in the hall of mirrors

What is it to...

What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'?

I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new.

•••

Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back to back, two or three a night – it's very good, I'd never seen it when it first aired. Kyra Sedgwick is really excellent – entirely natural/realistic, flawed and energetic and believable, at times remarkably cold, but often passionately empathetic, even with the criminals she catches. One of those rare cases where balancing the entire show on her character just works – as good as Vince D'Onofrio, for instance, though such a different style.

I was curious about the ending, so downloaded it – she ends up caught in an unresolvable conflict over a case, resigns to go to another job... since she shot a suspect through the side of the oversized, frankly rather dowdy bag she always carries, the detectives who work with her buy her a new bag. They give it to her in an extremely well-done scene – emotional but social, balanced between the difficulty of expressing feelings in a work context and the fact that they all do have a real connection. They apologise if the bag doesn't look exactly like the right one –

she smiles, looking at the bag, and says, 'It looks like love.'

•••

Of course, although in the world of the television show and its successor, she is going to another job, we know that she is resigning after seven years of a very successful acting stint. So it's really final, an exit. That comes through in the scene, because the actors are also dealing with the tricky internal state of leaving a frame of imaginative experience that they won't be able to reenter, except by watching video, which is quite different for them.

•••

(Incidentally... the sentence 'It looks like love' is also her first line at the beginning of the first show: but in that case a murder victim. So the dark, twisted beginning is transformed, over seven years, into an honest connection between the character and the people she works with.)

•••

Last night, I opened the window when I went to bed: a chilly, calm, autumn night. Unquestionably autumn, for the first time: no more feeling of transition, surprise that it was still warm, or that it was cooler but one could still wander around in a light shirt.

•••

I responded to a current meme, choosing three fictional characters (apparently they need to be from film/television, as pictures are expected); my choices made sense to me, though I hesitated – they probably seem pretentious, especially in Britain, where anything that isn't self-deprecating or self-mocking is considered pretentious. (I always note, when people say 'pretentious', the distinction between what the word actually means and what people have imposed on it.) But, after the past year, I find myself fairly uninterested in how the Brits view existence, at least when it clashes with my own views or feelings.

I ended up choosing Prior, in Angels in America, during his eerie visit to a heaven that is both reassuring and terribly sad; Chris as played by George Clooney, in the remake of Solaris, when he is sitting on his bed, watching the rain; and, because I knew that those would be seen as too serious – and perhaps inflated – and thus of course pretentious – but also because it made a kind of edgy, comic sense, the wonderful Dr Linda Freeman as played by Jane Lynch, the sardonically bitchy psychotherapist from Two and a Half Men (back when it was funny, before Sheen's pathetically narcissistic side took over from the other parts of him).

She really was incredibly funny, and so very, very bone dry:

Dr. Freeman: So, what else is going on with your life?

Charlie: Not much. I've been gaining a little weight for some reason. Maybe 'cause I haven't been sleeping well.

Dr. Freeman: (looks at him, as he keeps stuffing himself with another pudding) Yeah, that's probably it.

Charlie: Oh, and this one girl I've been seeing pretty regularly decided to dump me.

Dr. Freeman: Huh.

Charlie: *Huh* what?

Dr. Freeman: Oh, nothing, it's just... sometimes I feel like I'm stealing your money.

 •••

And reducing work load at the university... and concerned that that may put me in a dangerous financial position.

And trying to analyse the body and its strength and weakness: though my biochemical mood is so much better, the body remains shaky – as Sontag said: the way we live now.

And looking at the two articles that are due, then friends who have kindly given me more time to write them, and wondering if I'll finish them soon enough anyway.

And completing the paperwork to register for final exams at the Jung-Institut, while wondering whether I'll finish them, at least as soon as I want to...

•••

A burst of torrential rain against the window; then, soon after, sun.

•••

Plans and aspirations are still chugging along: will I finish at the Jung-Institut, will I retire from the University in a year or two, will I move to Barcelona, or another city?

I got rather – well, direct – with my landlord about repainting the damaged stairwell – which was finally done last week, in a single morning, after waiting for two years...

