in the hall of mirrors

Examinee

The first of these exams was the longest – Dr Weskamp, Dr Lüscher and a third woman I don't know go over one of my case reports, with dreams. The case is their selection, not mine – they are obviously curious about my patient who has a vast range of cinematic dreams; discussion is pleasant but searching, they cross from point to point to point in great detail....

But after ninety minutes they relax, send me briefly out of the room, and when I come back they are pleased to give me a good mark – I have to watch out for the countertransference issues I've already noted in my report, but they are reassured that I am self-critical about such things, and they all shake my hand, smiling.

•••

Ten days later, an hour after the interview, I am still a bit wound up: sunny streets, but not as hot as last week – people are wandering in a summer-weekend-afternoon kind of way, and a young man with a tightly wound runner's body walks rapidly towards me from the Zürichsee, wet, with a surfboard.

•••

The second exam is... well, not quite so pleasant. First of all it begins at 8 am – which means leaving my top-floor Zürich flat at 7 am; which means getting up at... oh, never mind.

Psychiatry: I am confident, and I have chosen a good case. I know that I am supposed to avoid psychoanalytic language – stick to psychiatric terminology, this is where you show that you can communicate in a hospital emergency room without sounding like a useless dingbat.

Unfortunately, I fall into deep water: I am focusing on problems of dissociation – a respectable psychiatric term, I think – my examiner, usually a friendly man, frowns: he doesn't like that word. Tell me about it in another way.

(He doesn't like the word? Can he do that?....)

I have a good, but admittedly rather complex, diagnosis, and it really hangs on aspects of dissociation, so... I flail, with increasingly large arm movements and in deeper waves: it's even more exasperating that my own analyst – who is himself a psychiatrist – has been reading, and talking, about dissociation for three months now....

Roth is not pleased – he is extremely not pleased. He makes hand gestures, which I cannot interpret for the life of me, to suggest the words he wants me to use instead (what does it mean when you curl your fingers and wave your hands in little semicircular motions?) – if my analysand sees people on a commuter train and they don't seem entirely real, isn't that a hallucination?... well I wouldn't exactly... I shut up, seeing that I'm not helping myself.

I go into the hall to wait. This wait is very long: and I suspect that Maxwell, my second examiner, who was quiet during most of the exam, may be trying to save me –

She evidently succeeds. Roth still looks a bit thunderous, but I have been given a Three, which means: that was lousy but you passed. We all shake hands, with not quite as much pleasure as on the previous day.

(I do note with some internal interest that this is, of course, disappointing: but I don't shake with emotion, as I did three years ago at the midpoint exams, when I got a Two – this is merely a thing, as it were.

Which tells you how far my own analysis has come.

And even Roth will, I think, get over it....)

•••

I want something to eat... ignoring Giovanni's texts (he wants to meet for dinner and go to the gay bar that has my favourite bartender, but he also wants help with a translation, which is a very Giovanni approach to social meetings – I'm not avoiding him exactly, but not rushing to help either), I walk along and dig into my backpack for the trendy magazine guide with its pictures of galleries and graffiti and roof gardens.

An interview with a food critic: what are your favourite places in each neighbourhood?... after a long list of hideously expensive and rather heartless-sounding two-star hotel restaurants he mentions Gamper, a small, blithely unusual-yet-natural Swiss restaurant in the suburbs. It sounds perfect.

•••

The third exam will be at 4 pm that same day. I try to get some rest, but don't go back to the city – I don't do many days that are this long, not for the past couple of years – I wander around the garden of the Institut; it is fairly hot. I eat my lunch from a black bento box, but at an odd time of day, a bit early, when the other students aren't out of class yet – in the little boat house, next to the lake – small waves, when a speedboat goes by larger ones, and a cool breeze that appears from time to time...

So. Third exam of three, this time, or of five, or depending on how you count of six, in total. Individuation, with Strubel, and Miyake.

(My students must love knowing that I'm sweating these exams....)

