in the hall of mirrors

Bathing at Delphi

I continue to like Jarman more and more, overturning my earlier irritable disdain.

I have been reading his Chroma, a sort of journal/book of quotes/poetry cycle/death diary, the last book he wrote before he died: it's full of memories and the frightening and painful bits of dying of AIDS, but also full of the joy in colors, the wisdom of a (shortish) lifetime of painting and thinking about colors. I so wish I could have given a copy to my sister Sandy, as she had made a special study of the technology of color – if she hadn't died last December; my other sister would perhaps like it, as she is an artist, but it might not strike the heart of her joys as well.

It is full of wonderful passages; but one that brought me up short is in the chapter on green. It is a short memory of backpacking in Greece with a friend in 1960 or 1961, when Jarman was eighteen; they were on the island of Delphi, lost, late at night, and settled their backpacks and slept by the side of the road. When they woke they were "in a cleft in the mountain. A chasm in which fig trees grew, watered by a crystal spring that sprang from the rock."

They bathed and shaved in the water, washed their clothes – and then were interrupted by some Greeks, who were very angry, then the police came, then they were dragged away and told not to return...

because this was the spring at Delphi, the sacred well of Apollo, where the oracle drank and spoke. Without knowing it.

Although it was sacrilege, although they got in trouble, I was so incredibly envious of him in reading that, I cannot tell you – Jarman himself thinks that is where he got the gift of poetry, of knowing. I think so too.

Door into summer

One of Heinlein's early novels – back when they were relatively short, amusing adventures, and before his testosterone-driven narcissism and paranoia drove him to write the sprawling, ranting novels of his late demented phase – was The Door into Summer (1956 – the year I was born). The pleasant conceit of the title was that the narrator had a cat who, in winter, would go from door to door in his house and miaow to be let out; but that cat was convinced that one of those doors led to summer and warm weather – when the door opened onto snow and ice the cat would retreat in disappointment, to try the next door.

The windows on the west side of my sunny, airy apartment (at least compared to other British row houses – I was really very lucky, given their usual design) open onto spring and the beginnings of warm weather; but those on the east side, on the side that gets a wind from the not-so-distant North Sea, open onto late winter and chilly air. It's a strange balancing act to open windows and not get a clash in weather. This also makes me more aware of the classic European symbols of east and west winds, cold and warm – after years in California, such distinctions seemed blurry....

And across the street on the east side, the other houses – for all of which, of course, that is their west side – have animals in the windows: a black and white cat upstairs, then two doors down a young Irish setter, and a gray cat in the next window. All the animals are expectant, excited, even the demure cats: they pace up and down, eager brown eyes wide open, and keep looking out to the west at the warmer weather, and at the approaching spring....

Ostern in Stuttgart (I)

[March 19-23, 2008]

Winterschnee (Wednesday)

Snow is forecast, although it is Easter weekend (admittedly a very early Easter, tribute to the peculiarly arcane calculations the Church goes through to establish the date – look it up some time, the formula is nothing short of bizarre); and here it is – rich, heavy snow, very wet, but falling beautifully in the small park outside my room.

This hotel room is tiny but outrageously efficient: this is, in fact, a Germany that I’ve always liked a great deal – well-made, well-designed, excellent heating and lighting, wonderful bread, a vast range of Schinken und Käse at the deli next door. Perhaps I like it so much, not only because everything is so dependable, so neat, so functional, but because this is the Germany I first saw in 1993 – my first trip to Europe, the eight or nine months I spent in Kiel and Darmstadt. Like those small cities, Stuttgart was bombed flat in the war; so everything is post-war design, what Joyce has called ‘very seventies’; but Stuttgart does this kind of thing distinctly better than Kiel or Darmstadt, as it is both small and quite wealthy, because of the local Mercedes/Daimler-Benz money. I remember the city tram lines, which had a charming toylike quality – I wonder if they’ll still look that way to me….

Nachtschmerzen

Rather horribly, the night before my flight today, my digestion became acutely painful, endlessly, miserably so; I slept very little, and was a wan, frustrated ghost by the time I took a taxi to the airport. Impossible to change my flight, of course, impossible to handle being on the plane, impossible to handle the unreasonably bad planning at Schiphol where, as I’d been warned, transfers have become outrageously slow and difficult: a weird contrast to the rationalist pleasantness of the architecture of the new airport, which is purely rational urban Dutch, as though the entire place were a Helvetica font.

My dear friend Joyce, whom I am visiting here in Stuttgart, is in so many ways a blessing, and is happy to spend time helping me try to feel better: some Heilpraktiker tea, some pills at the Apotheke, a couple of Brötchen at the delicatessen by my hotel. I can do no work today, although the whole point in this trip is to put together this book that should have been finished ten years ago: but she is forgiving about that, and when we have done what we can to generate some symptomatic cures she takes me back to the hotel, we sneak various teas and a hot-water kettle into my room, and I sleep all evening.