If I don't move anywhere – if I can't – will I be able to stay in this apartment? Will I have health care?...

Of course all of these aims and concerns are framed in a series of if-clauses, of codified uncertainties: a necessary set of caveats – and the inevitable internal judgments: if I never finish this, if I never finish that, if I never move, this hasn't been so bad. If these things never happened, I would be all right.

More, perhaps, like Prior than like Chris: and perhaps more like Prior than like Linda....

•••

What does it mean to end things, to go on, or finish, or say good-bye to, when the focus is no longer on a future event or context?

When the good-bye feels like the main element of meaning in the entire process?...

A Hollywood ending

So: although it has been a bad year – illness, anxiety, possible collapse of plans, disconnected from a culturally suicidal Britain, feeling cornered by the future – hospital, new medications, side effects –

that year is now having a big Hollywood ending: after three or four days of some of the worst side effects I remember ever having, they are suddenly dissolving with bizarre rapidity – headaches and allergic reactions become transitory, suddenly milder, nausea vanishes, reflux decreasing, head clears.

Soaring violins as the sun rises behind THE END.

It is clear that there is a very, very real difference between those October-August medications, and these that I have been taking for a week now: that vicious drain of energy is simply – absent. The body feels oddly whole, defined, out to its edges – I hadn't realised how long it had been since I felt quite like that.

And I sleep so deeply! It is strange – I had forgotten what it was to fall into a deep sleep, no restlessness.

Not to mention – if I may say this – when I urinate, it is a strangely pale yellow – I keep catching another look to see what's wrong: where has all the blood gone?...

It's nearly a year since that's been the case!

•••

Today I was a little shaky still, but it didn't feel weak, disturbing – more like part of a gradual recovery.

In fact, I saw my analysands today! – I'd warned them that I might have a short session, but lasted throughout, and was fine.

•••

Of course, the abrupt evaporation of my psoriasis is still distinctly weird – transformative? –

All right, I'll bite: is this one of those movies where we gradually figure out that I'm actually dead now, which is why everything suddenly seems to be so easy?

I guess that's a bit of a cliché since The Sixth Sense....

•••

I still feel a more ruthless, more self-centred relationship to my job, to the university, to Britain, than I did before: a sense of urgency to make changes remains, though there is more space around it.

I will continue with the Occupational Health interview for the university – I'll tell them things are much better, but I still want a report and examination on file.

In relation to the university, the government, the Institut, I am now feeling a bit more 'what is this organisation doing for me?' than I have been for some time: so many systems and structures are so skilled at telling us that we owe them, deluding us that we should organise our lives and decisions and happiness around making sure that All Of Their Work Gets Done.

After twenty years of business and nineteen years of universities, enough: let's draw some boundaries. The university gets what it pays for, the Institute gets just what it requires...

And I will tell them to take care of what I want, now.

And try to get to something – something new.

•••

I have thought, several times in the past few months: even when I've felt ill and anxious, the times when I was sitting with my analysands felt right: like something I wanted to do, whatever other things might dissolve.

Of course all of them protested, in one way or another, that if I needed to cancel it was fine: but I said no, and I meant it.

•••

... It may seem peripheral, but – the vanishing of the psoriasis: that is just so bizarre –

when things change, that we already know will never change –

It's like healing.

At the moment...

things aren't bad today.

My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that.

I sort of remember dreaming last night – if I'm sleeping deeply for the first time in months – perhaps I'll remember some dreams...

This is indeed different. Not great but different.

I know, early stages yet: but this might actually work.

•••

Let's go back to the beginning of these five days....

•••

Health/time structure 1: renal catheter inserted seven weeks ago was removed last Thursday. They put in another temporary one for what was supposed to be three and a half days...

Health/time structure 2: as I've said I messed up my medications last summer, was put on new toxic ones in October 2015, and have assumed since then that my doctor couldn't change me to anything else... and still feeling poorly enough, often enough, that I've worried whether I can keep working at the university. Or complete the degree at the Jung-Institut. So, ten months of dislocation from plans, hopes – a sense of disorientation and collapse.

