in the hall of mirrors

At the moment...

things aren't bad today.

My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that.

I sort of remember dreaming last night – if I'm sleeping deeply for the first time in months – perhaps I'll remember some dreams...

This is indeed different. Not great but different.

I know, early stages yet: but this might actually work.

•••

Let's go back to the beginning of these five days....

•••

Health/time structure 1: renal catheter inserted seven weeks ago was removed last Thursday. They put in another temporary one for what was supposed to be three and a half days...

Health/time structure 2: as I've said I messed up my medications last summer, was put on new toxic ones in October 2015, and have assumed since then that my doctor couldn't change me to anything else... and still feeling poorly enough, often enough, that I've worried whether I can keep working at the university. Or complete the degree at the Jung-Institut. So, ten months of dislocation from plans, hopes – a sense of disorientation and collapse.

Health/time structure 3: I first got psoriasis when I was 18, and freaked out (not surprising, only older people are less worried by unpleasant but trivial body problems). It increases or decreases over the years, treatments aren't particularly effective, and when my immune system has been more or less a mess (for instance, the mid-1990s) it was far worse – though there's no clear direct relationship between it and anything I can see.

•••

So, Thursday, catheter out, catheter in. Feeling a bit beaten up.

Having contacted Occupational Health through my head of school, I am scheduled for an appointment on Tuesday.

Having emailed my own doctor that I was seriously having trouble with medications and worried about (unplanned and sudden) retirement, was talking to the university, Occupational Health, worried about the Jung-Institut, he responds! – and says, come in and talk to me.

Friday morning, I stagger (a bit) in to see him. He actually has a new alternative medication: it's not nice – the flyer bluntly says, same side effects profile, but cheaper – but he suggests it. Great. Pick up new prescription, take it home.

Friday night, take pill. Hits me like a ton of bricks...

but it is different: the body's response skews off in different directions. Toxic but not draining in the same way, perhaps? Still shaking, but only temporarily, it seems?

Almost as though – though I couldn't be sure yet – the eerily destructive quality of the last ten months' medications isn't present in this one – it's just the kind of medication that slams its way through the body, careless and heavy and even violent, but not... poisonous.

•••

But the renal catheter ain't great either, and everything feels very, very rough on Saturday. And Sunday; and on Sunday night I think, I cannot take that pill tonight – the catheter is out tomorrow, I'll skip it until then – and don't tell me I'm not supposed to skip medications because at this point I do not care.

•••

We all know the traditional conversation around HIV meds, that they're so hard to take – medical gossip is that more than half of the medical professionals who take prophylactic, one-month treatments never manage to finish them. So there.

(I wonder how many cancer patients stop taking their meds?...)

As for me, over the years people have often, blithely, said, Oh you've lived so long, you must have been so good about taking your meds! I just roll my eyes of course – my first time on AZT in 1991, I gave up after a month, convinced that dying would be better. And the awful meds of the 1990s – the one that caused kidney stones (hmm, there those are again), or the stupidly designed one that you had to crumble up and swallow in liquid, except that it never dissolved (did no one ever figure that out?) – I was utterly careless about taking those... in fact I wasn't very good about the major meds until the late 1990s.

(At some point, clearly, I realised I was going to live for a bit... and perhaps it was worth actually taking care of myself. Huh.)

I also think, with some guilt, of how I've blithely said that HIV meds aren't so hard to take these days – at training sessions for medical students, radio programs, and so on. I suppose the truth is that of the current twenty-five or thirty in use, in various combinations, most are nowhere near as bad as they were in the early, or late, 1990s...

but now I've been bumped to a bottom rung, the dregs, the old stuff. Like returning to 2001 – very unpleasant.

•••

As for these pills, it seems strange how much impact a little pill can have on the body –

and then I think, no: many poisons are pretty chemically simple, aren't they? And although some of them do only very simple things to kill people, others rapidly create a cascade of destructive effects. So maybe some small things are considerably bigger than we are.

•••

So, it's Monday. I'm still in poor shape – I email Occupational Health to cancel Tuesday's appointment, copying in my head of department, and saying: sorry, I just can't do anything now.

Around midday, my head of department calls, kindly agrees to treat me as on sick leave for a couple of weeks: don't worry, we'll figure it out. Which is the best I can do now.

In the afternoon, a doctor from Occupational Health calls: not unpleasant, but – well, bless his heart – he must be The Most astoundingly Boring person I've spoken to in forever: extremely long and extremely complete statements of everything, including the highly obvious. But he is also quite helpful, and not at all unpleasant, if you can wait from paragraph to paragraph for the obvious point.

I call the urology clinic in midafternoon: sorry to miss my morning appointment, I'm taking new and awful meds – they say don't worry, come in soon.

Which I'd love to do because even the catheter is pretty miserable.

And they say, you could even take out the catheter yourself! ... I think not.

•••

I don't take my meds on Monday night. I'm walkin' on the wild side... okay, not a good idea.

There's a certain who-cares fatalism floating around all of this... as too often in the past ten months imagining how to make getting rid of all the things I own easier, so they don't all need to be taken care of... Will? Charity shops?

•••

Floating through all of this is an acute sense of time: time in suffering, time where the body flings pain or ache or mere discomfort from one area to another – often across parts of the body that are hard to map: the dense structure from throat to crotch, the many organs.

I very rarely vomit, but over the weekend I do so twice – the second time a startlingly, utterly clear stomach acid, that comes up like a burning poison. We are always so unaware of what goes on as food descends into us – I realise there are parts of the body that are designed for this apparently deadly stuff, but that is hard to experience when it comes up into the visible body, the part we think we live in...

