in the hall of mirrors

Seven years

Three days ago: this blog's seventh anniversary... not of course terribly important; but I'm pleased I've kept going.

It has occurred to me that I may need to stop blogging at some point in the future – when I am working as an analyst; I know I already tend to work through thoughts and problems here, and that might be professionally problematic.

But we'll see.

In any case: it is spring, it is the awkwardly numbered year 2013; but I'm glad to say I'm still around at the age of fifty-six.

Which indicates, at least numerically, a certain amount of success....

Wings

A sudden and amazingly heavy rain fall: plus a lot of hail – that strange sense of buckets of water and ice falling, and for a considerable while. The usual fragments of thought about climate change and problem weather, combined with the visceral excitement of it all, which is fortunately happening on the other side of my windows.

Looking up, there is a sea gull flying east, from the direction of the city out towards the coast: high and intense and swift, he seems incredibly determined. Perhaps panicking, perhaps enjoying it, perhaps simply focused – whatever his response, I really have never seen a gull fly so fast, as though hailstones aren't hitting his wings, his tail, his head.

Astounding: speed, and ruthless focus....

Six years; and recent weeks

Blog Anniversary: since 14 May 2006. It is now six years....

How different life is now than it was then: yes, still in Newcastle, same job, same apartment, still living alone. But the inner world, and my memories, expectations, hopes, feel so different...

I suppose I feel more... I don't know. More aware of the past, of places, of various people – without being quite so attached to them. Anger and fear at daily trivia fade into mere irritation; I recall and connect differently to the past (55 years! Four continents, working and living on each! A number of cities, a number of homes – the places I loved most I remember; at some point it would be interesting to make a list of every home I've had). And somehow people seem both more transparent and more whole, in a way... obviously a shift in my perception of them.

There is of course the reserved coolness of being on sabbatical: at times a bit like one of those ancient Chinese or Roman exiles, to a country villa – everything is slower and calmer, the cities are far away.

•••

Admittedly there have been points of contact: last week our students performed David Lang's Are You Experienced?, a post-minimalist work for electronic tuba, narrator and ensemble. Our tuba player, the wonderful Alex Dawson, organized the performance at my suggestion (after all, how often do you discover that there is a virtuoso tuba player among your students). His solo, a burst of amplified, melismatic madness, was quite wonderful.

As for me, I did the narration. In rehearsal, I had discovered that, even after spending time on it, the text doesn't come into clear dramatic focus. It's not really a character so much as it is a collection of composed feelings – compare dreams, hallucinations, where identities flash into and out of being.

(I suspect, in fact, that the entire work tends to be composed in terms of moods, of feelings – rather than the closely focused development of a them (Reich), shifting key signatures and harmonies (Adams), or the subtly elided expectations of the best Glass. It would explain the success of Lang's more focused tour de force, Cheating, Lying, Stealing, a remarkably uncomfortable work based on painfully irregular rhythms; when I teach it in class, I talk about  some of the disturbing darkness of the late 1980s and 1990s, of a world Adorno would have recognized.)

Which meant I could focus on performing feelings: the visceral, the highly charged, the not entirely conscious. Overlapping scenes and lines and musical moods shift from panic to anger to a creepy sort of reassurance – but the kind of reassurance a serial killer gives his victims. (I didn't say they were nice feelings, mark you.) My miking – excellent tech by our department technician (who incidentally just won a well-deserved University award for being fabulous) – was very responsive to closeness and breath; I realized I could really chew on the mike for the last movement, which becomes slow and dark and dreadful. Most remarkable was the sense of abandon in letting the final growling whispers grind through the speakers. As I told a friend, I was channeling Vince D'Onofrio – a far, far better actor than I'd ever hope to be; but a powerful model of a big, dangerous man with enormous energy and focus, all of it held in reserve.

Quite an experience: and I probably did a better job than I usually do of letting the visceral out – all of this Jungian work has reoriented some of my sense of where parts of myself are living.

 •••

This week there was also a memorial puja for Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, the guru who made such a difference in my life when she visited Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She died thirty days before this ceremony, in mid-April of this year; she was the kind of person it is hard to imagine dying – that boundless, generous, almost preterhuman energy. There is an odd resonance with my mother's death last fall, as with my eldest sister's several years ago; I suppose, finishing this at the end of Mother's Day before I post it on the day after, it is indeed true that everyone has several mothers, and several fathers.

Ma had some of the elements of that tradition of 'mad' Buddhist teachers – unlike the usual Hindu or Buddhist or other Eastern religious, who tended to act calm, quiet, reasonable – cool – Ma was one of those who exploded with a chaotic, sensual, often hilarious energy. She tended to toss insight, strength and advice at people so fast and so hard that they would lose their footing almost immediately, and have to listen.

Not polite, not reasonable: but utterly real... hmm, maybe I could learn that from her. Yet again.