But I’m not really better, and from around midnight that becomes all too clear: tonight, I am still in pain – and, increasingly obviously, real and serious pain. For months I’ve been assuming that my digestive problems were a kind of irritable bowel syndrome, something that requires managing my diet and avoiding coffee (why, in that burst of writing I did before I left, did I drink coffee three days in a row? – such foolishness); but of course last night and tonight I can’t help thinking: is this a different, a worse, problem than that? If I had an X-ray now, would it perhaps show some kind of awful dark shadow on my left side, where the colon is – where the pain is constant now?

Madness. Somewhere between the trivial pleasantries of Stuttgart, the valiant attempt to banish the ancient demons of not finishing this book, Joyce’s kindness, and my long reading of a novel by Nicholas Mosley – a book whose dark, thoughtful confusion is making perhaps too much sense to me right now – I can’t really find my balance. And I need to find it, because I’m not at home, because that damned book must get finished – and because, maybe, I really, really need to go to a doctor: and brace myself for something real – something non-trivial.

Mosley (Thursday)

And how strange: because of the pain, sleep is impossible; instead I have read this dense, wonderful novel – Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters – five and a half hundred pages, entirely between getting on the flight at 10 am yesterday and 6 am today.

It would be so wonderful to sleep: but if I can’t sleep, at least this novel was the best of distractions. The density and darkness of so much of it – the tangled politics, ideas, and increasingly demented behaviors of 1920s and 1930s Germany and England, seen through the eyes very intelligent young people who are at a loss to understand what’s going on… and a happy-ish ending, which brings me great peace, something I could use right now.

Of course, now I have only one other book left to read, a professional and depressing one on the cultural theory of AIDS… I hope the local Buchladen has books in English.

But I think, more importantly, that I need to call Joyce as soon as I think she’s awake, and go see a doctor.

Krankenhäuser (Thursday)

Joyce responds quickly and practically to the situation – she really is a marvel – calling around to see what the best choice of hospitals would be, then telling me to dress and stand outside (I can’t button my pants, but hold them up inside my long coat) while she drives over to get me. The first hospital is a mistake, we are misled by confusing signs and two different hospitals with similar names; but we finally reach the correct one and take a gleaming elevator up to Internal Medicine. Many questions, many explanations, about insurance, citizenship, pain, age, date of birth, previous conditions; Joyce calls me, repeatedly, Herr Doktor Professor, and mentions to me later in an undertone that that ought to get me better attention. It’s like when I was living in Hong Kong: I used my titles like social weapons, and they worked – but I’m out of practice doing that, Brits tend to be somewhat ashamed of professional titles and avoid using them. Joyce points out that, on the top of the check-in sheet that is now the beginning of my medical chart here, it says clearly: Professor….

A charming, businesslike young woman doctor examines me, takes blood, enters me into the hospital: but what is wrong? They don’t seem to know….

Joyce comes with me up to my room, which I share with a very old man (it seems that almost all the other patients are in their seventies or eighties – Joyce says, well, Germany has a negative birth rate). He is not exactly charming – slurping food and moaning occasionally – but his wife and daughter are very pleasant, and I settle down, expectant that someone will now take care of me, and I can stop worrying.

In ernst (Friday)

I am not happy.

Friday morning, and although they are kind to me they have done nothing definite yet, and I am definitely not well – Bauch bloated, Magenschmerzen, Fieber. I point these things out to the nurse, in no uncertain terms; there is some bustling around, and I am taken in a wheelchair down several elevators, across and around several halls in different colors, almost entirely across the hospital to the surgical wing – to be seen, as though I was led through tunnels to consult with a sort of master wizard, by the Chefarzt (senior doctor, far senior to the ones I’ve had contact with so far). He is a big, hearty, country man; in the next few days, when he is out of the room, the younger doctors will tell me he’s known as a sort of Landarzt (country doctor), bluff and strong-willed. He examines me, then turns to me and says: I’m not sure what’s wrong, but we’re going to operate – now – so good-night, because you’re going to have general anesthesia.

I am taken into a room where a young man and woman bustle about, arranging me on a specially designed bed that has blue plastic gel supports for the feet and head – very high-tech, very well-made, very German – and prepare the anesthesia. They joke, I joke – I’m actually relieved that something is being done. And perhaps a bit relieved to being made unconscious.

But, of course, also a bit anxious….

Afterwards

It was a burst appendix: full surgery, eight-inch incision down the middle of my belly – later in the week I will read that when an appendectomy is done before the appendix bursts, it is done with a small incision, a camera, and two or three days in the hospital. Or when they already know it’s a burst appendix, the incision isn’t much bigger – but because they were going in blind, they did a great big exploratory incision. Ah well, I wasn’t so lucky: I will be here for at least ten days or so. I also read that it’s not their fault – although so many people have appendicitis, symptoms vary so confusingly that thirty per cent of appendectomies are misdiagnoses….

