in the hall of mirrors

Samhain

Today, the second of what I estimate to be three astoundingly difficult days of change: I would have said before, of disaster and loss, but now I'm not so sure.

A great crisis at work that has been held at bay for eight years. And crashing into the new medications, which has all gone – well, I was about to say unexpectedly wrong, but – actually: at top speed and amidst a host of unexpected added tests, appointments and decisions, the medical front may be actually going more as it should after having been somewhat skewed for some months.

A strange sense of entering battlefields and being forced into decisions I would have backed away from as recently as a few days ago: and simultaneously discovering there are plenty of people ready to help, there are ways forward rather than down, and that these may be changes that were actually needed.

That, in fact, change is not the same as death....

Air

Something remarkable about today's air: cool, damp, sharp – an almost Scandinavian feel to it.

Although northern England is close to the latitudes of Denmark and southern Sweden, we don't often get quite that kind of air – it reminds me of that sense of clarity one gets in Copenhagen some days, where everything seems reasonable and one wants to get out to do and see things.

A bit like a quick shot of akvavit?...

Awakening Conscience

Sometimes, especially when watching TV or wasting time by various means, I have that feeling of exhaustion, surfeit, revulsion, retreat: somewhere among the parts of my rather dull life over the past decade as an aging academic living alone in a small northern city with lots of wet, cold weather, and despite seeking some sort of new fire for existence out of my Jungian studies, and while being bored with the round of teaching the same subjects and modifying the same spreadsheets and taking care of the same problems year after year, I'll remember that I wanted life to be more interesting, more alive, more amusing. My fault of course: the television can always be turned off, it's always possible to go outside; like so many I am too often mesmerized by glowing screens and computer games, that whole lower existence that has become so typical of many of us.

It's a bit like the moralistic painting by Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience. A well-meaning if didactic work; there is a most interesting take on it scattered through Brian Aldiss' fictional 'Zodiacal Planets', or Zeepees, a bunch of artificial planetoids scattered across the inner solar system that furnished the setting for a handful of wonderfully bizarre stories he wrote in the 1970s. The stories emphasize a mildly, chaotically decadent lifestyle of minor art forms and arcane indulgences – astrology and weird foretelling, casual chemical body and mind modification and drugs, recreational schizophrenia, art works that suggest a slightly rotting culture (perhaps he'd read Spengler on the indulgences of 'late' civilizations, or maybe he was just thinking of Gibbon on late Rome). Across the background of two or three of the stories, a famous video artist uses dense data streams to recreate the Holman Hunt painting as well as other Pre-Raphaelite 'story' paintings, and extend them into videos that tell what happened in the following ten or fifteen minutes... a blithely useless artistic endeavor that suggests the sillier and more expensive Saatchi-funded trivia you can see in major galleries.

It is, of course, a malevolent if fun setting for Aldiss' stories; but it does a good job of suggesting that awful feeling of energetic pointlessness, of people desperately looking for something to do... which always begs that question: if we didn't simply watch screens and phones, or only somewhat more healthily read books; and run races and go to gyms and tanning salons and public parks, and look for pseudo-religious meaning in local classes and study groups; and get massages and acupuncture; and go to gallery openings and museum exhibits, then... what would we do?

An acutely uncomfortable puzzle.

I don't want to turn the television back on; but... what else is there, that is really so different from it?... ah well. Time to get up from this piano bench, at least....

Light, air

About six weeks since my last post. No serious reason for this – not especially in stasis, not down, not depressed; busy but not immensely so, just many things to do in a long row. There are changes – new plans, changing plans, changing dreams – most of which bode well in one way or another; but not a great deal of vast or startling news.

And, given the introspective tone of this blog most of the time, not many changes in perception that I feel any huge need to share. Again, not a dramatic difference: just... energy going in other directions.

I'll apply for a large grant in June; I'll go to Zürich to get back into Jung studies, delayed around the stroke, in that same month. And I'm applying for British (i.e. EU) citizenship – it really seems the best way of preventing anxiety/uncertainty by my family (and, of course, by me) if I were to have any other health problems.

After all, my own country isn't doing a very competent job of taking care of its own citizens... you can imagine how welcome I would be, returning to the US with any of several health conditions, if I had been working in another country and therefore not paying into state disability taxes, etc. Pathetic, of course, but this citizenship application means that such inept and brutish governance is no longer my problem.

