in the hall of mirrors

Correction / Amplification

An addendum to my previous post – because I don't want to be unfair to the theater company Propeller:

• I assumed it was obvious in any case that my mood/attitude in that post affected by my judgment of their Comedy of Errors. (Plus my judgment of the play itself, which I still think is... well not up to S.'s best. 'Could do better'...)

• Tonight we went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream – much more a favorite play of mine anyway – and it was much, much, much better. (Still spoken very fast, but I think a lot of troupes do that to Shakespeare these days – the inevitable cost of linguistic/cultural change.) In fact, at a number of subtle points, it was really wonderful – so my thanks to them.

• Many excellent players, but note – great Titania, wonderful mechanicals, great Helena... and:

• the actor who seemed intensely sexy to me in briefer roles in The Comedy of Errors was even more so as an open-shirted, barefoot Oberon in the Dream. Some people are just, essentially and remarkably, hot.... a shame he didn't come to the bar afterwards. Ah well.

We did, afterwards, go to a trendy bar – then to the gay bars, where I haven't been in, oh let's see... several years I guess. At first we went to places that were too loud and too young and too straight – then finally we all managed to agree to go to the (sort of) leather bar, which was  considerably more relaxed and pleasant.

Of course the entire concept of meeting someone I like did cross my mind....

But that's all right; I'm home now, and will quietly go to bed.

Shell games

The odd mood of the past few days – not a unique mood for me, but one that seems to be holding steady more than usual – is perhaps emphasized by the combination of having enough space to stay in that mood (it is our Easter holiday, I have a lot of work to do at home or in the library, but relatively few necessary contacts) and recurrent impulses to stay with it, even when it is reflected in accidental meetings with strangers.

The sense of sadness – but with a certain calm, and clarity.

A day of procrastinating, after a week of procrastinating, after years of – well, you get the drift: which finally fell into about three hours of intense and semi-productive editing. With constant background noise from my own mind about how miserable this all is, how useless I am, etc. – a familiar litany, especially around this project, out of all of them. And again that illusory quality – the project itself slightly unreal and contingent to the world, and my anxieties very unreal, but they shadow everything.

A play that wasn't really very good – Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare's cheesier from my point of view; Propeller, an all-male troupe, made it as energetic as they could, but it still seemed flimsy, a faintly empty event. (As there's space for a brief flash of a review – the Adriana was extremely good, putting on a barrage of successful coups de theâtre, and a handsome Doctor Pinch did one short but impressive turn; the others were also good, but not good enough to make me care about the traditionally silly separated-at-birth stuff – which is in any case the outer shell of theatre at best, like baroque opera, or Edwardian melodrama.)

And so: actors, physical energy and sound, the overlap of the tawdry and the funny and the not-quite-real – and the slight failure of skilled professionals who can't quite manage to bring an illusion into presence; perhaps emphasized too much by a set and production that projected the tawdry, the shallow, the dispiritingly unsuccessful imitation of reality. (Brits, and comic pseudo-Mexican accents... some of them simply shouldn't try.)

A late dinner at one of our small city's new overpriced, overhyped celebrity restaurants – a lovely young waitress, warm and friendly, and me feeling oddly dramatic myself, like a mystery man alone at a corner table; with a sense of reality (the food, the woman's smile) mixed with unreality (the slightly false, commercially amplification of the food and restaurant, the slightly disjunct though sincere expression of her hopes for a life in politically conscious theatre).

Later, in bed, reading a Chinese fairy tale on an electronic screen... a fragment of history in it, but the details are wrong: but it's a fairy tale, so who cares? And the comfort of the story fades quicky, as the story disintegrates into fragments and footnotes after two pages... the many other electronic texts around it in the program, really too many to see: novels, stories, plays. Philosophy. Psychology....

