in the hall of mirrors

Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire

If you think about it all: rot, chaos, aggression. Disintegration.

But my desk remains, my job remains, my friends and colleagues remain... I buy food, talk to students, plan trips. There are no problems.

To be honest, there have been some fairly disastrous periods even during my lifetime when one couldn't depend on governments for simple support, basic decency; and most of us pottered, or occasionally staggered, along through that.

***

You know how personal development sometimes operates, in a relatively liberal society – people allow themselves to imagine or behave in ways that may have caused them apprehension, that may have seemed shocking or impossible, gradually integrate those aspects of themselves, become comfortable with them – and gain larger awareness, peace of mind, become able to handle things and continue. Often their most radical behaviour fades, though they won't ever again be alarmed by someone offering them a joint, or a bed, or a bizarre costume...

But when the paradigm of that personal development is projected onto culture, and individuals and groups and nations split off to be possessed by shadows or demons or angels that are floating around and gathering energy in the population, then the damage can be concrete and real, and irreversible, because the real world does not absorb energy and rebound like the symbolic world. And, of course, in the worst cases, war, destruction. Including when a culture has spent some decades living with the potential of total destruction: whereupon bursts of total freedom, of irresponsibility, become a lot more... alarming. (See some of the solutions for Fermi's Paradox.)

Right now it seems as though two major governments are possessed by their own shadows: and all the demonstrations, letters, battles, have at the moment no impact whatsoever – because the politicians are acting out their own fantasy worlds, floating in strange and unreal vacuums. Even the ones who don't seem seriously dissociated – May, Corbyn – act as though they are wandering through dream spaces, making decisions that are not quite real, but that symbolise their fantasies of power and recovery....

***

The title is the third section of Tom Disch's eerily great novel 334; at one level the section is more sedate, less anxious, than the others – a kind, reasonable therapist, a middle-aged woman, works with hallucinogenic drugs in a New York a decade or two from now; the approved structure of her therapeutic interventions is that she and her patients 'live' for periods in a fantasy world where their lives can be worked out, and her particular professional fantasy world is fourth-century Rome. It is clear that, within the fantasy world, no one knows that the Empire is irretrievably dying – there are inconveniences and changes, a farm is destroyed by a wandering army, but life potters on.

Such a wonderful title: ironically academic, casual. Summing up the quotidian and the apocalyptic in a simple phrase.

Because her life, in her New York, which to the reader is clearly in trouble, is perfectly fine: she sees patients, takes out the trash, makes dinner for her husband and son. When under the drug, she and her patients sit by an unfinished pool on a farm in the Roman countryside, talk about the new mysticism from the East, ask the servants to bring things. From one angle, it is the end of an empire, all collapsing into dust: but from another, the weather is pleasant, and here are grapes and a ewer of fresh water....

•••

Life is, after all, not bad at all. My list of things to do is long – I must keep up with students, with classes; I must move ahead with work for the Jung-Institut. There are indeed three papers to write, and the one for the patient and kindly J. is so absolutely overdue that it must, must, be done in the next very few days. Like, within four days, frankly, or perhaps five.

But I feel fairly well. Sleeping a bit too much, but that's not disastrous – the body is, well, pottering along; the bed is comfortable, I come back to the desk. Food seems interesting, the apartment is clean and open. I make a point of giving away some books and CDs – and there is a bit more space around the desk, and that is pleasant.

I went to the 'other' HIV support group again – a lot of guys, it was pleasant, a place to feel at home. I even noticed that others are also a bit too chunky, or not walking with alacrity – perhaps my physical annoyances are sort of normal for people who are no longer young, who are taking complex medicines, who are part of a sedentary computerised culture. In any case none of these problems seem terribly huge.

Facebook is of course full of articulate unhappiness and resolve from American friends, and from others; but I feel as though I can't really do anything about that. Sign petitions, watch the British government to see how abysmally stupid it's going to get... think of moving smoothly, obliquely, to another, non-Anglophone country – we'll see, perhaps in a couple of years or so.

Time scales are shortened, and the world is made a bit smaller in my mind. Can't pay attention to everything.

Music, earphones, it is now late evening. Put some documents aside, that's enough work on them.

Perhaps a bath....

The best lines

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six...."

"...In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch and held it high up to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door. 'I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,' said the Spirit. 'Look upon me!'"

"'... Thank you and your husband so much for the beautiful calendar you sent us. It was so good of you to think of us –' 'Oh, you can't possibly say that.' 'Why not? It's what I always say.' 'We sent them something on the twenty-second, so they had to think of us. There was no getting around it.' 'Well, what did we send them?' 'I forget – good heavens – I think it was a calendar....'

