in the hall of mirrors

At this point

A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years...

in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that appeared again, in heightened post-Confucian forms, in Mao's revolutions...

Across a time where I have expanded and perhaps more broadly experienced certain spaces of my existence, my psyche: where illness and health are seen to be two sides of the same thing, as are living and dying, being and not-being, creating and not creating, closeness to others and distance from them.

Where memories of people – Terry W. seriously explaining something from across a table in Los Angeles, Mark R. still alive and grinning with glee in the living room of a Victorian in the Castro, my sister talking to me in the garden of a London museum – Norma walking energetically in front me in the park a couple of weeks ago, Ma Jaya holding her crowded court in the back room of John's house in West Hollywood, Bill G. looking up at me from the piano in a small club in San Francisco with his kind, ironic eyes –

where they all fuse, in some way, while still remaining distinct...

Strangest of all – and it is strange because I have spent my whole life judging what I am doing: and so there was not enough practicing, not enough writing, not enough work – and later not enough joy, too much being alone yet still not creating, much – that space of time that seems from one angle to be either wasted or celebrated, or – but as we know those judgments merely fold back onto themselves, endlessly burrowing into tunnels of never-enough, so there is no point in extending the discussion of them –

strangest of all is the sense that, looking back, and across, from this late point in life, near my sixtieth birthday – that if I had done everything completely differently: performed, written – stayed with people I loved, landed luckily in some happier houses in warmer climates, smiled across the guests at a dinner table at a man I loved who was sitting at the other end –

that it would have actually been no different: that this awareness of time, of space, of what is and has been, would not actually have an altered nature or substance, merely because it focused on different events, different people. Different raw materials.

That our lives are all, really, very similar cloths, even if made from different threads....

•••

Some visions go to this place, beyond the point of seeing life whole: where the contingency of what actually happened becomes self-evident – the later parts of Nabokov's Ada, Kate Bush's Coral Room – Iain Banks' Excession, Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, Jane Siberry's Oh My My, Malick's Tree of Life – even Spielberg & Kubrick's A.I.: the Buddha would have been pleased.

Where the fights and attempts to win and lose have not merely been resolved in one way or another, leading to a triumphant or tragic ending – but where we have seen that they could have been not only different, but even more: they could have been anything: that we could have reached this clarity from any set of points....

Glory, glory

Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced...

Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones, something with a rather trendy shape, sort of like tiny hairdryers. I think they're the earphones I bought in some airport or other.

I disentangle and wrap up three pairs, then take the newest ones and plug them in, looking for the jack socket... just testing.

And... at first I think, a bit loud. And then – oh this is gorgeous: yes it really is.

Stunning sound. Chris Wood's version of Jerusalem, which was making me sad a couple of weeks ago, but now with such rich, vivid tones and undertones...

Mesmerising.

•••

1980. I am in San Francisco, I am young (about 23) and, I think I can say with some accuracy, cute.  I mean, yeah, clueless, but... cute.

It is a San Francisco Halloween – perhaps my first, or second? – and I have met some guys who Actually Own a major Bar, which means they are extraordinarily cool. Older of course, but hot. Everyone is gradually getting ready for a Halloween party, so there is much delay and smoking of pot as people change their minds on costumes and times and places and drinks and whatnot...

I am sitting on a white leather sofa with men who come and go and discuss plans. One of the guys sits down and shows me something new that is very, very cool: a Walkman. Apparently Sony has created a leetle teeny cassette player, and you can play whatever you want, and walk around with it. You listen through the earphones – here, go ahead, try them.

I have never seen such a thing...

But what is absolutely, utterly amazing, for me as an ambitious if rather lazy musician, is that when you play a new album I've never heard of – Guilty, by Barbra Streisand and a blown-dried Bee Gee, with a trendy white-on-white cover – the shimmering partials are so beautiful, it is just...

My impression – and everybody's impression: none of us have ever heard anything like it, the fidelity is extraordinary, and the album full of high, sweet sounds – is that I've never, ever, heard music like this.

Yes, okay, the pot probably helped... but really: what sounds.

•••

It's been true for a few years: I don't seem to care about music quite as much. I teach, I write, but often I can just... well, take it or leave it. (Would my colleagues, my students, be scandalised by my apostasy? Let's not tell them then.)

But this... it is past midnight, I should be in bed, but I'm still just... listening:

Miles Davis, Nefertiti.

Nightnoise, Bring Me Back a Song.

I haven't heard some of these things in ages, they take me back to... well, the 80s.

Tippett, String quartet no. 2.