Anniversary 5

Five years of this blog, today... yes, of course entries are occasional, and they scatter themselves across oblique moods and memories, more than direct experiences – well, that's kind of how my life runs these days. But I'm generally pleased with it – the reflections are perhaps not as fragmented, as decentered, as the Swedish modernist cycle of poems referred to in the title.

Tonight we went around a yearly exhibit series here in Newcastle, 'The Late Show', where all sorts of galleries and studios are open late on Friday and Saturday. It's really amazing how many work and studio spaces are scattered along the west side of town – I knew about some of them, but it turned out that old building after old building, former warehouse after former warehouse, isn't dusty and unused inside, but remarkably full of artists – I didn't know there were so many of them. Some of the artwork was very impressive – some huge sculptures of fallen fruit and flowers; dark, crabbed etchings of small church gardens. I tended to respond especially to the intricate and the detailed, rather than the large and splashy.

But actually, the amazing experiences for me were in some of the privately rented studios and workrooms. My love for living spaces, which crosses through so many of my dreams (there are more dreams of rooms, buildings, streets with peculiar architectures, in my inner world than a lot of other kinds of symbols) was awakened by a few of the rooms – some studios overlooking the Ouseburn (a small tributary of the river Tyne) had different levels of work spaces, sitting spaces that looked out of windows, and even lofts where it might be possible to sleep. Although it's probably only allowed to work in them, not to sleep, a few had been turned into wonderful quasi-homes – whether the artists slept there or not, they could have, and that was wonderful.

Best of all, a particularly large basement studio on the side next to the river, with tables and bookshelves lining the river side, a large printing press in the lower area, and chairs and spaces that were both work-oriented and comfortable. For this evening when there were people walking through, candles everywhere, the room cleaned up, prints on the walls – but the upper level, with the tables and windows, not open to just everyone: a sense of subtle privacy – as though the woman who lived there knew it was beautiful, but also knew that it was hers. Like an amazingly resonant, peaceful, hard-working place to live... quite a dream, really: that deep sense of quiet and calm concentration, of awareness, of sensitivity to things, and to the spaces they occupy.

[The picture is a tiny caravan/trailer – not a studio, but it has some of the same balanced, real feeling to it.]

The Evil Internet

Normally, although the Internet is a mess of advertising and manipulation, much of my daily experience of it is relatively personal, or at least to my taste.

But in the last few days the trashy, controlling, greedy, incompetent, screaming corporate world has been moving in heavily on some of my familiar standards... the Mac shareware site is taken over by a corporation that has ruined it in just a few days, Bloglines is being discontinued by its growing corporation because it doesn't pay enough, and of course Pirate Bay flickers on and off.

The stupidest part of this is the sheer heavy-handed ineptitude of the bloated corporate management once they take over these sites – they broaden it, mess it up, make it unreadable, then when it stops paying off (because they ruined it so quickly and so utterly) they close it down after a few years. I know also that this is the invasion of my haughtily superior Mac sites by the cheap trash of the Windows world – because Apple is no longer considered to have such a small client base as to be useless for corporate drones.

Ridiculous. I know that my students, and other savvy youngsters, stay a hundred steps ahead of these changes, and that for them many of these sites were hopelessly vieux jeu long before they were taken over. But I'm not as good at keeping up with the new versions of things... oh well, another bit of proof that tiresome old Adorno was right.

It reminds me a bit of this lovely/hideous/comic/grotesque video, on io9 (which seems a nerdy enough site, though with energetically frequent daily updates, that no corporation would bother with it – I hope). They are cheerful despite all those little advertisements, aren't they?...

A few words

After this period of sparse blog entries – and me feeling a bit guilty for not keeping this up – Romi phoned me tonight to make sure I was all right (she lives out of town in Northumberland, and we don't see each other often – she actually glances at this blog occasionally to see how I am).

Which is lovely of her... and no I'm not giving up on the blog, and no I haven't written anything since Zürich, and yes things are fine, basically.

The good bits: I'm in better health than for I've been a long time (thank you Jambo), Zürich went well (I have some photos to put up), it has been a quiet summer; my intentions have been to FINISH some research bits once and for all. I have mostly procrastinated, but at least I have little to do but procrastinate, so that keeps me from easily justifying not working.

 The unamusing bits: I haven't done much though some things are nearly gone for good (wouldn't it be a blessing if I could get help to finish the so-dreadfully-overdue book on Gerhard!), and I really want them all out of the way because, annoyingly, I will have to start a nasty medication this fall – interferon, for either three months (if it fails) or eighteen months (if it works) – and have calculated my calendar so that the best time to start it is in early November. Have warned department head, etc., so it should all go smoothly. And am very much hoping not to take antidepressants thank you very much, we'll see how that discussion (argument) goes (normally you're expected to take antidepressants if you go on interferon – but I'm in good shape... we'll see).

Oh, and the weather is chilly and rainy – it is in fact an exceptionally rainy Northumberland summer: I think that as the rest of the planet heats up we might expect our relatives from far and wide to start angling to come live with us, don't you think?

Reserve your places now.

