in the hall of mirrors

Crossing

Crossing from one year to the next....

This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one place to another, I'm experiencing this is very different: to plan, to choose, step by step, feels like... well, a calmer, more conscious kind of life than I have lived, for most of sixty-six years.

Retiring from Newcastle University became entangled with an internal, then increasingly external, change in my relationship to organizations, schools, committees – community groups, support networks....

I realized I just wasn't interested in those things any more, that they had become mostly burdens. Which is unexpected as, for a number of decades (since the early 70s, really), I have alternated between trying to make things happen and, sometimes unhappily, giving up on making things happen. It's been a fairly basic pattern for me, entangled with wanting to be seen and heard (all that youngest-child stuff, amplified by the quieter social spaces of the last twenty years), plus wanting certain things to be understood differently, wanting to transform or expand or be a part of certain conversations – and then, as an analyst, getting entangled in professional conversations about taking care of people, of groups, of the world.

I do still tend to be project-focused, rather than any freer kind of being, which I realize has its limitations, even its hungry-ghost aspect. But there are vastly fewer projects now, and each is connected with far fewer people and practically no time anxieties. So, to go to an image from the first pages of Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, I spend far less time among those people panicking and fleeing the moon, as it looms above them....

I left a lot of committees and projects – including practically all the things I've joined in the past five years that were tied to my new persona, my third life and second career, as a Jungian analyst. I found myself habitually doing things like those I did as an academic – I was on the research committee of the Zürich institute, and the alumni board; helped Barbara with the internship project, wrote forewords and afterwords, taught a number of online classes (Zürich, Los Angeles, even far-away San Francisco!) – and of course helped manage the past three years of our online lecture series and videos; and the gay book group, plus showing them films under lockdown, and the online men's group, then meeting about the local men's group that never happened...

Leaving all those things, even when they were things or people I liked, ended up being a relief. A sense of quiet – even of great quiet, like the music at the beginning of act 3 of Britten's Midsummer: the forest is always there, mysterious and quiet, and if only the lovers would shut up they might be able to hear it....

•••

So, it's the change of the year: and a clear sense that all those things are done, and done.

It leaves a slightly strange vacuum: one I wish I'd experienced more often in my life – so many projects, so many things I wanted to do....

In this vacuum, it feels as though doing things has been one of my life's problems: why things were not finished, why the sadness or guilt of unfinished projects ended up coloring too many weeks, months, years, out of my life. Which now seems frankly silly: nobody insisted that I do these things – I can now hear, again, something as simple, as lucid, as Susan McClary telling me in the 90s: you are doing too many conferences and committees, stop, focus on real work.

That now seems obvious.

And – you may be pleased to hear – it also now seems easy, even for me.

No longer fleeing that menacing full moon, as it rolls across the sky...

•••

Listening to big choral works by Schütz: which links to the me of 1974 – nearly fifty years! – dazzled by the university's music library, those glorious collected works... and so joy in books, and music and history, and German-ness and serious dignity; but also in the sensual explosions that happened in the recordings of those works. As well as playing seventeenth- and twentieth-century pieces in the practice rooms, late at night.

•••

So, after getting rid of so many things – what is left?

The first book, then the second. (Maybe a third, we'll see.)

Analysands. I see about twenty people at the moment, but only ten or twelve in a given week (some of these relationships are rather itinerant, which is okay). I enjoy this work: the balance of the right numbers and timing is hard to hold on to, but I manage.

Some teaching. Not much, but some – mostly Jungian stuff, mostly online.

Aside from those, I still have a couple of Newcastle postgraduates; though I don't mind taking on more, I suspect the department will conserve and focus, both in relation to money and to keeping current staff working. (Our crazed, greedy Tory government has torn up a lot of pre-university music exams and teaching; that will all come back some day, but the next decade may leave music teachers and institutions struggling across the country).

•••

As the Hollywood joke goes: "But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"....

•••

Things are quieter. I'm a bit more like good old Montaigne (well, I wish), or like the old magician collecting herbs in the woods that I envisioned at the beginning of this pandemic.

Speaking of which – I've still never had COVID, that I know of, and would love to keep it that way...

In the larger frame of 2022, COVID, and the way everyone else seems to think of it – including Saturday Night Live – I have to confess, I don't see 2022 as such a disaster. Sure, COVID (but that was already familiar, and hasn't really gotten worse, it just hasn't gotten much better – so that feels kind of like the years 1984 to 1995 under AIDS). The Ukraine war is dangerous but not new – I'm still surprised by people who say, why don't you care about Yemen! – rather obviously, Russia has nuclear weapons that most of the world doesn't. And that is scary. But that cliff edge is something we've stood near several times in past decades. I didn't experience this year as seriously disorienting or fearful – perhaps that is just me. I always seem to come back to: it's not as though we haven't seem times that were just as bad.

Perhaps a big part of my reaction is based on my emotional shift towards being, well, less concerned – about everything – which follows processes that have been happening for maybe thirteen years now, since the 2009 stroke, since visiting the Zürich institute, since – well, since a kind of, perhaps implicit, decision that Things Needed To Change.