"Her fingers tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and alas! a quick change to hysterical tears and wailing. For there lay the combs that Della had worshipped for so long in a Broadway window. And now they were hers, but the tresses they should have adorned were gone. But she hugged them to her, and at length she was able to smile and say: 'My hair grows so fast, Jim. Oh! You haven't seen your beautiful present! A platinum watch chain, I hunted all over to find it. Give me your watch, I want to see how it looks on it.' Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled. 'Dell,' said he, 'let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to buy your combs.'"

"Ralph and Imogene were there all right, only they didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they were in the right place – because of all the candles I guess, and the church being full of people. They looked like people you see on the six o'clock news – refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't care what happened to them. They couldn't have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph – Imogene's veil was cockeyed as usual, and Ralph's hair stuck out around his ears."

"Look, would it be all right if I was to put you in the stable? I mean, just for tonight, till we can get a bit of space clear. It won't be too bad in there, there's plenty of straw and all that, and we can keep the animals separate – I could give it a clean-out first. No charge of course, till you have a room – come on then, bring her in, and be careful. I'll get the boy to fetch the midwife... dear oh dear, what a night, what a night..."

"A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. 'Oh my,' she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, 'it's fruitcake weather!'"

"I opened the last carton, labeled DECORATIONS. There on top was the cardboard tree Jannie had made in kindergarten. That always went on the dining room table, and then there was the big Santa Claus face Sally had done in first grade, and that went on the back door, and the red and green paper chains Larry had made when he was a Cub Scout went over the doorway. Not two weeks ago Barry had come home from nursery school with a greenish kind of a picture of a snowman, and that somehow got established on the refrigerator next to the big chart Larry always made early in December, so we could all fill out our Christmas lists and keep them in plain sight. Here were the popcorn strings my mother strung when I was the youngest child, and the paper bells Larry and I made when he was so small it seems unbelievable now, and the jigsaw Santa my husband cut out the same year, and the painted candy canes, and the red ribbons, and the green paper wreaths. 'Oh, my,' I said, looking at all of it. 'Oh, Mom, just sit down,' Jannie said. 'You just don't remember, that's all. You sit down and I'll do it.'"

"If, on the other hand, you want your celebration to be social, you will probably find that you have more options than you may have realized at first. Whether you perceive your lack of family as an irretrievable loss or as a chance to explore new options depends entirely on your attitude. First, redefine your idea of 'family'..."

"But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."

At this point

A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years...

in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that appeared again, in heightened post-Confucian forms, in Mao's revolutions...

Across a time where I have expanded and perhaps more broadly experienced certain spaces of my existence, my psyche: where illness and health are seen to be two sides of the same thing, as are living and dying, being and not-being, creating and not creating, closeness to others and distance from them.

Where memories of people – Terry W. seriously explaining something from across a table in Los Angeles, Mark R. still alive and grinning with glee in the living room of a Victorian in the Castro, my sister talking to me in the garden of a London museum – Norma walking energetically in front me in the park a couple of weeks ago, Ma Jaya holding her crowded court in the back room of John's house in West Hollywood, Bill G. looking up at me from the piano in a small club in San Francisco with his kind, ironic eyes –

where they all fuse, in some way, while still remaining distinct...

Strangest of all – and it is strange because I have spent my whole life judging what I am doing: and so there was not enough practicing, not enough writing, not enough work – and later not enough joy, too much being alone yet still not creating, much – that space of time that seems from one angle to be either wasted or celebrated, or – but as we know those judgments merely fold back onto themselves, endlessly burrowing into tunnels of never-enough, so there is no point in extending the discussion of them –

strangest of all is the sense that, looking back, and across, from this late point in life, near my sixtieth birthday – that if I had done everything completely differently: performed, written – stayed with people I loved, landed luckily in some happier houses in warmer climates, smiled across the guests at a dinner table at a man I loved who was sitting at the other end –

that it would have actually been no different: that this awareness of time, of space, of what is and has been, would not actually have an altered nature or substance, merely because it focused on different events, different people. Different raw materials.

That our lives are all, really, very similar cloths, even if made from different threads....

•••

Some visions go to this place, beyond the point of seeing life whole: where the contingency of what actually happened becomes self-evident – the later parts of Nabokov's Ada, Kate Bush's Coral Room – Iain Banks' Excession, Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, Jane Siberry's Oh My My, Malick's Tree of Life – even Spielberg & Kubrick's A.I.: the Buddha would have been pleased.