Kate Bush, A Coral Room.

Slightly drunk with some of the music by now, I think.

Marco Beasley, Tu bella ca lu tieni lu pettu tundu.

Dieter Schnebel, Schubert-Phantaisie.

The sounds just glow.

Sun Kil Moon, Trucker's Atlas.

Gamelan of Cirebon....

•••

And now it is past one, I really have to go to bed...

Earphones.

Who'd've thought it.

•••

I'll go to bed in a bit.................

Detach

The past ten days...

At first entirely chilly, detached: the election as shock, a worse shock than Brexit of course, but similarly a stupid move towards danger and chaos engendered by incoherent desperation and an extraordinary amount of sheer lying.

The US is on the other side of the ocean, and I don't live there... I have a passport of course. (Why would I have dual citizenship in the two countries that are intent on toppling their own stability, power and wealth in favour of a ludicrous national vanity, a pathetic desire to return to their past as confident playground bullies? Which so ridiculously, so blindly ignores the fact that everything has changed since those pasts were presents....)

•••

Well: I refuse to – entirely – care.

In classical Marxism, of course, that makes me the blindly selfish bourgeois, the coward who cannot face the revolution. Ah well... there may be an element of truth there, but there is also a basic problem with that analysis – it is grounded in a dedicated militarism: everyone must be a soldier, everyone must fight for the utopia of the proletariat. We are cannon fodder for a great theory.

Since that militarism only works when you go for the ridiculous tail-end of Marxism: the certainty that the revolution of the proletariat, and the dazzlingly wonderful world that results from it, is inevitable...

Two weeks ago I taught a lecture on Walter Benjamin – including the first of the Theses on History: the dwarf in the fake automaton, the one who reveals the religious we'll-all-go-to-heaven-when-we-die fantasy at the heart of Marxism.

Or it's like the pseudo-wise psychotic nonsense of Maoism – since everything tends to a glorious future, and we know that because Marx says so, if only everyone goes on the long march, lets their babies die valiantly, and puts the insufficiently rigorous people of Cambodia into killing fields, then that is really a great thing, because it will lead to that pure, transcendent future....

•••

Okay, the worst thing about a Trump presidency isn't the mess of blowhard policies – he really isn't Hitler, obviously: he's much more fragmented, inconsistent, chaotic – it's a shell-like narcissism, not a paranoid obsession with enemies; and yes of course many of the people he's hiring are more paranoid and dangerously coherent than he is; but the whole thing will tend to undergo constant instability at the core. So it's not the hyper-focused madness of German fascism, it's just the chaotic narcissism of Italian fascism.

But of course the difference is that the nuclear option exists this time around, which makes all these games much bigger....

Yes, well, maybe that's the answer to the Fermi paradox.

But, from this side of the Atlantic, there's not much point in talking about that, or Putin or North Korea or a mess of journalists who don't know how to manage their constantly elided, unstable power...

•••

Enough.

A good class today; I'd been feeling a bit unhappy about teaching Derrida and deconstruction after the election.

I mean, yes of course you can use deconstruction politically, but it doesn't really feel quite like that... especially in the admittedly rather abstract way that I teach it.

So... I told the class, I was unhappy with the election, and Brexit, and wasn't sure what to teach: we discussed it for half an hour, and they said okay, do next week's lecture – Deleuze and Guattari: yes, also weirdly intellectual, but with much more political impact, more ways to get us out of the paranoid traps of our culture, into the open air...

And it went well – they liked it – argued over paranoid and schizoid, were alert and disoriented and put up with my explanation of Balinese erotic practices...

(I always worry I'll get fired at that point in the lecture - if I were in some parts of the US I'm sure I would be.)

So: it felt like a good thing, like a productive thing...

•••

But otherwise I feel fairly disengaged.

A phone conversation with David M. – we only speak every few years; He went into an extended post-election rant, I let him go for a minute or two, then stopped him cold: I was quite clear, I just didn't want to hear any of it. However, I found myself honestly offering him a place to stay here. A bit silly perhaps... but it comes naturally out of that image of Rick's nightclub in Casablanca, and the sense that we may be making those kinds of decisions, those kinds of flights.

And if I move to Barcelona there are always those classic Eixample apartments: the long ones with several rooms along a corridor. Perfect not only for several bookcases in each room, but also for guests who have fled from other countries. House rules... who's buying the food... No crying at dinnertime, that's one of the house rules.

•••

My students are worried, but relatively abstractly so – they aren't after all living in America.

The days are cold but sunny; in other circumstances they would be pleasant if bracing.

