yet; but no longer perpetually failing either.)

Since today was Thomas' fortieth birthday, we (Thomas, Rumana and I) went to the abovementioned lovely restaurant – a rarity up here: although it's possible to sit outside at a lot of restaurants, I've never been in one where the part outside was so pleasant and easy-going. So realio Italy, so trulio Spain... so memorably like California.

(Will I dream of Californias tonight? There should have been a Rimbaud poem about traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco – there is a line from something like Le bateau ivre that is almost in my mind's reach... no, I can't quite get it.)

At the table, I began, slightly incoherently (champagne) and tangentially (sunshine) to explain my love for Paul Monette's first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, which is so intensely beautiful, which has such dense sentences, all hung around with a young man's deep desire to understand his own sad and joyous feelings, and the dense desires of others: and the gorgeous ending, with fireworks, and all the friends, outside, on the lawn. Where the narrator, who has always worried too much about time and life, who has been so deeply frightened by the passing years that he does nothing that could have anything to do with them, has finally relaxed, to be happy with people he cares for.

I do wonder, at the back of my mind, whether this calm transitional feeling will pass, and I will be anxious again, worried again, in that deeply nostalgia-possessed way typical of me (as it is of Rick, the narrator of the book): but, for today, I can see time passing, change happening, and simply marvel at how beautiful it all is....