And of course I'm aware that, though I like to think I'm less frightened of death than many people, I find the slow, stretched-out time of suffering incredibly difficult. You cannot skip seconds, or minutes: it pins you to time and holds you, moving through each moment without flexibility.

Think of the shape of life: the latter part inevitably has this suffering – and of course modern medicine allows too much of it to continue. Which is why we fantasise about the brief heart attack, the sudden accident – anything but the months in a hospital room, its smells and discomforts, made endless...

An end which is fairly probable for many of us.

•••

(I came back to talking about this on Wednesday, in a brief web session with my analyst: he had been reading Jung' Nietzsche seminars, liking them a lot – as do I, I still think they're among the best of the seminars – and pointed me to 1936, Seminar 4, where Jung speaks of how incompetent the early Christian intuitive, mystical types were with the body, in the sensate world.

Which is where you would get the dominant traits of a religion, and later a culture, that would end up being so disembodied: in a world split between the transcendent/evanescent and the concrete/static, how could we possibly know how to be in our bodies?...

Which links to that entire modern capitalist world where I live in a large, pleasant apartment, but without close connections to a culture, a 'village', where it would be easy to say: take all these things when I go, use what you want. And I know you'll be around at the end, so I'm not worried.

We don't have any of that, do we...)

•••

Feeling less awful Tuesday morning, though still very weak. In four days I've lost nine pounds – hmm, the New Late Summer Diet.

And, okay, this is weird: in four days, my psoriasis, for the first time in years, has virtually vanished....

Isn't biochemistry odd.

•••

The clinic: a sympathetic nurse, a guy who may be Filipino, or Chinese? – tells me about a guy who had the same procedure last week, and his boyfriend there to hold his hand. (Clear cultural cross-connection here – we are automatically linking my HIV, and perhaps my evident foreignness and living alone, with being gay. Which is of course true.)

Home. Shower, wash sheets, wash clothes, vacuum. Slowly, not energetically, but everything gets done. Food in refrigerator has gone off of course, can't keep up with it when you're not eating anything, so give up and toss things. Which is always a shame but oh please I can't do everything.

•••

I am weak, but not miserable; I don't feel that bad.

I take the third pill – in five days – and –

Negative capability

Analysis, a couple of weeks ago.

For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything.

The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our confidence.

Later, when I go back to my room – a round room in a stone castle, with ancient hangings, a modern bed in the middle of the floor that looks awkward; my suitcase is open on it –

he is there, sitting in my chair, and he refuses to leave. I am angry, I pick him up, in an ungainly fashion, holding him in front of me with his legs folded – I try to drag him to the door – but then as I wake we begin to talk, as though we haven't been fighting –

•••

My analyst starts laughing (he is usually gentle and polite, but today he is... I don't know: a bit rambunctious?). He loves this dream: the teenager is obstinate, he's at my desk!...

He’s bright, he’s curious… he doesn’t do things the right way because well, dammit, that’s the point of adolescence – that’s why we need children, to invent the world anew…

And he says something unexpectedly direct, out of the blue:

'How have you ever gotten anything done? You're the problem, not him!'

•••

I am wrestling with the teenager in the dream: Jacob and the angel?...

My mother used to wake me in the morning by turning the radio up loud in the kitchen: I was always angry, wanting to stay asleep.

My analyst sees: in that intermediate place between sleeping and waking, the young man and I are able to communicate: that feels so dramatic, as though my control is down.

It feels as though there’s gold in the dream, but it’s out of my reach...

•••

A strange couple of sessions: these images and feelings vibrate, are alive with energy –

but at the same time there is a dark line around them, one of sadness: I keep feeling sure that, fascinating as all this is, any real energy or understanding that is embedded in these strange images will not be available to me.

Why not?

Because... because of the story of the Buddhist abbot, and the resulting promise: that I will have lifetimes where things are out of my control, so that I become less arrogant, so that I pay attention to those in my care.

Because I am too old, because I waited too long, because I have been too slow in my analysis, avoiding the hardest things and their sensations, their emotions.

Because I'm so tired lately, feeling ill with side effects, worried that I'll have to retire early, give up on moving anywhere, on any future change or hope –

Because, when I went to the local funeral in Bali in the late 1990s with an Aussie boyfriend, he could see them dancing and cutting themselves with knives, but not bleeding – while I saw nothing, just had a sense of several hours passing, looking at the stage, where I felt antsy and uncomfortable, but I couldn't remember what had happened.

Because, although I don't disbelieve in the transcendental, I can never see any of it: and that may include my own power, my creativity, my happiness –

•••

My analyst says: is this something the young man would know something about? He doesn’t want to leave because he wants something from you.

I mention meeting with a struggling student last week: I told him he might go into the depressed place, like walking into a cave with a torch – just to see what is there, not to solve anything.

My analyst continues: you know exactly how the young man in the dream feels, or nearly… He needs empathy and help, rather than coercion.

•••

When I finally finished my PhD dissertation in the summer of 1997 in Hong Kong – thirteen years after starting graduate school, when no one thought I could do it – I don't even remember the summer. It was written, by me, but I don't remember doing it.

I wasn't at my normal level of consciousness.

Which is something like not being able to see the Balinese knife dancers...

•••

My analyst: this dream feels different from my other dreams – the same, but different… it’s emotionally much clearer.

I note that this is a castle, which is unusual – the hangings are tapestries, not something modern. It's very old: is it almost like the broken stone platform far beneath the surface, except we are inside it this time?...

My analyst: the teenager is fairly inarticulate, because that’s what teenagers are –as are complexes when we try to engage them.

I say: he’s too angry to articulate it – the others in the dream are exasperated that we can’t convince him to do what we want. He looks civilised enough, well dressed, but we can’t get him to fit into our social conversations...

