in the hall of mirrors

Different

Continuing, in the night, this uneasy fascination with change, time, life – the night is still hot, the pillow still like a heating pad.

It was all probably produced by the long bursts of heavy, outward-directed work of the past weeks, that have finally left me dried out, tired – in the midst of this heat. And helping C– move today (or, more accurately, not helping much; I did take her to dinner afterward as a slightly guilty show of support). Which means my dear neighbor of four years is gone, to be replaced by lord only knows what.

Watching television, yet again, after reading some of those graphic novels (comics to you): what if by some twists and turns I had ended up in media, rather than the arts or academe? I would probably have been better at it (I am after all a rather sloppy intellectual, with a fairly casual education, and what might be called a rather weak or flimsy spirit); though I might not have had the energy for the pressures of media life – on the other hand, there are many niches in media life and popular art forms, and I might have found one that I could have handled. And if such a life had caught me early enough, I probably would have found a more continuous energy – the longueurs of my life might simply never have happened.

However, I can also sense how quickly I would have gotten frustrated at the shallowness of what is allowed; not many people in media/popular arts get to live in their dreamscapes, most are merely put to work in what is usually fairly trashy day-to-day production.

So: a life that would have had more money, more employment continuity, but probably more existential frustration... hmm.

And what about tomorrow, which is Monday? Shouldn't I be doing some boring academic administration? Can I coast for the day? Will it be so hot that every activity seems to be called into question?

Forecast: finer

Once again, the weather is better, and so am I.

That Venezuelan houseguest is again delayed, and confusion reigns on that front; but his Latin American identity has somewhat influenced the whole situation, as I merely feel like: oh well, okay, no worries. (Now you can see how valuable it was for me to live in easy-going San Francisco for years, and how much I wanted the Sydneysiders to get me in the habit of saying 'no worries' at every turn – it can be valuable to live in places where the existing culture is at odds with one's own personality...).

Writing. Powerpointing. Listening to music, and of course doing better work since the computer is in the 'office' middle room rather than the living room (plausibly I should keep it here).

Sunshine on the basil, thyme and cilantro plants: I do need to buy bigger pots, but they don't seem too unhappy.... And a dazzling tune, played by one of my colleagues, Catriona MacDonald, a very fine fiddler: called, quite appropriately, 'The Joy of It!' – it's an intricate, spiralling tune with a few shifted beats here and there, each of which make the tune leap forward into ecstatic polyphonic arabesques.

***

This morning, I was briefly lying on the couch; the sun made that side of the house warm, without it getting hot. It was so lovely and sunny, I thought of a favorite Chinese poem – one that I had begun to set to music some years ago in an unfinished song cycle that I had titled 'Bronze Mirrors'.

Summer day...
Reading in the heat of noon
I grow sleepy, put my head
On my arms and fall asleep.
I forget to close the window
And the warm air blows in
And covers my body with petals.

(Yuan Mei, 1716-1797; translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

Grey

[N.B. not, in this case, 'gray' - I'm not generally enamored (enamoured?) of British spellings; 'analyse' seems rather nice, sort of aesthetic, but 'colour' is merely affected (English isn't French, however many Norman aristocrats would have wanted it that way) and 'programme', which comes up daily at work, is just ridiculous. But I'll admit that 'grey' is more properly, well, grey, then 'gray' is. More of a soft, dove grey, as opposed to some rough piece of construction paper?...]

So the weather is grey, again, and I am a bit too. The worst thing about the first three years here (as well as the last years in San Francisco, when so much seemed to be going wrong) was that I seemed permanently stuck in greyness, unhappy, worried, overwhelmed by things to do, unable to move far out of it all. That's been somewhat less true this year, but I can still fall into All That without much difficulty – the weather pushes me towards it, and the minor ups and downs of work and daily life still seem to involve more downs than ups. (I should live someplace with good weather – and probably by a beach. And obviously, way too obviously, and whether or not I feel up to the commitment, not alone.)

By the end of last weekend, it felt as though too many little things were demanding attention; I finally decided, rather helplessly and with some uncertainty, to cancel the coming trip to London, for Europride (maybe I'll go the following week, which sidesteps the festival – which is either stupid or clever of me, I can't decide which). Trying to focus on the many little administrative things still floating around, like midges – they all seem so exasperating after two weeks straight of meetings (now that all of the students have left, how can there still be so much to do for them?). And of course when a large pile of work gets shifted, behind it are always the various things undone: big projects, writing....

Hmm, story of my life. Not a terribly exciting one, I know, but an annoyingly accurate one.

Perhaps the solution is to drag myself into town, get a haircut, do some shopping, ignore all the boring stuff until tomorrow... that would probably work.