in the hall of mirrors

Idleisms (which became: Out of balance)

Butt In Chair: the great injunction for writers (okay, perhaps not as great as 'Done Is Good', as it's a bit less presentable in mixed company – whatever that means these days) from Susan M.

I am in my chair today, having moved myself and computer from the living room, where the increasingly beaten-up couch, television, and distractions of literary trivia live, into the middle room, where there is a clearly defined working desk and shelves of philosophy, cultural studies, semiotics. I, at least, feel less useless; and the distractions are, at least, more high-minded.

***

I don't understand why I always, on assembling a cup of tea, end up with a sticky smudge of honey on my fingers, or on the mug, on its handle somehow – it seems to come from nowhere, from some weird opening into something that should probably be called H-space. And I always notice at the point when my fingers are on the keyboard, on the trackpad, on some papers....

***

Bothered the past few days by the self-pity so heavily embedded in my AIDS writings, in this blog, and frankly in my personality. After reading bits of Stephen Mitchell's anthology The Enlightened Heart (I love Mitchell as a translator; this is his collection of spiritual prose), I kept thinking: yeah, well, my own real problem is that I'm so impressed by my own problems. Which, let's face it, aren't huge ones. When I think of the book I'm supposed to be writing – and, in fact, one of the two articles I'm supposed to be writing right now, before that book – the underlying message is one of how tragic my life has been; and that gets in the way of writing it – I know I can tug on heartstrings, but I feel rather cheap doing it. Well, I suppose there's no way past all this, other than being aware of it, and trying to grow out of it....

***

Yesterday (Friday) was a lost day: Wednesday had been okay, if faintly depressing (final marks settled on last year's postgraduates – and no matter what I did, I couldn't make the numbers come out with more than one Distinction – but apparently they were all pleased enough with their Merits, so that was probably just my problem); Thursday was hard-working but effective (taught two classes, and did them well – ah what an ego boost that is! – which will tell you a lot about me as a teacher, both what I do correctly and what's wrong with my teaching – as you can probably figure out, I tend to teach as a 'performer', which creates enthusiasm and also probably leaves the students feeling a little used, a little browbeaten, at times).

Thursday evening I went to the health food store, and unfortunately responded too easily to marketing; I bought slippery elm bark (not the pills which, as V– has said, never do anything, but the stuff itself, powdered). Drank it in a mug before bed. Was a wreck Friday – despite the generalizations made on the box about how good it is for the digestion etc. etc., it is clearly meant for people who have constipation – which is, frankly, never a problem in my life. Running back and forth to the bathroom, tired and with body systems racing out of control, on a day when I'd vowed to sit and write....

So today is what yesterday should have been, plus some time to (continue to) recover. We'll see....

***

Unfortunately, the tea, and especially the hot chocolate (no sugar, but chili included) has probably been a bit much – now my gut (my short, and admittedly partly euphemistic, term for my whole digestive system, which I experience as sort of a large, intermittent problem right in the middle of my body, and so want a short, easy term for, a term that feels immediate but not repulsive) is suddenly jumping around again, overstimulated... sigh. I wish the whole gastro thing would just function, do its damned job, and stay calm. Of course, lately, with the new meds, things do seem better – but how much better?

Rain on the window, but the sun still reflecting off the clouds: pleasant, relaxing. Opening the window for a few minutes (just a few, since it's cold) would be good....

***

I know that a lot of other academics, scholars, writers, book people, also worry about not writing enough, or find steady, productive writing difficult to do; and that many of them regard parts of their bookish activities with skepticism or dismay (the tendency to read trivia, or to read unconsciously, etc.).

But I wonder about those who conceal such worry: K–, for instance, in his big Amsterdam apartment, with his desperate egotistical attempts to make himself look important, even when he encounters an old, more successful colleague – what worries, what despair, is all that pompous self-aggrandizement covering up? And does he realize how ridiculous he sounds, endlessly funneling all conversations back into His Achievements? – we all take him less seriously, not more, after hearing him maunder on and on about his own current projects and Their Significance.