My analyst: he’s not even shadow, he’s you from the outside! This is big…

•••

Since before the session, all day, in the train coming here, the tram, I've felt something else, there is some other meaning here: I am having some sense of something I can't quite define –

my analyst makes suggestions, I tell him sharply to stop: it's not clear to me, and if we keep talking about concepts and specifics I'll lose what I'm trying to see in myself –

almost like a shape, like a shape of my own internal world and ideas:

I've told my own analysands that sometimes the hardest things to understand are like the astrophysical nature of a black hole in space, of space/time that is distorted, but invisibly so: and that distortion, that extraordinary gravity and pressure, controls us, but can't be seen by us.

This feels similar: I can't quite articulate it, though I keep trying –

I don't want to let these things, this mystery, collapse into some concrete solution: fall into something merely two-dimensional, when my experience of it is – well, clearly a lot more than two dimensions.

I am fighting to see this – whatever it is –

•••

My analyst, who has backed off from ideas and questions, sees that I need to be allowed to go my own way in this (I rarely snap at him – he's very sweet, we get along very well) –

he tells me about negative capability: Keats' comment in a letter about the special, difficult ability – really, the willingness – to keep something suspended, unknown –

it is like Jung's ideas of holding the tension: the difficulty of being willing to not know what is going on, to stay with it until it becomes what it needs to be.

In Keats' famous letter, he uses Coleridge as a counterexample – Coleridge, older, a critic, more certain, who instructs the younger poets in the ways of the world: but Keats recognises the flaw in Coleridge, that he needs to reach a conclusion, he needs to decide how to do things, what things are for, very quickly. Which means he loses any possibility of understanding something he didn't already understand...

My analyst says it's also like Nagarjuna's stanzas on emptiness. I'll take his word for it – I can look that one up later.

•••

I want to change everything.

Do you know that I moved often in the late seventies, and in the nineties? And then for the past fourteen years I haven't moved at all – a loss of momentum, in fact too much anxiety over the exhausting moves of 1992 to 2002.

I can even list them - fourteen, or fifteen (depending on how you count them) homes in the ten years between 1992 and 2002:

    4/85-11/92                Spaulding Avenue, LA, with various roommates, especially Paul P.

    11/92-8/93                Cumberland Street, SF – the most beautiful hillside apartment

    1993                            Kiel – six weeks for the language course for the Fulbright

    1993                            Darmstadt – the first part of the Fulbright

    1993                            Berlin – renting a room from a pharmacist who had a habit – kicked out

    1994                            Berlin, Alexanderplatz – the huge streets, the old-fashioned Ossi apartment

    9-12 1994                    Irvine, CA, for the seminar with famous musicologists

    12/94 – 3/97             Market Street, San Francisco – the shabby druggie building; expected end...

    3/97 – 5/98               Hong Kong, above the ocean – a professional, age 40! A glorious apartment.

    8/98-7/01                  Hong Kong, Central – more high-density, closer to things.

    7/00-1/01                  Los Angeles, Westwood – visiting professor; intensely ill... a strange time.

    1/01-7/01                   Hong Kong: I plan to move to the job in Sydney... which blows up in my face.

    2001-2                        Adelaide (Sydney) – living with handsome John, but no job...

    2002, summer          Los Angeles, Susan & Rob’s – with my boxes, for another huge move

    September 2002        Newcastle: at Ian's for a month, then this apartment...

with the money gone on the move and the year without a job... and a sense of having climbed to something, and crashed: life is in ruins...

No wonder there has been such a feeling of lostness in the past fourteen years.

•••

When I try to throw the young man out of my office, I wrestle him, I hold on to him – like the legend of Proteus, who will only tell you what you want to know if you hold on and don't let go:

like negative capability – holding onto the shape of myself that has formed out of all the events of my life –

No, I know better than that: I wasn't formed by the events.

I was formed by what I thought of the events: what I made them mean....

 

Cracks in the world

A strange and fragmented time.

It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder.

Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar, and the shooting of a kind, passionately honest young British MP, we have a distant recollection of politics going too far, of real actions generated by poisonous rhetoric, of increased violence and desperation.... of that point where lost souls at the edge of everything react to symbolic conflicts with real weapons.

The hope is that things won't get worse... if it were really like the 1930s, in a few years we would be looking at a major war, one that would occur for ludicrous reasons. But that would destroy... a lot.

•••

Does that seem like an overreaction?

In the logical, real world, of course an underlying, barely stated goal of the EU was: no more world wars. Not ones that started in Europe, anyway.

Is the quality of rage, of incoherent demands for a return to a nonexistent Great Golden Past, the same, no matter how much actual violence and death it produces?...

•••

Reading Aion over the past three months: Jung's sense that things come back in our lives – at first as disaster, ineptly managed by us: the hope is however that we learn something each time, and land with less of a crash at each return of situations and circumstances.

(Psychological source of ideas of reincarnation?... or of course, if you prefer: a psychological mirror of reincarnation. You may locate reality on either side of the parallelism, as you wish.)

Yes, of course: shades of Eliade, Spengler, Nietzsche – it's true that these big dreams, these huge nightmares, of recurrence and fate are a bit too closely linked to 1930s fascism. (Spengler's prophecy, dated rather neatly in 1936, rejects the attempt to pull him under that umbrella: 'da ja wohl in zehn Jahren ein Deutsches Reich nicht mehr existieren wird!'.)

Are grand visions of recurrence, or of disaster, necessarily associated with fascism?... undecidable. Though some of the 1930s versions of such ideas appeared at the core of that which rotted until it exploded – all over large parts of the world – but perhaps such vastness doesn't need to be so superhuman that it dehumanises everything, and everyone.

•••

But I'm tired. Somewhat, anyway.

The HCV medications went well – I am fairly sure that, come September, the final tests will say they were successful.