My patients were also anxious after the election, but again in a rather distanced way.

My health has improved greatly in the past month; R.'s advice on food and supplements is really working.

Russia, North Korea, Trump, Penn, Congress, Supreme Court.

•••

Remember the fairy tales that centre on a magician who removes his heart and puts it into a casket, puts the casket into the highest room of a castle, and the castle is on top of a high mountain, the mountain beyond a great ocean, and it can all be reached only by the most powerful of eagles? Or it is guarded by a basilisk, or other such stuff?

•••

I don't worry about America. I'll watch the British arguments over Brexit, but with a certain detachment. I'll keep both citizenships while looking for others – is Barcelona still possible? Of course the Nordic countries are always more stable... not sure I'm interested in the weather, though.

•••

I don't care, really.

I refuse to.

Drawing-in

From crisp to cold...

The past couple of days when I've left the house, it is chilly; I think each time, I need a scarf.

A brief hospital visit, the doctor is late, I don't need the x-ray any time soon so I take the request for it with me and walk quickly out and grab the next bus.

I get back to the café next to my office just half an hour before my lecture, breakfast-less – I ask for speed but the cook forgets and lets my panini burn, and the contrite woman behind the counter throws together a tuna sandwich and most of what I had paid, and hands it to me as I rush to the lecture theatre.

(Why isn't it a panino, I always wonder. Is it perhaps because there are two pieces of bread.)

"Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear, and, as far as possible, for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flower beds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their levelling and rinsing."

As the students are filing in, I take a few bites of my portable brunch.

Barthes: the lecture seems okay, but the students are sleepy – are they still recovering from the time change? It's all right, it's good enough – at one point I lie on the floor to show them the end of Mark Morris' Mythologies, they wake up enough to laugh – at the end they roll groggily out, as though they are headed straight for bed.

I walk down through the university, buy some of the new line of sturdy soups at M&S, and get on the bus. I sit next to an elderly lady, we talk about travel and weather – she tells me she is 81, I say I'm nearly sixty, she says, predictably, oh that's nothing, with a laugh. I say good-bye to her as I get off the bus, come home –

but behind everything I'm doing is already a kind of cozy retreat-and-relaxation: even running around I'm already in a late fall / early winter mood, stocking the pantry and closing curtains.

"It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own."

I haven't brought in the rosemary and oregano and thyme from the back patio– but I must admit there's plenty in the freezer, both dry and in olive oil. I make some nettle tea, on R.'s orders.

I hear firecrackers outside – and check the calendar: yes, tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day. People tend to mess about with fireworks from a couple of days before Halloween. Seeing whether the matches really work, I suppose...

A casual mention of a short story on Facebook led to buying a cheap copy of an old paperback, which came today – exactly my kind of thing, though I don't remember ever reading it: Bradbury edited a collection of Timeless Stories in the early 1950s that was then reprinted for decades. After a brief encounter with television proves uninteresting, I turn it off and, in the dim light of the living room, read the first stories...

"He put away the nets. He stacked wood against the wall by the stove for next spring, and for anyone who might be shipwrecked on the island, and he tied down the woodshed with ropes because it stood so near the high-water mark."

There is a little bit of time travel in all of this: though most of these stories aren't familiar, the tone is – and so is the cover: this is a 1970 edition with artwork in a style that is familiar to me. That is also when Ballantine Books began to splurge on Lin Carter's idea of bringing back fantasy classics – so many of them are on my shelves, so many of them are so important to me.

In fact, there is a library-rescued Complete Storisende Edition of Cabell piled up, in order of course, next to my fireplace...

"The gales began to howl around our lonely island and the weather was cold. All of us now lived in my house where there was naturally a good porcelain stove and where we intended to sleep through the winter."

I wake up to the doorbell: a late night delivery of groceries, half an hour early because the driver wants to go home. When I open the door it is really cold, and I say so, though it is perhaps something he has already heard this evening: he is cheerfully energetic, a friendly Geordie lad who makes the usual jokes about it being 'fresh'. I tell him he wants to get home in this weather.

I have bought a bit too much food – solid and healthy, autumn fare for the most part. Except the mango, that's an indulgence. It's a bit of a fuss to put it all away, but I make room, packing away everything securely, preparing.

"It wasn’t raining at the moment but the forest was covered in mist and looked very beautiful, and it got thicker and thicker where the hills went down into Moominvalley, and little by little the pools became rivulets, more and more of them, and Toft walked between hundreds of streams and waterfalls, and all of them were going in the same direction as he was."

Seasons of mists...

I fall back into my book.