in the hall of mirrors

Anxiety-confidence-fear-pride-resignation-...

So: a bit too many appointments, too much teaching (though it is not going badly); editing the book; studying for four Jung-Institut exams, with two papers; taking over the HIV group's peer counseling...

I have been thrown from worry to a more steely determination, and through everything between, in more and more erratic and rapidly changing cycles, over the past two months. I suddenly wake in the night, think about one of the exams, what there is to do to get ready for it; I make tea, wondering what book article I should edit today; and, too frequently, I drop everything to go teach or sit in my office, waiting to reflect the all-too-similar anxieties of students....

It is of course difficult to arrive at any conclusion about any of the given tasks in the midst of such chaos. I could of course delay exams until winter, I could find out what would happen to the book schedule if I didn't finish until July... but I know that those protective, but negative moves wouldn't win me much breathing space now.

Above all, I do know that I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in comparable states: getting things done, and also not getting things done. Despairing, anxious, excited, proud. Utterly confident, at points. I would not want to be that person again, though I know that before my own Great Crash of 2001-2, I still had such expectations of my self and my future that I could keep going more easily. I am always exasperated at my own inertia over the past decade, but it remains hard to move beyond it, either physically or emotionally, or almost more importantly in terms of actions.

Now, in my mid-50s, the emotions tied to these things have a certain detachable familiarity: I can look at them and keep walking, though they do throw me off my stride at every point. (It is easier to see their illusory nature, of course – complexes, illusions of the world, you can pick any context to interpret them.)

I suppose, like a hamster in a plexiglass ball, I need to just keep rolling forward: not in a straight and rapid line – I'm not capable of that, I'm frequently off course, but then I may roll back in the proper direction – but just to keep the ball rolling....

Beautiful men

After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a first meeting with Rumana, Norma, and Susan of something that may turn into an actual writing group –

today I did some e-mails and admin, plus a bit too much procrastination, as usual. Then yoga – which, over the past six weeks of trying to reconnect to something I haven't done for about fifteen years, keeps consistently transforming itself from a duty into a joy – and then a taxi to see a play about AIDS by a local writer (Steve Burbridge), performed in a pub, which I thought I should see...

The play was good – solid, a concrete experience of diagnosis. It reminded me that, for all my work with HIV training and counseling these days, I do tend to become – abstract about the experience, distant from my own stories, which gradually turn into memories that are dusty as old library books. And, of course, that so many of my later experiences are about isolation... and yes, I get by without the added pressures of other people. Or of relationship. How easy that all makes it. Or... not.

But at yoga the extraordinarily beautiful young man who worked in the health tent at last year's Pride – actually a beautiful puppy, but still very distracting – was for some reason in my class, though I know his abilities are years ahead of all of us.

Then after the play a very tall, handsome, almost exasperatingly charming bear of a man, with dark hair and a trimmed beard, stood at the door with a bucket to collect donations for local Pride festivities. (Yes, I spoke to him – and, as you might imagine, I was not entirely... coherent, throughout. But I suppose men like that are accustomed to people not completely making sense when they talk; they must assume that most people have some kind of mild neural damage. Probably located in their speech centers.)

Oh, and he runs the local Pride festival. So he's also intelligent, organized, take-charge... yeah yeah okay.

Then finally, since it was after 9 pm and I hadn't had dinner, I walked a block to a tapas restaurant I pass everyonce in a while. And yes, you guessed it: a disorientingly handsome, unexpectedly dark-blond, Spanish waiter – friendly, charming, personable... he told me his name (as did the handsome bear) but unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to actually remember it. (Albañas? Something like that.) With that Spanish bearing – a clean, slightly soldierly intensity – a bit more sternly noble than my ancestral roots, with their more slapdash, self-indulgent Italian and Greek styles.

Are these men crossing my path just in order to confuse me?....

In spring, a (young?) man's thoughts turn to...........

Brodkey

In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht... last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a noted writer about AIDS....

Brodkey was highly intelligent, intensely arrogant, and either mostly straight, or sort of not so much really. He claimed he'd become HIV+ in the 1960s, back when he was still (admtting to) having sex with men – which is really, really implausible; it is considerably more possible that it would have been in the late 70s/early 80s. I've tried to read This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, but it is off-putting – it is amazing just how much Brodkey adores and idolizes himself. And it is, frankly, fairly tedious/repulsive: it is clear that, for him, the great historical and cultural tragedy of AIDS is that it struck (you guessed it) Harold Brodkey.

So it was strange to see Sutherland try to explain what we can know about the hallucinatory mess of Brodkey's creative career: the fiction of the massive Great Novel, which apparently didn't even exist, and the circling, chaotic bursts of publicity that appeared around its imagined existence for nearly forty years. It is possible that Brodkey's greatest fiction was the tale of what he was going to write....

So: like Stefan Brecht, like Truman Capote: the arrogant, unproductive fraud, who is evidently but secretly filled with shame and confusion. And this one had AIDS, to boot. Obviously a shadow figure for me – and by that I mean: someone who seems to symbolize parts of myself I most reject, loathe, and fear, but also parts of myself that I inevitably and constantly carry around with me. That being what a Jungian shadow is....

In a week when I have promised R. that I will work every day, I have actually worked three, or perhaps two and a half, out of five days; and edited perhaps six pages. Not so utterly terrible: but perhaps all these flashing images of failure and success, the unreal background to real work, are keyed in to my views of these other writers.

Because last night my dreams were filled with pages on Brodkey – books, newspaper articles, web pages – and until the early morning hours, when I tried to pin down just what he had done, I couldn't lay the image to rest.

Disturbing dreams: until I could look at them closely enough to acknowledge the reflections... and then the dreams were gone.