But of course those HIV medications that I started in October are also tiring (if not quite as much so). I seem to be floating back and forth across a space between illness and wellness – in the nineteenth century, even up to the 1950s, life, career and social structure would have adjusted to it: he comes in on Wednesdays and Thursdays, the secretary answers some of his letters.... Well it's not that way any more: you're either a useful worker or you're not, being full-time is our ultimate identity crisis.

But, although my department and its head are supportive about me taking whatever time I need, I do feel an anxious push to decide: am I working or not? Am I part-time or full-time? When will I be better?...

or will I actually get much better than this?

Not anywhere near dying, but also not really well: how many months, how many years, is that going to continue – and how do you manage it?...

•••

Selected notes from today's strange, resonant analysis session – some bits are perhaps too incoherent to explain, but it does hang together for me; and my analyst was clearly seeing into me with extraordinarily clear vision, as though today was a remarkable session for him too:

The dream we spoke about – I said, first, this dream is obviously unimportant:

'Younger people are being visited by their mother and father, who have driven from Wales to stay with them; but the parents are still staying in their van because of a disagreement with someone living around here, or the landlord or owner or something. The mother, an older gray-haired woman, is telling us about it – a Welsh accent, and some dialect – she hasn’t quite gotten to an explanation…'

A fragment of a dream: Wales. (Despite fourteen years in the UK, and my dear friend Patrick who has returned to Swansea, I've only been to Wales once, in Cardiff for a conference; but, more resonantly than anything I know or feel for Ireland or Scotland, reading the Mabinogion and Walton's version of it had a real impact on a younger me: for Walton it becomes the story of a long, slow disaster, of a rich, proud culture wrecked and pushed aside by aggressive, cynical invaders, and of a culture with strong woman twisted into a resentfully patriarchal one).

A sense of something plain and everyday – modern Wales: Methodism, poverty, sheep, rain – but at the same time something eldritch that never leaves the land, that lingers in the hills across the centuries. I feel as though, if the mother in the dream had finished her story, it would have become eerie, dangerous, impossible, and yet impossible not to believe.

We've both read Alan Garner's The Owl Service, with its utterly intense final transformation...

And yes, of course I can hear the oddly detached quality of the way I wrote down this dream: I don't know anyone in it, I am not a member of this family – I, and unnamed others, am merely leaning on the outside of the window to a van, listening to her story.

A comment partly from my analyst, partly mine, as we were agreeing in that moment: ... in dreams, in stories, there is an overlap between the world of the dead and the world of magic: the world of magic responds to our needs, but the real world doesn’t – necessarily...

Worrying about being healthy enough to work: there is something risky about trying to organise the future... to pin down the future, to desperately plan, is to move closer to death, to stasis: it always has the danger of becoming an attempt to stop the clock. Which ultimately succeeds.

Giving the body commands: when the body fails, I am dismayed, worried about being seen failing, dropping silverware (as in the café this morning, where I kept apologising to the waiter), screwing up. When my body fails I go into a detached, focused overdrive that separates me from others, reduces my ability to connect – a kind of organized defensive tension.

(My analyst, who has MS, says that in the past year, when he falls in public, he just lets go – and it is a comfort how strangers, men, standing around will hasten to help him up, without any fuss – just a supportive strength: men at their most direct, the inarticulate physical expression of uncalculating kindness. I am envious, but I can't react to feeling fragile with the same confidence.)

•••

At the end of the session, I am tired: but I say, today I really need something I can take away. I'm still a bit lost in all this, but the look in your eyes says you've really seen something: what is it?

He tries to work it out for a moment, and says several things, one after another: the anxiety of failure – like a failed initiation... The ego dethroned, how painful that is – in this case dethroned by the body: so, forcing a new relationship between ego and body.

And, finally: Wales is periphery, but its essence is deeply embedded in the land – it is broken and lost, but never completely so: they keep singing, and waiting for some unknown future – when the ego insists on being in charge, shadowy things are pushed away, to one's own loss...

•••

I absolutely understand him. In fact, we absolutely understand each other today: I couldn't clearly theorise myself – and perhaps putting this in a blog is saying too much – but the whole conversation rings, still, even now as I write it: like a great gong....

•••

Like a great gong.

It's not owls, it's flowers.

A thousand years: and still they sing.

Anniversary

Well: a surprise – ten years today since I started this blog.

Cue opening vamp for 'I'm Still Here.'

(MJ, you'll remember how much needs to be put into that song to carry it off...)

•••

Time, change.

Current health update: last week was terrible, this week wasn't bad. I took advantage of seeing the senior HIV/HCV specialist on Thursday to ask him about long-term expectations, and whether I could choose him as my doctor when my current doctor retires late this year...

He said some things I knew, and some that were more unexpected: the HCV will probably be cured, we'll know for sure in early September; after the cure liver cancer remains a possibility, and cirrhosis doesn't simply go away –but the probability decreases steeply, and with patients who don't drink much (= me) a lot of the cirrhosis should clear up.

And yes, he's happy to be my doctor (he said 'I'd be honoured', which was kind); and since, of all the doctors at the very skilled Newcastle clinics, he is the best with general health and behaviour patterns (rather than focusing on treatment regimens), that sounds like a good idea to me– especially as it seems as though I may have somewhat more toxic medications for some time to come; I need someone who is good at the subtle balancing acts of the body's processes.

•••

Time and change: even moving, finally though fitfully, from winter to spring brings everything to life –

but in a way that somehow emphasises its contingent, changing nature, and the sense that so many springs and summers are in the past.