But, thank God, I am no longer in pain… morphine… intensive care. Feeling much better. Actually quite comfortable, rather happy. Morphine…. There are five connections to me – catheter, a tube down my nose into my stomach to carry away bile, a drip in my arm with saline, Schmerzmittel – morphine… – and antibiotics, whatever. Intensive care is fairly strange, constantly busy but at a low hum. Many machines, blinking lights, a sense of constant watchfulness. Intensive Care has not only Krankenschwestern – nurses – but also the supposedly stronger Krankenpflegern – male nurses: gender divisions are unsubtle in German hospitals. The lights are never turned off, the lights are never bright. Morphine…. there is a little tube attached to one finger, checking my pulse. Joyce says that the battery of screens behind me has all sorts of moving numbers – she tries to figure out what they mean – she can see what must be pulse and temperature, the rest are mysteries.

I am not uncomfortable. Morphine….

Nadel (Saturday)

A catastrophe: but not for me – because of me. The Chefarzt – I am gradually absorbing the information that he isn’t merely head doctor for a division or something, he is literally the chief surgeon for this entire large hospital – stuck himself with a needle during my surgery.

The dreaded needlestick injury: infection with HIV, with HCV, through accidental blood contact with a patient… one hears so much about it, it’s even been a long-term semi-tragic subplot in ER, House, and other television hospital dramas. It’s quite different when it happens during your own operation – now I feel, well, like a threat, like an unconscionable danger to others: as though those old Republican plans to put us all into quarantine in Utah were not such a bad idea….

I learn, also, that the Chefarzt is a month and a half away from retirement. He is widely feared, and as widely respected – the younger doctors (especially the meticulous young Turkish one who is slightly pompous, slightly grandiose, when he is alone in my room giving me instructions) often look panic-stricken when he is in the room, as though they’re about to pee their pants.

This is all upsetting. A plump, red-cheeked young doctor, sort of a young German teddy bear, asks me for information on my HIV viral load, my doctors, everything – I give it all to him, fax numbers, whatever I can. I am anxious, and say so: at one point I tell the Chefarzt himself, I’m very, very sorry – he simply raises his hand and says: this is not your fault, this is our job and our responsibility, don’t worry about it. And it is clear that he means it.

Of course, one must imagine: this bluff, strong man, retiring in six weeks – a moment of clumsiness in surgery: is one reason for his retirement that he no longer feels quite sure of his hands? How awful, then, that they should betray him in a moment, that they might betray his own health, his own immune system….

That day, a fax is received from England with my most recent test results; everyone is reassured that my HIV viral load is undetectable (as it has been for several years); I’d told them this, but of course doctors are always happier with information that comes in directly and officially from their own kind. Just to make sure, they send my blood to Heidelberg for testing… the next day the results are back (speedy service for a Chefarzt), and there is indeed no detectable virus.

So the Chefarzt is happy, he won’t have to do any kind of prophylaxis. Of course my HCV viral load is not low at all – but there’s no prophylaxis for that, and in any case HCV infection is exasperatingly mysterious. He seems unworried – and more than that: he seems pleased with me, that I made such a fuss about it – and this will have some very positive repercussions: because although I have not paid for a single room, I notice in the ensuing days, the ten days I will still be kept here, that I am practically always alone in a nice room.

The advantages of being a Herr Doktor Professor: and a favorite of the Chief’s….

Making oneself crazy

... or should that be: making one's self crazy?...

In the interstices of watching these films, and scanning Joyce's thesis so I can report on it (the airplane and hotel for her defense in Paris are already organized – which reminds me: I also need to buy a flight to Washington to attend my eldest sister's memorial), I've been trying to read only books related to AIDS: easy enough in terms of finding them (they are all on four-and-a-half three-foot shelves – yes, there are a lot of them), but of course rather difficult in terms of finding the emotional patience to stick with them.

So, I made what seemed an easy choice: Hervé Guibert's Paradise, one of his last novels – which is, I think, the first Guibert I've finished. They are mostly quite short, and gracefully readable, in English or in French; but, well, do I have to explain why I don't always finish novels about AIDS?... okay, well, let's face it, they're mostly downers.

This one is very good, if perhaps a little too heterosexual for my tastes; but, although I expected the ending to be fairly wrenching, I wasn't quite ready for the chaotic skill and range of it – hugely disorienting and upsetting, really, not so much because of any individual passages (although they included torrents of images suggesting infection, sex, betrayal, death, and damage) as because of the entire dementia-ridden nightmare of disconnections: although it is not difficult to imagine the dislocations and inconsistencies of a novel that ends in dementia (at least not for anyone who became accustomed to Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs or a mass of writers since them), a skilled writer like this one can make you experience it, perhaps more than you would like.

(It made me think of my own drafted, probably-never-to-be-finished novel, and its considerably gentler dementia-oriented ending – which you can read towards the end of my long blog entry The Voyage to Europe; and that connection was actually rather encouraging, as it occurs to me that if I am incapable of writing a long novel, perhaps a short one would do. Well, maybe someday.)

It was really fairly crazy-making: and wonderful, and impressive – far more so than Collard's shallower egotism, in fact. But it was definitely a rapid and uncomfortable descent into the maelstrom: a kind of reading, thinking, and in fact remembering that I tend to avoid these days.