Was there ever such a broad topic for an exam as individuation!

This is of course a kind of meta-discourse – and fortunately I'm good at meta-discourses. I talk about my new analysand, the one who has been seeing me since I handed my reports in, and her rapid changes; I talk about a world of politics and chaos, and how dismantling complexes, anxieties and projections becomes more difficult when the world is a mess.

I talk about myself: and he moves in on parts of my own story – and I am telling my life story, yet again: in a somewhat different form, of course. I do this story a lot, don't I? for medical students, for my own students, for interviews – not to mention while boring my friends...

But fortunately this not an exam on narcissism, it's about individuation. They are very pleased, and I've got another good mark to balance the miserable one....

Of course, as Stuart pointed out, by tomorrow no one will remember the marks. Just that you passed.

•••

I walk through town slowly... it is getting more crowded. As I recover from the interview, I sit at a lakeside café to have a drink: white wine mixed with mineral water.

It is Saturday; there are many people walking, local and tourist and shopper and people enjoying the summer afternoon. A brass band blares out as part of some festival – and a lot of things rapidly begin to come into focus: there are trumpet fanfares, an amplified announcer, boats – people stop and watch on both sides of the lake, along the bridge, and they gather to look down from the high plaza in front of the cathedral...

But through it all, down the Zurichsee, glides a single swan, royally unconcerned.

•••

After exams, a week of classes – I attend a few, not many. I am drifting in time somehow – not, as it happens, dissociating (ha!) but sort of present, without feeling any enormous need to be involved.

It is easy to look at notes for the thesis. It is easy to talk to people. It is hot, but only a little bit miserable for a couple of days.

Hinshaw's city office, full of books, for a couple of hours of supervision – we mostly wrap things up and check in. Meister-Notter – I catch her to talk about the picture interpretation exam next February (yes, there are two exams left, plus thesis) – she is reassuring, and her main instruction is: don't worry about it.

The Institut office contacts me – there is another interview (what? another one?) where an analyst not known to me, but who has read all of my case reports, talks to me about all of them at once.

Don't worry, they say.

Almost everyone passes.

•••

I leave the café and walk to the Paradeplatz, to find the tram to cross the town to this restaurant... I realise as I follow the map on my phone that I am actually walking into Giovanni's neighbourhood. But he isn't here, he's at the Institut, so... no pressure to translate anything tonight.

•••

Saturday: I lie around all morning, disinclined to go anywhere. I finally take a shower around one, get dressed carefully, and walk down into the city, to find the building where this interview will take place.

•••

After walking along a street with some varied storefronts – a corner café with women at the tables who appear to be prostitutes, who look at me directly and also calculatingly; a small yellow shop selling African food, with a large man out front on his phone, who gives me a different but also direct look... and I turn the corner to see the small, fine restaurant with a pleasant quiet storefront, and what look like the local crowd sitting at tables out front, greeting each other, drinking, talking.

•••

At the apartment building's entrance is a tired-looking elderly woman, sitting on a shopping cart – with cataracts so thick she can hardly see. Could this be my examiner? – no; a thin dark-haired woman comes to stand next to me and talk to her. I ask, can I get in, I am looking for Fr. Dr. Bachmann? (Because my reports have been read by an analyst named Ingeborg Bachmann – which is slightly disorienting; she has the same name as a famous Austrian writer who also wrote opera libretti, so it's sort of like being told that Joyce Carol Oates has your patient reports and will get back to you about them.)

After some discussion, they decide I am okay; the elderly woman has locked herself out and has been waiting, exhausted, with her shopping – so we help her in slowly, and I finally follow to go up the steps to my appointment.

•••

The waiter is charming, funny – a big, tall, lanky young man with stubble, sort of loosely handsome and jokey and friendly. He tells me food will be available in twenty minutes; would I like champagne? The champagne is light gold in colour, and really – I mean really – good. I think: I'll be taken care of, here....