Where the fights and attempts to win and lose have not merely been resolved in one way or another, leading to a triumphant or tragic ending – but where we have seen that they could have been not only different, but even more: they could have been anything: that we could have reached this clarity from any set of points....

Three women

A few days after the Brexit vote, I am talking to N. over the phone: an intelligent, skilled businesswoman – in fact someone much more skilled at managing the world and its demands, laws and finances than I am (which isn't setting the bar very high, I admit). She is, however, upset, also as I am – concerned about the house she owns, the flat she rents for herself, the economic future for her consultant business, and most of all for her son, who has recently graduated from university and gone to work in London, and his future...

And she and her son are people who really, really have it together. As well as people who have a very good idea how international relations, law and finance all work and are interlinked, as they've both lived in Germany for substantial amounts of time and made complex decisions about citizenship, property, rights, etc.

Though she remains, as always, focused and articulate, in the course of going through various scenarios and plans it is clear that she is also extremely upset – that now familiar sense of the world upending itself, of collapse and disintegration...

•••

On the train back from Sheffield, a woman with glasses and kind, intelligent face is talking to a man on the other side of the table we share. They are talking about choruses, and musicals – the woman is singing with a local chorus for the first time in her life, and enjoying it immensely; the man teaches a lot of students musical theatre, apparently at the school level. I can't resist intruding, talking about the shows and experiences they're discussing, my own experiences, and my students; the woman enjoys our talk, the man might feel a bit more encroached upon.

At Durham he gets out, pleasantly saying good-bye to both of us; she and I talk, then more animatedly around the Brexit vote. She is a judge, going to Edinburgh to preside over a particular case, one about a child in a conflicted family situation; her face is open and warm, but you can also see the dignity, clarity and ethical assertiveness needed for a judge. She is also anxious and angry over the Brexit vote – we talk about consequences, structures, and implicit politics: I admit that some people I know felt as though they were voting against an overly controlling government, but that I would much rather be managed by a number of conflicting organisations arguing their way to some compromise than I would want to be under the heavily oligarchical structure of modern Britain (or perhaps I should say, of modern London; or, as one of my colleagues from London corrected me, of The City – that is, that part of central London dominated by finance and government).

She clearly has a more precise grasp of law and rights than I ever would, so the fact that she looks so concerned, nearly despairing for a large class of people, is arresting...

•••

K. cleans my apartment every month or so, irregularly; she and her husband and two daughters are Bulgarian, and when she is here we always talk about how they are all doing, how school and now university are working out for them. K. is animated and fun, and tends to take care of me, bringing homemade food and asking what I think about various current matters, so of course we talk about Brexit – I do get a bit direct, but we've known each other for years, so I can ask: do her daughters have noticeable accents, are they paying attention to whether they bump into the wrong people in Newcastle, in Sheffield? Because there has been a sharp increase in incidents, with some violence, aimed at immigrants across the entire country in the past weeks.

(As for K. and her husband, they both have fairly heavy accents – I assume they know to be careful in some parts of town...)

We talk about my passports, plans, health care, futures....

K. says it's not a problem, but none of them have British citizenship, so they don't know what will happen to all their plans, to their lives. What is the future for her business, for the family needs that she supports so heroically? (Because I'll tell you, I couldn't do the work she does to keep a family afloat, and they live in a pleasant house.) I get a bit anxiously heavy-handed here, stressing that they should pay attention in bad neighbourhoods...

•••

In the meantime, I have managed to offend my family by firing off an enraged email in response to their Brexit jokes – it really wasn't funny to me (this was a day or so after the vote). M., another American, can see my point of view, as can my analyst – but that's not quite what concerns me: it's not whether I or anyone else are right or not; it is... that general atmosphere of splitting, of disagreement, of confusion...

of panic, of rage, of lowering skies, of fragmenting rights and futures, of disintegrating stabilities.

Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters: an extraordinarily vast, complex novel, where he (the most ethical descendent of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Blackshirts, and so someone who has spent his life trying to figure out how to atone for his father's grotesque actions) outlines the desperate confusion of the 1930s: not knowing where right is, where safety is – some of the violence and chaos of the past weeks suggests what is, at least now, a smaller version of the early 1930s...

Well, for now, anyway.

•••

A week later, I meet with N. again – we sit in a restaurant and talk. We are both calmer, but with plans and ideas: multiple futures, financial and legal... waiting, and watching....