But this hasn't been the Bay of Pigs, or 9/11, or Prague 1968. Or the 2008 crash, or the election of Trump, or any of a mass of other dark things from past decades. Admittedly, events have happened in a more open cultural space, so we see more of them. And you can think of hyperobjects, and the sense that disasters these days seem further beyond us than earlier perceived disasters.

But I continue to feel calm....

•••

So, okay. Let's be traditional and think of 2023 – not with resolutions, exactly, but with things I want to do.

Continue writing, finish the larger stuff – while the (vastly fewer) small projects (one overview chapter, and the sprawling and disjointed blog entry about Barcelona that has meandered across the last three years, which should really get done) can be just polished off.

Visit Barcelona, and focus: should I, can I, move there? What do I do with my physical life, my books, how do I find a new place to live – with how many changes, accepted losses or benefits?... but that project can unfold over time.

Make, finally, a web page, with a new home for this blog, and a place to put it all together – work, writings, past. Something that looks decent enough... with a designer? I'll keep looking.

Clear out much of what I own, and get accustomed to walking away from things and projects without looking back.

Stay open to unexpected discussions that cross my mind, about time and experience and memory and death... and write them out, return to them. Which should be helped by the quieter spaces around me.

Manage the few project/event things on the 2023 calendar (the conference panel, the co-taught seminar, the handful of people asking for professional advice) without letting them get overgrown or entangled with similar things.

Relax a bit, walk more, listen to some of the music, read some of the books, that cover the walls of my life. Cook a bit...

Doesn't sound impossible. Not even improbable. Wouldn't be too shabby....

•••

(There are nights when I see the rooms and hallways of my life in Barcelona. They are pleasant and quiet – not bright but comfortable, book-lined. And, even if I never get there – those are good times....)

A bit vague, not lost

Anniversary of this blog... sixteen years. A few days ago, really, on Saturday, but this is close enough.

No, the blog doesn't feel dead to me, I'm still here for it, and it for me.

I retired from the university in February; moved the books of my office to storage; and now keep talking about moving to Barcelona. I'm not getting there quickly, but am not terribly worried... of course it might fall to become a thing that doesn't happen, but I think it probably will happen.

Life is quieter after retirement. I'm pleased they'll keep me as a retired 'guest' – so some minor perks, software, connections. A few postgraduates to work with for a while; if other links arise I don't mind – as long as they don't involve meetings, or list emails, or (horrors) marking.

Of course I continue as a psychoanalyst. I worried a bit in the past few months when appointments decreased... and then they increased. None of these things are major concerns – the income is fine, and I've hardly ever had more than 12-14 patients in a given week – and that can feel like a lot, bit it's manageable. 8-10 is more usual, I mostly enjoy doing that. My landlord rebuilt the trellis behind the deck in back of my flat, so I can see people there, on folding deck chairs that N. found for me – I'm still being COVID-cautious (I never have tested positive, which is fine with me), but I may start letting the vaccinated into my home next month....

And, though this is another project that has drifted through the years – I want to put this blog on a website of my own. (I'm not terribly interested in whether blogs are still current... I'm fine referring my thoughts and patterns to a now-aging form. It's still more modern than Montaigne's tower, and anyway I have heating and running water, which he didn't.)

As for travel... I won't go to Buenos Aires for the August conference, it seems like a terrible plan to get into a plane that goes that far for that long, with people crossing through several continents... a shame to not get to my sixth continent, but that's a goal I can let slide.

I will risk teaching in Zürich in July, though, and just wear masks throughout the flight. Teaching... these days it's seminars for adults, with no marking (yay!) – the Zürich seminars will be among the first where I'm doing 4-6 hours on a topic, so there will be time to dig deeper; and I think next year I'll ask for even more hours. What do you think of, say, eight hours over two or three days on archetypes and opera, focusing on productions at the fabulous Zürich opera house?

Another online seminar for San Francisco in December, and maybe Los Angeles (also online – seeing cities I once loved would be wonderful, but given the triple whammy of COVID, long flights, and costly travel for a pensioner, I think I'll wait before doing any more long trips).

•••

There's a department farewell in three days: I already know what to say – it's been in the back of my head for years. It won't have the same impact for them (it hasn't been in the backs of their heads for years), but I think they'll get that I know I was lucky to land here. Though, yes, I also love being done with the job... it's interesting how colleagues from around the world have identified with what I'm doing: but I feel as though I'm doing something a bit different from a lot of retirees. After all, in some ways, I actually expect more now rather than less – working, and living, feel even more interesting than they have for a long time (perhaps than they ever have?) – though they are defined in ways I wouldn't have foreseen a decade ago.

And the book! – or books! – I am indeed proud of what I've written so far, and annoyed that I haven't done more. (About 21,000 words of a book that's supposed to be under 50,000 – but the draft feels forged, intense – I find my own writing about AIDS both good and also a little scary, which is okay with me.) T. and D. and A. and others nag me to keep going... I hope I'll get there. And the other book. And who knows, maybe the third.

