in the hall of mirrors

Amidst

Three psychoanalysis clients!... uh, patients? Analysands?

And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'.

Analysand... an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most people don't recognize, so...

(Incidentally: did you know that the old fuss over whether 'psychoanalysis' was restricted to Freudians or not is now considered unnecessary? I'm allowed to call myself a psychoanalyst... I still prefer 'analyst', though of course that also tangles me up with my musicology colleagues, who then think: Ah, he knows all the different ninth chords!... and no, I don't know them.)

Oh well. Anyway it's going well.

•••

Many things to do, a sense of a sudden expansion in responsbilities – it did occur to me that suddenly I do have rather a lot going on: analysis, plus continued training, my own personal analysis, my first control case colloquia and supervision sessions, both in the UK and later in Zürich;

some teaching (fortunately less than last semester), exams to mark, postgraduates, planning courses for next year; year abroad students, their plans and auditions and paperwork...

the HIV patient group, teaching medical students, peer counseling... oops I do have to catch up on the peer counseling appointments.

New chairs for the middle room (because chairs for analyst and analysand are supposed to be both comfortable and similar). New business cards, for all of these things – made on my computer, as long as I can figure out how to add small pictures. Endless e-mails all over the place of course, the curse of our time.

And of course – RESEARCH!... the slowest of all areas in my life, the one where I really must get a lot more done. And soon. Editing the book, two articles....

•••

Today was remarkably but effectively busy: e-mails, brief meetings that finished off tasks, the bank and new shoes, jumping from one appointment to another with alacrity and success – the way successful people are supposed to be, of course, according to all of those Business Advice books.

Naturally this is a bit surprising for me, as I can often be fairly helpless when faced with many tasks – but it is as though I am reaching a stage where many things (even most things, aside from writing of course, which is still my weakest point) can simply be glided through: done lightly and quickly. With the Tao, as it were.

And the truth is – I think that, even more than my personal analysis and training, the biggest source of this lightness is being an analyst for others: that caring for, hearing, the histories and disasters and strengths and anxieties of other people pulls me out of my own locked gears –

as though the larger view given me by these analytic relationships rebounds into my own life: and my own concerns suddenly have space around them, alternatives – even: life....

Recovering

Today's two-hour lecture was probably the last AIDs activity for a while... except of course for catching up with some counseling.

Framed with a great deal of self-clarification – I felt the need to explain to my students that I was tired out by the subject...

And then did parts of the 'AIDS Rage' lecture, with most of the examples. Exhausted, came home.

This evening, putting things away: the apartment clean and quiet, myself calmer.

As I take clothes from the dryer, I think: sometimes revisiting these feelings, these ideas, is like tearing at old wounds...

Which isn't as horrific an image as it might seem to you: for me it feels only sad, rather – alert. As though I am watching myself, and keeping the past in my conscious mind.

I go through some of my psychology study e-books, reordering them, thinking of last night, when I read Ralf König's Bullenklöten – which is in a way a sexy comedy; but last night I was focused on the terribly sad ending, after one character's pursuit of raw sex has collided with his lover's equally frustrating search for romance – when both have been horribly disappointed by their illusions and mistakes, which have almost torn them apart, they find each other again on a northern beach...

– Er ist weg – es ist vorbei. Und safe war's auch nicht.

– Ich weiß.

and finally one puts his arm around the other.

Backwash

So, as the events and discussion around AIDS gradually dwindle...

even after World AIDS Day, there are still backwashes (or perhaps: backdrafts?) from all these memories and feelings.

Monday was the patient group discussion with graduate students in clinical psychology – which is always both easier and deeper than our more usual presentations for medical students: the psychologists pick up what we're feeling instantly, and we can go further – but that has its own demands....

M. and A. were there with me; both of them talked for longer than usual, driven by some wish to talk about things they hadn't said over the previous weeks, perhaps. M. especially, as he had been doing public discussions of HIV tests in schools, the conference, etc.: he told the story of the illnesses and death of his lover in the late 1990s – which I have actually never heard before: he always tells the story of his legal/public battle with the major retailer that fired him for being HIV+, but I'd never heard the part before it, which is where the real depths are.