So it's nice to realize, yet again: I can handle it....

•••

But, after some hours of restless sleep while stormy winds beat the windows – and I don't mean sleep at night: finishing the novel at midday led to an afternoon of avoidant, depressive unconsciousness – I woke around dinnertime, had some tea, and put on a CD.

And how beautiful, how wonderful a piece was given to me, to make me feel better, more able to get back to work, to living: Robert Sessions' beloved piano miniatures From My Diary (1940), which I used to play back when I had a piano in the house. (Yes, I agree: it would be good for me to have a piano here – we'll see.) I suspect that many music students know these works, as they were examples in some popular music theory/history anthologies; I wonder if those other musicians remember these tiny, amazingly human pieces with as much affection as I do.

Best of all: the lovely, shimmering space outlined in the first miniature, between the pedaled bass and the answering quasi-harmonics of the treble....

•••

A small addendum on Guibert, after reading what others have to say about him online: it may seem ridiculous to complain of Collard's egotism, compared to Guibert's – very well, Guibert spent his entire life writing about himself, photographing himself, trying to meet important people to aggrandize himself, etc. – but Guibert's egotism doesn't bother me: it's not only more skillful, it is also not so shallow – Guibert is obsessed with himself not because it [he] is himself, but because that's what he knows best. Though it is amusing to see how irritating his self-obsessed success must have been for other Parisians (Duras hated him, and threatened to leave a major publisher unless they stopped showcasing him), it doesn't seem terribly important – he is an interesting writer, and of course nine-tenths of the successful artists of London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and other major cities are guilty of the same self-advertisement, the same manipulations, the same 'planned' friendships....

Framing the past

Having finished watching Parting Glances, I can see – yes, it is a good movie; but I don't think I missed so much, walking out on it twenty-odd years ago. An interesting and touching slice of a certain kind of life, and the party scene is indeed great fun; of course from my current point of view they are all so young – this is a film about, perhaps, 28-30-somethings in the midst of becoming whatever they are going to become. (Except the argument in the stairwell with the 20-something, who is so excruciatingly young as to be merely annoying.)

All of which carries me back, through the music, the behavior, the ideas... into the past. I couldn't watch any more AIDS movies (I'll do Les nuits fauves tomorrow, but not now; and I'm still putting off Longtime Companion and Philadelphia, yet again), so I put on whatever was on television – which happened to be Clueless (1995). Which, though it is the blithest and ditziest of comedies (despite some unexpectedly edgy bits – did you remember the mugging, or the kid throwing up in the pool?), itself constitutes a certain nostalgia, a certain memory – perhaps its innocent concentration on the life of a sixteen-year-old, and one whose every whim is automatically paid for and handled, makes it very much about youth and memories of happiness. As though its then ultra-current 1995 instantly became a cherished memory, just through being framed in a certain way.

I wonder how film scholars handle the endless backward-looking, the endless nostalgia, the idealization? – don't they get tired or confused about time and memory? As much as musicologists get tired of having their emotions jerked around by lively or passionate music, I suppose... or film actors get tired of seeing themselves eternally younger, prettier, and perfectly framed.

***

Another frame – the non-events of my day all seem determined to push me back into the past. Reading E.F. Benson's ghost stories is a pleasant diversion – not a very strongly flavored one, as they are not imaginatively eerie like those of M.R. James, nor of course as dense as those by the other James (no, of course I don't mean William). The truth is, the ghost part of each story is rarely that interesting; the pleasantest part of reading them is the exposition, with its comfortable prewar houses, leisurely days, and his rather obsessive fussing over large, well-appointed rooms. But the stories are amusing enough; and as I get to the end of a large omnibus collection, the last few show a little more work and imagination, and are therefore more interesting.

'Pirates', which he must have written in the early 1930s, is very simple: you can see the end coming a mile off – but it is still quite beautiful, much more delicate and subtle than anything he'd written before (perhaps because it is apparently based on autobiographical elements). A lonely, aging man remembers the house where he grew up with his large family, all of whom are now dead; he finally returns there, redecorating it to look just as it once did... and of course you can guess the ending. It's nicely done, though, and gracefully nostalgic (especially for an old guy like me).

These stories have a forward by Joan Aiken, celebrated and prolific children's author. She is a favorite of mine, but not the way you would think – I never liked her famous The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, finding it confusing (I didn't understand her alternate England with its similar but different history, at least not when I was young – why would anyone want a Victorian England with wolves and villains?). The one book of hers that I own, and still reread every few years, is Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, a wonderful series of comic fantasy stories that unfortunately apparently never gave birth to a sequel.

My copy is actually a school prize, given to me as – I quote – "Library merit award... for the most creative annotated list of books read during the school year 1967-68, Mamie H. Spruill, Librarian". I was eleven at the time; you get the sense that dear old Mrs. Spruill, a kindly, rather horsey woman with curly blonde hair, was trying to figure out the appropriate spin for giving me some kind of award. Her book was really a perfect choice, being both fun and peculiar; it may be telling that I'd handed in a reading list that was interesting, but not a winner in any of the normal categories – that certainly fits my later life and work.