(Of course, confronting K– with his old colleagues was my fault, and perhaps something he would have avoided if given a choice – one small way that I've changed the world, especially the world of those composers who were important in Darmstadt in the 1960s, has been in taking them to see each other again. I've reknit several relationships, dragging men in their sixties across one or another European town to talk with their old lovers, their old rivals, their old friends, and probably their old enemies – always with my Californian ingenuousness, my non-European assumption that they will be glad to see their pasts face to face... which I'm sure isn't often true; but I'm also sure that, always, even when the discomfort was palpable, those confrontations were good things – at least better than no confrontation, better than hiding and ignoring and pretending.)

***

Waves of unhealthy energy, again, up and down: the overstimulation of the chocolate, the rather druggy passions of a body out of balance, tingling feet and hot neck and panting breath. Hot or cold, energetic or sleepy, all rather fluid, out of balance: but less hopeless in this room than in the other one – although lying down to sleep is not so easy here, at least I feel a bit ill, a bit fuzzy, in a room where the signs are all of thinking, not of wasting time.

But perhaps I'm a bit too ill: I think I need to really lie down, probably on the bed – should have had some form of breakfast I suppose; but now even that seems too difficult....

***

Late afternoon: boy, I made myself ill somehow – could it really just be that chocolate on an empty stomach? (Admittedly after a day of an upset gastro system.) Still rather trembly, in bed; haven't eaten, when I get up to find something to eat I'm too shaky to stay there.

***

... okay sitting in chair again; the day is fading, sky now dark gray rather than light. Still trembly, but heated up yesterday's rice dish to eat something (there wasn't much left though). Talk about self-pity, and self-reflexivity: how annoying. And how odd – although it does all help somehow that I made myself ill in this room, rather than the other one: although I didn't have the couch to collapse on when I wasn't able to do anything else, it seems that at least I tried – and the day isn't really over yet....

***

A brief evening return to the casual 'idle-isms', and even the honey theme, I started with... I, and my stomach and palate, were comforted by some 'mandorlata' and 'nocciolata' (almond and hazelnut creamed with honey, bought at an Italian deli in York last week) on wafers. Pleasant, lovely, heartening stuff....

Fall back

I love getting that hour back in the fall, when the clocks return to 'real' time.

It's silly, I suppose – living up here in the north, where by late October the night has eaten more than half the day anyway (official dawn-to-dusk is now eleven hours, and in December that will go down to a depressingly small number); and having the job I do, where I rarely need to go in mornings, it shouldn't much matter whether it's 3:30 am or 4:30 am right about now.

But I love it – it's such an utter gift – as though time can be given back to us....

Against junk; and a small panic

I'm bothered by the amount of junk in my life – by which I don't mean anything that Bukowski or Burroughs would talk about – but more like what's meant by junk mail, junk television... junk yard dogs. Well not exactly that last one, but you know what I'm saying.

Over the years my reading has drifted back and forth – from the kind of reading where you really engage, where you learn something and think and get involved or excited, to something more passive. I have a great many books – about, let's see, twelve bookcases in the house (plus seven at work), all about three feet by six or so, plus about another bookcase's worth stacked in the storage room. So, for years, there have been masses of texts available to me – in fact, that's how I live: from the rich density of the shelves I casually call 'philosophy' (actually philosophy, cultural theory, semiotics, all that kind of stuff) through the delicate sophistication of the shelves of poetry, which have grown to be a substantial part of the whole, to the vast shelves of massed literatures, which run from the complex and intellectual (which are, frustratingly, often also depressing) down to the relatively vapid.

Unfortunately, although I used to graze over a wide range of these books and not worry too much about whether any reading habits were good for me or not, a distinct decline started in the mid-1990s, when I was living in a miserable apartment building in San Francisco, one full of druggies and people on the edge of homelessness, and bashing my head against the concrete wall of finishing my dissertation. The second stage of this decline has been here in northern England – in the wake of the frustration of being rather unceremoniously dumped here by circumstance, and the lack of people around to talk to for too much of each day, I've tended to read only what won't bother me – i.e. what won't challenge me, and what won't be too depressing.

