in the hall of mirrors

Flash

Reading in bed, electronic on an iPad, Tove Jansson's story collection Traveling Light. I was very happy when it, with the other recent ones – especially Fair Play – were translated by a small London publisher; my intense attachment to the Moomin books, especially the eerie late ones, and to my old, beaten-up copy of The Summer Book, told me that they would be wonderful. And they are.

This is, as it happens, rereading; and the first story is not unfamiliar – I rediscover it; but I'm sleepy, and won't finish it, just enjoy the clarity of the writing in the first paragraphs.

But this story is attached to a memory of an interior – mostly light brown wood and half-shadows, a circular bank of windows, the ceiling a half-cone of slats: a restaurant which is nearly empty, where I am having a distinctly late dinner – where exactly is this place, Zürich or Bern, somewhere in northern England? Down in Totnes? Göteborg? Milan, or Parma?

Some place where I walked in and thought, isn't there a more normally crowded place, but realize that it's late enough that this is pretty much it. And they are pleasant – probably northern European then, businesslike, open to a certain hour, no question of closing early; and if I'm the only customer, or nearly the only one, they don't mind.

Light wood, slats, circular. Tables, all set; but it is past the summer holidays, and there won't be many more customers in the coming days, and evenings. Quiet and pleasant enough, a good dinner, and this book.

I don't know where it is, nor do I remember more detail – I am even unsure if it was not a dream: but I am comfortable inhabiting this memory of a large room....

If we really...

At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or... – those clouds have moved into something unexpected...

If, when we die, there is some place to go, where others are who have died already... (what was that film from last year, The Tree of Life? Like the ending of that, then); what will we say to each other? How will we look, do we hug in the same ways, or want to?

People who died at very different ages, in different times....

Somehow I can see some of the lovers and friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. For one thing, they are of course younger, fresher: naturally they would encounter me and be, well, a bit shocked, perhaps repulsed. Rather uncomfortable: they wouldn't quite know what to say, would want to exchange a few conversational fragments, then get away to be back with... people their own age.

Or is there some kind of ecstatic reunion, followed by confusion: the world changed, after I died? Well, how, what do you mean? And why are you different now – did you change, too?...

And yes, of course: those other fantasies, familiar from many imagined and implied afterlives, where we are all at some central point in our lives: where we are reestablished as beings who have an ideal state, who don't live in time. I can imagine that, too: but perhaps I don't think of myself that way enough these days – my analyst, my medical doctor and my acupuncturist, all of whom point slightly testily at my collapse into a weaker and older image of myself than actually exists, would probably be in agreement about me here.

A somewhat muddled afterlife, then: where there are young people and old people, who remember caring about each other more than anything, ever.

But who don't quite know what to say to each other any more, or whether there is anything they can do together that would make sense... And then the clash between increasingly fantasized, love-imbued images of people, and their complex realities. It's true that the reality is (almost always) better; but you also discover that you don't quite know how to connect with that reality...

As though we no longer know our lines. Or, more acccurately, as though, even among the people who matter the most in the universe, we don't quite have... a place.

For Jarman

In April 2010, I gave a presentation about Derek Jarman, where I worked through The Garden, Edward II, and Blue, showing the closeness to death in each film.

Or maybe: not just showing. When I polished the presentation to give in New Orleans, I felt close to something....

I promised, last year, to turn the presentation into a published paper for Gus Subero, who has been waiting for it since August. On Monday he sent me a deadline: it must be done by 8 a.m. tomorrow, or it isn't included. I have actually been grateful for this deadline – I've tossed everything else aside to polish an already faceted stone.

And now I'm polishing the last page, which I haven't gone near in months. I'm proud of the page – but it feels on the edge of – something: and as I'm copying out the text of Jarman's elegy –

“I fill this room with the echo of many voices / Who passed time here / Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint / The sun comes and floods this empty room / I call it my room / My room has welcomed many summers / Embraced laughter and tears / Can it fill itself with your laughter / Each word a sunbeam / Glancing in the light / This is the song of My Room.