It was... remarkable. I think he spoke for twenty-five minutes or more: full memory, no flinching, no fragmentation in storytelling – he was right there through the whole thing, and showed it to us with a simple, undemonstrative strength I didn't even know he had.

Then A. spoke about the various problems and ideas that have come up in the three years since her diagnosis – so many changes in direction, so much altered; it is still fresh for her, but she is present to it all. Some of this emotional solidity came from the subtle emotional resonance of twenty young psychologists, from our sense of their ability to stay with the difficult...

And afterwards, questions, discussion; and then, there wasn't much time left. We asked for just one more question, and one of the women said, What would you like to go back and tell your younger self to do differently?

M. and A. gave long answers about taking care of themselves, HIV testing, etc. My answer was crystal clear in my head – I wasn't quite sure it would make sense; I'd mentioned that I worked across the street, as a university professor, that I'd lived on four continents; but –

when they finally turned to me, I said: I wish I’d known it was more important to be with someone than to finish the dissertation.

Which was a simple, slightly deadly thing to say... there was nothing to say after that, either; just silence for a minute or two.

And we ended the session, thanking everyone for their time.... 

Eve

Tomorrow is December 1 – World AIDS Day – so... today is World AIDS Eve.

Or something like that.

(And December 2, an even more privately important day: the day Reid died of AIDS in 1983.)

Last week I took a less cleaned-up, less – public version of my previous blog post to analysis. Discussion of all those references to death, aging, grief... S. pointed out something almost ridiculously obvious, which I couldn't see until she said it: that all the Aschenbach and Christou resonance is blowing up out of the roiling waves of a number of AIDS remembrances.

Because I don't have emotions about all that any more, do I... hmm.

Made a list of events I've been involved in this month for A. to publicize online –

• 7 November – all-day Skype conference with N., connecting the local NHS and PWAs and two countries in southern Africa about community AIDS care
• 13 November – presentation at city library on art and AIDS
• 22 November – ten-year anniversary of HIV patient group; lots of friends, nurses, doctors, etc.
• somewhere in there – television interview with Me In My Home, looking through books and talking about being a long-term survivor
• somewhere else in there – radio interview with me and A. at my office, talking about HIV testing and its importance, etc. – made by a pleasant young woman from a local radio station (she used her iPhone as the mic! I didn't know you could do that)
• last Thursday, 28 November – class lecture on music and AIDS
• 21 November, the banquet around Melinda's nomination for an NHS award related to the HIV patient group (remind us to tell you about the music some time... it is indeed possible to repeat the same tune too damned often)
• 27 November, the MESMAC conference on HIV testing – didn't do anything, was just in the audience
• and then two days from now, on Monday: the meeting of members of the PWA group and psychology students, when we tell them... all sorts of things about our lives. (I still need to phone more people to set this up....)

So anyway, yes: kind of a lot of ... stuff. The presence, not only of histories and ideas and terms, but of course of memories and feelings...

Honestly, I can't quite remember what I was planning on saying about all this.

Which may be the point: I (we) definitely know what I'm (we're) talking about when it comes to AIDS/HIV; but perhaps it is sometimes hard to focus on exactly what it is that we do know, or remember. Or really think, deep down.

It's too vast, I guess – too present, to see its outline –

I always tell my classes a story from the first time I taught a course about music and AIDS, back in Hong Kong, somewhere around 1999 or so. I'd been articulately powering through all sorts of ideas and information and materials, explaining poems and symbols associated with the AIDS Quilt Songbook; and I got around to the white balloons –

you remember white balloons: afternoons in the gentle green meadows of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the balloons were a new symbol, because people didn't want to use traditional symbols (a time when many were angry at organized religions for their institutional callousness).

And I absolutely lost it: turning to the whiteboard, marker in hand, just stopped – couldn't move, and wasn't going to turn around...

Still don't know to this day if they noticed or not. Perhaps it's not so strange for a lecturer to freeze in mid-lecture, even for a couple of minutes; perhaps they thought I was just... thinking.

And now, I tell classes about what happening, to explain to them: it's the detail in the corner of your mind that catches you – not the big chunk of fear or loss: but the small, gentle symbol that you hadn't thought about for years...

But I've probably told you that story before, haven't I? Ah, well: Grandpa's getting old....

