in the hall of mirrors

Analysis

Monday/Tuesday: the sequence of actions –
(a) Awakened early, stomach in difficulties, feeling stressed. Attracted to dreams and sleeping (because of avoiding responsibilities, because of the pleasantness of relaxing, because it was chilly out), stayed in bed.
(b) Received several phone calls, tried to ignore, let machine take messages. Finally answered one call on my mobile, was told that friendly American academic (academic friend?) is in town, and we’re going to dinner with him. Agreed to join group, though aware this would destroy possibility of doing work tonight.
(c) Got up early afternoon, stumbled around, annoyed over pattern of day and the various ways it was getting out of my control. On the other hand what would I have done that was so useful, otherwise? Showered, then thereby felt better; laundry, cleaning up.
(d) Slept again for an hour or so.
(e) Started to type lyrics from the show I’m writing about into a document so that I could use them in the presentation.
(f) Interrupted this quasi-work to go out to said dinner. Walked through town – thereby getting some exercise; the day had gotten warmer and pleasant – was ultimately glad to see colleagues and visiting friend/academic. Enjoyed dinner, it was socially pleasant after some initial awkwardness (it looked at first as though we were all a bit detached from each other, and/or a bit tired of each other – which makes sense, one of the delights of summer for academics is getting away from one’s colleagues for a while, but we got over it). All got rather hilarious, and fun; I was myself a bit silly, but enjoyed it all. Also good/valuable (?) to see famous friend.
(g) Dinner itself: some of it very good, some of it okay. Probably spent too much money, drank too much alcohol, ate too much fattening food, but still enjoyed it socially.
(h) During dinner was told that I would have a houseguest – for a week – slightly dismayed at first, then thought, no that’s good, I’ll get kicked out of the front room and will have little to do but work on presentation and other papers.
(i) Traveled with I–– to club to briefly greet/talk to visiting writer from New York. Fun to talk to writer and his charming girlfriend, even over loud music. Left after about fifteen minutes, thinking hmmm, I should see writer’s presentation this week. A pleasant connection; and frankly it's nice to know people who are successful in the arts.
(j) Sleep. Ill by morning (rich food and alcohol); got over it by midday. Phone call to meet with student; cleaning up to prepare for houseguest; bought lunch with said student at nearby café, rather than making lunch. Thus bad (paid money) and good (house clean, brief social contact); and also of course ambivalent (enjoyable lunch but probably more than I needed to eat; espresso might wake me up but might bother my stomach; etc.).
(k) Home, finished cleaning, realized houseguest wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. Lay on couch, slightly sleepy.

Why would I record all this in such absurd, probably quite tiresome, detail? Well, I find myself – as I often do; but more consciously now, and even with some criticism of the process itself – trying to decide what in all this list is good, and what is bad. If I am too depressed/isolated, then social contact is good, isn’t it? But does it waste time I should be spending writing? How about the conflict between the pleasure/inspiration of good food, and the relaxation of wine, on the one hand, and gaining weight or getting less healthy on the other?

And larger issues: what are the relative positions of pleasure, and of work? How will I know when I'm wasting my time... or taking care of myself? Or, to put it another way: when are useless/devolutionary habits running me, or (of course!) when am I thinking/worrying too much?...

Heidegger: in talking about Being, he adds something unexpected – that it is not that Being is the only 'right' way of being, as opposed to habit and trivia and mistakes. He offers a rather forgiving lever out of anxiety – he says that being everyday or trivial is perfectly normal and part of Being, that it's the ground from which we might be able to do something better, a ground that can't be eradicated and shouldn't be despised. This is sort of like when Buddhists say that the confusion and attachment of life is actually the material you use to find a place beyond it – you can't erase the muck, it's the fertilizer for making something grow in your life.

Simple enough, I suppose. But I'm never entirely sure which fork I should go down, at any given moment... the anxiety about judging is of course typical of my personality type; but it makes some days, with all of their dull and bright facets, engender extraordinarily unwieldy towers of judgment and concern.

I should have been a beachcomber....

The hillside

'And I fell asleep and had this dream':

after continuing to read about awareness, eternity, and timeless responses to tragedy or despair in the Upanishads and Buddhism and Taoism;

after the last in a long chain of long days of meetings, tired of but not upset about so many things, and after some champagne (the farewell reception for Religious Studies, in a context of hearing startlingly bitter farewell speeches) and wine (dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, where they always treat me like family, where I had a brief discussion with the waiter of our mutual reactions to death, loss and return in Solaris):

A dream, almost without incident, but all made out of a single incident – a single process, with the kind of magical aura that would make Jungians consider it a 'deep' dream – in this case almost without embellishment, the most naked of processes, perfect, clear and reassuring, almost startlingly stripped of unnecessary detail or story.

On a hillside near where I grew up – as it so happens, on the hill where the house stood of those neighbors who, mysteriously enough, had as a family name my own first name – I was friends with their middle son, whose first name the same as my father's, and my brother's – all very confusing, I'm sure, for me as a young child; and of course rather obviously now, from a dream point of view, intended to point back directly at me, in the most arresting way –

a dream of a vast year's process of planting, summer, winter; of the empty hillside with the tiniest of seedlings, then a long process of growth into a thick harvest, then rains and water pouring down the hill in literally torrential floods (that vast flooding: I must have been so impressed, when I was five or six, at the changes in weather when they turned to snow, ice or water, and ran down that steep, long hill near my parent's house – an entire street, Overlook Drive, had been built along a deep ravine, and many of our neighbors lived in houses at the top of long steep stretches of ground): and change, and the death of all the plants, but with the knowledge of their return. All of this blended in what was almost a long stop-action movie in a single arch, which felt both like a travelogue, and also like an experience, as if I were born to this change, to this harvest, as someone who knew these plants and their cycle intimately.

I told you it was obvious. But how extraordinarily powerful, nevertheless....

Suspendu

Hanging between: the restaurant banquet table, and the bathroom door. Or at the table, D– on one side, B– on the other. Between the conversation and the piano: and the imagination of doing something with the piano. Standing among D–'s explications and my doubts. The walk home – between these green summer trees and blue sky, always between heaven and earth. Among all the things I imagine, but hesitate before or during, or within, the doing of them.

If the reasons for my regrets are all the things that have gone wrong, the context behind those reasons is the constant sense of the many other ways things could go, could have gone. Suspended: why can't I play a dazzling, charming Schubert impromptu on this restaurant piano? What if I were to be as sure as D– is of the validity of writing, of ideas? What if I were firmly present here in this pleasant group of colleagues and friends, or alternately at home alone, but not always hanging in between?

I know of course that no one is totally here, or there (with very few and special exceptions): that doubts, hesitations, unclarities, nauseas, inner disruptions are everywhere, for practically anyone. I certainly don't think I'm unique in any of this.

But there is an endless wistfulness in this for me, as though I've got my nose pressed to the glass of other people's lives: it must be so real to be like that one, it must be so fun to be like another, it must be so... they must be so certain of themselves... aren't they?

And of course the interesting question, amidst all my usual regrets and false turns, is not only how would I have lived my life differently – had all those contingent accidents gone in other ways – but, in the context of vaguely believing (but not quite believe, more perhaps hoping) in reincarnation, how will I handle it better next (life)time? Or a thousand times hence.... Am I moving forward, is the hesitation proof of development or backsliding, am I anything but waiting for the universe to tell me what I'm supposed to be? Which is, self-evidently, a fairly poor place to be.

Pendu, suspendu, sous-pendu. Le pendu.