in the hall of mirrors

Visceral

And so: since the chilly equilibrium reached at the end of my previous post, there has been a feeling of negotating the curves in existence, but with certain blinkers, or speed governors, removed from the engines, from the windshields...

(Hmm, I wonder if my brother would appreciate the car metaphors. He'd probably manage them better.)

Yesterday I was reading Erikson on child development, for an exam at the Jung-Institut this summer. One I'm still not sure I'll be ready for... ah well, keep going until you hit the wall.

Erikson is kindly, expressive, interesting – and yes he was a Freudian, and I've always been irritated by Freudian and Lacanian theories; but Erikson's fluid, non-academic, non-medical-school background made him quite comfortable with using some aspects of Freudian theory while loosening up others to fit the patients he was seeing in the 1940s and 1950s.

Reading him, this time, I was pushing myself to work harder, and thus really digging into his partially Freudian child process structures – and finding them plausible, sensible, inevitable... and somewhat frightening, as reflections of myself. (And yes, I know: as we are warned, it is common to overidentify with many patients, concerns and problems in psychological literature – but there are also times when you read something and think: good lord, I'm on this page.)

I was, after all, the serious, often anxious youngest child: it is possible that I wasn't always as depressive, as judgmental, as intense as I am now, but (despite one remarkable picture of me with straw-blond hair and the sunniest smile imaginable, at the age of four) I was probably not a child who caused everyone to think: Oh, he'll be fine. I tended to be more the one who would elicit reactions like: hmm, he's not going to take life easily...

So it was eerie to read the child cases in Erikson's Childhood and Society, and recognize a certain fellow feeling. I don't much like the ruthless determinism implied in Freudian ideas, but I have to admit, there's no way around certain primal aspects of the real and demanding parts of the body, of learning to be human – and it's deeply saddening to realize that I was obviously one of those kids who struggled to get from one step to another; and who held onto the resultant anxieties and angers in a vast array of actions, for years afterward.

[Incidentally, notice the very beautiful picture – that is a photograph, and not a drawing, by one Joyce Tenneson, the cover to the current edition of Erikson's classic,which is worth buying for it alone. And it fits beautifully – it reflects Erikson's gentleness, plus his ability to see right into what is going on...]

***

So after that: today I took a few more notes, hastily resolved a research portfolio update for the university, answered a few e-mails... and slept. A lot. Doing nothing, when there's so much to do.

And at five started to put myself together to go to the yoga class I've been taking for a month with Conrad, and with Dan: all the while a voice in the back of my head trying to convince me to skip it, not to go. But I did go...

I had a lousy time of course, fighting every step of the way, skipping poses and steps, filled with disconnection and inertia and confusion, a desire to run away. I kept pushing away at Conrad and Dan when they came by to offer help – didn't want it: this was going to be a Bad Session, and that was that. Fortunately, they were kind enough to allow me to be that way...

And by the end of the class, having done perhaps forty per cent of it, I was a bit more relaxed, but my head was still swirling with these tangled, incoherent complexes: all the while rapidly firing questions at myself in mid-pose, about my body, about my existence. Near tears, even...

***

And collected myself, changed clothes, and went to the funky-Japanese restaurant for Deb's birthday dinner, where I drank – hot sake, something I love but rarely have these days; one of the few alcoholic beverages that actually feels sort of healthy. And which does indeed knock me off my pedestal, quickly and painlessly: I repeatedly joked about feeling like a Japanese businessman in one of those tiny Tokyo bars, quietly falling off his stool after a few hours of draining a bottle that has his name on it...

But also I was actually a pleasant companion, I think, after a cold start: long conversations with Deb, with Andrew, with Katrina, a few comments from  a quieter Michael. And I was relaxed, more present, happier: all the while thinking, at the back of my mind, so how does this fit in?...

***

So: why might this be worth writing about?...