Easter

On the one hand, longer days, sunlight, a still-chilly and intermittent promise of spring.

On the other HCV medications, confusions, changing demands, papers to write –

Behind it all is still a greater calm, dreams that tend to move through anxiety to relief and resolution. Not an imagined change, clearly a real one...

But no, not anything you'd be able to call inner peace.

•••

As for medications: I spent a few days at the beginning of the month, plus a few more days at the beginning of this week, discovering things that are slightly wrong, or that need adjusting, and then discovering that I also have to revisit older medications, including some of the post-stroke medications I'd gleefully dropped last summer – and just when it all seems clear and I've pinned things down, very very firmly (hmm, are we in some way anxious?), there was yet another change, or an error, or an adjustment...

It's not that they don't know what they're doing – or that they aren't meticulous and caring, because they are – it's the tangled interface between HIV treatment, HCV treatment, post-stroke and blood pressure medications, and the extremely exasperating though apparently trivial fact that my 'miracle' HCV medication (not the really, really hideously expensive one, though I doubt it's particularly cheap, but hey I have citizenship so no one can claim I shouldn't be given it) cannot be taken simultaneously with any antacids.

Which is so exasperating because neither the miserable HIV medications I've taken since October, nor the new HCV medications, are at all stomach-friendly.

Therefore, at the very least, three months (well, I've done more than two weeks of my time already) of daily, self-induced stomach upset and grogginess and occasional shaking exhaustion, all of which always make me unconscious and uninterested in work, or anything else.

Okay yeah gripe gripe gripe.

A tangle of protocols and contraindications...

•••

My skin is just a shade closer to orange. It is probable that bilirubin will increase until I look fairly jaundiced for three or four months. And the self-righteous youngest-child in me thinks, That'll show 'em – anyone who thought I was exaggerating my anxieties about my current treatment will be Properly Ashamed of Themselves, when I end up the color of a mandarin...

(And this has a previous referent in my life-as-a-patient: in 2001, teaching as a guest lecturer at UCLA, I started Ritonavir for HIV - which came in very large orange capsules. So, when I started to turn orange, I thought it must have something to do with those pills. Nonsense of course, it was the appearance of HCV and bilirubin from a disoriented liver. What a disturbing time that was – so ill and disoriented, the injected interferon, fragmenting health... Susan later said, you looked like you could blow away in the wind. But that was a past, and somewhat worse, time.)

When I am more orange, I will sit in department meetings and scare the heck out of administrators.

I am only heroic on alternate weekdays...

•••

It may be the wrong time for the Jung-Institut to run an online Skype seminar on Aion, which includes some of Jung's major thinking on sacrifice, Christianity, and the cross. I'll admit I didn't much enjoy the discussion around Tarkovsky's last film, The Sacrifice – the long, dark dream, the imagined brutal sacrifice of his son, the vision that tells him that if he gives up everything, then the world will be saved –

So he burns his house down, and goes to the hospital, refusing ever to speak again.

The discussion went quickly past a usually important Jungian distinction, symbolic vs. real – which has little to do with the more arcane Lacanian developmental distinction; it is simply that we can imagine, dream, create images that have implications that don't need to be embodied in the real world...

But I was bothered by this, and burst out in irritation, disagreement – really anger: that we can't be too blithe, too easy, about images of death and sacrifice, because they can lead onward to realities...

Think of, for instance, the web of oblique, uncontrollable psychosomatic processes: if despair or depression induce psychosomatic states that can tend toward illness – including real, dangerous illnesses: cancers and such – then we can't really treat these casually. Because when something dark enters the ageing, damaged body, it doesn't leave easily.

•••

And yes, of course: now I can see (actually, I could see within an hour after the online seminar) that my insistence on emphasising that distinction emerged from my own anxiety, my own anger, my own panic over the return of serious health concerns over the past year.

The difference between symbolic disaster and real disaster: because very, very real disasters do happen to people.

Easter is symbolic – of course anyone getting crucified probably wouldn't be satisfied with seeing it that way...

•••

When I did go to the HCV clinic, what started out as rational/discursive – we checked some of your ancillary medications, and it turns out you can't take this one simultaneously with that one – I basically went to pieces.

