in the hall of mirrors

Saṃsāra

So: massive stupidity, an inchoate, unthinking drive to flee into some imagined, nonexistent past, and an extraordinary amount of manipulation and intimidation that finally imploded on itself.

It no longer even seems interesting to me to pretend that everyone has a reasonable opinion – it's clear that many who voted for Britain leaving the EU were confused, deceived, or simply stupid. Certainly many with little long-term awareness – this was a great victory for Murdoch, more than anyone. Which tells you about the structure of power these days.

•••

For me – and yes, I am furious and disgusted – the primary associations and meanings are not only structural chaos, financial disaster, conflict, restriction, loss of possibilities, and even increasing potential for moving toward a new era of war.

They are also that cluster of personal anxieties that I associate with poverty, illness, instability, and living in places that are either too expensive to afford, or too foreign for one's rights to be established: where things may be okay one year, but cancelled or denied the next. The instability of life in a more narrowly constituted nation, that doesn't have a broad base of support and flexibility across a number of borders.

So, for me: temporal points in San Francisco and Los Angeles when money fell apart or health care was denied; or later in Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney, when government departments told me: you're not our problem, you're just some foreigner....

Now, very often things have gone well for me – even a late rent payment was almost okay, and the pills eventually came through the mail.

But a few times larger disasters would hit, and security, home and money would evaporate, and I'd start thinking: exactly what are the transitional steps that lead to living on the street?...

But I've never actually had to do that, so: lucky me.

•••

(Incidentally, don't you love the diacritics? One of my favourite facets of Wikipedia...

Small pleasures: they keep us going, don't they – sometimes through an entire life: like the fussy apartment of an elderly concentration camp survivor in the Village in New York, where there is a shelf of small plates that were hand-painted in an Austrian factory that was destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid...

Are the plates saṃsāra? Or the memory? Or the great political decisions and battles that led to those memories, this place?

All of them are, of course...)

•••

However, I remain acutely aware of a substantial difference between a protected environment, one that you expect will remain protected (we arrange research trips, climb aboard flights without thinking about visas or permissions, focus on the charm of a city rather than the border we can't cross – and if you break your arm you go to the local hospital), as opposed to a more uncertain environment where you need to apply for rights and permissions.

And you may be given those rights, or not; and the decision may change because of the elections next month, or perhaps something goes wrong and the local police decide they'd rather that you go to the airport, then...

Now, political apologists, and certain everyday people, will insist – usually in ways that try to shut down the discussion, so that they can control the anxiety of others – that Everything Will Be Fine, that you will just apply and it will probably come through, it practically always does, it will only take six to eight weeks or maybe ten at the outside, it will get handled.

I think those people are unaware how a life that is lived contingently – that is, one where the world rocks and spins in an uncertain fashion, one where stability and that which can be defined as 'home' aren't really present: one where you can find your balance, but you have to frequently adjust your stance to keep it, and your muscles have a slight twanging tension because you are always ready to leap or roll to the side when something big starts barrelling down towards you – is itself an endless ache, a drain of energy and focus of anxiety.

Thus, for me at least: a drug-dazed Berlin landlord whose new boyfriend wants me out, right now, in the middle of the night, with everything I own; a San Francisco apartment in a wrecked neighbourhood, where the guy across the hall who has been doing more crystal every week vanishes one night and never returns, and the schizophrenic guy upstairs pounds on the floor in the night when his psychotic visions become unbearable; or unpacking in a beautiful, sunny apartment in Hong Kong, as droves of foreigners close British businesses and pack up the money, sell houses, and fly away, while daily rumours of Beijing's power shifts, in the dark shadow of the malevolently sharp-edged Bank of China skyscraper, filter down through a chaotic network of Putonghua, Cantonese, English...

•••

Most of the time, it's not the individual disasters that are tough – though when they happen, at intervals of a few years, it can be hard to recover.

It's that constant slight tension, that sense of not being taken care of – the sense that, for years or decades or the rest of your life, you will need to watch where and when the wind shifts, and relocate yourself to corners that seem more protected than others.

And that is a tiring way to exist....

•••

That, I think, is why I'm so angry: I know perfectly well that it can be exhausting to hold oneself ready for loss, collapse, and the evaporation of support systems.

It's a lousy way to live, really; modern governments get away with this far too much. Perhaps, for someone like Murdoch or Cameron, it's useful because it keeps the public perpetually distracted – a little fear, a little uncertainty, is useful for keeping people tractable.

But it stinks. I honestly thought I was mostly done with that kind of life – it appears that may not be true...

so: toss the British passport in a drawer, use the American passport, and start finding out how to get to practice or work in other countries – get information on applying for citizenship in those places – and see how many years you have to wait until stability is once again available...

at a price.

Cracks in the world

A strange and fragmented time.

It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder.

Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar, and the shooting of a kind, passionately honest young British MP, we have a distant recollection of politics going too far, of real actions generated by poisonous rhetoric, of increased violence and desperation.... of that point where lost souls at the edge of everything react to symbolic conflicts with real weapons.

The hope is that things won't get worse... if it were really like the 1930s, in a few years we would be looking at a major war, one that would occur for ludicrous reasons. But that would destroy... a lot.

•••

Does that seem like an overreaction?

In the logical, real world, of course an underlying, barely stated goal of the EU was: no more world wars. Not ones that started in Europe, anyway.

Is the quality of rage, of incoherent demands for a return to a nonexistent Great Golden Past, the same, no matter how much actual violence and death it produces?...