David / Howard / Graham / David / Paul / Derek / Graham / Howard / David"

there is the musical background of gongs, and I am crying a bit, and my nose is running...

No, my nose isn't running: it is bleeding.

Heavily.

And it is as though this is a mark of what is given to me: I do live, still (or: I seem to), waiting for some useful purpose perhaps; but when I come this close, I can't help but show some sign of it. Heavily.

Is this why I haven't been spending time on these pages... at some level I know that this is risky. I'm allowed to live, but there are... warnings.

A tissue in my nose; and no blood has gotten on my shirt. It is late at night, and the living neighbors are watching television, which noise hums in the background. My last paragraph, which clearly doesn't need reworking – just, perhaps, one more comma placed for the reader:

If the eye is a camera, perhaps a series of transformation shots could be filmed, following each other in a slow-motion series: a transformation of soldiers dying in World War I, into gay men dying of AIDS; a transformation of Christ into a man attacked and humiliated by laughing policemen; transformations of Tilda into Mary, of Edward II into Jarman, of externalized rage about death, about war, about violence and repression and inequality, into an internalized identification, even a kind of defiant acceptance. And finally, a transformation shot that turns Jarman, in his garden, into everyone who dies: into blue…

The paper is done – the tissue is holding the blood – and I can send it in.

Not a close call, exactly: more of a long-expected visit; but by a friend....

Trove

A quiet holiday: if the theory was that I shouldn't go anywhere because I had three articles to finish and a collection to edit, what really happened was more typical – although I didn't travel I also didn't work much. Today I got back to it, though...

But among all the holiday quiet (there's a phrase for you), the tree did get put up, there were a few gifts and cards, and I did spend a pleasant Christmas day with Michael and Andrew and their family.

At some point, a few days before Christmas, I thought: okay, if there won't be a lot of celebrating, I can easily justify treating myself. So I went online, went through various long lists of books I was thinking of buying (because I do keep such lists...); and I splurged – about fifteen or twenty books, around £200. Of course it's too chaotic to have packages mailed to my home (the exasperation of going across town to collect them, if I'm not lucky enough to be home for deliveries), so everything went to the office – and then the university was closed until today.

So: today included a bunch of boxes, packages, envelopes... Mendelsohn's new Cavafy translations, which are graceful and lucid, and in a more substantial/gorgeous binding than I'd expected. Another book of Red Pine's translations of Chinese poetry – also a beautiful edition.

Piranesi's drawings of prisons – those spooky distorted spaces; the newer Dover edition, though simple and inexpensive, is really large, with big, clear reproductions. Like so many books of the past decade, when visual processing/printing has taken such a leap forward, beautiful and yet ridiculously cheap.

Two more Tim Powers, and a Geoff Ryman: two of the finer, spookier fantasy writers, at their sharpest. Mann's Buddenbrooks – yeah okay it doesn't sound exciting, but this is the fourth of those John Woods translations, which are so brilliantly done that you realize that Mann is actually worth reading.

A huge collection of 'personal' essays – I've enjoyed personal essays much more in the past few years, for some reason; the usual publishing scuttlebutt is that no one ever wants to print them because they don't sell, but they can be wonderful. (No, I still haven't found an affordable copy of that Beerbohm set – the little ten-book collection; someday I will, though.)

Two Robert Walser collections – the new one of the microscripts is really an amazing thing: a beautiful edition with excellent illustrations, and graceful translations of these strange secret texts, which were lost for so long. (I wonder if it's worth buying the German edition of all of those texts?... but it's a good question whether I'd really get anything out of them. Worth a look, though.)

Yet to arrive – a bunch of Mark Doty's poetry; Tom Disch's last collection of stories – maybe a bit sad or grim, but there will certainly be some brilliant bits, and if he chose to be funny there will be some great pages; a children's book, though a clever/funny one, by Tellegen; and a few other fun things....