(Finding something to read that's 'not too depressing' can be pretty tough, too – it's amazing how much fine writing tends towards tragedy and disaster; one of the many reasons I love Byatt's Possession so much is that it has a gratifyingly happy ending. And one of the reasons I so hated her Still Life is that the favorite character, the one sensible person, just when she decides to go back to school, has a refrigerator fall on her. I mean, really....)

An even more problematic habit is an increased indulgence in repetitive, predictable television: favorites include CSI and its offshoots, Simpsons, South Park, the various Law & Orders – not such a bad bunch I suppose, but I'm not watching for the detail, I'm just watching to pass the time. Passing time, wasting time, killing time: the edginess of those phrases recalls a scene in that most wonderful of children's books, Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth, when Tock, the dog whose body consists of a large clock, reacts angrily to Milo's excuses about his own listless, pointless wasting of time.

Not to mention junk food – I'm feeling especially guilty over this; after various rather hard and largely successful work from Monday to Thursday, I ordered two pizzas and ate them over about a twenty-four hour period – how ridiculous, and what a poor idea from several angles (one of which will come up below...). And then felt lousy, of course. And then there's those long winter sleeps, and the deadly temptation of computer solitaire....

I did grab Barthes' New Critical Essays off the shelf – an essay collection being an easy and often even fun way back into a thinking literature; it's a bit hard that the first two essays are on subjects I don't know well (structuralist interpretations of La Rochefoucauld and the Encyclopédie, all very French of course); but I did get a certain intellectual alertness from them, almost like the mental equivalent of breathing eucalyptus oil. And I put away the books that had been on the table – a long, probably well-written but entirely unimportant novel compendium by Jack Vance (Alastor) and one of Juan Goytisolo's more bizarre pseudo-literary parodies (A Cock-Eyed Comedy, where he makes a strange tour de force out of combining Catholic hagiography and gay pornography). Okay, neither of those is exactly dumb – but they're both really intellectualized timewasters, and my whole point in reading them was to do, basically, nothing.

***

All this has gained a bit of urgency, because I'm suddenly not feeling very well – Wednesday I had a beer with the guys, and ended up exhausted and toxic the next morning; and the past two days I've been sleeping all day, with various weird muscle aches (not flu I think), frequent headaches, and darkened urine – not to mention the burst of zits in unexpected places over the past few weeks. All of which suggests liver problems, one more time: I see the doctor next Friday, and am wondering if he will get dictatorial again – forbidding me vitamins, blood tests every three days, and such. V– and I discussed it over lunch – she also has liver concerns, and heart concerns (her surgery delayed yet again); the slight oddness of trading anecdotes about chronic illness over lunch was ameliorated by the sense of mutual, hard reality: we both seem to be more willing to consider bad futures for ourselves than the people around us, and we both usually try to plan ahead for the consequences (it's one of the reasons I love her so much). This is also why my ridiculous pizza suddenly looks so bad in retrospect: for an ailing liver, the fats and preservatives in cheese and sausage are obnoxiously toxic. No help when you're trying to not get ill.

It worries me (my eldest sister says I worry too much – she's probably right, but that's not something that's going to change any time soon). It's almost like the way they used to explain the power of the ending/climax of Miller's Death of a Salesman: that because he seems to be so happy in the next-to-last scene, his death is that much more poignant – if something awful is going to happen to a character, make them optimistic, or resolved to improve their lives, first. Sounds like that damned refrigerator, doesn't it?...

That weird humming

Every year my neighbors change – this is an area with lots of students, some of whom are a bit unpredictable. I've never had a real disaster (as V– seems to have this year, with loud music from upstairs), but some of the changes are a bit, well, peculiar.

