A time of flickering changes, referents –
going through books, CDs, tech, implements and bowls and glasses, my office at school, my office at home, the living room, the kitchen: the world of things. There are burdens here, and entanglements – I am approximately as good at letting go the world of things as I am at, say, flying. And I mean while using my arms to do it.
Much of this going-through-things is not difficult, a pleasure: reconnection. I remember everything, I see everything: books are off the floor and in order. Perhaps 10% are gone, which gives a greater clarity to the rooms, to my mind.
•••
CD cases, spoons....
•••
More and more, it is not all done alone – Robert comes over to get the sofa, Makis offers to help.
Norma brings Peter over to look at all the audio systems, to decide what to replace: and he is pleased, there is good kit here, we can reorganize... a server, digital and analog transfer points....
A certain returning pleasure in things: they look cleaner, more interesting.
•••
Science fiction paperbacks. Linen shirts from Hong Kong.
•••
I am aware, have long been aware, that my attachment to masses of things – ordered, organized, shelved; and now digital things, and things that are plugged in or are not, things with pages or plastic cases, things on hangers and in drawers – is a dominant part of my life.
When situations have crashed or gotten rough – the move to San Francisco, carrying a suitcase and duffle bag from neighborhood to neighborhood while looking for a place to live (had I not heard of storage lockers?), that confused landing in a too-small rented space in Los Angeles, then squeezing into the beautiful hilltop apartment back in San Francisco where I was for a year (but there wasn't room for it all), the crash landings in Berlin, the third return to a dark, grimy apartment in San Francisco – the chaotic collapse of moving from Hong Kong to, well: to a kind of vanishing space in the middle of the air –
and finally pushing everything into this apartment, where I have been for sixteen years:
see, I recognize this now – this is like Richard Toop's apartment in Sydney, like Fred's apartment in Los Angeles – I am that mad person who collects far too many things.
And how many years out of the last sixteen have I wanted to get rid of things? But it was too hard, too confusing, too heavy.
•••
Shoes and sneakers; shampoo bottles from good hotels.
•••
The books in my university office have a gritty dust at the edges, but that is the fault of the construction guys in the previous building, who promised to cover them and did not; at this point I'm resigned to the fact that these things will not be free of grit in my lifetime.
Perhaps afterwards, in used bookstores and a library, they will be cleaned.
In some moods, of course, this is merely further proof of the chaos that lurks in the world, the one against which I am so defensive. If I were one of my own analysands, I would raise an eyebrow: do you see how heavy these things are for you? Like... like all the spirits Marley invokes in A Christmas Carol: wailing through the night, trailing long chains of money-boxes....
•••
Bowls from Japan, bowls from Spain. A blue glaze, especially beautiful.
•••
Things... yes, I promise you, despite my personal limitations, I do keep thinking: am I not near an age when people in older cultures would give up everything, just hold on to a saffron robe and a begging bowl?
The house and everything in it goes to family, to neighbors: here, it's yours, take it.
I can't really manage that kind of freedom....
Not yet.
•••
A small cat carved in obsidian; an afghan blanket knitted by my mother.
•••
So angry over the past couple of years: Brexit, and world confusion. Will I move to Barcelona, or will I live here for the rest of my life? Of course there are many things to consider, to imagine, to wonder about; but at the back of all of them is the awareness of things, of taking things and ordering them and finding space for them. Including the sense that, if I never managed to settle down in Barcelona, it would be so difficult to move back – as it was so difficult to move to San Francisco, Berlin, to be deported, to...
well: take each situation, and see that this is the opposite of a free and cheerful backpacker.
•••
The drawer is full of pens and small paper and plastic tags. Which are useful?
•••
An online exchange with an old friend, late at night: he is now on the wrong side of political history (I hope so, anyway).
I am strangely enraged: this is not a confrontation I have often (it helps that I do not live in the US, that I am an academic, that I am gay – the probability of getting into these discussions has been gratifyingly minimal).
Angry, ruthless: I am without mercy, but afterwards not at peace.
A world tilting towards ruin, and this is one of the fools who wants it to tilt further – those people who say, Let it all burn: do they realize what that is really like, when it all does burn?...
•••
Boxes of papers from, at least, four decades. Or more perhaps.
•••
The dream:
it is the end of a long dream; details blur and go out of order, but that doesn't break up the charged feeling.
We are walking a long way through the waste, sometimes a desert, sometimes beneath a dark, huge building. He is a big man, a bit cold and distant; at some point in the long trek he takes my bag from me and trudges along with it.
At another point he wants to climb down into a huge deep, very dark, area carved into rock, or built from metal, which has a metal ladder that seems to lead down; when he goes over the edge I am horrified, because it looks as though he will fall for miles – but then it is clear he is standing a ledge that is just a few feet down and in lighter colors, like painted cement, it’s not so dangerous; it has a ramp that leads downward more gradually.
When we finally arrive he no longer has my bag, and he doesn't care – it is lost somewhere, in a long trip across many places. I am desperate and enraged, I attack him – it had everything in it. He doesn't care.
I can't remember what was in the bag, so I can't replace things.
Later, without transition: a woman, cynical – she seems to be the one who lost the bag, I remain enraged, I try to hit her.
She finally seems to know where the bag, and some of its contents, might be – it may have been taken by one of the servant women when they were taking care of children (a flash: one of them, a simple dress and a scarf over her head, with a child in a small park).
•••
As I wake, emotionally filled, charged – grieving and painfully angry, but not, somehow, confused – and I try to write down the dream – it seems clear: this is all one emotional world – this is not a dream where narrative or symbols really matter, this is not a reference or reproduction:
it's enacting an emotional cluster that has its own strong reality – stories and ideas may pass through it, but they don't much matter.
What matters is the feeling of loss, of failed self-protection, of rage, of sadness – the sense that these people don't care what I've lost; and my reaction to that is astounding, it overpowers, it drives me.
The two figures are sort of – possibly – like Vincent D'Onofrio, and Madonna, respectively. In the dream they are not famous people or dazzling in any way: they are just... cold. Strong, hard. Uncaring.
I am full of rage and grief, and they don't seem to care: I am despairing and lost, and they are cold to it. A sense that this rage is familiar – me as youngest child; losing everything as a familiar feeling; the heartless coldness of everyone older.
The way I keep being tough with others: it is a reflection of people seeming cold to me about things I’ve lost.
•••
Medications and vitamins and bags to hold them in; and spices, whole and ground, red and black.
•••
All of this Sunday morning, I am... not drained, not exhausted; but it's true, this dream hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm moving slowly, reacting in a detached manner to messages.
A sense of going through the dream, and all that it means: all the fragments of behavior and rage and panic and protection and coldness – many spinning flashes from my life are embedded in this cluster of loss and defense: when Patrick moved my books out of order as a joke, and I was so angry – the last carton shipped from Berlin that broke in the post office, and not knowing what was lost – or all the way back to that earliest memory, at three years old, watching the family pack the moving van, but I think I will be left behind; and I watch, devastated, as they leave – and take all the things –
... In some ways this is not difficult to explain, or to bring into focus: not now, after so many years of looking into myself – but yes, it is strange: because it is so obvious, isn't it? Invisible until now...
though perhaps many in my life have seen this in me.
As M. said, so long ago: if your analysis works, you will be the last to understand why.
•••
Tired. But with a large clarity, a kind of release.
Breathing; a certain exhausted lightness....