Other writing... that Barcelona (and Sitges and Vienna) blog post, which is about five pages in draft... I really do want to post it some day. It may end up a bit fragmented, but... I'll do what I can to keep it as coherent as its original intentions.

•••

Last night, dinner with D. in a beautiful small restaurant, one I'd never seen. Long conversations: a sense of moving forward, of getting somewhere... cross-linked experiences of talking to another psychologist about things that intensely matter, of making exciting plans for a different future, of moving somewhere in a way that feels important. And similar conversations online with A....

But even these relationships, the power of talking to someone who can push you to go further, are powerful largely because of the general space of who I am at the moment (and this is the important part, the part that made me want to write this post, though I suspect I can't make it clear):

because even fragments of aging and fragility, of not-doing and pleasure or sadness, of world difficulties and personal victories, are framed by a continuing, even accelerating, sense of changes in my own awareness, in dreams and thoughts: of time, self, memory... for months, even more than previous times in my life, I keep having a wider sense of all the things I've been, all the things I've seen and people I've known, as well as all the things that could have been: as though they are all available, as though awareness and imagination have, for me these days, so many interesting facets, that...

well, at one trivial level: that complaining about almost anything would be merely silly. It would be beside the point of existing, actually.

Even a wasted morning doesn't feel wasted these days....

Happy blogiversary.

[Essaying] Bloggisization

Brian Dillon, Essayism. He writes beautifully, and has become famous by doing it.

Actually I'd never heard of him until I started noticing those Fitzcarraldo Editions – are they named for somebody involved, or for Herzog's strange movie, and the man the movie is about, played by the mad Kinski? – it's probably about the movie, since Fitzcarraldo is apparently a bizarre Spanishization (españolisación?) of the locally unpronounceable Fitzgerald – but in any case Fitzcarraldo Editions are terrifically subtle, well-crafted, densely literary books with simple covers, blue or white with spare lettering, they're the kind of thing one buys while being very aware that one is buying A Book (shades of Mallarmé, he would have liked to be published by these people, unless of course he were overwhelmed with the dismayed feeling that they are creating things that are almost, but hopelessly never quite, what he wanted), and I do indeed like buying books, and with some slight distinction buying A Book, which I also regard as a non-shameful (to me anyway, I live alone and don't need to justify my purchases to any vaguely disapproving partner) indulgence.

So Dillon (may I call you Brian?... no?... well all right then) Dillon is writing about the nature of the essay, and so tearing into / breaking apart the usual statements (which aren't quite clichés but are close, and Dillon being famous as a Current Voice, he's struggling with the possible clichéistic nature of them).

And as he moves rapidly and deftly, but also slightly irritably and desperately, around the topic, I am reflected back on (as so often) myself. (For some years I also have an oblique self-justifying set of thoughts around the idea that my constant self-reference, in this blog and in writing and in conversation, isn't narcissism – we've recently had a grandiosely fucked-up example of real narcissism in political history, which has fortunately made it much easier to clarify to analysands the distinctions between narcissism and being a bit, possibly too, focused on oneself – and if mine is egotism it's kind of an unavoidable egotism, because if you end up living alone in a quiet suburb of a small city, there isn't much else other than oneself to think about.)

As it's four in the morning, but with the glory that is a North Sea summer light, which almost (for years I would say this resentfully: almost, though this summer is a bit different because warming has created several weeks that actually feel like a very mild, almost-warm summer) makes up for the damned winters, the sky is already light, beautifully so; and so although yesterday, Tuesday, I was tired and mildly ill, to the point of worrying about the small amount of student marking still to be done – the plan was to be entirely done with it last week, then last weekend, then Monday, then yesterday, but sadly it's not done yet and I hope I'm not about to get yelled at – and this morning I fortunately feel much better, to the point of getting up at this bright four a.m.; and so my mind is working, and it reflects the Dillon essay in a way not atypical of my imaginative flights....

and that's a bit like responding with my own thoughts to Dillon's worrying, growling pulling-around and chewing on the nature of the essay.

Because the book I'm supposed to be writing, the first of two or three AIDS books, has pulled me into the orbit of Becker on death, and his junior colleagues' extension and concretization of his ideas (if you look at the link I'm really sorry about the cover – someone seriously incompetent chose it, clearly panicking over the content of the book to cover it over with something twee and disconnected), which points towards the general human need, which is exaggerated as one gets older, to build, make, establish, remake, parent, control, foster, and all sort of other verbal things in order to create somethings that will get us beyond our own deaths...

And so a kind of Discussion Panel comes to mind, where I (because I haven't published much and am not very notable) am included at one end of the table for numerical reasons, probably, and so can appropriately be humble, but am still allowed, even expected, to say something.

So, after everyone sails into Why There Are Essays, I respond with my version: that essays, with their abstract and writerly pleasures, are a bit like drawings in the books of John Berger: art that is sketched, real, present, because it is existential in nature. That whatever other reasons there may be for generating essays – a newspaper gig, a desire to explain – essays are like sketches, and that's why they exist, and maybe that's one explanation for the weird etymology of the word.