Health/time structure 3: I first got psoriasis when I was 18, and freaked out (not surprising, only older people are less worried by unpleasant but trivial body problems). It increases or decreases over the years, treatments aren't particularly effective, and when my immune system has been more or less a mess (for instance, the mid-1990s) it was far worse – though there's no clear direct relationship between it and anything I can see.

•••

So, Thursday, catheter out, catheter in. Feeling a bit beaten up.

Having contacted Occupational Health through my head of school, I am scheduled for an appointment on Tuesday.

Having emailed my own doctor that I was seriously having trouble with medications and worried about (unplanned and sudden) retirement, was talking to the university, Occupational Health, worried about the Jung-Institut, he responds! – and says, come in and talk to me.

Friday morning, I stagger (a bit) in to see him. He actually has a new alternative medication: it's not nice – the flyer bluntly says, same side effects profile, but cheaper – but he suggests it. Great. Pick up new prescription, take it home.

Friday night, take pill. Hits me like a ton of bricks...

but it is different: the body's response skews off in different directions. Toxic but not draining in the same way, perhaps? Still shaking, but only temporarily, it seems?

Almost as though – though I couldn't be sure yet – the eerily destructive quality of the last ten months' medications isn't present in this one – it's just the kind of medication that slams its way through the body, careless and heavy and even violent, but not... poisonous.

•••

But the renal catheter ain't great either, and everything feels very, very rough on Saturday. And Sunday; and on Sunday night I think, I cannot take that pill tonight – the catheter is out tomorrow, I'll skip it until then – and don't tell me I'm not supposed to skip medications because at this point I do not care.

•••

We all know the traditional conversation around HIV meds, that they're so hard to take – medical gossip is that more than half of the medical professionals who take prophylactic, one-month treatments never manage to finish them. So there.

(I wonder how many cancer patients stop taking their meds?...)

As for me, over the years people have often, blithely, said, Oh you've lived so long, you must have been so good about taking your meds! I just roll my eyes of course – my first time on AZT in 1991, I gave up after a month, convinced that dying would be better. And the awful meds of the 1990s – the one that caused kidney stones (hmm, there those are again), or the stupidly designed one that you had to crumble up and swallow in liquid, except that it never dissolved (did no one ever figure that out?) – I was utterly careless about taking those... in fact I wasn't very good about the major meds until the late 1990s.

(At some point, clearly, I realised I was going to live for a bit... and perhaps it was worth actually taking care of myself. Huh.)

I also think, with some guilt, of how I've blithely said that HIV meds aren't so hard to take these days – at training sessions for medical students, radio programs, and so on. I suppose the truth is that of the current twenty-five or thirty in use, in various combinations, most are nowhere near as bad as they were in the early, or late, 1990s...

but now I've been bumped to a bottom rung, the dregs, the old stuff. Like returning to 2001 – very unpleasant.

•••

As for these pills, it seems strange how much impact a little pill can have on the body –

and then I think, no: many poisons are pretty chemically simple, aren't they? And although some of them do only very simple things to kill people, others rapidly create a cascade of destructive effects. So maybe some small things are considerably bigger than we are.

•••

So, it's Monday. I'm still in poor shape – I email Occupational Health to cancel Tuesday's appointment, copying in my head of department, and saying: sorry, I just can't do anything now.

Around midday, my head of department calls, kindly agrees to treat me as on sick leave for a couple of weeks: don't worry, we'll figure it out. Which is the best I can do now.

In the afternoon, a doctor from Occupational Health calls: not unpleasant, but – well, bless his heart – he must be The Most astoundingly Boring person I've spoken to in forever: extremely long and extremely complete statements of everything, including the highly obvious. But he is also quite helpful, and not at all unpleasant, if you can wait from paragraph to paragraph for the obvious point.

I call the urology clinic in midafternoon: sorry to miss my morning appointment, I'm taking new and awful meds – they say don't worry, come in soon.

Which I'd love to do because even the catheter is pretty miserable.

And they say, you could even take out the catheter yourself! ... I think not.