Well, I was not always as I am now. (Does that sound like some sort of ancient mariner? So be it.) I've often done the reserved/severe thing throughout my adult life; but during the long, wilder, warmer years of living in California (1979-1997) I frequently went out with friends, I went to bars and restaurants and clubs. I went to parties and pools and walked around neighborhoods, I sat and had long, earnest conversations –

I had lovers. And, of course, more casual than lovers.

That richer, more sensual life – I've frequently complained about its loss, I know. But it is perhaps especially valuable for me tonight, in the face of this painful look into my own original self – that disoriented, unhappy, angry child – to resurrect all these living fragments of pleasure, of happiness, of joy.

Because – though my current friends might not believe it – I do remember actually enjoying my life in these ways: and I do know that it is my fault that so much of this is missing from my life over the past ten years.

And I know that I can get a lot of this back: if I'm merely willing to step aside from my own path, for a moment....

Brecht (no, I mean the other one)

Today I went to York for the second time, to my new analyst, S.

I like her a great deal – and this might be a very good change for me: it feels as though my two major analysts, John and Mitch, have both been people who were fairly similar to me – which seemed necessary at the time; but lately I have become impatient with myself, and my dreams for six months have spoken with increasing urgency of a need to connect with the feminine, the sensate. And S. is sharply intelligent, but also kind, not sardonic; and she picks up on very different aspects of our discussion – ones that I would struggle to keep in focus for myself. So this might be a very good thing indeed.

***

The day was ruthlessly cold, but the train to York is much easier than the one that went beyond Leeds, and York itself is easy and charming enough that I walked through the weather to look at a small part of the town before taking the train home. In a used bookstore, which incidentally had a considerably larger and more sophisticated range than is the norm in my own city, I saw the second edition of Stefan Brecht's book on Robert Wilson, the one on the 'theatre of visions' – but ultimately didn't buy it, as I was fairly sure I had the first edition back at home.

And I do have it, though I haven't glanced at it in a long, lo-o-o-ong time. I once found it dense and remarkable – now it seems easy to rapidly grasp, to understand...

But understanding brings up some very strange lights: illuminations from when I first saw this, back in the 1980s; what I thought of the book and its subject then, what I thought of the author, what I thought, and what I now think, of myself.

Because this book, and the one from the same series on 'Queer Theatre' (which is also on my shelves), each trumpet on the flyleaf the same monumental list of nine books by Stefan Brecht – "The original theatre of the City of New York. From the mid-60s to the mid-70s." A phrase pregnant with possibility, full of the fantastic richness of a time that always makes me envious – and that makes me think, bloody hell (yes, after ten years in the UK I can think in British curses), why did he get to know all those amazing people – from Robert Wilson to Charles Ludlam, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Merce Cunningham... and here I am, just sitting in my flat with my books.

Ah well I shouldn't complain, I've actually worked with Monk and Wilson, met Cunningham and seen Foreman, so I haven't been completely out of the loop. Monk even recognizes me when she sees me, so I'm not a complete loss.

But in looking through the list of nine books, I thought: well, I should see if I can order some of the others on That List...

Well: they don't exist. Stefan Brecht wrote critical, documentary, intelligent but highly opinionated and personal books – two of them, and the Quuer Theatre one isn't very long, in any case – but he listed all those others, which simply don't exist. If you get the impression from the list of nine book titles that he intended to pass his ultimate judgment on a huge range of the successes and failures of an extraordinarily vivid time – and that is clearly the case – then, well...

he simply never did it. He died in 2009, the known-but-not-really-famous son of a famously arrogant (or: arrogantly famous) man, two of the books in existence, notes for two others to be published posthumously. And in looking through the Wilson book, I am struck by the final section, which I hadn't remembered – where (S.) Brecht explains how Robert Wilson, between 1974 and 1977, started to 'fail' his own visions....