We write essays, or make sketches (or blog of course) as a way of being: writing that emphasizes writing, but also writing that emphasizes what we're seeing, what we're understanding at this moment. And that's a major triumph over death, despite its slight and casual nature, because it's an unquestionable statement that I was here –

and I suppose it would help to point out that, if one reflects off to the side: if most writing is arranged around story-telling, in a way that pleases Jungians – stories are natural, when we write stories we fall into those stories, as in the one I read by Gene Wolfe in the middle of the night; and Wolfe is a good example of this kind of thing because he's always writerly, aware of the history of writing and of the many directions it can go, but also very aware of mortality and time and loss; and so when he writes a pastiche of Jack Vance he's very aware of time and the fact that Vance is dead, and the fact that Wolfe himself won't live forever, as is now especially true because he actually died a few years ago, but Wolfe is able to look all that in the face – and so our constant focus on stories does indeed contain many of the most important driving forces of why people write, and paint, and make art and talk to each other, and enter that world of creating worlds –

but in the case of the essay, as in the case of Berger's sketches, I want to emphasize the purity, the pure existential impact, of it: no longer tied to story-telling (I'm hyphenating that to make a point, I know it could be one word), when someone is writing an essay they are making sentences, and enjoying them, enjoying the process: as when Berger draws something rapidly, casually, and redraws it to try again to capture an element, it's not so much about making a substantial artwork that will impress everyone with its image-ness and reference to archetypal whatever and artistic visionaryness and so on, but it's just about the making itself, about the pleasure of creating something that didn't exist before –

which can quite fairly, but without any dreadful Beckettian tragedy or childish Dylan Thomas-esque brandishing of toy swords, create a space that isn't touched by death:

when we write these sentences or draw these lines, with the emphasis on the sentences and the lines themselves, they are merely, but definitely, assertions of being present: they are life because they reiterate that basic human statement that I am here, which is also always, especially for those who are older, I was here.

And that is what I like about essays, whether by Lamb or Sebald or Sontag or MFK Fisher or, frankly, me:

that even if I never finish any of the books, I, now, like these sentences: and I like that I made these sentences exist: so I like essays because they prove that Lamb and Sebald and Sontag and Fisher and I are alive, or were alive, as that distinction isn't terribly important.

Just like a sketch by John Berger. Just like an unfinished painting of a lot of water lilies. Just like that earthquake-y point where Annie Dillon asks potential writers, Do you like sentences?

Because we have all been alive and we proved it and that can't ever really be erased, even if civilization vanishes into eons of dust.

And when I finish my improvised statement, my time on the panel is done, and we throw it open to questions from the audience....

Anniversary, and questions

A few days ago was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog – 14 May 2006.

I wanted to finish a blog entry from September 2019 – so a bit more than a year and a half ago – a fairly amazing late-summer experience of Vienna, Barcelona, Sitges, and life, and excitement, and death, and ending.

It's a draft, about 2,000 words, of something that probably should have been 5-6,000... if I'd gotten focused, written what I was thinking, the awareness – and the excitement, the passion. It was clearly a time of coming alive again – and it has echoed through the months since then: a sense of being full of energy and eros, of seeing how wonderful and exciting things were – or, are – and how big death is, but also how much it has become easy for me to face....

A shame I didn't really finish the draft; at some point I'll post the fragments, especially my eerie closing, which I'm very proud of. That ending may or may not resonate with friends or readers, but for me it is one of those pieces of writing, in stories or articles or blog entries over the last fifty years or so, where I think: yes, that is wonderful, and I am aware that I am done with desire or need or loneliness or disappointment, because I have written that.

•••

But today has a couple of things in it: one is that wish, and its disappointment; and this desire to mark the anniversary, even if some days late...

But now, after two patients this morning, four scheduled this afternoon, a sense of busyness and the usual concerns about writing the book (which should be more important than anything in my world, but is also something that just may never happen) – I drink a smoothie and some tea, I finish washing the dishes, I look at the dim weather, and...

am overwhelmed by a wave of weakness.

That's happened periodically over the past three or four years. And now it echoes a strange event from five weeks ago – a very, very minor event that recalled, that suggested, a stroke: I was standing in the front hallway in the evening after various activities, including showing a movie online to the gay book group, and my eyesight, abruptly and without fanfare, shifted sideways, angled down, split – for probably less than twenty seconds –

I thought, yes, I've seen this before. It was a part of what happened in 2009, when I had a stroke. This time it isn't the same, it's much smaller: feels like a warning –

I go and lie down, though I'm not as ill afterwards as I was in 2009. As I say, a minor event.

I didn't even go the doctor for several days, but after telling a friend or two about it, and seeing their faces and their irritation, I thought, yeah, I'd better tell someone. The GP, then referred to the stroke unit, an afternoon of tests and discussion – no MRI... they add blood thinners back in to my meds, treat it as real but not (yet) a problem.

It was odd... I talk about death and ending all the time, this shouldn't be much of a surprise, or a shock. And it's not – the possibilities around such a tiny experience are not unfamiliar, I can already see them, I just have to turn my head and look.