•••

Fr. Dr. Bachmann introduces herself, and transitions smoothly from pleasant to professional. I open my iPad with my patient reports, but she tells me to close it – we are just talking, you won't need to refer to them. We sit, and I look attentive – and then I try not to look too attentive, because that might seem weird – and so on....

••• 

It is pleasant when a waiter decides that you are amusing and, after he does the Usual Thing with the large group at the next table, comes more quietly over to you to joke and tell stories about tonight's specials... we have fun, and I realise I don't want to make my own decisions tonight – especially not at a place like this, where so much subtle attention is obviously being paid to what matters. Because this restaurant has almost nothing in the way of self-conscious hauteur: all energy is focused on, really devoted to, the food.

He tells me about the menu – the main is an easy choice, but the appetisers all have weird short knotty Swiss names, and I have no idea what to choose. What do you think is best? He nods, and brings a flat dry local salami, oven-roasted bread, and a sharp little knife.

•••

Fr. Bachmann says that she is generally pleased with my reports, but she has some questions. Why is there not more on my countertransference in these reports, why do I not explain what is going on with me? She becomes more searching, watching me closely.

•••

An intensely rich potage of mushrooms, made by someone who loves mushrooms, with shavings of something – vegetable – and an egg in its depths.

•••

Several of your analysands are friends with each other – what do you plan to do about containment issues? And Fr. Kast told you that you are too sympathetic with one analysand – what have you done about that?

The questions are making me sweat a bit... if I fail this one I assume I will be able to take it again.

•••

A small, round, deep tart of red onions in pastry, garnished with white sheep's cheese and mint leaves.

•••

What are you going to do about the patient whose life changed and she stopped coming to you – what do you see for future concerns? Have you planned what to do in case things start to go wrong again?

I am waving my hands expansively as I talk, even closing my eyes to remember what I want to say...

•••

A big but fragile juicy meringue, with whipped cream, topped with a large dollop of fig jam. The elderly woman next to me asks if it is good, and I give her a heartfelt yes.

•••

At the end of an hour of questions, she relaxes a bit – and then the corners of her mouth twitch up, slightly. She looks at me with the warmth she had at the beginning, and says, unexpectedly:

You are a good analyst.

I catch my breath, look at her in amazement –

•••

And so, to finish: a small glass of Marc, warm and incredibly sharp – like a drinkable flame....

Und Zürich wieder

The school year wound up remarkably firmly, last Friday... which was welcome. Yes, well, a few more things came up – a plagiarism case (that turned out not to be one, which made life easy), a handful of students rejected from the year abroad (since they're trying for conservatories there are more rejections than most departments get, but I Know People at institutions who might be arm-wrestled into taking late applications, and so fire off a slew of emails).

Exams over the next two days: Dreams and Case Exam, Psychiatry, Individuation. Notes, reports, my own analysands – remembering sessions and dreams from months ago that had faded from memory; and because I know he'll ask about my own analysis, going back to my own dreams – ending with the fuzzily vast topic of individuation: which has so many specific parameters, but which can't entirely be defined....

And I am aware of a light backwash of sadness over the topic, that returns from my own analytical experiences over the past six months. Which is only a sort of flash of a thing, embedded in an elemental understanding that I am not quite what I was: my internal world is clearer, vaster, calmer –

but, as I've noted in several blog posts, something in me – a relatively childish part I suppose – also wanted life to actually, magically, be different: to live with someone, in a different climate, but somehow with friends – to have a livelier, healthier life –

instead of course I'm weaker, less healthy; but also calmer. More accepting – well, mostly.

Yes, a light backwash of sadness....

•••

I packed, planned, gathered study materials so that I could stare at things up to the last minute for each exam. This morning, the taxi – I am chatty, the driver a bit less so, but he doesn't seem annoyed. Airport, planes, lines, papers...

Unexpectedly I run into Mohammed, one of the good-looking lads who hang around Drew and Kev, before my flight. He's from Saudi, and will come back to do a degree in the fall; we talk about best plans, where they might go. He walks me to the stairs when my flight is called; the first part of the journey, Newcastle to Amsterdam.

