in the hall of mirrors

Shadows

... I don't feel well....

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Bits of news and experiences, some silly, some exasperating, exhausting. Some vaguely foreboding.

I've mentioned my own error from late spring and summer, in taking charcoal capsules for stomach problems – which led to medications not being absorbed –

which is now turning into a chain of events that has been getting longer and heavier, for three, four, five weeks now.

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I did actually manage to develop resistance to my existing medications – and to the entire class of HIV medications that they belong to.

Which is really unfortunate, as those were all in the More-Effective-And-Less-Toxic bin.

My doctor was... not best pleased. Frankly he was openly angry with me, and worried; I, of course, can hardly be outdone when it comes to self-righteous anger, so I made it clear to him that I knew this was my fault, but it could hardly be reversed now.

He softened a bit... not much of course, that's not something he does.

We are quite a pair...

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So, back to Ritonavir – only 100 mg a day, tied to two newer medications, each just once a day.

Ritonavir is of course hard on the digestion, depressive – in fact kind of miserable, even in small doses. I was ecstatic when I was taken off it in 2012...

Well, here we are again.

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And in the intervening years my digestion has become more fragile – I suspect, myself, it may be linked to liver damage from HCV (now around 30%, though that percentage isn't rising quickly – it's a good thing I've never done much drinking, and can't stand British stout).

Which means IBS has been happening with increasing frequency, dully, painfully.

And now Ritonavir is evidently enough of an irritant to cause regular IBS, for three weeks now.

I keep trying to wean myself from Mebeverine, but my body repeatedly shows me that I can't manage without it.

Of course Mebeverine is pretty miserable all on its own... Cure worse than disease? Not quite, I guess. A close race, though.

•••

Is this all a bit more disorienting because – although these health concerns are hardly new to me – my own psychoanalysis has been so disorienting, so fissured, for three months now?

At points I have wondered: how could I be just now experiencing such a shattered, deep part of myself, after all the analysis I've already had? Am I simply not good enough at this, have I not worked hard enough?

Should I be actually working with other people's problems when I am like this?...

But I have been repeatedly reassured: the wounded healer is not at all uncommon.

Sometimes it actually improves our ability to do this work...

•••

And there have been points in these three months of startling insight. Many of them, in fact: as things get darker they are also hugely illuminated.

How could I have lived so long without seeing my own internal mechanisms...

Not so much hope, but: astounding, vertiginous clarities.

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A letter from the hospital, two weeks ago: I am to get another MRI, because of... some biochemical indicator I don't understand.

I am blithe about it on Facebook. A., who is a hepatologist, asks for details. I give them to him...

A long personal message from A., beginning: 'Not to be sitting in the room with you as you read this makes me unhappy.'

I am properly warned, and read the long, complex technical message with a sinking clarity.

This MRI is to check for liver cancer, which is suggested by the change in my body chemistry.

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I know I shouldn't be shocked – liver cancer was always among the probabilities with HCV – and I thank A. calmly... and go to bed.

Sleep isn't easy.

For a day or two, I am... rocked off my foundations.

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We don't really know anything yet, of course. These are but shadows...

And this has always possible. Since 2001, in fact.

My own hepatologist has also been anxious about the recent problems. We are scheduled to treat HCV next spring now –

which is seven months later than our most recent plans –

has my blunder lost me this time, when I needed it most?

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That is too dramatic. It is still possible to get a cure for HCV, it is still possible to treat liver cancer. Or a transplant?... it is still possible.

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I sleep.

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At night, because sleep is erratic, I read fragments of novels on my iPad, as the moon rises.

It doesn't interest me much to finish any of them... but paragraphs, sentences, ideas, fly through the night and evaporate.

•••

During the day I lay on the couch, wondering how I'll finish the two presentations that need to be given next week, in two different countries

Ah, and, before those two, a speech for World AIDS Day – what am I to talk about? Charlie Sheen?

Not very interested in him. I'd rather talk about other people, frankly.

Not about me, though.

•••

I remember Steve's funeral, when we drove far out of town for the ceremony – it was the last time I saw David, one of the other members of the HIV patient group who had done much of the work for ten years. David was anxious, even slightly frightened – not usual for him – he said he hadn't been well, that his treatments were not being successful... I was a bit shocked.

David was always calm, at least up until that day.

His funeral was – how many months later?...

•••

When my analysands arrive, I put myself together and pay attention – frankly it is often the most energetic, positive part of the week.

I am mostly doing all right with them, I think. Small glitches, impatience, they forgive me.

Other messages and decisions from the Jung-Institut are too hard to figure out right now. I let it all slide...

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Skypeing with M., who is filled with life these days: a prospective new boyfriend. He pushes me, gently, to go online and try to generate new romantic possibilities for myself! – but it is dark outside, it seems not to be the time...

With other friends, I am distant, too abrupt.

Then, I apologise – usually.

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I ignore too many emails...