In fact, quite possibly, the only teacher whose hopes I've fulfilled has been Mrs. Spruill. Some other favorite teachers from long past would probably not be too disappointed with me – the tough and well-named Mrs. Sargent who taught algebra, Mrs. Hollingshead, who had me do an independent tutorial my last year to read Joyce's Ulysses (my chemistry partner, a football player, kept trying to borrow it to find the dirty bits he'd heard were there), the egomaniacal Mr. Hoffman who taught me music (he later died of apoplexy, which was completely appropriate); and others... but I didn't do much with math, nor have I written great novels, and I don't sing or play much music any more.

But Mrs. Spruill hit the nail on the head: at least I still read interestingly.

Time, and its frames....

Boxes

I have continued, unfortunately, to be of no use to anyone; last Thursday, now six days ago, I had done many things for many people, and for myself, for about two weeks; then at that point I stopped utterly.

I'm helped in this by being finally on research leave: a state both wonderful and, for me, very very dangerous – let's hope I don't completely waste this time, as would be rather typical of me.

But what I have been doing (while doing nothing) is recuperating, I suppose; which has consisted of reading and lying on the couch; and ultimately a burst of William Gibson. So my mind is full of rereading Neuromancer (1984) for two days, then Count Zero (1986) for a day. It's striking how different the endings are of the two books – Neuromancer ends in a digital transcendence that practically vanishes offscreen, as the merely human characters drift away to their lonely, fragmented and dissolving ends; while Count Zero makes sure all its protagonists (at least those who are still alive) move on into happy, supported, family-like lives.

But what I wanted to talk about was the one of three story lines in Count Zero that I always loved, and which, on rereading, I find even more remarkable: the story of Marly, the art dealer recovering from disgrace and betrayal, who is hired to search for the sublime. She is looking for the maker of a group of mysterious box sculptures that are modeled on the work of Joseph Cornell (which appears in the story's background; above is a picture of his Cassiopeia I).

These passages remind me of another beautifully written response to visual art, the descriptions by the character Rita in Paul Monette's early novel The Gold Diggers (1979). The Gold Diggers is Monette trying to break out of his dense poetic voice (as in his wonderful first novel Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978)) into something more popular and suspenseful; ultimately it all gets too plotty and tangled, but the fine poetry about personal emotions and understanding is still all there. And Rita, the art history graduate out of a job, who is going to stay with her gay friend the decorator, will discover a cache of stolen paintings, including a small Cézanne watercolor of a tree: as I remember it, she says to herself it makes her want to go live there, under that tree, forever....

I don't generally have those reactions to visual art – not to the right works, anyway; the pictures I like are often considered pretty second-rate, probably because I need narrative and symbolism and such things (which are better kept for literature or drama). So when the characters of Rita or Marly tell me why a, to me, simple work of art takes their breath away, I value it and try to think about it.

I had forgotten that, toward the end of Count Zero, when Marly finally meets the maker of the boxes (which turns out to be a stray fragment of the artificial intelligences that run everything in Gibson's Sprawl novels), it cuts pieces out of her expensive Paris jacket, pulls from her purse an empty Gauloises packet where her now-dead lover wrote an address, plus the holographic slides she has used to hunt for the boxes, and puts them all together into a new box sculpture for her – summing up the surprises and tragedies of her story, making them into art. She laughs and says, when it hands her the box, "I am honored".

Which makes me wonder: if a small wooden box, with a glass cover, could contain the important elements of my life – or at least a recent part of it – what would be in it?

Perhaps: the cheap little 128MB flash drive with 'Kaletra' stamped on the side – given to me by the drug company as a souvenir of the orange antivirals that both save my life and make me sick; a half-melted candle, I think; perhaps a tarot card – the King of Swords, probably; a page torn from my Moleskine notebooks; one of the polished translucent stones from the bowl next to my bed; and a corner cut from the vivid green trees photographed by my father.

If some genius would arrange those things, so that they made sense....

Oltrano

Having noticed that James McCourt has written seven books, years after I (and possibly most others?) had assumed he would never be a prolific author; and realizing that, after an Amazon order of three of the newer ones, I now have them all; and starting to think of his career as almost backwards from the norm – he is someone who wrote an 'ultimate' book first, in 1975, then went back and started to try to live in that universe, to fill things in, to occupy spaces that had already been made impossibly ethereal and transcendent – and, stuck for a couple of decades writing the kind of fragmentary stories that suggest an already ended career, he has become confident and fertile since the millennium; and on top of all that while reading his second book again, Kaye Wayfaring in 'Avenged' (1983-5), and I think probably making sense of it for the first time (as it is clearly not a book for anyone under the apparent age of a particularly reflective forty-something)...

That second book always felt fragmentary, fairly 'post-', as do the Kaye Wayfaring stories published in 2002: if Mawrdew Czgowchwz (I write that without checking the spelling, but I promise I'll do so before publishing this blog entry – this is, after all, about the problem of hubris) is perfect, it leaves no room to continue, so it's a bit tough (as much as it is attractive) that now three books, and a projected two or three more, are going to take place in that same narrative universe.

