Sunday afternoon in Newcastle. Sunny and clear, shops and restaurants open, people walking along.
A young guy, shaved head, talks on his phone, walking up and down. He goes to the corner of a granite building near the bus stop, leans over, retches – vomits, not much, some chunks of food in what is probably mostly stout. He stays on the phone: only slightly shaky, only for a moment, he continues his conversation, ends it, walks off talking to another guy.
I am startled: it is as though he throws up without missing a beat... what they call, in the North, hard.
***
Eight and a half days until I leave for New Orleans, for the Big Conference. Before I came out to have lunch with Michael and Andrew, I tried to curb my anxiety at the many things there are to do, including new ones that have popped up without notice, by making a careful list – split up: research, the conference, teaching/admin, personal. As always, the list helps: it is a lot – especially the research that must be finished – but it can be done, perhaps; and checking things off cuts into the anxiety.
I think about Jeannie, as I do at times – a remarkably beautiful young woman with steely intelligence in her dark eyes: she taught seminars for est when I attended them in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. She said many things, and taught very, very well, with a slightly ruthless, businesslike manner; but I always remember her saying: Have you ever noticed how much you get done on the day before you go on vacation?... What if every day were like that?
I will have to be hard about things: less discussion, less fussing, just... done.
***
Through all of this, the tangential side effects of a bitterly symbolic dream, from a week ago. Penny, the character from The Big Bang Theory, appears on a walkway above my room – a dream room in a kind of large college dormitory, architecturally peculiar with partial walls, horizontal passageways, unenclosed spaces. She says she is going to the hospital; I am surprised, give her a hug – but as she gives details they become more alarming: a hospital that is hours away, she will be gone for a year, someone else will stay in her apartment. I am increasingly concerned: and as she lies on a dormitory sofa with me in an adjacent chair, near a wall stained by leaking pipes and damaged plaster, she scratches her head: a wig pulls partway off, and beneath it she is scarred, damaged, incredibly old...
Frightening. For me, Penny would be some sort of anima/eros figure – not a love object as she is for the straight men of the show, but someone who has sensuality, health, sexuality, happiness and sadness – strong feelings, strong physical resonance, with a great deal of kindness and empathy.
So, what can it mean that she is so sick – damaged parts of the self, the loss of happiness and the body, the afflictions of illness and lonely aging... and worse: the dream figure is going away for a year? Specific time references in dreams are alarming: they may be merely suggestive, but...
Sadness, loss, and finally anger – a lot of anger. A difficult focus on the essential pain of the complex, rather than its connections out in the world.
***
Earlier this week I read Steve Kluger's gay novel, Almost Like Being in Love. Fun, if not terribly well written (all the characters, even the kid, sound exactly the same – a lot of near-Will and Grace wisecracks); but I enjoyed it. The whole idea of young men who fall in love, then find each other again twenty years later – worlds filled with cheerful, healthy, hunky lovers and secretaries and colleagues, and blithely sarcastic woman friends on the verge of marriage: a casual gay-pop paradise.
But ultimately painful: the fantasy-recharge of reading about giddy fun, erotic possibility... but the wish-fulfillment parts make it ring too hollow: finally I am caught between hope, despair, envious distance, and disappointed disbelief.
***
Age, illness, isolation: when it feels too late for the attractions of living, not to mention: of love.
This does, admittedly, slow down my ability to focus on my conference paper: Derek Jarman's last works, and his battles around, and acceptance of, his imminent death... this is always the painful difficulty of writing about AIDS, too near the deep end.
***
The list pulls me back – and hard: back, to work....