•••

Reading Aion over the past three months: Jung's sense that things come back in our lives – at first as disaster, ineptly managed by us: the hope is however that we learn something each time, and land with less of a crash at each return of situations and circumstances.

(Psychological source of ideas of reincarnation?... or of course, if you prefer: a psychological mirror of reincarnation. You may locate reality on either side of the parallelism, as you wish.)

Yes, of course: shades of Eliade, Spengler, Nietzsche – it's true that these big dreams, these huge nightmares, of recurrence and fate are a bit too closely linked to 1930s fascism. (Spengler's prophecy, dated rather neatly in 1936, rejects the attempt to pull him under that umbrella: 'da ja wohl in zehn Jahren ein Deutsches Reich nicht mehr existieren wird!'.)

Are grand visions of recurrence, or of disaster, necessarily associated with fascism?... undecidable. Though some of the 1930s versions of such ideas appeared at the core of that which rotted until it exploded – all over large parts of the world – but perhaps such vastness doesn't need to be so superhuman that it dehumanises everything, and everyone.

•••

But I'm tired. Somewhat, anyway.

The HCV medications went well – I am fairly sure that, come September, the final tests will say they were successful.

But of course those HIV medications that I started in October are also tiring (if not quite as much so). I seem to be floating back and forth across a space between illness and wellness – in the nineteenth century, even up to the 1950s, life, career and social structure would have adjusted to it: he comes in on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the secretary answers some of his letters.... Well it's not that way any more: you're either a useful worker or you're not, being full-time is our ultimate identity crisis.

But, although my department and its head are supportive about me taking whatever time I need, I do feel an anxious push to decide: am I working or not? Am I part-time or full-time? When will I be better?...

or will I actually get much better than this?

Not anywhere near dying, but also not really well: how many months, how many years, is that going to continue – and how do you manage it?...

•••

Selected notes from today's strange, resonant analysis session – some bits are perhaps too incoherent to explain, but it does hang together for me; and my analyst was clearly seeing into me with extraordinarily clear vision, as though today was a remarkable session for him too:

The dream we spoke about – I said, first, this dream is obviously unimportant:

'Younger people are being visited by their mother and father, who have driven from Wales to stay with them; but the parents are still staying in their van because of a disagreement with someone living around here, or the landlord or owner or something. The mother, an older gray-haired woman, is telling us about it – a Welsh accent, and some dialect – she hasn’t quite gotten to an explanation…'

A fragment of a dream: Wales. (Despite fourteen years in the UK, and my dear friend Patrick who has returned to Swansea, I've only been to Wales once, in Cardiff for a conference; but, more resonantly than anything I know or feel for Ireland or Scotland, reading the Mabinogion and Walton's version of it had a real impact on a younger me: for Walton it becomes the story of a long, slow disaster, of a rich, proud culture wrecked and pushed aside by aggressive, cynical invaders, and of a culture with strong woman twisted into a resentfully patriarchal one).

A sense of something plain and everyday – modern Wales: Methodism, poverty, sheep, rain – but at the same time something eldritch that never leaves the land, that lingers in the hills across the centuries. I feel as though, if the mother in the dream had finished her story, it would have become eerie, dangerous, impossible, and yet impossible not to believe.

We've both read Alan Garner's The Owl Service, with its utterly intense final transformation...

And yes, of course I can hear the oddly detached quality of the way I wrote down this dream: I don't know anyone in it, I am not a member of this family – I, and unnamed others, am merely leaning on the outside of the window to a van, listening to her story.

A comment partly from my analyst, partly mine, as we were agreeing in that moment: ... in dreams, in stories, there is an overlap between the world of the dead and the world of magic: the world of magic responds to our needs, but the real world doesn’t – necessarily...

Worrying about being healthy enough to work: there is something risky about trying to organise the future... to pin down the future, to desperately plan, is to move closer to death, to stasis: it always has the danger of becoming an attempt to stop the clock. Which ultimately succeeds.

Giving the body commands: when the body fails, I am dismayed, worried about being seen failing, dropping silverware (as in the café this morning, where I kept apologising to the waiter), screwing up. When my body fails I go into a detached, focused overdrive that separates me from others, reduces my ability to connect – a kind of organized defensive tension.

(My analyst, who has MS, says that in the past year, when he falls in public, he just lets go – and it is a comfort how strangers, men, standing around will hasten to help him up, without any fuss – just a supportive strength: men at their most direct, the inarticulate physical expression of uncalculating kindness. I am envious, but I can't react to feeling fragile with the same confidence.)

•••

At the end of the session, I am tired: but I say, today I really need something I can take away. I'm still a bit lost in all this, but the look in your eyes says you've really seen something: what is it?

He tries to work it out for a moment, and says several things, one after another: the anxiety of failure – like a failed initiation... The ego dethroned, how painful that is – in this case dethroned by the body: so, forcing a new relationship between ego and body.

And, finally: Wales is periphery, but its essence is deeply embedded in the land – it is broken and lost, but never completely so: they keep singing, and waiting for some unknown future – when the ego insists on being in charge, shadowy things are pushed away, to one's own loss...

•••

I absolutely understand him. In fact, we absolutely understand each other today: I couldn't clearly theorise myself – and perhaps putting this in a blog is saying too much – but the whole conversation rings, still, even now as I write it: like a great gong....

•••

Like a great gong.

It's not owls, it's flowers.

A thousand years: and still they sing.