 Yesterday, and today, there is a sense of spring in the still cold air: much more light, sun, freshness. Bird calls, in fact (aren't they annoyed that it's cold? – I assume those feathers keep them going).

And I have recommendation letters to write, applications to finish, paperwork to do. Not hugely exciting: but not really unpleasant... and when they're done, they can themselves go out into the light, into the air.

Snapshot

After last night's slightly dense blog entry, which seemed to involve working through my feelings about the past year through the plots and changes of a television show: today was spent waiting, rather uselessly, for the electric company to come replace some sort of switch. They had reserved me from 8 am to 8 pm, and around 7:50 pm I phoned them – it turned out that somehow they'd gotten too short notice... all right, we'll try again next week.

The other background circumstances being that I still haven't written a damned thing of any use. Another day spent mentally circling all of the Great Projects... and a strange feeling of involvement (I must make myself do this thing!) simultaneous with utter detachment (it won't matter to any possible history of the world if I do not do this thing). Slightly sharpened because tomorrow is a day of going to Keighley for analysis, for looking at and talking about myself: and yes I've done a bit of active imagination, together with several useful dreams, but not as much (never, never as much) as I could have.

And, after reading some calm, slightly mesmerized Brautigan, a cluster of BBC programs (yes, I know I should say: programmes), better than the stuff that usually goes past on the screen, on Pepys, some comments on Woolf, etc.... they bring up time and memory and recording, the eerie difference between the moment and writing about it, between the breathing self and the record of that self. I have a lucid but ephemeral sense of this set of attitudes frozen in time, a sort of transparent slide of myself and my feelings and all the things that happen and don't happen, which has already turned into a kind of frozen memory: one that, when one looks at it, from whatever distance in time or space, becomes a caught fragment of time, of awareness – not an exceptional moment, not a bad moment, not a good moment: just a multileveled fragment of frozen time that can be added to a long row of them, as though in a box...

waiting, for whose eyes I cannot imagine.

Dying / not-dying

Feeling well today. Then feeling very tired, so went and laid down. Then well again.

And talking to Alfred, who has more success and fame than I ever will, and who is thirteen years older. After having been treated yesterday by Jambo, my acupuncturist, who is twenty-eight, full of life and presence and direction. I feel somehow bracketed.

I've spoken before of my bad habit, over the past twenty years, of expecting to be dead soon – of AIDS, of course, if not just generally... – but there is also my bad habit of having always-already given up on myself, of thinking of myself as older and more hopeless and resigned than I am, than I need to be. Alfred, for instance, is unavoidably and almost even annoyingly sturdier and more optimistic, more youthful, than I am... I actually allow myself to be, no, I make myself into an old man.

My dream several days ago was of a big, dark music conservatory, a place where I was a serious student of the clarinet, where it was raining. A serious, respectable dream, I thought at first. But John, my analyst, pointed out that, although the dream is very respectable and not shameful or unhappy, it is in its way pretty bleak – just as my current work, my research, my teaching duties, are all things I don't much enjoy, just things I feel obliged to slog away at. Indeed, as an analyst, he is quite different than Mitch was – if Mitch encouraged me in grimly facing the worst (appropriate in those years of short lifetime expectations), John wants to know why I'm not enjoying my life more. It's an annoying question, and I really can't answer it – at least I can't answer it and still sound intelligent, in charge, in control.

An obvious problem – one that I'm seeing for what is not entirely the first time, although John insisted that I look at it a lot more than I have, more than I am comfortable doing – is my fatal, miserable willingness to be older than I am, more hopeless, with less to do, less before me, less hope. And, of course, why would I have hope, if all my tasks and work seem so mundane, if everything I set myself to do is essentially so boring? Even in these pleasant summer days, warmer than usual at these latitudes, I fret, I look backwards, I sigh at my usual despair and diffuse, uncaring use of the hours of the day. Frankly, who would want another twenty or thirty years of that?

I was reading Edmund White on various older writers and artists (Art and Letters), and it's true that many of them seem younger, more hopeful, than I am. A few are admittedly more hopeless... but those are the ones we know were seriously messed up (Bowles, Genet, Kafka, etc.). I'm neither of those – neither really deranged (okay, that is good, right?) nor particularly optimistic....