Arrogant. Arguable, perhaps, that Wilson had to work through different means, move away from his original approach – but still the book became arrogant, high-handed, foolishly dismissive. And, in the same context as this dismissal, (S.) Brecht planned all these other books, in the grand monumental fashion of One Who Would Deliver Opinions On Everything (ouch! that hurts, when I turn it back onto myself). And the books are flawed with summary judgements, and most of them aren't written, and he married and taught at universities, and then he died in 2009 at the age of eighty-five....

Talk about failing your visions.

No, that's pointlessly nasty. Because I'm not angry about these unwritten books, any more than I'm angry about my own failure to write so many books, to do so many things. It is just that that huge List Of Books which is foregrounded in these two volumes is such a monument to the grandeur of expectations; to the certainty that one will walk up to life and knock it over, as though it were light as a feather...

And that anyone will deserve to have done so! Even now I am mildly indignant over that last section of the Wilson book, "Decline of the Theatre of Visions", where (S.) Brecht explains how Wilson started to – as far as (S.) Brecht was concerned – fail. Such an attack, embedded in such hubris: and a perfect illustration of the fact that people can only do what they do, including both Wilson and (S.) Brecht; that our fantasies of conquering the world are, at least for most of us (even for Genghis Khan?), truly empty fantasies...

***

Perhaps this seems so sharply, almost sardonically, brought to my attention today, because in order to pass one of my Jung Institute exams I have been reading on Buddhism, desire, compassion, and theories of reincarnation. And I am thinking, in a mildly amused way, or in a way that reflects past misery, about failure and success, about the book I really must complete in the next couple of months, about whether my own life is a success or a failure – usually I'd say it's a failure, but now I'd say that with a mild and increasingly unworried shrug, walking through the sparsely blowing snow of a street in York in my long black coat – and how that keeps getting reflected in my own analysis, and in trying to decide what I think of all of these discussions of death, of reincarnation, etc., etc.

And I am even thinking, perhaps, of love and happiness – if those aren't just memories for me. Yes, those things come up in my dreams, too.

So perhaps, if (S.) Brecht could manage to live out his life with these books blaringly, embarrassingly, painfully listing the huge projects he never finished (see! Debussy was smart enough to keep his list of projects in his work room, and not publish them like a fool); and if Wilson could go on making art works, even after being publicly told he'd failed, so early in his career; and if we all get second chances, or perhaps we get endless second chances; or even if we simply live such that we believe that we get second chances, then...

Maybe it's all not such a problem. Maybe I didn't miss out on everything that mattered in the seventies, or in life; and maybe what I'm doing right now is actually just what I'm supposed to be doing...

And maybe – could this, then, be true compassion? – (S.) Brecht is fine, just where he is.

In-the-midst-of

A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between.

Liminal, perhaps.

With students, cheerful or as though awakening from long and confusing slumbers – talking about their lives, dropping by, doing good work: flashes of pride and movement and change, amplified by the spring weather. Today they all seem like friends of one type or another, I can almost feel them leaning against me as though I am some kind of support: students who are just getting used to me, and students who will graduate this year, figuring out what to do next – an unavoidably big step – and one of the last of them reflects back, asking about my studies at the Jung-Institute; and my explanation of how that is going begins to outline an exactly similar movement and change....

I give a preparatory lecture on the changes of 1968, political and perceptual and cultural and (thus, eventually) musical: not quite the energetic circus ride I will show them on Wednesday, but a warmup that leads to it, ending with Jefferson Airplane at their most flamboyantly bizarre. As I have students read paragraphs aloud, statements about change and the excitement of that time dotted around the room like a 60s performance piece, I feel their awareness of being-in-time becoming sharper, fuller – perhaps if they really wake up, they can live differently....

I have a brief meeting with David, looking over paperwork documenting the past ten years of my activities with the HIV patient group, which I'm putting forward as a Research-Linked Community activity of some kind. Redoing this stuff is tedious, but the project does mean a lot to me, so... and that is both reflective and (sort of?) productive. Paperwork, yes, but about a reality, and one that also recalls many emotions and real changes, and real losses.