It's almost as though, rather than going backwards in narrative time and phylogeny to the Silmarillion (impressive but boring – too archaic a style for me) and massive tomes of back histories, Tolkien had written a book about the third through the eighteenth years of Aragorn's reign. I mean, really: of course they lived happily ever after, of course they were terribly successful for a very long time, but can you anyone imagine writing about it?...

(Remember of course that I'm writing this without having quite finished my rereading of that second book, or the third or fourth that are already written, let alone the ones he's working on now. So I'm bound to be wrong and unfair. But to some extent this is about my personal response to the books, not what's actually in them.) (And that, my dear, is what we call hermeneutics – don't you dare ever quote me on that.)

Here, then, is the difficulty: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (okay, that time I couldn't deal with not knowing so I checked the spelling, and had indeed missed out on the last 'w' – the same frustration popped up this semester when I was teaching about Darmstadt and high modernism, as thrice in four months I had to write Penderecki's first name on the blackboard, and it probably came out differently each time – why can't we just call him Chris?), the novel, ends in transcendent space. The problem, the canker, enters with the introduction of the truly fabulous young countertenor Jacob Beltane, who styles himself an 'oltrano'; and since Mawrdew (I can spell her first name just fine, heck I'll just stick with that) is transcendent, parodically but also truly the operatic ultimate in that she is successful and amazing at absolutely everything (and perhaps you can see my problem on the horizon), she must inevitably meet the handsome young Englishman, start to sing beyond the limitations of vocal ranges (ah, hubris – when real singers do this their voices start to disintegrate), and finally marry him, bear twins, and travel off to the unreal New England island of Manitoy to hold arts festivals of archetypal, ultimate works.

So where do you go from there?... the end of the 1975 novel is unreal and in fact almost but not quite satirically so, the last fifty pages or so going off into a dream of perfection, of artistic and living transcendence, of no more problems possible, of art without restraint, without reality, ultimately without flaw. Given that part of my personal reaction to the book is one of insecurity and inadequacy (the writing is amazing but also amazingly difficult, and also of an over-the-top difficulty that sort of outdoes Ulysses, though fortunately not Finnegans Wake; the main characters are astoundingly successful, increasingly rich, and can do anything, including speak many languages, perform in many media, and have ultimately perfect parties, where they improvise pastiches of the entire history of music at the harpsichord and write acrostic sestinas for each other), the unreality of the ending is almost comforting, as it soothes my excited but affronted narcissism by becoming just beyond-everything, by becoming so obviously unreal that it is no longer a challenge to my own talented but inept life.

I don't know if Wayne Koestenbaum said anything about gay narcissism in his forward to the NYRB reprint edition of Mawrdew Czgowchwz (I have the old Noonday Press paperback, simple but lovely with a perfect cover – a basic cartoon of an operatic Walküre with an open mouth, and that mouth is filled with the only color, a patch of solid gold), but he should have. The whole is an experiment, not only in camp extravagance, but in longings for perfection, for the complete narcissistic inflation of all values – it becomes a universe where everything we imagined we could do would actually come to pass (Sondheim would surpass his four journeyman musicals and two college productions to write a slew of real shows, and some of them would even make it to film; or, to speak of the many, many also-rans, Heggie's operas would have been a continuing success, Disch would not have collapsed into cynicism, Rorem would have been worth taking seriously, etc., etc.).

So after indulging all those narcissistic desires in your first novel, published when you are (I mean he is of course) thirty-four years old, what do you do then? His next major invented character, Kaye Wayfaring, who also occupies Mawrdew's universe and gets to become her sister-in-law, is also amazingly fabulous but much more flawed: part of the more 'tainted' world of film, with a frankly rather tawdry Georgia family background that has 1930s-novel suggestions of incest and abuse along with the vicious figure of her suicidal mother. In that version of this narcissistic world, Mawrdew is older (65 by my count – yes, I actually did a Word chart of all of McCourt's novels, their publication dates, and the apparent dates that happen within the narratives, and figured out when Mawrdew and Kaye were born) and she watches snow fall, throws the I Ching to advise the younger woman, and maintains a quiet, rather cryptic position as the Voice from Beyond. It may not be accident that Kaye is exactly McCourt's own age – so this is evidently a coming to terms with the flaws and disasters of real, as opposed to imagined, life – but we're still trapped in the vast demands of Mawrdew's transcendent universe (perhaps that is why, although the older woman is always kind to the younger one, Kaye often thinks of Mawrdew as savage competition, as unfair comparison).

And where is the young, transcendently beautiful but admittedly rather boring character of Jacob Beltane? Did he die in a convenient soap-opera-type accident, leaving a mourning diva and two handsome sons? Naturally I need to read the 2002 stories, where Mawrdew will be from 68 to 85 years old – or perhaps she will actually die in the course of that book, I haven't read them yet – and you can see what I'll be watching for. But even without knowing exactly what narrative games McCourt will play to make his universe work, like eighteenth-century clockwork patched with parts made of more modern metals, that same vast problem looms on the horizon: if you really got everything you had dreamed of when (narcissistically) younger, in art or in life, then what the hell would you have done afterwards?