Ten years

In the midst of a busy period – about ten weeks when everything seems to be happening at once – our HIV patient group celebrated its ten-year anniversary...

which is kind of amazing, really.

No offices, no paid staff – so there's no way we can be defunded, even in a time when the world seems filled with greedy rich people and government cutbacks. And some collisions and problems among other HIV charities in the area – we've kept as far away from those things as possible; I hope we can stay immune to it all (if I can use that term...). I've been the general manager for just under eight of the years – I took some breaks, then returned to it... two of the original six members have died (gentle, hard-working David, and also Steve, who now has a foundation named for him); and a couple of others – but not many.

We've done about 250+ hours of 'training' – which is where we have two or three PWAs talk to medical students, or psychology students, or sometimes nurses, doctors, even GPs, about our lives, experiences, problems... they're generally blown away. Fascinated, full of questions – even medical students who are normally focused on technical issues suddenly discover that we are – well – people.

And over the same ten years, probably about 150+ hours of peer counseling. And then there's sitting on NHS committees to represent a patient viewpoint, and keeping up a website (which needs retooling – the graphics, by Tony, are here).

A few of us are a bit fragile – as much with age as with any HIV-assignable condition; most are relatively healthy, looking for things to do. In fact, one of my biggest concerns now is that we have, for instance, ten or twelve people interested/trained in doing the peer counseling – and we only have about that many referrals in a year. 

But people want to do things – go into prisons and talk to prisoners about AIDS, work out a patient self-care management program, as they do in Leeds...

It's good that we're almost too restless, that so many of us want to do more: we have the energy, the health, do do it all... we'll keep trying to find avenues for this energy. But the life it represents – that alone is pretty fantastic.

It is clear, by the way, that hardly any places around the UK (or perhaps elsewhere?) have a group like ours – at least not one that has been so steadily viable.

The group was originally created by Melinda, the head of Clinical Psychology here in Newcastle; the night before this celebration, there was an expensive and large-scale NHS dinner/awards ceremony, where she was up for an award for leadership. She remained a runner-up – we were a bit disappointed; but then one of the young women psychologists who works with her said, during a break, Let's go up on stage and take photographs. So we did: just like winners.

And so: we are continuing to do things, continuing to – frankly – leave the nurses and doctors and administrators continuously mildly surprised, that we're so active –

I guess I don't have a clever way of saying more about it: but this is a Good Thing. And I'm proud of it.

Beautiful men

After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a first meeting with Rumana, Norma, and Susan of something that may turn into an actual writing group –

today I did some e-mails and admin, plus a bit too much procrastination, as usual. Then yoga – which, over the past six weeks of trying to reconnect to something I haven't done for about fifteen years, keeps consistently transforming itself from a duty into a joy – and then a taxi to see a play about AIDS by a local writer (Steve Burbridge), performed in a pub, which I thought I should see...

The play was good – solid, a concrete experience of diagnosis. It reminded me that, for all my work with HIV training and counseling these days, I do tend to become – abstract about the experience, distant from my own stories, which gradually turn into memories that are dusty as old library books. And, of course, that so many of my later experiences are about isolation... and yes, I get by without the added pressures of other people. Or of relationship. How easy that all makes it. Or... not.

But at yoga the extraordinarily beautiful young man who worked in the health tent at last year's Pride – actually a beautiful puppy, but still very distracting – was for some reason in my class, though I know his abilities are years ahead of all of us.

Then after the play a very tall, handsome, almost exasperatingly charming bear of a man, with dark hair and a trimmed beard, stood at the door with a bucket to collect donations for local Pride festivities. (Yes, I spoke to him – and, as you might imagine, I was not entirely... coherent, throughout. But I suppose men like that are accustomed to people not completely making sense when they talk; they must assume that most people have some kind of mild neural damage. Probably located in their speech centers.)

Oh, and he runs the local Pride festival. So he's also intelligent, organized, take-charge... yeah yeah okay.

Then finally, since it was after 9 pm and I hadn't had dinner, I walked a block to a tapas restaurant I pass everyonce in a while. And yes, you guessed it: a disorientingly handsome, unexpectedly dark-blond, Spanish waiter – friendly, charming, personable... he told me his name (as did the handsome bear) but unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to actually remember it. (Albañas? Something like that.) With that Spanish bearing – a clean, slightly soldierly intensity – a bit more sternly noble than my ancestral roots, with their more slapdash, self-indulgent Italian and Greek styles.