But it does, of course, leave me a little disoriented, a little off balance...

•••

Intermittent odd feelings and weaknesses since that day; a more enforced series of walks with M. and with M. (two different names, indistinguishable when you have only the first letter!), but they're hard to do, not only because of inertia and overweight-ness, but a real sense of that post-stroke weakness, fortunately in a very attenuated form.

•••

And so today, this wave of completely incapacitating weakness: I sit at the desk, feet up on its corner, typing away – it's a kind of work but I'm pushing myself to do it: if I keep being reminded of mortality, of the fact that, one of these times, everything will start to end for me – then at least I can write, I can talk about it...

•••

A bit of relief at the possibility of being done with the university, with marking and administration.

A bit of concern about all my analysands: there are too many, it's true, and can I be sure they'll all find their ways forward, if I vanish from the conversation? In most cases yes, but....

And the weakness washing through me, making almost everything impossible, but in a relaxed and sort of wonderful way: letting myself wash into the universe....

•••

Not being sure what this is: not being sure what anything is.

Fortunately, with my post-everything education, and openness to not knowing: that is, in itself, kind of a relief.

I should go lie down... do I cancel my two o'clock?... perhaps the only decision now is the one over the next minute, which is to lie down and not be concerned...

•••

There is something absolutely at the existential center of my life about illness, anxiety, and the resonance of this not-doing-ness. Fortunately I've gotten rather good at paying attention to it.

And to now.....

Anniversary

Well... not quite the anniversary.

It was thirteen years since this blog was begun... as of yesterday.

A day late, that's appropriate for a thirteenth anniversary, yes?

•••

No posts since the new year; which doesn't mean I'm giving up on this. I do like the blog, I like writing it....

I want to transfer it to a better website, get somebody to help redesign, something that looks better and is more flexible. A multi-page website – psychoanalyst, academic, blog. Do I make all those pages visible to each other? I'm not quite sure.

•••

Since January I have finished the thesis for the Jung-Institut, which is an accomplishment somewhere between 'amazing' and 'finally,' and which is also a torso of what it should be. An attempt to draw up all the heaviest, most unbearable aspects of thirty-five years of HIV/AIDS: infection, fear, anger, the rotting body... death of course.

A draft of about 160 pages was taken down to 80 at the orders of my supervisor – they're going through a period of wanting to simplify the academic side of the training....

I'm never terribly impressed with such policies – my own university sets a maximum number of pages, which I think is merely tacky, but even an expansive Wagnerian PhD student had to comply. It's okay, he's kept all that he wrote and will continue to publish, I hope.

And, of course, compare the situation of my dear John, who basically wrote about four theses... at least he got not one but two degrees for that.

As for my own thesis, it currently feels a bit like I've ticked a box: as I get into the idea, as I look at the draft and see what needs to be rewritten and what is missing, I know that this will be a book....

which is good, because (pay attention, children, I need to boast while pretending to be humble) I have been commissioned for one, and very probably will manage to get a second through the same channel. With a reeeeally goooood publisher. And, because circumstances are different, because much is written, and most of all because I am now very different, this time I think these books will happen – one this year, the other within a year or two.

Given the neurotic exasperation of arguing with my supervisor, and my rather sad anxiety that I was once again proving my inability to finish large things, it was a great emotional rescue to get the book commission in the midst of that conflict.

I'd already written a note to myself, on the new whiteboard by my desk:

"write past the thesis – aim for the book(s)"....

•••

It has been a cold spring, with continued miserable politics.

But I have been flying along my own path – relatively calm since getting over the thesis, and even that was a fairly attenuated anxiety.... bored and annoyed by the world, and by the irritability and anxiety of so many in it, I've been floating in a world of word, psyche, screen....

At some levels I am calmer, at others more irritated by others, especially when they are themselves fractured, unhappy, anxious.

(But I don't mean my own analysands – I am patient with them, I think. It is actually a great existential relief to firmly know that place in myself where I can step back from my own feelings, and ask instead: what is this? There is a calmness there which is of course professional in nature, but which has its own quality, like a still pool in a Zen story. Even amidst my irritation with so many others, a couple of days ago, while dressing, I suddenly paused and asked: what is that irritation? Why does everyone seem so anxious, so self-lacerating – of course there are the cultural level, and the political level – but what in this anger is being created by me?....)

•••

The past couple of days have been beautifully warm. It won't continue of course, but this has been the kind of weather I love – why is it not like this for, say, four months a year? Then happiness would reign.

•••

The last couple of weeks of writing the thesis, I was eating more, and not caring – there was too much to focus on. And so I am now heavier, and irritated, even publicly embarrassed, about that, though of course no one else notices. More importantly, I do not feel well – the heaviness, poor digestion and aching, and the weakness – I haven't been going for walks; and I do, too frequently, start to shake, start to become really weak, usually for several hours.

I still assume this is my doing – an extreme lack of exercise; though this is happening too often. It could actually be something external – though really this is probably just an exceptionally ridiculous version of the ways people let themselves fall apart as they get older, which is of course a good way of dying before time.

