Traveling...
After the past couple of shaky months, and shakier weeks, and all of the activity around World AIDS Day, a trip for two conferences – a small conference on identity and music in Graz, and a larger one of Jungians doing politics, in Rome.
How was it in general? – a lot of travel (Newcastle-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Vienna, train Vienna-Graz, Graz-München, München-Rome, Rome-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Newcastle...). Interesting conferences, interesting people, friendliness. My two papers were successful – even: very successful (!) – even though both were also somewhat fragmented, and I only finished drafting them at 3 am in each of the previous nights – so it was worth it...
But, because I was putting myself together at the last minute, I didn't get to look around enough, to enjoy the small city, and then the big one. I did have one afternoon wandering around the Coliseum with Cristina – and, because of the impending international meetings, there were very few tourists, so a relatively relaxed afternoon.
(Did you know that Roman architecture is so much larger, more massive, than Greek, because of the invention of concrete?... all those huge buildings are concrete faced with stone. It explains a lot – about architecture and about culture. Those buildings are going to be there for a long time....)
Health was better, less uncomfortable, better sleep....
•••
In Graz, an attempt to establish a different context, with different boundaries, for identity politics: as we're all pulled one way or another over various crazy people with guns, religious fanatics (I dislike blaming religion for everything – it seems clear to me that it's the crazy edge of religion, as it is the crazy edges of politics and economics, that are doing the damage), and fights over being transsexual, stars with HIV, etc., I wanted to get past the warring factions of 'dueling martyrs'. Didn't completely manage to pin it down, but tried to outline something that could contain the various groups in a larger context of projections...
And a great restaurant in Graz, with lively, handsome crowds, twice. That was a pleasure. But it was a shame that I never got to the Austrian Christmas market – and I should have bought a Krampus cake, some gingerbread, etc.... oh well.
•••
Rome: a pleasant if pretentiously overdecorated hotel (an 'art hotel'). A charmingly sexy Italian bear, in a suit, at the front desk.
And a drafted paper that was falling apart in my hands on the day before the session....
I was pulling together ideas that first came to me in 1986-7 – a certain resentment, an indignation, over the discourse of AIDS/HIV being dragged into political marches and activism. For me, this has always been about politics as a way of avoiding, of diverting attention from, the anxieties at 'three in the morning in a hospital room', a phrase I've used a few times in papers... therefore I was going to articulate that angle as clearly as possible.
But, after feeling increasingly disoriented and anxious, I abruptly realised, about a day before giving the paper that I no longer believed in my own arguments – or, at least, my reasons for those arguments.
A strong opinion, that began to disintegrate under erratic sleep, my own anxiety about diagnoses and tests, cross-connection with a dark patch in analysis – and of course time: years of change and repetition, which cause any opinion to destabilise...
At which point, rather than either presenting a paper I no longer entirely believed in, or on the other hand tossing it out, I made a decision that ended up being the best one possible at that point – to frame the paper in the context of its own problems, one that would instantly be understood by an audience of psychoanalysts: that the original arguments, along with some fractures and disjunctions, must be understood as embedded in something that is itself problematic, unstable, unresolvable.
I used a metaphor I've used before, in class – that death and extreme illness suggest the image of an astrophysical black hole, where gravity, magnetism, light are heavily distorted, and anything one had reasonably known or believed starts to twist and crack under the pressure.
And, even if you thought you knew something about illness, about anxiety and death, about the process of dying – when we get near to it, the super-natural intensity of every aspect of the experience, imagined and real, causes any ideas we had to fragment, to disintegrate – our illusions and coverups crack across all of their weak points, and we realise that we have merely reached another level of fooling ourselves.
Even if you're coming around to it again: the illusion that you knew something, understood something, cracks under the enormous, invisible forces....
•••
It made sense, in the end. It was definitely intense, and I'm not sure anyone was quite ready for it on a Sunday morning.
I'll work on it – as it stands, still a fairly fragmentary, self-deconstructing paper – but worth taking further...
(And a very senior analyst asked for a copy! Must tinker with it a bit before sending it to him.)
•••
Back to (this) earth:
I keep meeting cute bears lately – I'm glad that beards are in; I think they will stay in for a while (despite the occasional fiat coming down from fashion editors, generally women, who keep claiming, with increasing desperation, that facial hair is Over). The handsome bear at the Italian hotel, the handsome bear who interviewed me on World AIDS Day, my handsome-bear dentist, the handsome redheaded Australian bear-technician at the hospital this morning, who kept his hand on my arm while explaining the impending MRI –
The MRI was easy, by the way. I think my post-stroke MRI was considerably more brutal because it involved forty minutes of my head clamped into a banging, grinding machine – this was nothing, in comparison. Except for all the Coldplay over the headphones, but whatcha gonna do.
... I like bears.
Perhaps I need to keep more jars of honey around the house....