Are these men crossing my path just in order to confuse me?....

In spring, a (young?) man's thoughts turn to...........

Brodkey

In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht... last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a noted writer about AIDS....

Brodkey was highly intelligent, intensely arrogant, and either mostly straight, or sort of not so much really. He claimed he'd become HIV+ in the 1960s, back when he was still (admtting to) having sex with men – which is really, really implausible; it is considerably more possible that it would have been in the late 70s/early 80s. I've tried to read This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, but it is off-putting – it is amazing just how much Brodkey adores and idolizes himself. And it is, frankly, fairly tedious/repulsive: it is clear that, for him, the great historical and cultural tragedy of AIDS is that it struck (you guessed it) Harold Brodkey.

So it was strange to see Sutherland try to explain what we can know about the hallucinatory mess of Brodkey's creative career: the fiction of the massive Great Novel, which apparently didn't even exist, and the circling, chaotic bursts of publicity that appeared around its imagined existence for nearly forty years. It is possible that Brodkey's greatest fiction was the tale of what he was going to write....

So: like Stefan Brecht, like Truman Capote: the arrogant, unproductive fraud, who is evidently but secretly filled with shame and confusion. And this one had AIDS, to boot. Obviously a shadow figure for me – and by that I mean: someone who seems to symbolize parts of myself I most reject, loathe, and fear, but also parts of myself that I inevitably and constantly carry around with me. That being what a Jungian shadow is....

In a week when I have promised R. that I will work every day, I have actually worked three, or perhaps two and a half, out of five days; and edited perhaps six pages. Not so utterly terrible: but perhaps all these flashing images of failure and success, the unreal background to real work, are keyed in to my views of these other writers.

Because last night my dreams were filled with pages on Brodkey – books, newspaper articles, web pages – and until the early morning hours, when I tried to pin down just what he had done, I couldn't lay the image to rest.

Disturbing dreams: until I could look at them closely enough to acknowledge the reflections... and then the dreams were gone.

If we really...

At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or... – those clouds have moved into something unexpected...

If, when we die, there is some place to go, where others are who have died already... (what was that film from last year, The Tree of Life? Like the ending of that, then); what will we say to each other? How will we look, do we hug in the same ways, or want to?

People who died at very different ages, in different times....

Somehow I can see some of the lovers and friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. For one thing, they are of course younger, fresher: naturally they would encounter me and be, well, a bit shocked, perhaps repulsed. Rather uncomfortable: they wouldn't quite know what to say, would want to exchange a few conversational fragments, then get away to be back with... people their own age.

Or is there some kind of ecstatic reunion, followed by confusion: the world changed, after I died? Well, how, what do you mean? And why are you different now – did you change, too?...

And yes, of course: those other fantasies, familiar from many imagined and implied afterlives, where we are all at some central point in our lives: where we are reestablished as beings who have an ideal state, who don't live in time. I can imagine that, too: but perhaps I don't think of myself that way enough these days – my analyst, my medical doctor and my acupuncturist, all of whom point slightly testily at my collapse into a weaker and older image of myself than actually exists, would probably be in agreement about me here.

A somewhat muddled afterlife, then: where there are young people and old people, who remember caring about each other more than anything, ever.

But who don't quite know what to say to each other any more, or whether there is anything they can do together that would make sense... And then the clash between increasingly fantasized, love-imbued images of people, and their complex realities. It's true that the reality is (almost always) better; but you also discover that you don't quite know how to connect with that reality...

As though we no longer know our lines. Or, more acccurately, as though, even among the people who matter the most in the universe, we don't quite have... a place.

For Jarman

In April 2010, I gave a presentation about Derek Jarman, where I worked through The Garden, Edward II, and Blue, showing the closeness to death in each film.

Or maybe: not just showing. When I polished the presentation to give in New Orleans, I felt close to something....

I promised, last year, to turn the presentation into a published paper for Gus Subero, who has been waiting for it since August. On Monday he sent me a deadline: it must be done by 8 a.m. tomorrow, or it isn't included. I have actually been grateful for this deadline – I've tossed everything else aside to polish an already faceted stone.