For instance: I keep being awake far too late the past few weeks – often not going to bed before 2 or 3 am, sometimes later; or, like tonight, being wakeful from indigestion (it's 6:30 am, I'll go right back to bed after this, I promise). However, I keep hearing sounds from various neighbors, even at this hour, that seem as though they should be unexpected: as for the new Malaysian students downstairs, the guy keeps talking very, very late – isn't his girlfriend annoyed? But maybe they have the same peculiar reaction I do to the northern winter nights: they go on for so long that it becomes hard to know when you're supposed to be awake, when to go to sleep. Maybe they just have some acclimatizing to do.

But somewhat odder is that weird humming from next door. I wasn't quite sure until tonight that it wasn't from downstairs, but I'm starting to pick the sounds from below me apart from the sounds that come from the fireplace – and this is an entirely separate oddness. A guy is humming, probably in his sleep: a rather aimless and confused humming, as though he would pick out a tune if he could only think of one.

It's not unpleasant or annoying, just... odd. It makes you wonder what his roommates or partners – if such a thing exists, if they haven't run away in exasperation – say to him: "You were doing that weird humming again last night...."

[Believe it or not, the above picture was actually on a science website as an illustration of 'dark matter'. Well, duh....]

You May Have Won

Well that's odd. After mentioning answering Winning Lottery spam e-mails yesterday, I keep receiving them today – the spammers couldn't possibly be reading this, could they?....

Or perhaps there's a truly amazing new generation of bots – ah, the development of technology. Either way, I'm wondering about the repercussions of public exposure. Yet again....

Changeable

The weather is changeable, and... so am I. (Hmm, another version of a phrase I've used before.)

Chilly but bright autumn days; then dark gray days that move into winter. And I'm similar – I did finish editing the three articles; a mixture of satisfaction and mild frustration (the third article is from ten years ago with some rather old and slightly problematic ideas, and I'm a bit doubtful about having it published, but oh well).

I'm sleepy and kind of drained – not up to really articulating most of this – but, some of the passing thoughts I keep chasing round and round:

(a) me and people – why are there stresses and hostility, why are there points when suddenly people you thought you liked turn on you, and of course: am I just paranoid or are people difficult? Why – and it probably didn't do me any good to read certain stories in the past couple of days that emphasized people as manipulators, as liars, as sociopaths – are so many people capable of justifying themselves when they do twisted or dishonorable things? And – although I'm trying, as always, to be as self-critical in this as I can – what are the points where it's my fault, or where it's not my fault? Because, even when I think I know which is which, it's so easy to change my mind....

(b) me and my body – why am I sometimes tired, why am I sometimes in good mood, sometimes in a bad one? I always want causality in these matters – something identifiable, and therefore something I can change – but I can't always discover causes. Perhaps weather and reality are sufficient reasons.

In any case, I've gone to winter bedding – from what I think of as 'American style' (smooth sheets, thin blanket, cover, afghan knitted by my grandmother) to 'European style' (fuzzy sheets, duvet). Always a strange and sensual change, in either direction – although it is almost too warm now.

Weather, body, mood, mind: light and dark. It's not enough to see it as arbitrary (how merely materialistic), but I'm seldom sufficiently certain of causes – and the uncertainty always leaves me anxious...

a bit.

Interspersed

Overlapping experiences:

• have had a cold for three days, groggy and sniffling (sniveling? – that always seemed to be a different sound of course); every once in a while my face crinkles up, I mumble 'damn', and sneeze to one side or the other.
• the weather is gray and increasingly wintry, but
• it also has that windy liveliness that one associates with Halloween, which makes autumn so fascinating. (Is that merely the fractal shapes of masses of leaves blowing by? If beauty is merely fractal, how hard it will be to wax lyrical about it....)
• and a lot of work has gone well, things in my area are actually way ahead of where they were at this time last year, and even in some ways ahead of where they've ever been, but
• there are still clusters of things to do, logistics mostly, and because I've been so fast and aggressive about settling things with students and colleagues they expect those things to be rapidly settled also; then
• scheduling a meeting has been chaotic and unsuccessful, which has me distinctly exasperated; and on the other hand
• one of the anthologies is due in less than a week – I have some time to do it, but of course masses of anxiety, combined with
• the odd complacency that comes with knowing that whatever I do it will be finished soon, and
• longer-term discussions of projects floating through all of this, combined with having to make a list of my work over the past seven years – there is quite a lot of it – which is really rather satisfying.