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Yes, I know: Paris, politics, downed planes. The rising tide of online voices panicking, lecturing each other.

Not interested. On the couch.

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November, the scorpion.

Rain and clouds.

Tonight, clear, and such a moon!

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I've been here before – or nearly anyway.

None of this is awful, none of this is a shock...

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•••

I don't feel well...

Music, sweat, travel: appealing to the passions

In mid-September I was in London – all too briefly; and I apologise that it took so long to write about it...

I can remember some of my response in words, at least, even if the visceral immediacy of it has faded.

The short form: I went down to London, merely overnight, on a day when it was pleasantly, and unexpectedly, hot in the south (not so here in the north, I ended up lugging my leather jacket across London and back).

Rolf Hind organised a couple of concerts that focused on gay and lesbian composers, and wanted three of us to introduce them – a half-hour panel with Philip Venables, whom I hadn't previously known, and Freya Jarman, an old friend. It was great fun talking through the whole, grand history, for me since the mid-1980s, of talking about gay and lesbian studies in music, what they might mean, what they might not mean... and the intense reactions of people who can't stand them.

The weather changed the tone of everything – by London standards, it was hot and sweaty, but in a pleasant, freeing sort of way: some men on the street tended to look fairly muscular and energetic. Including one of the pianists, the muscular and energetic American Adam Tendler... the whole trip had an unexpectedly erotic tone to it: man-watching is not often a great pleasure in London (at least not compared to Barcelona, San Francisco, etc., etc.), but the guys were at their best: busy in a citified way, carrying things and waiting for buses, all the while in shirts cut off at the shoulder, with the current trends towards muscular gym fitness and beards...

But this is, at least mostly, about the music.

Much of the concert was – how can I adequately speak of this? – truly dazzling. Early modern to high modern to postmodern, a number of works that were intensely demanding, that stretched time and one's sense of the possible – you know that there are twentieth-century works that really seem to wake you to different levels of consciousness (like minimalism at its best, or more atonal works that set up elaborate, complex patterns, then expand the ground they seem to be occupying, all the way out to... ah sometimes it's just too hard to explain).

Transcendental musics: not quite like the emotional passions of major nineteenth-century works, but experiences that alter one's sense of time and space and awareness...

I'm not explaining this well.

Erotic, powerful music: is it possible that the fading of my long engagement with the avant-garde, so fascinating for me for most of my life but less so in the past few years, is simply because I'm depending too much on recordings? Because, as I've learned often enough, the ability of a performer to play highly complex musics doesn't guarantee that they can make the works 'fly', so to speak. A favourite example: Roger Woodward's demented, universe-shattering performance of Barraqué's Sonate seems to be disappointingly unique: knowing that I like the sonata so much, at different times I bought CDs by two other performers. In both cases, brilliant, hand-stretching virtuosity, but... no life. No shock, no crack across the sky, no sense of time as both unbearable and electric with passion...

Am I making any sense at all here? In any case, the sad truth – that too many performances of difficult modernist musics don't manage to carry the works across mere virtuosity, mere complexity, to bring the works into vivid life. Which can make the difficult process of performing them a bit useless...

But I'm talking about a performance where that didn't happen: where the dark electricity of Claude Vivier's Shiraz, of Julius Eastman's vast, strange Gay Guerrilla, were experiences of another, and more astounding, world: the kind of music that wakes you up to time and all its inarticulable transformations...

Rolf was amazing, as was Siwan Rhys. Others such as Zubin Kanga and Eliza McCarthy, also quite wonderful. One of the more unexpected events of Tendler's performance was a suite of Henry Cowell pieces – and another shock: he made them work, made them sound like real and important music. My experience of Cowell's piano pieces always previously suggested those pieces by George Crumb where the percussionists sing and recite poetry – sure, it's never been done before, and gosh good for them, but... ultimately a bit tacky/embarrassing. Those pieces often feel like not quite being willing to focus on a tacky stage performance, like mere bad acting.

But this performance was nothing like that... Cowell seemed like, well, a major composer, doing brilliant work: not just somebody scrubbing their hands across the strings. And I've never even imagined his work could be that way

Well, perhaps you see what I'm aiming at...

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A minor addendum: last night I read Alessandro Baricco's Mr Gwyn. The first book of his that was translated into English was Silk – which was beautifully subtle, but a bit like a parable (think The Pearl or Being There). Mr Gwyn is larger, more substantial, and – well, again, hard to explain: a writer stops writing, going into a kind of performance art, in an attempt to do something that seems really authentic, really remarkable. And incredibly subtle, incredibly meaningful at each tiny step of the long journey. It's a beautiful book, really impressive: and one of those that moves art out of the world of publicity and sales, of repetition and vanity, into something – ah well can't really explain. But: go read it.

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And another, my subtitle 'appealing to the passions' – have you ever read Max Beerbohm's essay, 'A Clergyman'? Perhaps the funniest, most bizarre, most unexpected things he ever wrote... go find it....