... and so... did I tell you I've met McCourt? I have letters I've written to him after we met, in 1993 and 1995; I don't know where his letters to me (probably only two or three of them) are, probably in the boxes still to go through in the front room. I'm sure that when we did meet, possibly in New York in 1987, possibly in Los Angeles in 1991, I gushed and told him how much I loved Mawrdew – and also talked with him about Time Remaining, the (again fragmentary but more successful) third book from 1993. (That chart of mine really does come in handy.) I actually published a book review of the latter – which is rather strange, as now I can't even remember reading it. It is an AIDS novel, and I'll probably need to reread it in the coming weeks; hopefully I won't be too exasperated by its extremely New York-centric nature (which continues in his sixth book, the quasi-history Queer Street from just three years ago, which is essentially about New York as the gayest place on earth – an unfair challenge to we Californians, as of course the New Yorkers have all the big publishing houses and can tell the story any way they want).

You will see that, psychologically at least if not narratively, the fact that I know McCourt is tied to this whole world of fame, fabulousness, narcissism, and dreamed-of success: it reminds me of the other Great Gay Writers I know – Armistead (as late as 2002 a very close relationship, I said with an eyebrow significantly raised), Alfred Corn (despite squabbling over some years, we reconnected when he moved to London three years ago – again I was somewhat intimidated by his successful-New-York grandeur), Edmund White (who thought I was cute – this is admittedly years and years ago, and I can't help regretting I didn't follow up on those compliments), Paul Monette (the poet who became an Angeleno screenwriter, and then poster boy for gay writers who had AIDS – and yes, Virginia, he knew my name), Adam Mars-Jones (who isn't quite in the same category, being closer to my age and not as famous as the others – Adam seems practically human, in fact, being chatty and self-involved and fun).

It even reminds me of that amazing stratospheric climb of 1976, when I was just nineteen, and a handsome (though admittedly rather short) architect flew me from my Virginia university up to New York, and dragged me around the city and the ritzier suburbs in Connecticut to meet his famous friends, which included architect Philip Johnson, painter Paul Cadmus, impresario balletomane Lincoln Kirsten: and I had a dazzling vision of knowing Just Everybody – which I then screwed up by not sufficiently wanting to Do It with the architect. My brushes with greatness: my brief meetings with the denizens of those circles of the famous, all of whom seem to know each other, at least to some extent – and around all of whom I have experienced my own worst deadly sin, Invidia, instead of the sins that I might have had if I'd gotten to join the gay mafia: Superbia and Vanitas (and, if I'd played my cards right, Luxuria).

So this post, about oltranos and 'ultimate' art, about narcissism, perceived or real greatness, success and fame, and transcendence, comes back to earth with a bit of a bump. A bump that is a relief: because of course I have flown almost too high in the strenuous cumulus of McCourtian prose, with its tangled sentences full of hesitations and backtracking, drenched with knowing references and campy asides, full of that exquisite narcissistic arrogance which simply assumes that you, Dear Reader, will actually battle through each paragraph; and that it will do you good.

This post is most definitely for my beloved Mitchell, who is probably the only person who will have enough patience with these knottily entangled sentences and obsessions to get to the end of them all. Hiya, M.

In Train

Headed home on the late morning train – pretty crowded but I can still manage a pair of seats to myself. (Hmm, that may be a fairly selfish choice; but I’m feeling tired/wonky enough (gastro again) that I think I deserve some space to myself (especially after the shared bathroom at the hotel – which is sometimes less pleasant than others – for this trip it was definitely a hardship)).

Reading Lady Montagu’s letters from the early 18th century – and how wonderful they are: spiky, funny, observant, with a slight edge that combines grandeur and satire. She is a sort of like a confident, wealthy, aristocratic version of Jane Austen a century later: a woman who blithely and calmly breaks all the rules of women’s behavior for her time, and uses politeness like a small dagger….

It’s also fascinating to see how different the various cities and towns of baroque-era Europe are: probably the most bizarre so far is Vienna – as she tells it, their clothes, habits and even their approaches to love affairs are so startlingly different than those of contemporary London that they could be on the other side of the world, or in another century. And, rather bizarrely, the Viennese court balls sound like a nightclub: men pay a gold ducat, women get in free.

Most of her best writing is too leisurely to quote bits of it; but at Ratisbon she discovered a place where every family argued with every other one, and during her brief visit she was expected to join one side or another of every quarrel – something she politely refused to do. Her explanation of this bizarre village ended wonderfully:

“I know that my peaceable disposition already gives me a very ill figure, and that 'tis publicly whispered as a piece of impertinent pride in me, that I have hitherto been saucily civil to every body, as if I thought nobody good enough to quarrel with.”