Then more airport shops, airport food....

Striding along at Schiphol, at one point I am suddenly so weak I have to move to the side and sit down; then... I keep going. Energy remains erratic, I shake slightly from time to time, wonder if people think I'm drunk perhaps. I can travel, but you can see why I am disinclined to go on long trips these days – I haven't gotten so weak that I have gotten into real trouble, yet, but of course that could happen, in transit.

Oh yes okay, didn't think of that, it could happen at home, too. But then that could happen to anyone.

•••

Individuation... a larger awareness... time and change, and that which doesn't change....

•••

Zürich is really hot – and I don't mean jazz clubs and dance parlours. 91 degrees today (= 33 C.), only a bit less through Monday... the Swiss don't seem fazed, but visitors do.

Which may be explained in a moment –

arrive, pick up package with apartment key, go and buy train pass and tickets; tell an irritable young English woman how to get to Bern, which causes her to dash off toward a ticket kiosk rather than continue complaining into her phone, which I regard as a win; take a train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof, then Stadelhofen, the tram up to good ol' Asylstraße...

The building remains slightly oddly yellow (who picked that paint? and why is only half the building that color?). I am moving steadily, slowly – it is truly hot. A sense that that is actually kind of healthy for me, if rather sweaty....

I go buy some food, come back to the apartment – but rather than unpacking and organising, turn around and go to the familiar Italian restaurant up the street.

•••

The owner and the waitress are glad to see me: we've gotten in the habit of speaking as friends over the past three or four years, though they see me only a few evenings in a year. Over the past two years they have seen me become a bit shakier, a bit more uncertain – I tell him I won't have wine, just iced tea, and he nods, odd as that may seem in an Italian context.

She is in a lively, expansive mood, as so often – she tells me about her upcoming vacation (Italy, somewhere else, then Slovakia – why would you go in that order? – but okay), and says that the weather has been like this for A Month.

No wonder the Swiss are acting as though they're used to the heat... and she agrees that, yes, more people are getting interested in air conditioning, despite the Swiss habit of regarding it as Unhealthy.

The owner has suggestions, but I finally go for the vitello tonnato – I don't have it often, it is a luxury. Theirs is not as delicate as some I've seen – it's really pretty robust: a sense that someone said, What I really want right now is vitello tonnato, so I'm gonna make it – everybody get out of my way....

•••

When you see people only occasionally, have no real reason to make contact, don't know their full names – why is it still so touching to meet them? Sometimes more than dear friends you know well....

If there were people you never saw again, people who vanished, and they were good friends, you might be sad – but you would fairly clearly know who they were. You would have clear memories, a sense of names, what they were like – what you were like together, what it was like to talk to them, or argue, or smile at them.

But when you meet kind, warm people in rapid, casual encounters – ones whom you particularly like – there is a sadness about knowing that this will be a connection that vanishes. And somehow, now, it seems sadder than the end of connections with real friends – they will have memories, but this is just an impression, a smiling face, someone who is instantly happy to see you.

•••

Tiramisu (of course).

No coffee, thank you, and I can't really handle a liqueur.

Take care... I'll see you again this week... thank you so much....

Sunlight

[From about a month ago, in late May – a sketch with no particular punch line.]

A lovely day... very warm by local standards, but relatively normal by my own, and those of Californian (and Australian and Italian and Spanish) friends....

Good things happened. Not the Dionysian spectacles of a few weeks ago, but a more regular day... sun, air. Across the street kids, probably uni students who have done most of their work, sat on the front porch, threw a ball around; the women downstairs ate lunch outside on their deck, sitting on the steps and talking.

I did some writing – masses to do, to different ends: but, most interestingly from my point of view, a sense of easiness about whether it gets done or not... I know the material for the Jung-Institut exams is late; and I realised today that if they said, no, too late, you have to wait for February, I'd be disappointed but not really upset.