There is some cross-focus among the papers I should be writing, which tangle with archetypes, with life and death and politics; and continuing to read Aion for the online Jung-Institut seminars, with its chaotic drift through images of transformation, eternity and existential focus; and reading the dark 'Dis' chapter of Kalsched's new book, which is both very striking and a battle to get through (why do I keep falling asleep?); and reading, tangentially though perhaps all too appositely, Geoff Ryman's WAS (one of the two great AIDS fantasies, along with Michael Bishop's Unicorn Mountain – but I've read the Bishop, while I've always struggled with the bitterness in the Ryman – but am fighting my way through it now)...

all these things, with sun and light and winter and spring, keep me watching life as though partly inside it, and partly outside.

•••

A dream of two people, one the lead singer from Lord Huron (I first heard their ecstatic but strange 'The Man who Lives Forever' a few weeks ago; a gauntlet thrown down by the puer, by the Icarus of the young man who wants to transform the world, and be young forever – one that ends up holding its energy in the air by fusing IV and V, then, in the studio version, pushing as many circling, ecstatic lines toward upper registers as it can...) and a woman, more symbolic and less real, who marries me in a festive ceremony: and a relaxed eroticism between the three of us – but I sleep with the singer, who in the dream is utterly embodied and male, without anxiety about the world: he sleeps next to me, arms flung back, full of the intense abandon of the deeply physical –

it reminds me, as I have repeatedly been reminded over the past few months, of the eighth Duino Elegy – not the shattering first one, which always fascinated me when I was younger: but the eighth, where he speaks of

... the Open, which is so

deep in animals’ faces. Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal

has its decline in back of it, forever,

and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

already in eternity, like a fountain.

In the dream, that is what the singer is: part of a living world as are the animals, moving endlessly in eternity, like a fountain.

•••

In WAS and in the Kalsched, there is a focus on children who lose track of their childhoods – and who, through anxiety or horror, lose too much of their contact with the natural world, too early.

Stoppard's radio play 'Where Are They Now?' is about a boy in an English public school, one who is miserable, pushed around, angry – but Stoppard does something amazing on the last page, where we suddenly see the boy playing football, running toward the goal, ecstatically happy with the summer air, the energy, the cheers of his teammates –

But of course you can see the loss: children who lose track of their own humanity, or perhaps their own animal joy in the world, and spend their adult lives trying to get it back: though after so many years it has receded like a distant tide, no longer bolstered by the energy of the younger body, and it takes long patience and transformation to get near it again.

•••

An odd moment today: Michael asked how my week had gone – I said I was feeling much better; and also that, aside from writing articles, everything else was going smoothly, up to date –

it may not sound like much; but the fact that I can experience my own time, my life, as something distinct from whether I am getting work done, as opposed to having the lack of productivity devalue my existence (as it has for much of my life) – this is both strange and deeply relaxing.

•••

My analysands also seem to be full of life, of spring – even those who are struggling or frustrated are writing stories, rethinking their lives; there is a sense of new growth, of buds and rapid movement forward, emerging in all of them.

•••

Makis and Nik are joking in a café, no apparent boundaries to their energy and happiness; people wander the streets on a sunny day, among the stalls of the market in the middle of town. Things are full of life... I seem to perceive it as a gestalt, as a remarkably dense world of experience (somewhat like my students when they are enjoying themselves performing in the local bars on weekends); I don't feel quite as though I am in the midst of that life, that liveliness, but it also doesn't seem that I can't have some contact with it, in some ways.

But there is still a sense of time, and distance, even as life goes on in front of me: as though I understand more deeply than I ever had that I could have spent more of my life out in the world, but that, as always, past years cannot, unfortunately, be retrieved. Which is, ultimately, not so bad: the possibility, the imagined alternate reality, can partly stand in for the missing reality: it is not such a disappointment.

•••

A certain warmth, a certain light, to things in these past few days of spring.

Talking to analysands, bright sunlight crossing the room, energy growing during the session.

A dream where I sleep next to a man who is un-self-conscous, creative and vividly alive.

All of it still framed in past-ness, in possibilities that I no longer believe can quite be reached by me: but the energy appears in dreams, in conversations, in the feel of warmth on the skin....

A comparison

So, our Jung-Institut online seminar is the first of its kind I think.

(The Jung-Institut, being a bit more Swisss and old-fashioned than many Jungian organisations, has never been very tech-savvy; a running joke in the profession is that Jungians are perpetually inept in the world of technology – though this may apply to a combination of an older generation, plus the more counter-culture Jungians from California and elsewhere; but one learns to expect Powerpoint presentations to founder and collapse without notice. Therefore a webinar is as much to be expected at the Jung-Institut as, say, traversing hyperspace.)

The seminar, run by the brilliant Nancy Robinson (formerly of LA), is on Aion... lots of strange discussions of dark and light, good and evil, sacrifice, avoidance, reality and illusion...

and wholeness.

Nancy keeps bringing all the strange tangle of images and discussions in Aion back to the psychological – which is obvious I suppose, but we're all terrifically lucky she does, because we are all tending to get swamped by the huge transcendental arguments twisting through the weird collection of materials that drive the book....

•••

We were finishing up, trying to get back to several discussions at once at the end of the two-hour session; one of the other students, much younger, healthy and happy and recently married, and thus perhaps less aware of dealing with the more hopeless aspects of life, was saying: so, when we're talking about transformation we're thinking about moving from these images around Saturn to those around Jupiter – the Gnostic and alchemical and astrological imagination trying to distinguish life and joy, versus death, age and disintegration...

I jumped in, as I do (not, I hope, as much as I once did); because this was so close to the bone, so close to where I've been for months – okay, it's true, for years –

No, I said. Not enough. It's not always possible to get to Jupiter – but that doesn't mean there's no transformation.