And in the evening I go back to Barbara's Italian lessons at my favorite Sardinian restaurant: afterwards there is of course the handsome waiter, a good and surprising pasta, a welcome glass of wine: the waiter wants to read what I'm reading, and it is Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler – I tell him I have the Italian at home (it's too difficult for me, of course) and I will loan it to him. On the condition, naturally, that he treats it with care... and so this sweet, charming man will owe me...

All of these things and words and papers and events piled in, like too many people in a Volkswagen Beetle, along with brief explosions of writing over the past few days, writing that is only part of what must get done in the next few months: graphic scores, string quartets, Meredith Monk, Gerhard Stäbler. And studying for four more exams in Zürich in June, can I get ready in time? It's a shame I'm not an efficient and forthright worker, but that is hardly news: and if I'm at least dealing with my procrastination by launching into topics that I know well, so much the better. Skype sessions with Mitchell and Nomi, rearticulating these projects, and memory and change, and discussion, spinning it out further and further....

•••

What is remarkable, what brings a sense of complex time and possibility to this messy pile of activities and papers, is the eerie quality of remembering or envisioning that appears whenever I close my eyes a bit: for I am falling asleep after that glass of wine, almost, no not quite, yes, no, I'm still awake, or not completely.

Memory tangled with vision tangled with awareness: dark city streets in Parma and Basel, some flashes that seem to belong to Berlin or perhaps San Francisco, Adelaide, Hong Kong, Los Angeles; dreams that might have arisen in Zürich, while walking around in a group late at night. A quality of watching, of getting that deep sense that people live in all of these places, and that I want to live there too: and yes perhaps if I lived in those places I would still have the same kinds of work to do, anxieties generated out of bits of paper; but I would be part of this tangle of people, of energies; and, maybe, perhaps, some one might be wondering when I was going to come home.

And through all this strange time awareness is shot the changing realization that, as I grow older, the possibility of being part of such a temporal/personal network does, admittedly, decrease. That may be what will happen, too – perhaps any hopes and wishes that I am on my way to yet another life, another career, another city, other sets of people, perhaps even living with someone who cares whether I come home to them, are not going to be fulfilled – perhaps the truth is that one of these present realities are actually the last stages of my life, and my life is not in transition to anything.

But that must be the proper definition of this feeling of transition: that it may be imagined, but not invalidated; that expectation does indeed spring eternal....

•••

I get up and, while am trying to figure out how this all this ties together, or doesn't – and not incidentally how to end this blog entry – I realize that I should pack my case to go to Leeds tomorrow for my last analysis session with John. Because I am changing analysts, I am going to meet with Sybil in York next week, and that is also a change, and another potential set of conversations that rattle through my head –

and I notice that, unusually, the plastic bag of fruit and nuts which I usually toss into my case isn't there – because the last bag tore, and I threw it out; and while trying to recreate this simple transitional object I suddenly stall in the middle of a step:

and the pause itself causes me to hold the sink for some moments, to breathe in and out and be aware of it, even to panic a bit, to begin weeping, in a passing stretch of disconnected sorrow: the same way that coming down a set of familiar stairs, but missing the last step in the dark, suddenly makes everything everywhere seem unpredictable – new but also unknown, and unknowable.

And all the casual joys and anxieties of a crowded day are turned inside out for a moment: because these transitions and changes suggest, in their oblique but merciless ways, that the entire set of processes, the various machines-for-living, can suddenly stop at any time

•••

So, perhaps that is where all of this gels – the young people starting in on their lives, my looking back on ten years of activities with people several of whom are now dead, my endless anxiety over finishing things: that reminder that transitions do not necessarily reach out to a solid point. That so much of life must be prepared to stop being life, often without much warning.

No, it's not news. But sometimes we just see it, whole.