A rhetorical, still fairly articulate kind of going-to-pieces – running through the medications forward, then backward, repeating that I really, really didn't want these medicines to fail, should we be worried that the first two weeks of pills might have conflicted with each other, is this all going to fail?, I know that transplants are possible if improbable – exactly what do I do each morning then, how about evenings? Because it's not as though I can really –

In other words: tense, more than a bit incoherent: yes all right, more than a little hysterical. She watches me, calmly, a certain stillness in her face: she has moved into a, for her, familiar awareness that a patient is going to pieces, and will simply wait it out, on what is probably a long day...

•••

The humorous version of this was Jean Kerr, when she talks about being in the hospital, and going from being charming and friendly to a post-operative state that is more irritable and loathsome: "It's as though June Allyson had been transformed into Ana Pauker right before their eyes. And they feel, not unreasonably, that they have been betrayed. As a result, the whole staff gives me approximately the same brisk, gingerly attention they would bestow on an old bandage."

Well, the HCV nurse was more generous than that. But I'm assuming my stock in the various infectious diseases departments, which has been built up from years running the HIV group, has dropped a bit...

•••

She does respond at one point: well, the ribavirin does, of course, create anxiety, all on its own.

I want to roll my eyes and say, Tell me about it, sister!...

•••

All at a time of cultural and personalised stress – astounding how many people on Facebook and across the internets are raging, correcting, attacking – I don't mind a lot of the tension and anxiety, though it makes for tiresome reading, especially as it is so repetitive; but when my self-consciously ethical, idealistic American colleagues, brought up within the same wave of identity politics that organised much of my education and writing, start aggressively correcting each other, I can't help thinking:

we're all getting older.

And some of us seem to be projecting an increasingly you-damned-kids-get-off-my-lawn emotional stance onto current American politics, and gender complexity, and disability, and neuropolitics...

I don't much mind being judgmental and easily irritated, that's something I've always done. But I hope I don't end up spending as much time being self-righteous as some old colleagues.

•••

Today I am better: when I finally figured out that I could still take the stomach medications at night, sleep is easier. I am a bit more accustomed to side effects. Perhaps because I had a chance to go to pieces with the nurse, I feel calmer –

•••

Tomorrow is Easter. We will hold the online seminar, despite the holiday – well of course, who's going to miss a chance to talk about sacrifice on Easter Sunday?

I am perhaps not quite as resentful of the reading, or the ideas, as I have been.

As for anxiety, as for dreams – with the spring sun, I will take what I get:

I'm still a bit touchy about all these sacrifices, though –

Wandering the stacks

So: I am finally going through all the books, and then the papers, in my office.

My office is being moved soon – rather sooner than I'd expected: repeated insistence on a clear date on my part gave rise to a flurry of emails assuring me that it wouldn't happen until mid-September; but now of course some administrator somewhere has changed his mind.

Or perhaps not: another administrator, always obliquely unsympathetic to our department, may simply be rushing me. (She retires next year... as she, for some reason, pointed out to me in our discussion. We may be feeling similarly about this.)

But, given that I have a huge mess of books and papers – approximately 9 of those tall Billy bookcases? –

and, even more importantly, given that my professional tastes and goals have changed in the past fifteen years...

it is a good idea to cut back (not as much as the administrator hopes – perhaps 10-15% will go) and look through things.

***

This is, however, not merely a practical experience, but an existentially complex one.

In the 80s and early 90s, I was fascinated with many aspects of music and musicology, gender and theory and modernism, history and ideas and people and... oh, tons and tons of things.

This all solidified a bit across the upheavals of the 90s: it became a bit clearer what I was good at, what I'd never be good at, and most of all what I cared about. The general move from a fascination with complex systems to more existential concerns, partly as a result of AIDS, emotion, bodily experience, and an anxious realization that many complex systems have little to offer beyond their own complexity, made me feel as though I was leaving Castalia... and that I was right to do so.

Then the crash landing in Newcastle, after expulsion from Australia, left me with chaotic feelings of retreat and anomie – nothing that I had formerly found interesting seemed alive any more. Yes, of course, I should have been grateful for this job, but it was hard to experience that... and so many projects dissipated into thin air.

But lately even the Stäbler book has been finished!...

***

So, as I go through these books, many of them recall people, conferences, conversations, events... concerts, ideals, hopes...

I'm thankful for the shifts of the past two years: this would have been emotionally painful before those transformations.

Still, books raise many flashes of wistfulness, disappointment – gladness; missing certain people, recalling them happily or with annoyance. There are people who have simply vanished from the face of the planet, as far as I can tell – a difficult thing in an internet world, that makes one wonder.

And, strangely enough, some old ideas and projects are starting to seem interesting again... 

***

So, exactly which books shall I get rid of?