Imagine an analysand who grew up in a disastrous family situation, parents who didn't take care of him, abusive or drunk or on drugs or whatever – and he grows up to be a conscientious, loving young father, deeply caring about his children and his wife, who reflects him as much as he reflects her. Transformation: he has suffered through something, but rather than carrying the damage forward he has reached a point where he can transform it into doing the best he can, into being in the world, into being happy, and knowing the value of that happiness, not taking it for granted, not greedily assuming it as his due.

(I have students who suggest this kind of image – the ones you can see growing into something remarkably whole...)

That's Jovian, that's for Jupiter.

But imagine another, older, analysand, in the hospital, dying of cancer: you visit her regularly for a kind of analysis – not least because everyone else is gone from her life, there's no one taking care of her but the nurses, and she isn't their favourite patient. After a lifetime of hating her mother, she is reaching a point where she can set that aside, where she can breathe more easily, where she can almost have sympathy for her mother – but where, in any case, she knows that the hatred is just a burden she has made for herself, that she can lay it down.

That's for Saturn: melancholy, death, dissolution.

But it's still transformation: there isn't much time left, there aren't the resources or the people for her to have a happy life: yet she has reached something much greater, a larger space than she has had for years....

This kind of justification, this bringing darkness and loss into the conversation, has been a recurrent background theme for me in the seminar: and it's true, I can get a bit hot-headed when making sure it is said. Because, of course, it reflects my own feelings on ageing and illness.

•••

Tonight I saw La grande bellezza, which, like Youth – both Paolo Sorrentino films – are distinctly melancholy, Saturnine. Not surprising, perhaps, that I overidentify with both.

•••

I know I'm bringing something into the seminar that is true, and needed: and also something that has its own limitations and complex distortions; but also something that can move forward into an even larger understanding, that I only see periodically, in glimpses.

•••

Yes, of course, there's too much Saturn in me, and in my life. That's hardly a surprise; as when Michael told me, years ago, that my blog was too whiny. Yes, I was furious at him when he said that, and we've never spoken since then; but even when he said it, I knew that there was some (only some!) truth to what he said.

But, as we turn the jewels and watch the different facets glint into our eyes, there are moments when a larger picture starts to become clear....

Aschenbach-moment

The past few months: there is a lot to say, and not much to say...

I continue feeling weakened, sleepy, with problems centred on the new medications. I resolve them more successfully on some days, with various ancillary medicines, and not at all successfully on others.

There was a point in early January when I awoke, calm and happy, as though some of the old, incoherently dark stuff that was coming up in analysis between September and December was simply over: a situation that is hard to describe or explain, though I have pages of notes among my dreams. Some of the space and lightness has remained.

Reconnecting to teaching, students, colleagues.

And now in Zürich for twelve days – not going to many events (hmm, I probably shouldn't have paid tuition this semester), but having some excellent supervision sessions.

I am at times anxious and moody, defensive or a bit barbed with other students, especially around health; but that feels rather shallow, as though things have truly shifted.

•••

Coming home from supervision with Kast in St. Gallen the other night – walking through the cold, calm evening of a Tuesday in Zürich, with not many people about. I was walking through the upper part of town looking for a restaurant, to have some dinner.

And, as occasionally it has, a generalised weakness/dizziness hits me – the body just stops having the energy to move...

As I am next to the church above the Helmhaus, it is dark for some distance around, but there is a bench in front of the church. I sit for twenty minutes or so in the cold, shaking – not with cold but with fatigue – looking down to the Limmat where there are lights – trying to figure out how to get home – feeling like Ashenbach: no, not with the barber, or the strawberries, but when he just can't move any further –

As my energy doesn't improve I finally stand and move, steadily if shakily, across the dark plaza and down the stairs; a few people glance at me curiously. It is wonderful that the tram stop is just across the street, and I reach it, as though trekking across a wide desert, in a few minutes – few cars, few people.

When I get off the tram the woman next to me is pleasant, then as I rise slightly alarmed – she probably thinks I'm drunk. As there's nothing I can do about that, I lurch off the tram and get to my building –

as I go up the stairs I have that sense that occasionally comes to me, of generations of Sicilian and Greek ancestors: it has never been clear what their lives were like, but I assume there was a lot of steady outdoor work. Because I never faint, and can always push a bit further: there's stone in the blood.

And drop my coat by the sofa, take off my shoes, and lay shaking on the bed....

After a couple of hours I get up and eat some of whatever's in the house. Put the coat away, try to prepare papers and such for the next morning.

***

A., a doctor who is also a student here, tells me I'm exaggeratedly anxious about my health these days. Perhaps; at least partially.

Analysis over a computer connection yesterday – my analyst, who has multiple sclerosis, wants to discuss both the quasi-hysteria of anxiety about one's health, and also the real difficulties of being ill: both sides, the projected and the concrete. I feel too tired to work through it during our session (which is plagued by bad reception on his end – we will have to change our procedures), but afterwards it resonates with me. It is always both overly theatrical, and bluntly real, with me... there is no centre point.

***

Last night, in the middle of the night, I read in Magid's Nothing is Hidden a discussion of a Zen parable about the nature of the world: we are, at the same time, in both a world of suffering and a world of light. It is exactly the same world: no difference – the only differences are what we project onto it.

As is perhaps an appropriate reaction, my eyes teared up, then I was calm, and fell into a deeper sleep...

Getting there

Traveling...

After the past couple of shaky months, and shakier weeks, and all of the activity around World AIDS Day, a trip for two conferences – a small conference on identity and music in Graz, and a larger one of Jungians doing politics, in Rome.

How was it in general? – a lot of travel (Newcastle-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Vienna, train Vienna-Graz, Graz-München, München-Rome, Rome-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Newcastle...). Interesting conferences, interesting people, friendliness. My two papers were successful – even: very successful (!) – even though both were also somewhat fragmented, and I only finished drafting them at 3 am in each of the previous nights – so it was worth it...