•••

I don't take my meds on Monday night. I'm walkin' on the wild side... okay, not a good idea.

There's a certain who-cares fatalism floating around all of this... as too often in the past ten months imagining how to make getting rid of all the things I own easier, so they don't all need to be taken care of... Will? Charity shops?

•••

Floating through all of this is an acute sense of time: time in suffering, time where the body flings pain or ache or mere discomfort from one area to another – often across parts of the body that are hard to map: the dense structure from throat to crotch, the many organs.

I very rarely vomit, but over the weekend I do so twice – the second time a startlingly, utterly clear stomach acid, that comes up like a burning poison. We are always so unaware of what goes on as food descends into us – I realise there are parts of the body that are designed for this apparently deadly stuff, but that is hard to experience when it comes up into the visible body, the part we think we live in...

And of course I'm aware that, though I like to think I'm less frightened of death than many people, I find the slow, stretched-out time of suffering incredibly difficult. You cannot skip seconds, or minutes: it pins you to time and holds you, moving through each moment without flexibility.

Think of the shape of life: the latter part inevitably has this suffering – and of course modern medicine allows too much of it to continue. Which is why we fantasise about the brief heart attack, the sudden accident – anything but the months in a hospital room, its smells and discomforts, made endless...

An end which is fairly probable for many of us.

•••

(I came back to talking about this on Wednesday, in a brief web session with my analyst: he had been reading Jung' Nietzsche seminars, liking them a lot – as do I, I still think they're among the best of the seminars – and pointed me to 1936, Seminar 4, where Jung speaks of how incompetent the early Christian intuitive, mystical types were with the body, in the sensate world.

Which is where you would get the dominant traits of a religion, and later a culture, that would end up being so disembodied: in a world split between the transcendent/evanescent and the concrete/static, how could we possibly know how to be in our bodies?...

Which links to that entire modern capitalist world where I live in a large, pleasant apartment, but without close connections to a culture, a 'village', where it would be easy to say: take all these things when I go, use what you want. And I know you'll be around at the end, so I'm not worried.

We don't have any of that, do we...)

•••

Feeling less awful Tuesday morning, though still very weak. In four days I've lost nine pounds – hmm, the New Late Summer Diet.

And, okay, this is weird: in four days, my psoriasis, for the first time in years, has virtually vanished....

Isn't biochemistry odd.

•••

The clinic: a sympathetic nurse, a guy who may be Filipino, or Chinese? – tells me about a guy who had the same procedure last week, and his boyfriend there to hold his hand. (Clear cultural cross-connection here – we are automatically linking my HIV, and perhaps my evident foreignness and living alone, with being gay. Which is of course true.)

Home. Shower, wash sheets, wash clothes, vacuum. Slowly, not energetically, but everything gets done. Food in refrigerator has gone off of course, can't keep up with it when you're not eating anything, so give up and toss things. Which is always a shame but oh please I can't do everything.

•••

I am weak, but not miserable; I don't feel that bad.

I take the third pill – in five days – and –

Negative capability

Analysis, a couple of weeks ago.

For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything.

The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our confidence.

Later, when I go back to my room – a round room in a stone castle, with ancient hangings, a modern bed in the middle of the floor that looks awkward; my suitcase is open on it –

he is there, sitting in my chair, and he refuses to leave. I am angry, I pick him up, in an ungainly fashion, holding him in front of me with his legs folded – I try to drag him to the door – but then as I wake we begin to talk, as though we haven't been fighting –

•••

My analyst starts laughing (he is usually gentle and polite, but today he is... I don't know: a bit rambunctious?). He loves this dream: the teenager is obstinate, he's at my desk!...

He’s bright, he’s curious… he doesn’t do things the right way because well, dammit, that’s the point of adolescence – that’s why we need children, to invent the world anew…

And he says something unexpectedly direct, out of the blue:

'How have you ever gotten anything done? You're the problem, not him!'

•••

I am wrestling with the teenager in the dream: Jacob and the angel?...

My mother used to wake me in the morning by turning the radio up loud in the kitchen: I was always angry, wanting to stay asleep.

