in the hall of mirrors

Closing doors

So: in a burst of extraordinarily blinkered and sociopolitically aggressive pettiness, the UK government pulls us out of the EU.

I've been joking for months that I have two passports, but unfortunately they're the ones nobody wants... but just try to trade them for something more respectable, better. Slovenia? Great, flat trade, or shall I give you money? Or how about if I add – marmalade?...

Eventually moving to a warmer part in Europe – Barcelona has been my target for a year or so – is not completely impossible as a result; but it will be considerably more difficult. The tangled requirements of professional licensing, work, a place to live, moving – and, of course, more than anything else: health care....

Which is also the most significant reason why returning to the US would be insane. Aside from not wanting to be under the current loony regime in any way at all, I assume I would have great difficulty ensuring HIV medications – even if there were state programs (but how could I afford to move back to urban California?), their stability would be based on the assertive strength of the state government – which is good now, but.... well, you wouldn't want to, you know, bet your life on it.

So that's another closed door.

•••

On Monday afternoon, walking in town, I had an odd, tense sensation across my eyes, my face: it kept feeling as though I were squinting, or grimacing – was this some kind of generalised tension showing up in the muscles? I don't know; but after a couple of hours in town I went home to rest a bit. It didn't feel like a health problem, just... tension.

Associated with a slightly dizzy sadness, disconnection: it is sunny out, but I don't quite feel it. Tired...

Tuesday, the feeling seemed to continue... or was it fainter; or not? perhaps....

•••

A sense of being cornered in the UK, unable to leave: I know, I shouldn't complain – I rent a pleasant apartment (I don't own it, but that should remain a relatively safe choice); I have nice friends and a job, I have my analysands, I have medical care....

Of course, with the NHS under heavy attack, I wouldn't be surprised if that also started to get shaky. When I started my current medications, I was handed a cheaply photocopied notice that they were being changed because these new ones were cheaper – it did turn out to be a better choice for me, and my doctor reassured me that he would never (never!) actually change my HIV medications on the basis of cost, but – well, let's face it: what does he know about the future? He's thinking of what would happen if structures remain relatively responsible, supportive: which is an opinion and not a fact.

Indeed, everyone has reassured me that medical care couldn't possibly change, or of course end, but... as we know, sudden, shocking changes do indeed happen in the world. Those 1930s stories....

The past few nights, I'm reminded of my old vision, the Story of the Abbot: the tale of how, in an earlier existence, I was horribly careless with the lives of others – resulting in a stricture on this life, and others: that those in charge of my well-being will also act carelessly (getting deported from Australia!) – and this will teach me what it feels like, so that I remember the lesson.

Another round of the wheel: another, not especially palatable, lesson....

•••

The BBC has been weirdly silent: we've known for only about a week what day had been abruptly chosen for the break – and then there was astoundingly little discussion: which doesn't feel as though no one has anything to say – it has a much more disturbing quality, as though Murdoch and his cronies decided that the common populace knows enough, and should just shut up.

Which is how this whole thing has gone... so much for that Magna Carta nonsense, it just got in the way, didn't it?

Tonight, a brief mention that the document is signed. All a bit like getting a single-page Notice of Eviction. Sign the divorce papers. You agree to give up all rights to. Yo are ordered not to come within one hundred yards of....

•••

Tonight, again, as I am sitting on the sofa, my energy sudden evaporates, I become a bit shaky – that weakness that hits me once several times a month: I sit, then lie down... I have gotten better at this; I know that I simply stop doing things, turn things off, and if it's particularly bad I head for bed, whatever time it is.

Not terrible, not disastrous. But not exactly the condition one should be in to plan a new life elsewhere....

•••

In Stoppard's play Jumpers, there is a strange moment – one not in the dialogue, but in the stage directions, and so something liable to vanish in performance. The secretary looks in a mirror:

"For the following speeches, the SECRETARY is the only person moving on stage. She gets up. She is going to go for lunch. Perhaps a clock has struck. She comes down stage to make use of the imaginary mirror… a grim, tense, unsmiling young woman, staring at the audience."