Scraps of news that are threatening and oppressive – plus fragments that go in the other direction: is this the illusion of the internet, where people grasp at a fragment of a thing and trumpet it as the whole – or merely the illusion typical of those past middle age, that the world is perpetually getting worse? Which I don't believe in any case; but it has been an ugly couple of weeks. The large structures and historical/political waves back and forth – never entirely real in themselves, interpretations and partial stories (not to mention all the falsehoods and altered stories). I don't normally like investing too much energy in them – but they are distracting lately, and create anxiety – or the shadows of anxiety.

At 3 a.m., or now 4 a.m.: it has been so cold this week, but with flashes of spring – and now you can hear the birds outside: sounds that seem late and slightly out of kilter this year. Birds are morning sounds, but it is still absolutely dark out – the processes that hold the world together keep moving forward, but again, not quite in sync with themselves, or with us.

A Buddhist, or a Sufi or any of a number of others, would of course say: perceptions seem disconnected from feelings because they are, things do not seem real because they are not. The sensory seems off because it is in the mind, the imagination fails because it always will. Of course, of course, but –

Perhaps the birds know.

Well: back to bed....

Insight

How unexpected –

some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the indoor, snow-filled spaces of a number of dark, scattered winter buildings, into a sort of big, open, airy space that I don't entirely comprehend:

perhaps because of two rather odd and unclear dreams that became startlingly revelatory in yesterday's (Skype) psychoanalysis session – thank you, B.! – and our attempts to connect up what they showed, to outline an entire line of change and development –

tonight a shockingly bright moment occurred when I could suddenly feel sheer joy at wanting to learn to be a psychoanalyst: the (perhaps strange-seeming, but real) sense of calm and value that is embedded in my whole connection to death, but through it to life – and at deeper levels than I normally can go –

•••

Or, to put it more coherently – perhaps. Though I can't guarantee that going back to the beginning will entirely help, as this is one of those paradoxical ones.

Two dreams, one that invoked an avant-garde theater performance (like the books I liked so much when I was younger, that are still behind me on shelves in this office – the experimental plays, the Grove Press editions! the ideas, the surprises, the sheer wildness of it all) – and opposed them to a dull, miserable sensate side, personified by a slatternly woman at the door –

and then a second dream in a children's library: extraordarily pleasant and warm, people sitting in chairs, parts of the room transformed so that chidlren could play there (a bit like the fairy tale exhibition that E. and I saw in February, in Zürich at the Landesmuseum – but this dream version was much brighter, with more California colors) – but which is then interrupted by me making a joke about AIDS, which offends a man sitting nearby, at which I coolly explain that I didn't mean to be offensive but just to make a point, and am in any case myself... well you can see where that exchange goes, approximately as it would in the waking world.

And somehow these two dreams – the first colder one, the second warmer, both with their oblique, interrupting fragments, which were really perhaps their important points – were somehow extraordinarily sad. That I was, in fact, extraordinarily sad when I worked through them at length, despite the fact that neither dream seemed sad in itself.

And that sadness is perhaps my own experience of something that people have told me, in the past few years – that my toughness in relation to death, to AIDS, was only achieved by cutting away parts of myself: as if on a cold, snowy hill, with a rusty knife – for the sake of sheer survival....

•••

So: after the discussion of those two dreams yesterday, and its resultant sadness, but ultimate dazzling clarity – in the last minute Brian said, so, explain it all to me again: and I spewed out one long, multi-connected sentence that reached from my failed hopes in the late seventies, from so much death in the eighties and nineties, through many events and interpretations up to the present moment in this present place, and facing what I have to do right now – or not facing it –

it is strange that today I would suddenly experience that exact same chain of things, that long series of knots, as leading to this amazing joy: as though caring about all of these things could really create a joyous life:

as though that ol' Katha Upanishad is actually right, when it says that we go through death, into life....

•••

My conscious, coherent mind is still a bit confused, as is this post: but it all seems to hang together, in some way that is perhaps inexplicable: yet real.