So, I can look at: my dreams. My thoughts. Me: and the limitations of my not very successful life, now dwindled to that of an academic living alone in a small foreign city. But, when viewed from outside, it seems so – well, silly: that I would turn those limitations into a good reason to truly, seriously give up, to cut off my hopes and stop living.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to be a person who is not dying; or even, and this seems to be what John, and Jambo, want me to be, one who is, at least more thoroughly, living....

Braw

Fragmentary entries on Lars' blog about writing, about finishing his second book. A friendly flag from Patrick on Facebook about finishing his book. Both times I'm interested, impressed, glad for them, and then – envious – am I the jealous Iago, the Loki of these dramas? Or worse, am I merely someone more pathetic and dim in the background, someone who doesn't quite cut the mustard, who fills in the rest of the cast, someone who can never finish the book he's supposedly working on....

Somewhat disoriented, somewhat angry, and then somehow a kind of rebirth: the past couple of days I keep imagining, sensing other ways I could be, could think – the freedom of summer colliding with the raw crack in reality that is the stroke, a sense of starting over and hang the consequences. New selves are imagined, new responses come to mind unbidden: perhaps after the stroke my mental pathways are flimsier, more easily crossed and broken and remade, who knows. If so, that's grand, just grand – they were traps, all of them.

Thinking, wondering, I do the dishes, a bit more roughly and quickly than usual, then stagger into the shower: yes, I'm still fairly weak and my hands are shaking, I'm veering from side to side a bit, but I take my shower, wash my hair, again faster, more roughly than normal. I'm wondering if I can reinvent myself, at least a bit, at very least somewhat: or maybe even, a lot – could I be more like some imagined, stronger, more heroic self, battling my way through all this, rather than moving slowly and pathetically, too cautious, too sad to get anywhere? Could I grab this book in big, juicy chunks, could I just write the damned thing and to hell with fussing, with anxious imaginings, with wasting so much time in a pallid, vertiginous lotus-land of computer games and trivial television?

Somehow the Jungian studies of the past year are giving me a theoretical grounding for this: that such male energy has always been available, but in my daily life I ignore it too much, I fuss and control and worry, making sure everything in the apartment is neat and clean before I can do any work.... But what if I took it, or more accurately took myself, more rawly, attacked myself, wrote whole pages, whole chapters out of the energy I can sense, can almost see? Thinking of it in transformational terms, in terms of the possibilities of my Jungian analysis rather than in terms of my own history, I seem to know more deeply, to realize: the truth is, everything can be broken up and revised, renewed. I didn't break myself up in this way when I was in analysis years ago, but that's because both I and the analyst thought I'd be dead soon – it was all retrospective then, a matter of forgiveness after funerals. This could be different, and I thrill to realize that it could be possible: to break up my sense of myself, my habits – I don't need to fit whatever I do tomorrow into yesterday's pathways....

I am still shaking slightly after the shower, still finding it hard to stand and walk. But if I can hold on to, channel, some of this energy, even in the coming days while I'm recovering, slightly dizzy, slightly confused, maybe I can use it, drive forward with it, and write in chunks, write until I fall over exhausted....

And then I would be something else: and that is one of the men, the better men, that I could, possibly, be.

Sub specie aeternitatis

I am very, very lucky – despite hosts of administrative things happening this week, most have gone off well; most answers to e-mails today were yes, okay, done; and I don't leave for Zürich until Sunday.

Therefore there is some quiet time to finish reading some of the Jung I wanted to read before leaving; and there isn't a feeling of chaos, loss, uncertainty.

Somewhere among the waves of ideas and small events and actions, I can collect things into a sort of a pile: yesterday's snowbound meeting with students and friends to talk about life and AIDS; my colleagues waving cheerful good-byes today, asking for chocolate from Switzerland, but with everything else apparently fine and requiring nothing from me; a few chapters of Iain M. Bank's Matter, the latest Culture novel, wherein though stress and violence are in the forefront the background is filled with those strange people of the Culture, who can live casually and freely, without lack, for however long it takes until their lives make sense to them; and Groundhog Day plays on TV, its strange plot a reminder that taking advantage of one's time can lead to incredible things.

And among all those, and the snow outside, I hit a phrase in the middle of Jung's autobiography: sub specie aeternatis. By the standards of eternity, according to eternity, as though it is a piece of eternity, something like that. And Jung is speaking of making sense of his life, by those standards: and the phrase, the idea, seems to glow as it never has before – I want to remember to live as many days as I can, aware of where they, and I, stand in eternity....