And Mom is fragile – the blunt truth is she may not be with us for much longer. Which makes me constantly wonder if, or when, I should be going home for a visit.

The useful bits: finish the research (see above), and my analyst says above all I should be doing something creative: write, draw, paint (even with as little skill as I have drawing or painting, nobody has to actually see it).

Or, of course: I could be creative by – writing blog entries!... hmm, yet another blog entry that circles around to its own topic.

Therefore I promise you, though I may or may not be boring at times, that I shall speak up a bit more.

Continue to have a lovely summer – see you around....

Anniversary 4

Four years of this blog – and you'll pardon me for writing so few entries over the past four months; I promise I haven't stopped writing completely.

In fact, next week I'm in Milan and Parma for a trip to our exchange partners; I was naturally a bit intimidated by going to northern Italy wearing my usual scruffy clothes (especially those awful shoes, which should have been replaced at least eight months ago), so Merrie helped me shop yesterday so that I would look decent enough to pass muster. The shoes we bought weren't quite her choice, but she thought they were, um... acceptable. And hey they were cheap.

And the linen sports coat – can I go for a bit of a silver-fox look?... All I really want in life is to live with George Clooney, or at least look faintly like him. (Feeza won points by saying she thought I looked more like Robert Downey Jr., which after the Sherlock Holmes film is a pleasant compliment. If, of course, exaggerated. Anyway, I'm at least an inch taller than he is....)

Most annoying part of the shopping trip: why is Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' playing so often in every single damned store? It was actually rattling through my head at 4 am, and although the video is interestingly decadent there's very little to the song itself. Most fun part: trading quips with Merrie for about five hours – we decided we were doing Nick and Nora Charles, without the dog....

Then in mid-June I'm back to Zürich, this time for three weeks, to study at the Jung-Institut. A bit unfortunate that I'll still be in a small hotel rather than a rented room with access to a kitchen, and of course it will cost more than I like – but still pleased to be going. It's actually hard to imagine quite what I will know, or think, at the end of the three weeks: of course that's the point of it all.

What else? Many dreams, some startlingly resonant, others repetitive. Students anxious as exams approach, but they are generating somewhat fewer silly problems than usual. More focus and confidence on writing, which I suppose is real news, although only when it actually results in things getting finished. And I'm a British citizen now, though it's disappointing to get notice of that on the day after such a scruffy, miserable, threatening result to a contested election.

Money, plans, future: a large tidal wash of planning aspects of the future, of trying to construct an old age that won't be too uncertain or miserable.

And, surprisingly often, temporal glimpses that run far forward or far back: a sense of the complexity of time, and how important it is – or would be – for us to be constantly aware of the complex changes, possibilities, limitations of our time on earth, and how they should affect all of our decisions....

Snapshot

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

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

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

waiting, for whose eyes I cannot imagine.

Anniversary

Yesterday (oops, missed it) was the third anniversary of this blog. 460 entries – that's about one entry every two-and-a-third days.

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately... life has consisted of, on the one hand, scattered and rather disorganized external demands (students discovering that they need to do some work before the end of the semester, colleagues setting up meetings on a rather chaotic basis); and on the other a vague ongoing examination of the inner world.

Dreams, analysis, uncertainty as to my own impulses: I cannot help feeling that I should be moving forward in a more aggressive manner with these things. But at least there is movement, of a kind.

But I keep wondering why I do things, and how I come to certain conclusions....

Broken lines of communication

A week since I've written in a journal, or done any spontaneous morning writing (see Dorothea Brande's famous 1934 book for instructions); and more since I've written here.

Well, let's see... an onslaught of students, most of them pleasant though some pretty feckless, but the sheer chaotic mass, the noise and mess, of them is daunting; three days of having a cold (more precisely: a cold virus endemic to a population of migrating undergraduates, transmission airborne, from a female first-year vector – who sat next to me in the first tutorial and sneezed and coughed at me for an hour, while I acted pleasant and urbane and thought at the back of my head, oh no, this won't end well).

And a difficult e-mail, an unfair and painful piece of work, from someone I didn't expect to attack me that way: and one that forbade me to mention it on this blog. No, I didn't feel any need to pay attention to that stricture – it's not anyone's decision but mine what to discuss here – but of course it tainted everything, adding a certain hostility, plus my own defensive anger, to every thought I've had for a week.

Which, of course, temporarily damaged my relationship to this blog, and to most everything else too... of course it has also helped me reexamine relationships, which naturally need a lot of attention in my life.

And, of course, all work on The Book has ground to a complete halt... it is always frustrating, and more than a little bit pathetic, how easy it is to stop me dead. Any foolishness can do it: I may be tough on some fronts, but in creativity/productiveness I am a helpless creampuff. Ridiculous....

Although not all the lines were broken: Patrick and I have seen each other a couple of times this week; he's doing very well, and it was very comfortable to putter around town with him, and to sit in his office while he gets ready for his own onslaught of students. The value of a good friend, in the absence of other kinds of support....