It is a disturbingly sad vignette: the other characters talk and jump, there is dazzling wordplay, and emotions and passions as the world disintegrates – but this minor character, who is silent throughout the play and acts practically as scenery for most of it, suddenly shows us something painful: so closed, so without hope....

In that play, of course, Stoppard is also attacking the redbrick universities and their damned working classes, their Labor supporters, those lefties who ruin everything. In other words: vile, irresponsible lefties like me. For him, at least when he wrote that play – because the early divisions in his life were between a beaten-down Eastern European communism, and a luxurious Oxbridge creativity – symbolic representations of power were noble and important, as they are for too many in conservative southern England.

Of course that devolves into the assumption that people and their needs can be disposed of, as long as the symbols stay firmly in place. Which sounds just like the more old-fashioned Republicans, who are so disoriented at the moment by the Neronian chaos of the current regime in the West...

•••

That sense of being lost, of spinning in space – in a culture, in an economy and a political system, that uses you as nothing but a cipher, a functional unit of income and control.

•••

We will shift, manage, there will be changes in everyday life – a weakened economy, fewer opportunities, paying for health care – and a mess of denatured laws, remnants of EU regulations with the bits that bother rich people taken out of them. We'll putter along, I suppose: and if the rest of my life is here, that is of course not such a bad thing.

But it is so sad: to have dream spaces, imagined futures and hopes, collapse into a heap of rubble....

Pornopolitical

I keep noticing that, over the past few months, I post more pictures of hot guys on Facebook. I am more frank about commenting on attractive men, including plausibly non-gay ones. I am blunter, and more direct...

On the one hand, yes, I'm thinking about not being alone, and trying to reconnect with some expectations of being in a relationship again – even if only in imagination – even at sixty years, and even when I am not exactly underweight, or over-muscled. So there's a falling into eroticism, to the extent that an old guy like me is actually capable of that – and thus a carelessness about what others think: I do indeed know that Facebook is a public forum with many different people on it, and that some of my friends and acquaintances are less comfortable with pictures of guys with their shirts off than others.

(Of course I also know that it's possible to unfollow someone while still remaining a friend – and while I'm confessing things: for some years I've maintained a special category called 'Acquaintances' – it's where I put people whom I do know, but whose posts are.... hmm. What may I call them. A bit aggressive, a bit crazy, a bit tragic, or a bit too shatteringly winsome to encounter before I've had my morning green tea. And probably there are many whom I know and hold dear who feel the same about my posts – which is fine, so long as I never find out about it.)

(I have had one relative – the most ardently pro-Trump – defriend me; when that happened I threw up my hands in disgust – disgust with them, not the situation: because making détentes no longer seems particularly interesting to me. I'm willing to ignore that relationship for however many decades it takes to recover.)

But it feels as though, since Orlando, since Brexit, since Trump – since a dark wave of oppressive aggression rose above our heads, a kind of control desperate to return to a past that never actually existed – posting pictures of hot guys on Facebook has become... POLITICAL.

I didn't say it was high-minded, exactly. But it is political. Kind of.

It's like the wilder drag queens, the Theatre of the Ridiculous, and various assertively sexual creative works by gay men, by women, by lesbians and transgender people and others: yes it may seem a bit much, and I know that not everyone will be comfortable with everything. (I mean, really: insisting that everyone must accept every image and practice is pure political ideology – sexuality is by its nature complex, and always has an essentially private facet: there would be something wrong, and also quite boring, if everyone were thoroughly comfortable with everything.)

So, I know it's a bit obnoxious, a bit heavy-handed. I know some people don't really want their daughters stumbling over such images on Facebook – and I do understand, though I'm not a parent, that the process of growing up has become uncomfortably complex in an internet culture, and I do respect people's anxieties.

But, just as I feel colder and more ruthless, more impatient, with this current remarkably stupid world, as May and Trump and Putin and the rest try to make fools, or slaves, of all of us – so I am also a bit impatient, a bit bored, with any idea of censoring myself for politeness' sake. Even for my friends –

because, as theorists have noted in the past: straights seem to have no idea how much obnoxious heterosexuality they fling at us every day –

and if all those Other Sides aren't going to take better care of us anyway – then why the hell should we try to take any kind of care of them?..........