Not to mention the complex resonances each of these bullet points invokes – even the sneezing reminds me of the HIV patient presentation on Thursday, where a student noted that I was already sniffling and asked whether I was paranoid about getting ill, or getting other people ill.

Of course this is the truth of living, much of the time – the pleasant and annoying, the good and the bad (last night reading Beerbohm and watching adult swim – a sharp contrast of high and low cultures, of the leisurely and the rebellious, the exquisite and the raunchy; plus experiences of good food and bad, interesting downloads and boring ones, etc. etc.).

That is what makes diaries so enjoyable, often more so than any novel or even essay – Woolf writing about her annoyance in meeting someone tedious for lunch, but overlapping it with her pleasure at the spring air, and her concerns about the printing press, all in one paragraph. Each thread tempers the others, without leveling the experiences of any of them.

Even realistic novels tend to cluster experiences in a falsely symbolic way – I get most annoyed with those dark satires where every experience, every detail, proves what a miserable schmuck the antihero is, and proves what a mess life is at every turn.

It's just not, of course, usually, really like that....

Through the mazes

I continue to respond to the summer and its work in a rather murky and unsatisfying way. The weather has moved quite firmly from hot to chilly, and gray to boot (not 'grey', it's not that subtle). I have piles of things that need to be done, but plenty of time to do them – and unfortunately my tendency in those circumstances is to avoid everything now, in favor of some (ultimately nonexistent) later. Marking papers, meetings, going to the gym... all can be indefinitely delayed....

Indulgence: sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad – I made a biryani last night (first time ever, rather fun and quite good too); and the cleanliness of the apartment, the use of skin oils and incense, relaxation on the couch with soft cotton blankets (one I bought in Cyprus, and I'd love to be there, the other one that my mother bought from a Pennsylvania Dutch store). The sensuality of things helps my mood.

And there are cheesier indulgences – late night 'adult' cartoons (not pornographic, just charmingly, cynically obnoxious) on television led me to locate and download the complete Venture Brothers series (now about twenty twenty-three minute segments, all floating around on Gnutella). They're absurdly funny, and, well, incredibly gay – although clearly written by straight men: somewhat like the Rammstein videos I found on the web a few weeks ago, and the slightly older Spy Groove series, they suggest new contemporary trends in queer culture – how peculiar it must be for straight men who don't define themselves entirely traditionally to exist in a space adjacent to all of us gay, lesbian, transgender types. You can see the impact of the queer world in the tangled ambivalence of the contemporary Regular Guy's imagination – even when being satirical or revolted, they make no more fun of us than of their own foibles. And they can't help but take advantage of the possibilities – all the sexuality, all the ambivalence, that they have gotten used to in queer culture ends up extending their own playing field, and they can't resist it.

Anyway, Venture Brothers is ridiculously funny. Such talent... maybe, if my career had gone differently, I would be associated with a studio producing such stuff.

Dismissal: colleagues' discussions of postmodernism have not made me feel as though I want to argue, but more as though it is worthless to discuss anything – as so often my colleagues seem to already know what they think, and they all seem to be in an agreement too close to allow for my opinions, my past, my experiences. This is what is so exasperating about leaving the Pacific behind, with all its freedom: it truly is another world... but of course this is also the best direction for me to follow in general: sometimes it seems as thoughengagement with almost anyone in my local environment merely leads me in small circles. Therefore disengaging is probably a good idea.

I've also lost some interest in applying for the current London job – it really has so many things wrong with it, and the probability that they would interview me seems low enough – does it really seem worth writing the letter?... well, of course, my advice to John was that it is always worth applying for jobs, but perhaps in this case a conservation of energy is better.