But, because I was putting myself together at the last minute, I didn't get to look around enough, to enjoy the small city, and then the big one. I did have one afternoon wandering around the Coliseum with Cristina – and, because of the impending international meetings, there were very few tourists, so a relatively relaxed afternoon.

(Did you know that Roman architecture is so much larger, more massive, than Greek, because of the invention of concrete?... all those huge buildings are concrete faced with stone. It explains a lot – about architecture and about culture. Those buildings are going to be there for a long time....)

Health was better, less uncomfortable, better sleep....

•••

In Graz, an attempt to establish a different context, with different boundaries, for identity politics: as we're all pulled one way or another over various crazy people with guns, religious fanatics (I dislike blaming religion for everything – it seems clear to me that it's the crazy edge of religion, as it is the crazy edges of politics and economics, that are doing the damage), and fights over being transsexual, stars with HIV, etc., I wanted to get past the warring factions of 'dueling martyrs'. Didn't completely manage to pin it down, but tried to outline something that could contain the various groups in a larger context of projections...

And a great restaurant in Graz, with lively, handsome crowds, twice. That was a pleasure. But it was a shame that I never got to the Austrian Christmas market – and I should have bought a Krampus cake, some gingerbread, etc.... oh well.

•••

Rome: a pleasant if pretentiously overdecorated hotel (an 'art hotel'). A charmingly sexy Italian bear, in a suit, at the front desk.

And a drafted paper that was falling apart in my hands on the day before the session....

I was pulling together ideas that first came to me in 1986-7 – a certain resentment, an indignation, over the discourse of AIDS/HIV being dragged into political marches and activism. For me, this has always been about politics as a way of avoiding, of diverting attention from, the anxieties at 'three in the morning in a hospital room', a phrase I've used a few times in papers... therefore I was going to articulate that angle as clearly as possible.

But, after feeling increasingly disoriented and anxious, I abruptly realised, about a day before giving the paper that I no longer believed in my own arguments – or, at least, my reasons for those arguments.

A strong opinion, that began to disintegrate under erratic sleep, my own anxiety about diagnoses and tests, cross-connection with a dark patch in analysis – and of course time: years of change and repetition, which cause any opinion to destabilise...

At which point, rather than either presenting a paper I no longer entirely believed in, or on the other hand tossing it out, I made a decision that ended up being the best one possible at that point – to frame the paper in the context of its own problems, one that would instantly be understood by an audience of psychoanalysts: that the original arguments, along with some fractures and disjunctions, must be understood as embedded in something  that is itself problematic, unstable, unresolvable.

I used a metaphor I've used before, in class – that death and extreme illness suggest the image of an astrophysical black hole, where gravity, magnetism, light are heavily distorted, and anything one had reasonably known or believed starts to twist and crack under the pressure.

And, even if you thought you knew something about illness, about anxiety and death, about the process of dying – when we get near to it, the super-natural intensity of every aspect of the experience, imagined and real, causes any ideas we had to fragment, to disintegrate – our illusions and coverups crack across all of their weak points, and we realise that we have merely reached another level of fooling ourselves.

Even if you're coming around to it again: the illusion that you knew something, understood something, cracks under the enormous, invisible forces....

•••

It made sense, in the end. It was definitely intense, and I'm not sure anyone was quite ready for it on a Sunday morning.

I'll work on it – as it stands, still a fairly fragmentary, self-deconstructing paper – but worth taking further...

(And a very senior analyst asked for a copy! Must tinker with it a bit before sending it to him.)

•••

Back to (this) earth:

I keep meeting cute bears lately – I'm glad that beards are in; I think they will stay in for a while (despite the occasional fiat coming down from fashion editors, generally women, who keep claiming, with increasing desperation, that facial hair is Over). The handsome bear at the Italian hotel, the handsome bear who interviewed me on World AIDS Day, my handsome-bear dentist, the handsome redheaded Australian bear-technician at the hospital this morning, who kept his hand on my arm while explaining the impending MRI –

The MRI was easy, by the way. I think my post-stroke MRI was considerably more brutal because it involved forty minutes of my head clamped into a banging, grinding machine – this was nothing, in comparison. Except for all the Coldplay over the headphones, but whatcha gonna do.

... I like bears.

Perhaps I need to keep more jars of honey around the house....

Existence

That in-the-midst-of sense...

Time recently past: too much stress since about the first of June – some of which twisted at me such that my guts started to react: I felt relatively calm but my body didn't.

I'd still like to ascribe this – partly – to current liver damage; which will hopefully be cured in August-October; which will perhaps improve the situation a bit... though yes, I know: once your body gets into certain tension/stress patterns it's there, perhaps, forever.

In any case: four or five days here in Zürich simply imploded into staying in my rented apartment, not going anywhere, cancelling everything...

then it was all calm, everything was fine.

Time present: a mixture of figuring out how to finish the Jung-Institut program in two years, or (only faintly possibly) eighteen months.

Summer, and the healthy energetics of Zürich, young people, people with leisure. A pleasant place, relaxed.

Good seminars, interesting discussions...

and, most electrically, Nancy R.'s seminar: she always has such a complex and vivid awareness of theory, possibility, existence, mind –

I undoubtedly think too much about my own mind/situation in this seminar, rather than my analysands (especially because of the anxieties of the past months); but the insights ring like huge bronze bells, and they transform the landscape. My analysands will feel the effects. A complex gamelan of developing and crossing lines, counter-lines, flashes of understanding, total or partial or transcendental.