And now I'm polishing the last page, which I haven't gone near in months. I'm proud of the page – but it feels on the edge of – something: and as I'm copying out the text of Jarman's elegy –

“I fill this room with the echo of many voices / Who passed time here / Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint / The sun comes and floods this empty room / I call it my room / My room has welcomed many summers / Embraced laughter and tears / Can it fill itself with your laughter / Each word a sunbeam / Glancing in the light / This is the song of My Room.

David / Howard / Graham / David / Paul / Derek / Graham / Howard / David"

there is the musical background of gongs, and I am crying a bit, and my nose is running...

No, my nose isn't running: it is bleeding.

Heavily.

And it is as though this is a mark of what is given to me: I do live, still (or: I seem to), waiting for some useful purpose perhaps; but when I come this close, I can't help but show some sign of it. Heavily.

Is this why I haven't been spending time on these pages... at some level I know that this is risky. I'm allowed to live, but there are... warnings.

A tissue in my nose; and no blood has gotten on my shirt. It is late at night, and the living neighbors are watching television, which noise hums in the background. My last paragraph, which clearly doesn't need reworking – just, perhaps, one more comma placed for the reader:

If the eye is a camera, perhaps a series of transformation shots could be filmed, following each other in a slow-motion series: a transformation of soldiers dying in World War I, into gay men dying of AIDS; a transformation of Christ into a man attacked and humiliated by laughing policemen; transformations of Tilda into Mary, of Edward II into Jarman, of externalized rage about death, about war, about violence and repression and inequality, into an internalized identification, even a kind of defiant acceptance. And finally, a transformation shot that turns Jarman, in his garden, into everyone who dies: into blue…

The paper is done – the tissue is holding the blood – and I can send it in.

Not a close call, exactly: more of a long-expected visit; but by a friend....

Nadir; and the problem of small talk

At the lowest point of light, time, and the year: that dark still point before the cycle turns back upward.

It was interesting to see some people get upset over the entire Mayan-end-of-the-world meme – furious that people would dare discuss something not scientifically proven. But of course part of its attraction for many – even for me – is the ambiguous attitude towards some huge change or ending: those of us who get tired of daily life as it is being lived these days may want a change – even a disastrous one. This isn't psychologically or culturally a huge surprise; consider it a way of blowing off steam.

A festive party at a local bar tonight, given by Hannabiel and Yllis: rich and heartening food, crowds of people, and their band. I was standing around chatting to students, some of whom I'd never spoken to personally before – one who took courses from me three or four years ago, and some of my current students. I kept getting welcome compliments on my lectures – evidently I'm more fun to watch than some; and students have tended to associate me with the wide-ranging ideas I teach in the cultural theories class.

I noticed myself tending to get into rather deep, directly personal conversations with all of them – a beautiful girl, a rough lad and his girlfriend, a gay guy, and a boyish one (the one who graduated a few years ago)... relationships, life plans, deeper feelings about things....

It reminded me of a time in the mid-80s in West Hollywood, when I was secretary and gofer for the astoundingly handsome Steve Schulte (as a Colt model he was renamed Nick Chase, and became the most famous of the entire Colt stables). Steve was fairly disorienting to work with in person, because in addition to being insanely sexy, he was also extremely kind, deeply honest, and very serious (aargh, just kill me now). But somehow I got work done, and managed not to stutter too much or fall out of my chair when he gave me my instructions each morning.

One day those instructions involved driving to see writer Paul Monette and getting him to sign some document or other. Steve casually told me, as I left: just so you know, Monette has no small talk. I wasn't quite sure what this meant, but when I got to Monette's house in the hills I learned: even though I was just the guy who had brought a form to sign, he had me sit down and have a drink, and he wanted to talk about what I intended to do in life, what it meant, what I found important in the world... quite amazing really; and since I'm always willing to talk about myself, I had a field day.

This was before AIDS redefined Monette's life, before his partner got ill and died, before he wrote his final memoirs and poems. But it left me deeply impressed: such a commitment not to waste time on trivialities... when you read some of the novels, you can see the same constant deep reflection on everything.

I am of course much more casual about my use of time. But I can see that, as I've gotten older, I do tend to jump into deeper levels of conversation with people.

Perhaps I am becoming, at least occasionally, someone who has no small talk....