Of course, all of this egocentric interest in the minutiae of my life and thoughts is happening under the great arch of war, terror, violence, all of it happening far away. The threats of British air flight reduce, for me, to: can I take my computer when I go to Spain next week? It reminds me of the obliquely bitter subtitle to one of Dorothy Parker's most hilarious monologue-stories, 'From the Diary of a New York Lady', with its recurrent refrain of "Damn Miss Rose" – that subtitle, which takes the whole egotistical mess to an entirely different level, reminds us that it is also happening "During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change". Ah well, if I'm living in my small world, perhaps that's not such a surprise – living abroad always makes one feel like keeping one's head down, and avoiding being seen; it has occurred to me that if conflicts were to eventually make it difficult to stay in the UK, I might have to make some unappetizing choices.

As for now: it would probably be best for me to cancel that trip to Spain completely – except that I suspect that I would lose about £500 without any refunds if I did. And, rather obviously from all of the above smokes and fogs, I need to clear my head – and a week in a hot beach town, with Susan to talk to, is probably ideal for that.

Cooler heads

Over the past couple of days the temperature has been dropping; today it is actually cold – raining, gray. Not miserable though; there's a light behind the clouds, and it all just feels cool, refreshing; the mild autumn chill (yes, I know, in August? – well, this is northern Europe, near the North Sea) is a fine change.

And my emotional temperature has cooled – from yesterday's anger and panic at how I've been living my life, to actually getting some things organized. What a list of things to do in the next two months! – is it really possible to do all of that research, and with that the administration that people keep nagging me about? The only way is, I suppose, doing things. Things of any size – small things that need to be done, parts of larger projects, and of course the always salutary things that involve deciding something doesn't need handling or can get given to someone else. And one must do Things, frequently.

Especially tricky because of my tendency towards passive procrastination: not looking for other things to do, exactly, but merely thinking, well I don't need to do this right now – and no one's watching me to keep me working. An gradually worsening problem over the years of living around, from the mid-1990s; living with John in Australia helped for a bit, but just as I started to feel comfortable, the government kicked me out....

A music track that I downloaded three months ago, then bought the CD: the final track on Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for Rabbit-Proof Fence, called 'Cloudless'. I finally saw the film on television the other night – or parts of it at least (as should be no surprise, given my general tendency towards avoidance these days, the fact that it was a film of a tragedy enacted by the Oz government made it both interesting and far too intense for me to be happy watching it). It was good, though; a very focused, but very passionate fable, very linear, with few surprises but excellent and brave work, especially by the actors. Interesting to see the Wikipedia entry on the Stolen Generations – it talks about the conservative critique of the whole protest, and then gives enough facts to completely undermine that critique, making it sound like a sort of poor man's Holocaust denial.

The music to the film was good, and helped to interpret the action as a good film score should; but that final track didn't, apparently, make it into the film as such – a shame, because it is a glorious Gabrielesque synthesis of native Australian chanting, building and overlapping lines (always my favorite kind of music climax), and subtle, shimmering electronic support.

The sheer passion, and grief, of the piece – beautiful, naturally and strongly colored voices, falling lines – is perhaps why I have played it over and over, in the past few months. Such a powerful catalyst: almost inevitably brings tears to my eyes....

Living badly

Yesterday: left the apartment so that the cleaner could take over; had lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant. Ended up eating too much, eating wrong, feeling terrible – exhausted at the end of the day.

The patterns: bad eating, no exercise, television, Internet – by the time I woke this morning I was so angry at myself. I thought of the old seminar rubric, which is approximately: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result – exactly what I am these days: letting myself slide into a dull and sullen old age, earlier than necessary, and hoping that it will all change, that I will get different results, different experiences – but without bothering to change my own behavior, my own habits.

Madness. Of course on the other side is an instrumentalized care of the self; having come from California, that is acutely familiar in all its many forms. But when the self isn't cared for, it becomes, well, such a mess; any illusion that a teleological approach to one's self is 'bad' is immediately countered by the utter lack of choice, of existence, of experience, that follows upon letting oneself slide.

Being furious at myself is so appropriate: really, I have such an easy life – all the tools for taking care of myself, physically, mentally, and in terms of creativity or fulfillment, are so easily available – and I just leave them there....

Really, really angry.