I'll get out more, I promise – I promise myself.

As so often: there are really no excuses.

But then, of course, in my life, there have been so many points where there were really no excuses.

•••

Thirteen years.

A box of books in the mail.

Sunshine, warmth, birds.

Writing in a café; the charmingly handsome man behind the counter.

And spring: a real spring....

Sky in evening

The sky is a mixture of dim golds and blues....

•••

Last week, we had four beautiful days of summer. Early May; those four days were strictly delimited – the weather was forecast to change on the fifth day to an ongoing 58-62 for the indefinite future, and it did exactly that.

But those summer days were, oh, say, 70-75 – not all that warm, but for these northerners it was a heat wave. Anyone with red hair, of course... a lot of rather dramatic discussion of factor 20, or 50, and the like.

But as for those of us exiled from summer lands – the Pakistani taxi driver last night, bringing me home from the concert by my performance art students, agreed with me: the British have no idea what hot weather is, and these days have been perfection.

We, the native foreigners, laughed in complicity at them: silly as they are....

•••

One of those afternoons, a picnic table, outside, at a pub near the Ouseburn. M. and A., and two women friends, and I.

Brits arrayed around us in various stages of relaxation, no particularly loud music... in fact one of the pleasures of that long, dazed afternoon was: no raucous or crazed responses to the heat. Just a sense of pleasure, for hours.

•••

The house on the corner of my street: some students live in it, or next to it –

today there are two young guys sunbathing without shirts, ridiculously pale, but muscled – muscles are so much more the norm now, basic health and exercise expectations have changed so much. There was something so confused and young (19-20?) but beautiful about them: not at all like Southern California guys, these obviously have no idea how they are supposed to look without shirts, even with their sharply developed muscles; their tan lines are wrong, accidental and sloppy and like trucker's arms around the shoulders –

but they have the careless, easy grace of unstudied reality....

•••

Over the warm days, a number of young men pass in the streets; they seem unexpectedly and intensely healthy, energetic. An integrated, complete kind of beauty: they take up space, and they enjoy doing it – they seem happy to be in the world.

•••

Twelve years of this blog, today!... I'd still like to move to a different webhost... and the old entries seem to have lost their formatting and look like a Beckett novel. Ah well. Can't really complain about passing time.

Or you can, if you like, but it won't have much...

•••

My students were so passionately invested in the performance art concert – because I didn't have creative performers from the other university come talk to them (they didn't seem interested earlier in the year – I should have insisted), their work had more rough edges than might have been; but! talk about deep emotional/psychological authenticity. This was all about the women rather than the men – the men just wrote papers this time, I told them they were being chicken. But the women – no playing around here: fantastic commitment, deep excavation, multiple levels of symbols and ideas – creations that did us all good.

All a bit humbling, really: if you had looked squarely at your worst shames and fears in symbolic form, in public, when you were young, 20 or so – who would you have managed to become by now?....

•••

When N. and I go walking in the park, we talk about her problems, and I (of course) hold forth too long. I am a garrulous old sod (but that's not news).

If we are worried about health, about life – about how we are feeling and what to do about it – I always tend to move, rather dangerously, into the endgame, to bring mortality into the space: we're older, the body changes – we cannot turn back time; and we can't magically make ourselves young, or healthy. But doesn't that give us a more defined space to understand our decisions, to know what to do next? Even if it may not succeed.

N. is alternately telling me what she is thinking, or is far away: but there's a sense that something opens up, for both of us.

•••

Oh, wait: redheads, sun – this was from a few weeks ago, but let's make sure it is preserved here, for the ages (because this blog will be carved into the walls of my pyramid – this particular passage in the secret inner chamber, of course):

'Today, by local standards, was a sort of heat wave (74º and sunny). I saw a patient, typed, worked, sun at the window, all the windows open....

and now there's loud music, from nearby. After a bit it's clear that it won't stop on its own, so I go out the downstairs back door to locate the source... next door, the scruffy rental house with tenants who are often there for just a semester, where the loud straight lads have lived for the past three months, in the doorway squeezed between the garage and our fence where there's practically no room but there is direct sun, is a tall muscly bearded redhead in an exceptionally skimpy bathing suit, pretty much a thong – clearly he thinks no one will see him – sitting sideways in the doorway, his brawny legs halfway up the doorframe, radio blasting.

I call out loud enough over the music – he leaps, startled – I smile, say, the music? – he twists longitudinally, his legs still up the doorframe, and turns the music way down...

I walk around back to my door, thinking:

Huh. Well.'

•••

Another morning, an early class – after that late concert: but since the days get so long here (dawn was at 4:25 am), we were all alert, ready, open to whatever comes.

The last class of the first-year music history series, a rapid revision of comparisons of modern and postmodern, new musics they might know and like....

Bur first, my obvious question: how are your final papers coming? And an intelligent guy, one of a number that I've started to recognise as real people, people I'll remember, says: it's so boring, it's so awful. 300 words and he's completely stalled.

So, I derail my lesson plan: why is it awful? What is awful about it? Why do you hate it? What are you trying to do?