Many, many books on modernism. Some repeat what others say, but more cheesily, with terrible illustrations. Some are by composers – if I don't care much about the composer any more, and it's an incoherent personal tour of various thoughts, it's out. Many overviews of modernism, avant-garde, technique: some are better than others – the wonky ones are jettisoned.

Loony, wide-ranging babbling by composers, even good ones, is of limited appeal. Only the ones who can actually make a point and stay focused are worth keeping.

Look at all those Stravinsky books! Are they all really useful?... but ultimately I only got rid of one of them.

Darmstadt: a wide range of composers and ideas interest me. But hey, not all of them – this collection on Goeyvaerts will never be opened again. Slush pile for library.

***

I've always been impressed – probably too impressed – by General Theories of Everything. Antiquated ones can go (Toch, Zuckerkandl, etc.); ethnomusicological tours of all time periods and places, which are inevitably vague and cloudy; and a range of I-Know-A-Lot-About-Music-And-I Know-What-I-Like overviews of why the great is so great. Or why the great is good, in any case, or other nonsense like that. Too many silly people who were too impressed by bad translations of Hanslick.

It's slightly strange how many works on feminism and gender studies are on the shelves: did I really buy everything that was for sale at all those conferences in the 90s? Yes, of course, I'm known as part of the generation that championed gender studies, but... so many of them say exactly the same things. There are merely better and worse writers...

Anything on gay composers stays, but a lot of the purely feminist can go the library, especially if I don't care about any of the musicians being written about. That's easy.

***

How about really, really complicated theory, that I honestly don't understand any more?

The answer is obvious – anything that works on Kh sets can go; Perle's first book makes sense to me, his second might as well be in Early Assyrian. Too much trouble for one lifetime, it goes to the library.

And what about weird theory – such as the peculiar photocopied pages on Schat's tone clock that were sent out by a New Zealand composer, bound in with an impassioned, handwritten letter pleading that all musicians must take this theory seriously, or otherwise we would drift down the sinful paths of atonality?... (I see from her Wikipedia entry that she resigned from university teaching to join the Divine Light Mission. Well, modernism is next to craziness, we all know that.)

Am I keeping Wuorinen's Simple Composition just so that I can make fun of the title?... He is always rather cranky, as it happens. (Sure he's gay but who cares – and he was crazily abusive of Monk, whom I like.) Dump it (him).

And how about books by other individuals I have come to thoroughly dislike over the decades?... unless they're absolutely necessary, dump 'em. (And no I'm not naming names here. Besides, you almost certainly can imagine the top five, or bottom five perhaps, of the nastiest musicologists in the Anglophone world... since the 90s there has been a great resurgence of unpleasantness in our profession. Some people think that is because these people are more right than others... they will have a bad time in a Buddhist hell, I think.)

***

Who ever thought Penetrating Wagner's Ring was a good title for a collection of articles?... I've got keep that one I guess. If only because no one will otherwise believe that the book exists.

***

I cannot believe how much I have spent on books I don't much like... oh well.

Did you ever fantasize about getting back all the money you've wasted in your life? Falling for embarrassing sales pitches: that car... yes I know, I've read my Adorno, we live in Late Capitalism.

***

Much is done. Much left to do.

Yet this doesn't create depression or anxiety: a surprising number of ideas actually look interesting – as though I could get back into them.

We'll see how the move itself goes – but the conceptual world of this move isn't such a bad one...

And it's nice to clear things out.

Finally.

The Sorting Hat

So, while I was supposed to be doing something else, Eve Forrest generated some ideas on Facebook...

and that made me do this. (Ha! 'made' - like she forced me into it...)

Which house did the Sorting Hat put various philosophers and cultural thinkers into?

***

The List.

Griffendor
Hegel
Foucault
Jung
Socrates
Cicero
Aquinas
Newton
Goethe
Martin Luther King
Barthes
Seneca
Umberto Eco
Koestler
Giordano Bruno
McLuhan

Slytherin
Adorno
Zizek
Freud
Baudrillard
Eagleton
Lacan
F R Leavis
Kristeva
Plato
John Calvin
Nietzsche
Fourier
Bataille
Kierkegaard
Marx
Sartre

Ravenclaw
Butler
Langer
Althusser
Derrida
Fanon
Said
Kosofsky Sedgwick
Badiou
Sontag
Buddha
Descartes
Rousseau
Kant
Trotsky
Beauvoir
Lyotard
Camus

Hufflepuff
Benjamin
Deleuze
Merleau-Ponty
Husserl
Carl Rogers
Horkheimer
Bachelard
Ouspensky
William James
Aristotle
Erasmus
Lao Tzu
Heraclitus
Meister Eckhart
Berkeley
Habermas

***

On reflection I think Hume is in Ravenclaw.