Time unrolls, and is not such a problem.

Only one analysand today, and one student came by; both meetings went well.

Off to the hospital, Mark and I do our usual tell-the-story-of-our-lives-interspersed-with-statistics-and-overviews for medical students on rotation to Infectious Diseases (in our case, HIV)...

Then Mark had to dash across town, with me following more slowly – he had to pick up The Cake!... our HIV patient group (the one that's been around for years, not the new one) had its fourteenth anniversary (well: approximately – within a month or so of the date, anyway) at a local pub; a sunny, open place, big wooden tables – we brought food, about 20-25 people showed up, so that was good.

(They had a chocolate cake that was so sweet that I felt a bit like a kid at a birthday party after a piece of it – body signals that I should run around and yell and grab other kids' toys until someone comes to collect me....)

Then walked into town, bumped into Aleksandra and a friend of hers at a coffee shop, both of whom are doing postgraduate work on LGBTQ topics, and talked to them for a bit.

Then Kev's gay and lesbian (LGBTQRXY∆ˆ) reading group, where we talked about Jeannette Winterson's later memoir Why Be Happy when You Could Be Normal?. We spent time arguing over meanings, but everyone liked it...

and then sat outside a restaurant, in the long plaza that comes down from Grey's Monument, at tables, with a bottle of wine, talking until nine p.m. or so.

As I think of it – it  suggests a different culture, doesn't it?...

Shafts of light

From the chilly, detached sadness of last week, unexpected changes – a day and a bit that were more entwined with the life, and lives, around me –

Friday, an official reception – you know the drill: speeches, food, suits, paintings for sale. But this one has much more life in it than most: an LGBT History project, in its second year – people enjoying themselves and talking to each other, all a bit astonished that this was an actual pleasure. A speech by a gay councilman, a Labour representative – given Labour's behaviour the past few days I am admittedly not too interested at first. But he is energetic, involved – he had been a musician, so Tippett's Child of Our Time was the focus of his discussion... and he also makes it clear, without exactly saying so, that he is absolutely against current Labour policy.

Good people: energetic, happy – and some beautiful younger men. It is hard to miss them, to be frank. But a sense of connection even across the lines of... hmm, what do we call them? Boundaries of contrasting attractiveness?

That won't suddenly become the new slang, but you get the idea.

•••

Somewhere in the midst of preparing my own presentation among these events, a message arrives from our department head: the previous day B. collapsed, theatrically, eyes skewing and vibrating, threw up everywhere – a stroke or what? Much anxiety and confusion, he's at the hospital now – eyebrows are electronically raised at me – others evidently remember my 2009 stroke, and defer to me slightly: what do you think could have...?

The reception isn't far from the hospital, so I text M., his wife, with the (only slightly fictional) news that I'm in the building. She says he is probably okay, he can't see anyone, but she'd like a break, so will meet me in the cafeteria.

And when I get there, weirdly enough, I joke – and then we joke together – for an hour. Yes, I know... but it seemed fairly certain that B. would recover, and M. and I were both increasingly caught up in a slightly giddy mood: hope, diminishing anxiety, a sense of relief with a slightly guilty look over the shoulder, in case things weren't entirely all right –

•••

Today (Saturday) – the LGBT group is having its all-day public talks; I am doing my 'AIDS Rage' talk, heavily cut, but with a lot of the music, and pictures and... well, all the flashy stuff I have been able to generate.

And it goes well. Hey, I'm actually pretty good at this, if I say so myself.

Passionately engaged speeches from various people: a cheerfully pleasant woman – a retired librarian – talks about her archival research into a local man who was a transvestite, and his endless tangles with the police until he vanished during World War One. The way she tells it: not exactly a sad story – yes, of course, much abuse and darkness, and the lostness of the end – but she constantly reminds us how assertive he was about doing and being who he was – strangely and not entirely sadly inspiring.

The wonderful woman running the logistics, very direct and smart and calm – what is it about her face that recalls an actress, someone who is also very good at walking into a room and putting every person where they need to be?