He's game to answer, we push through, I look around and check with others: how is your paper? What about yours?

I tell them: don't write a pile of boring crap for us, it's all right, I promise, we don't want to read it any more than you want to write it. If you've picked a question you don't like any more, change questions, or –

okay, you, the woman in the second row: exactly what is it that you hate about Wagner? Because, let's face it, there are a lot of things to hate.

As for you in the back, if you're doing popular music in the late 19th century, and you don't care about it... what do you care about?

We have a nonlinear but charged discussion with the whole room: pointing at students and saying: do you like your paper or hate it? What do you need to do next? Are you bored? What are you going to do about that?...

Half an hour spent on all of this, rather than my musical examples: but the air felt clearer, their eyes brighter: there was a sense that we all woke up, fell back into things....

•••

After class, lunch, and a sense of somnolence... the sun is out but it is cooler; home, and sleep.

Later, awake, a casual Skype conversation with M. I have told him I can't finish my thesis in time for July graduation, but that I'm calm about it – he checks closely to see if that is true, but no, I can honestly say: I spent an hour being sad about it before the decision came back by email.

Which it did while we were celebrating Eric passing his PhD viva, by the way... sitting in the staff room with champagne, two supervisors, two examiners, and the new soon-to-be-doctor.

I read the email about my own thesis on my phone, watch my annoyingly extensive cloud of painful memories around delaying or screwing up other degrees and projects float around me and evaporate, and a wing of time passes – I ask for another glass of champagne and return to the discussion.

•••

Our students are performing a baroque opera: they are so young, working so hard – how do we do things that are so difficult? Maybe that's what's exciting about it. The stage looks beautiful, the costumes professional; they are getting a taste of something.

A young woman in one of the smaller roles is especially graceful, especially funny: she is willing to go for the humor in the role – I tell her how successful she was afterwards, in the bar, surrounded by wired students and parents and staff....

•••

I am in the central room of my flat, with one of my analysands; I pull him up short: why all the arguing and analyzing about your partner – what's driving all this?

We both feel the immense sadness that comes into the room, one that is absolutely unmistakable. We sit with it, quietly, for a while: even if it's the kind of thing we would normally strenuously avoid, at the moment it feels like a gift.

•••

After my last analysand, I have finished the pot of tea, and it is late afternoon. Floating through everything, a sense of awareness, of power, of continuity: I can write the thesis, I can do what I want. Time floats, sunny days or rainy ones.

As evening comes on it is cooler, I close the windows....

while washing the dishes, I think: time, thesis. What I did today, what they did last night onstage.

Normally I would regret the move to cooler weather.

One of those 80s guitar albums that I associate with my California-in-memory is playing... this would normally bring me back to nostalgia, loss.

But today it feels as though everything is within reach: summer, spring; fall. Failure and success, youth and aging. Desire and loss and giving up and keeping going... it all floats, it is all available to me.

The other day D., whom I last lived with in 1982, and who, like me, has survived so much and so many places and people, was flirting by message from the northern Pacific coast: "if we get married, you and I will have to balance one another in tasteful tux." He includes a picture of himself reclining on a sofa – he is ten years older, but has kept himself in excellent shape. I tell him frankly, I'm not in excellent shape: and he says well, we'll just have to do something about that. And I think – really?... are you saying that this is possible?

I remember a dream-vision of myself, old, happy, relaxing in the sun, on the porch outside a San Francisco house in upper Market – but it is a half-drowned San Francisco in the parts of the city that have survived global warming, people in boats going from one hill or another, some time in one future or another: and in the vision someone is making dinner inside, someone I love – is that person going to be D.?...

But here in my own kitchen, where I am standing in 2018, I put the dishes away, I smile through the window, watching the beauty of the dimming summer day:

because I know I'm going to live forever.

Anniversary, again

The eleven-year anniversary of this blog....

Well, hey, it matters to me. A bit.

•••

After a brief but unpleasant virus – probably caught on that hasty train south and back – everything has a slightly disconnected feel to it: still coughing occasionally, but so what?... work to do, but really, who needs it?...

Shower, laundry, get myself dressed enough to go buy cough drops... then home and a Skype workshop, prefaced by a 'recovering, so everyone go away' message, and watch without participating.

The overlap in the past few years of analysis, the resultant digging in deep cellars, a vast increase in meaning, followed by a recurrence of that life pattern where fantasies of things I thought I wanted are taken away at a level beyond my control – perhaps this is the pattern I struggle with: a pattern about which I'm happy to make stories (like that last blog post), but uncomfortable accepting as truly mine.

And maybe that dislocated, dissociated, quasi-schizoid space between waking and sleeping, between sick and full of medications and awake and recovering, is always and innately the best place to see all of this...

Yet, disconnected. Not quite like a Kafka, or PKD, story – this is calmer, but it highlights the slight unreality of things....

•••

Spring, with clouds and some rain.

Awareness, with some darkness.

Return to health, with some coughing.

•••

Eleven years of occasionally writing, here – 753 posts, so that makes... 1.3 posts per week.