At night, I read Robert Silverberg in his most intense period, around the late seventies, one after another: many are brilliant, but The Book of Skulls is such a shattering, powerfully made, complete thing:

and, as I was lately remembering some of the weirder traps and falls of my youth (see earlier posts connected with the Association Experiment), I could see how the dense anxieties of young men could be channeled into  madness –

and how utterly clear it is at the end of that book that, even if there is no magic formula, even if the two young men who aren't dead are being lied to, they cannot possibly acknowledge it: they have fallen into doing such terrible things that they would now claim anything to be true, as long as it justified their past actions...

Because belief is, for them, now the only thing that keeps them from seeing themselves as utterly evil. So they carefully lock themselves into the shared madness... because that is the only place that is safe.

I think of how fantastically lucky I've been: even the most manipulated structures and situations, or the accidental or contrived contacts with demented and dark people in my life, have always had several easy ways out – and, glory be, I've taken them: I remember a San Francisco apartment, a group of us looking wildly at each other as the owner screamed down the stairs, just get out, get out (which was ultimately a very good idea); a New York apartment that I couldn't later find again (which was absolutely lucky for me); a car in the suburbs of Los Angeles, listening to the driver and realising just what he had done to become the thing that he had fallen to; and other moments where madness was just a few feet away –

This sense of clarity, of awareness: it holds these mad places;

but, and again I realise how stunningly lucky I've been,

it holds me safe; because I've only seen these things from outside....

Lessons

On the plane from Amsterdam to Zurich, a large, angry-looking man is already sitting in the row in front of us. First one, then the other of the seats in his row are filled by men who have suitcases. But he has put some flowers in the overhead bin... Twice he explodes with rage at these fools who have the temerity to put suitcases next to, in front of, his flowers; he gets up and throws their bags to the floor, pulls out his flowers, snarls in a mixture of English and Dutch how many years he has flown; finally the conciliatory stewardesses take the flowers to put them elsewhere.

Through all this, I and the delicately beautiful young woman in my row, in a stylish summer dress and dark red high heels – Spanish, Israeli? – something like that – glance at each other cautiously, eyebrows raised, startled, amused, wary of the explosion two feet away. She unwraps an expensive slim chocolate bar, and a small parchment card falls out; she reads it. The man subsides, and when all is quiet, she leans over and shows me the card: ‘Gracefully I embrace all lessons in my life’.

I can't help it – one bark of laughter. No one notices; she smiles with me, laughs quietly. And we relax as the plane rises...

••• 

I show her this when it is written, and we talk; she is Turkish, but has grown up in the Netherlands. We talk about family, food, the places we’ve traveled, for two hours…

Oh, and her shoes. They are indeed very, very classy.

•••

The train from Zürich airport into the city has a number of people, no air conditioning – a generally fairly sweaty atmosphere. But there is a sense of, not misery or dirtiness, but just a certain intense and unproblematic physicality. The Swiss in summer; the young ones athletic or casual, the older often assertive walkers...

A change in the sense of what the body is, how it is supposed to be: especially given how difficult mine has been for the past week (hives at stress, peeling, embarrassment), I become oddly reassured: being pretty doesn't really matter. The body is physical, erotic, even when it is sweaty: my whole sense of bodies changes. It feels very central European – not the self-consciousness of Latin Europe, but the unquestioned animality of Germanic Europe, when the sun is high.

I think of Ralf König's quote of Westenhagen:

Tiere sind wir,

wir still'n uns're Gier,

süsser Gestank,

vor Geilheit ganz krank,

aber lieben werd'ich dich nie.

It's complicated

A complicated time.

The Book, the one I had all those bizarre death dreams about, arrived in my office TODAY. And yet I breathe.

Too much to do in the past weeks, some of it distinctly though not disastrously late...

Merrie and I performed duets on my students' musicals night. We made blunders but it was exciting, and the kids were... well, some of them were really fantastic. MJ would have been kind to us, but really pleased with them.

Then there was all that end-of-semester marking – so many students doing such intelligent work – a surprising number, perhaps three or four in each large class, are actually nearly publishable. And the ones that aren't quite that good are nevertheless smart, dedicated, imaginative, passionate in their investment...

And that applies not only to the enthusiastic class on musicals, but also to the large but remarkably successful class on philosophy and cultural theory.

But I did manage to make myself mildly ill while stressing over a computer disaster related to marking; and also over those duets – I really should be forced to memorise things weeks before they happen... very intense at some level of my memory and imagination, the one that remembers some of the concert and stage disasters from my intermittent but frequently undependable performing careers.

Ah, I shouldn't say that, it's like hacking away at myself...

And today, the final discussion of marks; I was left surprisingly angry and anxious over one probable error by another part of the university... everyone is trusting in university systems to repair a problem; but, in a department that reads so much Adorno and Foucault, can we really be unaware of the fact that large systems tend to protect themselves, even when they're wrong?... ah well.

I am definitely feeling the pain of one student who was affected by it – that awful existential moment when all your plans and hopes seem fall in ruins... I know it all too well.

We should not have marking at all: it should be like Black Mountain College was, once upon a time.

Tonight will be a short night, then several errands and running around, plane to Zürich, train to Locarno for a weekend in a beautiful part of Italian Switzerland... actually that adjective is kind of redundant, I can't think of any unattractive parts of Italian Switzerland.

My own memories, my own feelings, my own body – my own perpetual illness: how do I experience all of this, when summer beckons, when there is much to do?...

There have been points in the past two weeks when I've thought: but I am not calm, reasonable, sane! I am upset, I am thrown off base, my body is generating symptoms of anxiety and anger – is it allowed that I have years of analysis, that I am actually an analyst for others, and still be like this?

But all right: there is indeed a centre, one I don't always connect with, but I know it is there.

And nobody ever said that when you understood your own complexes and neuroses, you'd wake up the next day to sunshine and happiness...

So: keep

going.