And I forgot Heidegger! Clearly Hufflepuff. Though some thought he was in Slytherin...

Yes, I shall get back to work now.

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....

Gastronomic, hypothetic, erotic

Barcelona...

So, history: frequently, between about 2003-4 and 2008-9, Susan and Rob and I spent some time each summer in Barcelona, or Sitges, which is nearby enough. Changing circumstances, the deaths of Chris and then Dennis, and my increasing preoccupations in Zürich broke that pattern...

And: a few years ago, Susan gave a seminar at the Barcelona music conservatory, and said they were really interested in her work – and that I should contact them. I sent a couple of emails – can we set up an Erasmus exchange? – but no answer. I assumed, well, you know: a large conservatory, attitudes between conservatories and universities – they probably aren't interested.

Then, a couple of months ago, the Barcelona conservatory emailed me out of the blue: they had heard of our department (ha! not because I had already told them about us, of course) and wanted to set up an exchange. Some fussing around, G. wanted to go in my place, I semi-gracefully capitulated; then he was too busy – so, fine: I get to go to lovely, strange, warm Barcelona again, to set up an ongoing relationship... that is intended to support going back and forth fairly frequently.

Uh, I mean, for the whole department, I mean... not just, like, for me. You knew that, didn't you?...

•••

Just after Easter is acceptable timing for them. I tell Norma about it, and she wants to go – so we set up an entire week, over Easter vacation. (Yes-I-know-don't-visit-a-Catholic-country-around-major-church-holidays... but that was when we could go; and it ended up being fine.)

Four days of Norma and I – some fantastic/exotic/complicated restaurants, including some modernist cuisine, plus its current avatar of Catalan-Japanese fusion. Various wonderful meals – at points it was as though that was the main point in being here (my fault, I think).

That first night, a series of small plates (Norma photographed the complicated menu) one after another – fifteen courses, I think? by a frantically energetic bunch of young guys that included some Adriá students.

A later evening, a plain modern café two blocks from the apartment – young people, trendy – great food: and I mean really great food. Small neo-tacos, experimental combinations by someone who really knows what they're doing. And, at the next table, two handsome, bearded Spanish guys talking energetically, kissing at intervals – and this isn't even the gay neighbourhood.

Two dud meals, which isn't too bad. Please read online reviews before going in.

Much architecture, much Gaudí. Parc Guëll was the high point – I'd never gone into the cordoned-off central area; Norma ordered the tickets, which was smart. Much calmer, much more beautiful – that park really works if you can experience it as a park, some place calm and quiet, without all the masses of tourists.

Good Friday!... parades; men and boys in black robes, like the Inquisition come to town. With mockups (I hope they were mockups) of flagellation; statues of Christ – one gaunt and bleeding, another more reservedly covered with a purple robe. A tiny, pale girl in a nun-like outfit, with a tragically pale cast to her face her eyes a bit sunken – she was part of one of the school group parades, and looked a bit too much the part of the suffering believer for my entire comfort. She caught Norma's eye and gave her a small card...

Walking, the harbor... some points where I got peevish with the walking; Norma is thoroughly energetic and likes walking. Well, I got better, after a while.

•••

Could I live here?... I really wanted to, seven or eight years ago. Then I thought: no, that probably won't work – I can't afford it; then with the rise in planning a late career as a psychoanalyst, the mildly anxious sense of the restrictions and qualifications on working in Spain (as in Italy), the number of Jungians in Barcelona (about a hundred?), and how long would it take for me to work out the language...

But I'm thinking about it again. I know, Bologna: but honestly this city is larger, more fantastic. I probably lose some clout by having a Sicilian name, which makes me just another foreigner in a city full of them. But I think it wouldn't be hard to work in English; and perhaps I could occasionally work in German or French, and eventually polish up some Catalan or Castilian... the psychoanalyst from another country, with a heavy accent: it's been done before.

Reading Claudia Roden and Zafón, Robert Hughes, Michener... all on Barcelona, on Spain. Rediscovering my desire to be here... and watching closely to see the good and bad points: a big, gorgeous city; shabby/scruffy in spots; lively, artistic in others; too many tourists; good weather, good food...