Time, space... a nearly Buddhist sense of the contingency of decisions and actions.

I may cancel some plans... that seems reasonable enough. Like reducing noise levels.

•••

You'd like the sun: that North Sea slanting, pale light, but brighter than usual – it would be beautiful to paint it....

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....

Nine years

Nine years ago today, this blog was begun... in 2006.

And this the 708th post!... so, about one every 4.6 days. Not as often as I feel-that-I-should, but steady enough I guess.

So, how's it going?

There's egotism of course – I like my own writing – which, I think, has gotten better – though also denser, more tangled –  but more precise; with, still, the elaborate sentence structures and punctuation that Jennifer pointed out some years ago – but less of the slangy, less of the everyday.

Reducing the slangy and everyday was never a conscious decision – I think some of it might be my own relative isolation over the past thirteen years; plus the fact that, now that I'm studying at the Jung-Institut, my brain is working harder again – which is good.

And, as I've said before, I think my style changed a bit after my stroke in 2009... we like to act as though I recovered fully, but it's perfectly possible that some minor processing centers burned out in that brief storm. Impossible to tell, but I still think that my mind was oddly clearer after that event – as though some fragments of myself were perhaps lost, erased – but the remainder was more in focus, in some ways. Linguistically, at any rate.

And there's been a bit of a shift away from repeatedly going through past things that had hurt me, that seemed to have thrown me aside: this was a change that wasn't made in reaction to the two who have had the temerity to tell me I was whinging (Michael P., the brilliant choreographer/dancer, who combined that complaint with other behaviour that offended me at the time, to the point where I am no longer in contact with him; and my dear Patrick J., who did get a blast of anger from me, but whom I would never drop completely – though, since he moved away, we merely exchange occasional greetings); but instead, probably, just through psychoanalysis: a resulting decrease in grieving, in perpetually experiencing loss.

•••

So, I'm probably a bit more adult – a bit older, more in focus.

My new direction over the past five years or so – studying to be a psychoanalyst: unthinkable back in 2006, but a pleasure – a plan for the future that is meaningful.

A university department that is still under some stress from upper-level nonsense, but where the emotional temperature has dropped – more reason, more calmness and separation.

A home that is a bit more self-consciously pleasant, organised. There's more junk in it of course – I still need to do some ruthless cutting; but the space works.

Friends whom I see more often than I did in 2006 – I actually see people regularly, something that hadn't been really true since I left San Francisco in 1997.

My mother is gone – not unexpected; she died in 2011 – and, what was more of a shock, my eldest sister died in 2007. The universe changes shape when we lose family....

•••

Another year, and I'll be 59, closing in on 60 – and closer to finishing at the Jung-Institut, which will probably be in February of 2017.

My HIV status is pretty even-handed, feels safer/more stable than nine years ago. Of course I certainly need exercise – it's on the to-do list.

And perhaps I'll free of HCV – assuming the new government doesn't clamp down too fast (in which case, he said ghoulishly, this can become a cirrhosis-and-death blog instead. Hmm, that doesn't sound like much fun.)

In a year I'll be someone else again: planning on more changes and possibilities, I hope –

See you next May.

Anniversary

My first blog post was dated 14 May 2006... good lord, eight years ago.

689 posts (including this one), therefore eighty-six or so per year - actually rather better than I thought.

I experience this as – partly – a long-term narrative of moving from sadness, and a lot of retelling stories of the past, to something a bit more complex, more wide-ranging: an experience, or a view, with much more space and growth in it –

partly as a result of the sheer luck of reentering psychoanalytic experience and theory: a feeling of having (being) a living self, growing, becoming more aware from year to year – rather than less.

Which – and I stay this with real, unprepared surprise, and pleasure – is really what I want most from Jungian individuation: that I, that we, keep on growing through time, even while moving through aging, moving towards death – rather than being either stuck in the past, or devolving into a deteriorating collection of repeated ideas, repeated reactions, predictable limitations, lowered expectations.

Which reflects the fact that, though my personal analysis with B. has been very intense and often passionately sad over the past month, it has also been deeply and electrically exciting – and I can feel that excitement: as though vast chunks of the past, of memory and feeling and experience, are becoming part of me once again: as though blood is flowing into dead limbs....

It is particularly wonderful in May, as the trees become greener and fresher, as we do also.

Remarkable, too, that one of my analysands has been going through something similar, and in a similarly intense way. B. and I laughed about this yesterday – synchronicity and possible mutual influence and transformation: I made a 'realistic' apology for any overly fantastic statements (which do often float around in Jungian work), but B. hooted at me, saying: really, where is the problem here.

If there is a problem... because perhaps there is not one.

(And then there's the other 'combined' psychological process between B. and I – the past few sessions we keep discovering how similarly we think, in terms of processing, etc. The difference between an analyst who is very different than you (thus helping you connect to something beyond your normal patterns) and someone who is very similar (who can create a remarkable self-reflective process)...)

So, despite intermittent physical miseries, an unpredictable world, a sense that there are passing dark spots crossing the world –

it does feel like spring....