My analyst sees: in that intermediate place between sleeping and waking, the young man and I are able to communicate: that feels so dramatic, as though my control is down.

It feels as though there’s gold in the dream, but it’s out of my reach...

•••

A strange couple of sessions: these images and feelings vibrate, are alive with energy –

but at the same time there is a dark line around them, one of sadness: I keep feeling sure that, fascinating as all this is, any real energy or understanding that is embedded in these strange images will not be available to me.

Why not?

Because... because of the story of the Buddhist abbot, and the resulting promise: that I will have lifetimes where things are out of my control, so that I become less arrogant, so that I pay attention to those in my care.

Because I am too old, because I waited too long, because I have been too slow in my analysis, avoiding the hardest things and their sensations, their emotions.

Because I'm so tired lately, feeling ill with side effects, worried that I'll have to retire early, give up on moving anywhere, on any future change or hope –

Because, when I went to the local funeral in Bali in the late 1990s with an Aussie boyfriend, he could see them dancing and cutting themselves with knives, but not bleeding – while I saw nothing, just had a sense of several hours passing, looking at the stage, where I felt antsy and uncomfortable, but I couldn't remember what had happened.

Because, although I don't disbelieve in the transcendental, I can never see any of it: and that may include my own power, my creativity, my happiness –

•••

My analyst says: is this something the young man would know something about? He doesn’t want to leave because he wants something from you.

I mention meeting with a struggling student last week: I told him he might go into the depressed place, like walking into a cave with a torch – just to see what is there, not to solve anything.

My analyst continues: you know exactly how the young man in the dream feels, or nearly… He needs empathy and help, rather than coercion.

•••

When I finally finished my PhD dissertation in the summer of 1997 in Hong Kong – thirteen years after starting graduate school, when no one thought I could do it – I don't even remember the summer. It was written, by me, but I don't remember doing it.

I wasn't at my normal level of consciousness.

Which is something like not being able to see the Balinese knife dancers...

•••

My analyst: this dream feels different from my other dreams – the same, but different… it’s emotionally much clearer.

I note that this is a castle, which is unusual – the hangings are tapestries, not something modern. It's very old: is it almost like the broken stone platform far beneath the surface, except we are inside it this time?...

My analyst: the teenager is fairly inarticulate, because that’s what teenagers are –as are complexes when we try to engage them.

I say: he’s too angry to articulate it – the others in the dream are exasperated that we can’t convince him to do what we want. He looks civilised enough, well dressed, but we can’t get him to fit into our social conversations...

My analyst: he’s not even shadow, he’s you from the outside! This is big…

•••

Since before the session, all day, in the train coming here, the tram, I've felt something else, there is some other meaning here: I am having some sense of something I can't quite define –

my analyst makes suggestions, I tell him sharply to stop: it's not clear to me, and if we keep talking about concepts and specifics I'll lose what I'm trying to see in myself –

almost like a shape, like a shape of my own internal world and ideas:

I've told my own analysands that sometimes the hardest things to understand are like the astrophysical nature of a black hole in space, of space/time that is distorted, but invisibly so: and that distortion, that extraordinary gravity and pressure, controls us, but can't be seen by us.

This feels similar: I can't quite articulate it, though I keep trying –

I don't want to let these things, this mystery, collapse into some concrete solution: fall into something merely two-dimensional, when my experience of it is – well, clearly a lot more than two dimensions.

I am fighting to see this – whatever it is –

•••

My analyst, who has backed off from ideas and questions, sees that I need to be allowed to go my own way in this (I rarely snap at him – he's very sweet, we get along very well) –

he tells me about negative capability: Keats' comment in a letter about the special, difficult ability – really, the willingness – to keep something suspended, unknown –

it is like Jung's ideas of holding the tension: the difficulty of being willing to not know what is going on, to stay with it until it becomes what it needs to be.

In Keats' famous letter, he uses Coleridge as a counterexample – Coleridge, older, a critic, more certain, who instructs the younger poets in the ways of the world: but Keats recognises the flaw in Coleridge, that he needs to reach a conclusion, he needs to decide how to do things, what things are for, very quickly. Which means he loses any possibility of understanding something he didn't already understand...