All time, all space

Home from a pleasant Christmas lunch at Ian's – excellent food – and sitting in the living room, with the tree glittering. And a beautiful strophic folk song by Chris Wood playing; and pulling out the tarot deck, to do one of those bottom-of-the-year readings. And seeing on the computer news of the Marshall Islands, where climate change is starting to strike: people flooded out of their homes – the islands of the world will be the first to weather the storms.

And, somewhere among these tiny fragments of experience, I suddenly am given that eerie Olympian awareness of time, space: of sadness and joy, of many, many people, and places. As though I see myself dealing the cards on my living-room carpet in the light of the tree, and it all slows down, as though in a film: and time slows and moves choreographically, as I become one of many tiles, many spaces and movements, weeping and happiness.

So much time, so much space: everything has such depth and beauty from that point of view.

But, I suppose, how could we ever live here?...

On the way to living

The past few days have seen some work, and a great deal of not working: in the midst of some lovely weather, much quiet, much space.

Today I followed several patterns familiar from this summer: up at 6, surfing the web unimportantly; then slept another hour or two; then...

but here the patterns broke a bit: I inadvertently diverted myself right into the mainstream of thinking about living by watching one of the two videos left by Randy Pausch, the computer science professor who just died, famously, of pancreatic cancer. He reminds me a lot of my brother-in-law (the one still recovering from my sister's death last December – I should call him, and will today, and will call my mother too); thin, smart, energetic, pragmatic, very American, a regular sort of guy.

One reason for me to watch Pausch's work is that I think I know at least as much, if not more, about illness, dying, mortality, and what it means, than he did (he wasn't ill for all that long). However, obviously, he's a guy with a family, with an energetic approach to things, someone who was very busy and engaged – none of which really applies to me, at least not much of the time. So: what does the optimist do when faced with these awful, anti-optimistic things?

And it was useful to see him talk: a bit fast and pragmatic, but good at rousing me from my overly introspective lethargy.

Indeed, one of the first things I did at the end of his 'Time Management' talk was to throw one of those beautiful Indian shawls that I leave over the doors in my apartment over the television set. Not that it's impossible to watch the hulking beast, of course, but now there's a brief barrier that might help me ignore it more often. I took notes on his talk, too; downloaded some (more) time management software, and moved it all to one folder.

(Slightly eerily: he gave that talk at the University of Virginia, where I was an undergraduate more than thirty years ago; and, at the very end, as the camera panned back to show the room and its architecture, I realized that it was in Old Cabell Hall – smack in the middle of the music building, a hall where some of my more thrilling and more embarrassing performance moments happened in the 1970s. A source of intense and sometimes very unhappy memories... one of the places where, in fact, I first gave up on myself, washed my hands of myself as a hopeless case, a lazy fraud, a dreamer not a doer.)

Speaking of giving up on myself – it becomes clear that one of the big differences between Pausch and myself in attitudes towards death/loss is that he really had a short time to deal with it, where I've had more than twenty years (twenty-five years, if you go back to Reid's death). And in fact the entire color of my life has been determined by decisions made at the end of the 1980s: realizing that I wouldn't live long, I understood many things about life – but also because I was sure that I wouldn't live long, I didn't work to implement any of those things, to change my own life to something that would make more sense. And still, that is how I operate, at some deep and all-encompassing level: waiting for my life to end so that I don't have to do the work to live it... and now it is twenty years later. Amazing stasis (that should, perhaps, be a hymn: amazing stasis, how sweet the sound, that destroyed a wretch like me).

At least I know all of that is absurd.

While finishing those notes, organizing, I played some music – since I'm writing about the classical works, I put on some of Ned Rorem's choral works. I don't care that much about Rorem, but his two settings of Paul Monette's AIDS poems need to be written about early in this book, as they are rooted in much the same aesthetic world as the AIDS Quilt Songbook and Corigliano's Symphony no. 1. And, in the midst of writing/thinking about all of this, and how the main barrier to writing/living for me is a range of foolish decisions to give up on myself that I made between 1973 and 1987, the Rorem/Monette came on – a vast, dark waltz, intensely sung, with a certain savage power and beautiful falling melodies, unmistakably more powerful and attention-grabbing than the pieces around it, so that I recognized the sense of it without even knowing the piece. Ending with the phrase, howled passionately and repeatedly over the crescendoing waltz of time, the one that defies any possibility of giving up: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here...