Temporal

Perhaps the problem is one of time...

Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival.

But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course.

Time awareness past: memory, and apparently modified memory. Patches of time remembered as such, which are distinct from those remembered as still, or non-active though still breathing and living, tableaux. Areas of emotional memory that have their own life – most of them not terribly charged, but reflective.

Time projection of the future – which for me also has embedded clusters of anxieties: that which is not completed, that which might happen.

And the relatively broad, seamless stretches of idealised future circumstances, of being in some situation I think I have wanted – Barcelona, a partner, a cafe with friends while traveling – and being aware, as I often have, that the relatively undetailed quality may suggest a problem: that my imagination of my own future future tends to have a bit too much fantasy in it, which accounts for some of the weaknesses and the scattered results in my life. But that is my nature, and I don't hate it: it just suggests a need to pay attention.

The vastness of death, of existence before a certain time, and then after a certain time.

Wanting to see futures: not merely to continue existing, which hasn't seemed terribly interesting for a long time, but to continue living into a time of interesting change, hopefully positive change. Because of the change, more than anything, I think.

(Recall that dream a few years ago: a half-drowned San Francisco – the one where I sit on the open balcony of a Victorian high in a hill above what was Noe Valley, now largely submerged by the sea –a warm, mild sun across the islets of the altered, now quieter city, and we see occasional small boats between them: I am old, and I can hear someone I love, but cannot in the dream see, making a small meal in the kitchen – a dream suffused with time: and the dream-me is happy...)

***

Today I was mildly groggy/cranky – after about a week of mild side effects each evening, after I take the more obnoxious pills – today I met with D. on my required report on research plans – then emails – the computer is slow, I send yet another irritable message about it – an afternoon dotted with current prospective students – most have problems easily resolved...

in the midst of this I played, on the computer, Chris Wood's 'Walk This World with Music'. Eerie, dark, and electric: the dull world comes alive, and time dances with sudden energy –

The music itself tends to do slightly strange things with time: double-stopped chords, lots of open intervals – which always makes the music reference eternity: flashes of organum, pedal points, drones, static harmonies – and beginnings and ends of phrases are sort of curled around themselves in pitch and rhythm to catch and carry you: this is one of those pieces that pulls you into the rhythm, and you dance, alert and fast and defenceless.

***

Some of this strange relation to time is from analysis: as though in the past year I walked, sometimes fell, into deeper caves in myself – times of floating awareness, of contemplation.

And the framework of anxiety that would normally make me anxious in relation to those times: that I am never doing enough – that armature seems to have fallen apart, joints rusted and weakened, the structure of embedded guilt twisted and disintegrating, fallen across the pavement in twisting, collapsing lines.

All this is sharpened by my rather cold reaction to the dull world – political stupidities on both sides of the pond, the sharp focus on what I want and how to get it: assuming governments, laws, economies and institutions will not be my friends, calculating –

Which means that this floating time sense, archaic chunks of unfinished selves, are not distractions: they feel like important realities – in any case more energetic, more alive, than the pathetic realities of a bemused and chaotic world.

***

Do you know Nowotny's Time? A book recently suggested by an analysand – and that led also to the International Society for the Study of Time, which she used to head. Yes, of course time is a mystery, of course we are embedded in, creatures of, time: but even thinking about it begins to illuminate the caves we walk through....

***

I hope I can finish the articles – I like my editors, and don't want to mess up their projects; and I also focus on the Jung-Institut, on writing and research and stuff that the university, the patient group, various people, want me to do.

But yes, there's a slightly disconnected calm behind it – a sense of: yeah, whatever.

***

Because time is so vast: I'd rather watch the world slowly wheel, clouds drift across the sky – the heart beats, and I know that it won't do that forever. My own life and death have seemed especially – well, contingent, or perhaps, incidental – over the past year.

This is not a bad thing... it is not even an uncomfortable thing.

***

Looking across time: a widened view, not quite in focus; but taking it all in....