El Raval is much too scruffy. The Barrí Gotic is increasingly touristy. El Born – hmm, used to seem a bit boring, but now... except for the smell of urine on too many corners. The Eixample? Maybe, some part of it that's not too massive....

I do still like the idea.

•••

Then my plane home is canceled. Laurie and her family have no trouble getting home to southern England on the same day – but I don't have their luck: planes are full, I have to stay three more days.

And cancel analysands, appointments, students... move a class back a week...

Sergio, whose apartment we are using, has to come back – but fortunately we like each other, we share the apartment. Slightly more complicated are his old girlfriend, and then his new one – the first takes me as part of the family, the second is cooler, French, and clearly would prefer the apartment to herself.

But Sergio likes me, we manage. All a bit chaotic...

•••

On the last night: a small, funky restaurant on the quiet, dark side of El Born, with surprisingly good food; a charming young waiter, who keeps catching my eye and smiling, and laughing, as though slightly self-conscious; and says at the end, Adéu!...

So: I keep seeing guys, and it is erotic. Not exactly sexual, but instantly passionate, sensual: a sense of possibilities, which rarely appears in Newcastle.

Now, at my age (yes, Virginia, I am 58) it may seem a bit graceless – tacky? – to go on and on, especially as these men are often distinctly younger than I am. (I don't put much cachet on youth – it is fortunate that I generally find 20-year-old men uninteresting; which easily keeps me out of trouble on a university campus. Unlike some people I have heard tell of.)

Perhaps it's just that younger men are, themselves, more on the lookout....

But I don't want to act like Goytisolo. Or Capote or Genet, or (please, no) Burroughs. No tacky slavering over the young and handsome.

Perhaps I can be like Cavafy – of course his endless wistfulness does seem a bit pathetic after a while; and so many of the men he is watching have such disastrous lives ahead of them....

•••

But it is the last day. I could live here, I think. (Let's check those regulations again.) And it is pleasant to see the buildings, the sun, the food – the men....

Of Pratchett

Terry Pratchett has died... media are stating it quite carefully; it seems possible, given that he valued the right to die, that it could have been a voluntary act in the face of early-onset Alzheimer's, rather than any kind of medical inevitability.

Which is absolutely his decision – I don't, myself, feel there is any reason to (or that we have any right to) either condemn such a choice or use it as an example of what one must do. Very possibly, in the next few days, some media storm will occur, of course, and people will polarise their opinions...

Which would be an example of the kind of thing he despised, and made fun of.

Ah well, that will also blow over, eventually.

•••

The first great experience of his books that I really noticed was Lord and Ladies – a surprisingly dark book, where he uses all the ancient images of Celtic folklore to see elves as heartless, malevolent creatures: glamorous, yes, but utterly willing to torture and destroy lesser creatures – which, from their point of view, meant everything else. A book with a wonderful ending, where the young witch who has always been flaky and helpless has to become hard as iron in order to defeat them.

Witches Abroad, which I've read several times, is both one of the funniest of the entire list of Discworld books, and has one of the deepest endings – the powerful witch who must defeat her sister, who turns out to be a manipulative narcissist – and they discover in each other similarities that are intensely difficult to get through... really a masterpiece of psychological insight.

Reaper Man – the book where Death really comes into his own, becomes a three-dimensional character, and must deal with his own difficult life (?) transitions. Another favourite.

Hogfather, where we see that the equivalent of Father Christmas must reconnect to his archaic roots to literally reconstitute existence – an amazing trip into the archetypal, with Susan as its briskly matter-of-fact, and at times somewhat irritable, chaperone.

And the University, and the Watch... points where the Captain of the Watch must deal with being a decent husband, and therefore dress differently and behave like a gentleman... where Ponder Stebbins helps save the universe by pushing the possessed psychotic off the University tower... the hilarious chilliness of Lord Vetinari... the unexpected working-through of theological problems in Small Gods...

and all the many, many places where joke after joke after joke rolls along, and one chuckles on trains, while points are made.

I haven't kept up with Pratchett's last three or four books, nor his final ventures into other kinds of fiction – the Nation books, etc. – but they're on the shelves. There will be time to get to them, for me at least...

Such energy, such ability, such a passion. And the subtle but brilliant development of the moral underlay in his books, after he realised they were very popular, and he could meaningfully contribute to the world and its better understanding of itself: which he unquestionably did, if by rather peculiar means.

It was good to see those last tweets – it really is a pleasure to think of him greeted by his own Death, the one who combines ruthless eternity with a thoughtful openness to self-discovery, and a love of cats....

Above all: a very good man.