In a letter to her sister, she satirizes the problem of describing travels, and the features you’re supposed to pay attention to, when you secretly think they’re boring:

“This is also a fortified town, but I avoid ever mentioning fortifications, being sensible that I know not how to speak of them. I am the more easy under my ignorance, when I reflect that I am sure you'll willingly forgive the omission; for if I made you the most exact description of all the ravelins and bastions I see in my travels, I dare swear you would ask me, What is a ravelin? and, What is a bastion?”

Pretty good, eh... I think, after all these years, and despite being an American, that I’m beginning to understand the theory and structure of wit….

•••

As Lady Montagu passes beyond the borders of central Europe, into Hungary, various Balkans and finally Ottoman Turkey, satire fades as her fascination with true difference rises: and she discovers a need to be honest, and even cautious, in describing Europe’s old and dangerous enemy. Quite a woman: as exact as any noble warrior....

Helpful books

There is a television show on, with Joan Didion (whose work I love so much) talking about her book The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year after her husband and daughter died. I was a bit surprised, however, when she said that part of why she wrote the book was because she couldn't find anything to read about grieving and loss that she thought was helpful.

That surprised me; there are a lot of books that do this brilliantly, and that help – C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed; James Agee's A Death in the Family; Alvarez, Ariél, and of course Spurious' Blanchot. There are anthologies – the best being Mary Jane Moffat's lovingly constructed In the Midst of Winter, a collection of writings across a number of cultures and literatures that she wrote after the death of her own husband. Then there are so many poems that help one get through – aside from all of the famous ones I know that I get a lot from Hoffman's anthology of Japanese Death Poems; and then of course all of the books about suffering, like the various AIDS memoirs and novels, or Renate Rubinstein's brilliant journey through having MS, Take It and Leave It.

Perhaps she just meant none of these writings seemed quite to mean anything to her, which of course makes sense – she had to tell her own version of the story.

I remember seeing Jane Chambers' wonderful play Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, about a group of lesbian friends who share a cabin at a country lake – but one of them dies of breast cancer between acts I and II. They used Cris Williamson's music beautifully – deeply felt, deeply sad 'womyn's music'. It was in San Francisco, some time in 1984, after Reid's death (December 2, 1983 – that's one of the few dates in my life I never need to look up, I always know that one). I'd been depressed a lot in previous months, but hadn't really cried I think: I still remember coming home from seeing the play to my studio apartment, sitting down in the chair next to the bed, and completely disintegrating – that amazing feeling of collapsing into crying that is way beyond tears, that is sniveling, choking, where you're amazed at your own body's reactions, and a part of your mind sets itself aside to watch and make sure you can still breathe.

I was amazed at all this: and almost incredibly comforted – that I felt so strongly, that I could hit that emotional wall and keep going into it. Although I remained a bit fragmented, depressive, schizoid, as I still am today; and though I actually tended to respond to everything, ever after, as though I were some kind of widow(er), in a way that was too despairing, too wounded, and not particularly healthy; it showed me that I would, in a strange way, be all right – that I could really grieve....

P'tit soleil noir

An elaborately Barthesian pleasure at reading the first pages of Julia Kristeva's Black Sun, her book on the psychoanalysis of depression. I giggle, recognize myself, nod understandingly, make comments...

"For those who are wracked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia."

You're right, I won't believe a word you say if you aren't yourself depressed – sympathy will win you nothing, my dear, I cackle.

"I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself."

A well-constructed sentence, a clear painting of what it is like: all right, I'll (experimentally) trust you. I don't feel like that right now, but I have felt like that – rather a lot in fact; although I don't know whether it is plausible for me now, the me sitting up in a comfortable bed with clean sheets and a window open onto the pleasantly warm night, sticks of orange-scented incense misting the room, my laptop on my lap (obviously) and next to me your book, held open by my workbook for cognitive behavior therapy for depression; that me who is post-bath, so obviously pleasure-oriented, hedonistic, and obviously can't be depressed then, to launch into this discussion. But all right, I'll try.

"Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present."

Active versus passive: and you may use those words however you wish to. (I can't help feeling that some of the 'alternative' meanings of those words are central to my problems, but heigh-ho.)

"Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic, it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable."

How true, and put a white violet in the book at that point, as Dorothy Parker would say. No, really: it does seem bluntly obvious, a fact that only someone with a rather silly flowery need for life to be Happy would not be able to absorb.

"Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me...?"

Ah now she's got me, a science fiction metaphor. But I can't quote the whole damned book, Knopf will have me by the balls. Her next points: some trigger takes me there – yes, having my promotion refused, then later Vanessa's death; but I assume she gets that 'there' was a place that already existed? – well she seems to be getting to that assumption. Some gorgeous writing on p. 4, that makes perfect sense to me, about the nature of what is lost; but rather more fun is the end of the third long paragraph:

"Absent from other people's meaning, alien... I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being..."

ah yes, arrogant. Or merely proud: the kind of pride that could be transformed into an imagined alter ego associated with a god of Death – Nachiketas, of course.

But it is too hard to read, and type quotes, and comment: and it is late, and I am sleepy... perhaps I shall read more: but without you, Dear Reader....