My analyst says it's also like Nagarjuna's stanzas on emptiness. I'll take his word for it – I can look that one up later.

•••

I want to change everything.

Do you know that I moved often in the late seventies, and in the nineties? And then for the past fourteen years I haven't moved at all – a loss of momentum, in fact too much anxiety over the exhausting moves of 1992 to 2002.

I can even list them - fourteen, or fifteen (depending on how you count them) homes in the ten years between 1992 and 2002:

    4/85-11/92                Spaulding Avenue, LA, with various roommates, especially Paul P.

    11/92-8/93                Cumberland Street, SF – the most beautiful hillside apartment

    1993                            Kiel – six weeks for the language course for the Fulbright

    1993                            Darmstadt – the first part of the Fulbright

    1993                            Berlin – renting a room from a pharmacist who had a habit – kicked out

    1994                            Berlin, Alexanderplatz – the huge streets, the old-fashioned Ossi apartment

    9-12 1994                    Irvine, CA, for the seminar with famous musicologists

    12/94 – 3/97             Market Street, San Francisco – the shabby druggie building; expected end...

    3/97 – 5/98               Hong Kong, above the ocean – a professional, age 40! A glorious apartment.

    8/98-7/01                  Hong Kong, Central – more high-density, closer to things.

    7/00-1/01                  Los Angeles, Westwood – visiting professor; intensely ill... a strange time.

    1/01-7/01                   Hong Kong: I plan to move to the job in Sydney... which blows up in my face.

    2001-2                        Adelaide (Sydney) – living with handsome John, but no job...

    2002, summer          Los Angeles, Susan & Rob’s – with my boxes, for another huge move

    September 2002        Newcastle: at Ian's for a month, then this apartment...

with the money gone on the move and the year without a job... and a sense of having climbed to something, and crashed: life is in ruins...

No wonder there has been such a feeling of lostness in the past fourteen years.

•••

When I try to throw the young man out of my office, I wrestle him, I hold on to him – like the legend of Proteus, who will only tell you what you want to know if you hold on and don't let go:

like negative capability – holding onto the shape of myself that has formed out of all the events of my life –

No, I know better than that: I wasn't formed by the events.

I was formed by what I thought of the events: what I made them mean....

 

Urology, ward 2

Seven weeks after they put a renal catheter in, in Zürich, they take it out in Newcastle.

Aaaaaaand they put in another one (AARGH DAMMIT). But that one will come out on Monday morning.

So, more blood, and yes it still hurts a bit, but now in a slightly different way, yeah yeah yeah.

You don't want to hear about this, but there's a string, and some tape, and I'm not supposed to take it off –

(I feel like a pull toy.)

•••

The ward itself was – well – think of a vet's, where a bunch of faithful dogs are moping and whining and barking, and they have cones on their necks...

All guys, most in for less than a day, a bit restless, chairs, beds, listen to headphones or type things into a phone or look into space. And, like the guy who shared my room in the Zürich hospital, eager to do anything to get out.

(Hey, hey hey, c'n I go now? Huh? Huh? C'mon, c'n I go? Huh? Huh? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeze?)

Honestly, I'm telling you: dogs. Friendly dogs, but... you know... perhaps guys concerned with such things are not at their most restrained or subtle.

Jumping up, begging, yelping: can I go home now?...

•••

I was the same, to be honest. The first indication that, as soon as the needle in my hand was removed, I might be able to leave, and I was rummaging around and getting dressed...

even though, to be honest, it wasn't very easy. Yeah yeah they asked are you sure you're okay, of course I am...

I wanted out, just like the guy in Zürich.

•••

The nurses had a complementary tone – a bit amused, not quite rolling their eyes, of course you want to leave, make sure you show up on Monday.

And the tape and string and all – DON'T do anything with it, just LEAVE it ALONE.

I MEAN it.

Do you HEAR ME?...

•••

They didn't actually slap me on the rump when I left.