D., who ran the whole show – an open, cheerful young man, who seems to make things happen just by his presence... And the mostly young, energetic people who have done so much work to make everything happen: a distinct sense that these are people who want to do things that matter, and they were lucky this time because it all caught fire: suddenly they all found themselves doing things that they wanted to do, and staying up late and running around like mad to do them...

A remarkable kind of inspiration. As when there are stage directors, or conductors, with that remarkable talent for making things happen – apparently without anxiety, without effort....

A young man who introduces the speakers, who recently returned to this city from a few years away, and now he is thinner, more assertive, more present – still shy and gentle, but one who seems to have discovered his strength in the world.

And my favourite lesbian lawyer: smart and quick, and unexpectedly the twin of a woman at my university office, someone who is always bouncing off walls with enthusiasm – the two of them alike and yet different: tall and blond, but sweet and tart in very different measures.

One of the last who comes to the podium, a trans speaker, friendly, imaginative, assertive but gentle across a complex series of feelings and judgments.

•••

Saturday evening, after that long day, back to the hospital to see B. Who is feeling much, much better, though absolutely wiped out – it was not a stroke (that phrase has a faint resonance of Dickens: "and to Tiny Tim, who did not die..."). His eyes are closed, as the pupils vibrate when he has them open too much – it was neurological, viral, maddeningly weird but not a stroke, and not permanent.

And yes, he is a bit wrecked (when human beings undergo system crashes, they are not like computers – the body is exhausted for a time; he won't be working for some weeks). But his brain, his mind, his memory – his creativity, his existence – should be unmarred...

Though he is tired, his eyes closed, his face is relaxed and he smiles from time to time. He shares the relief M. and I feel (I needn't worry about the previous night's joking, fortunately).

M. sits on the far side of the bed, I am on his left; I hold his hand for a while, with a sense of reassurance shared among us all. When I leave after an hour, I give him a hug – and, in one of those peculiar split-seconds of confusion and missed aim, I accidentally kiss him in the middle of the chest, rather than the cheek.

But neither of us are thrown by it: in this atmosphere of returning to life, it all feels like – well, like life. Pure life.

•••

There will be a birthday celebration for the guy who ran today's events in two hours – after such a day, which has had a friendly glow like embers, I don't mind indulging myself until then. So: Carluccio's – the outrageously handsome Italian waiter is near the door: he lights up when he sees me.

As I am floating tonight, I don't question this, I just happily go to my table. He is not on the floor, however – my waiter is a warmly friendly Argentinian with a wonkier, very guy-like face. But not unsexy: I think that, if the outrageously handsome waiter is someone you are dazzled by, the Argentinian is the guy you end up living with, the one who looks up and smiles as you walk into the apartment....

Dinner is good. Couples all around, I realise it is the Saturday before Valentine's Day – I choose from the regular menu, as too much of the valentine menu is a bit sickly in one way or another. (It has a 'for tourists' quality to it... and several items are dyed pink. Ecch.) The Argentinian and I argue out my choices – I feel a certain relaxed triumph as my order clearly interests him more than those of the adjacent couples. Well, hey: it's not their faults, what do they know.

After finishing dinner, dessert, a small liqueur: a brief Facebook exchange encourages me to get pictures of these waiters (friends on four continents want to know what I'm looking at, and I wouldn't mind pictures for myself). So I set up the camera on the phone, put on my jacket, pick up my briefcase, walk toward the front of the bar...

but neither is around. Oh the timing of taking breaks.

I put the phone in my pocket with a sigh, realise I need to buy a birthday gift, so walk over to their small deli – the maitre d', a big, tall, athletic local, helps me choose a box that combines liqueur and chocolates. A voice behind me – so, how was your dinner?... I turn and the gorgeous waiter, with his jacket on to leave, smiles at me. At that point I'm too flustered, and not coordinated enough, to get my phone to do what I want it to; so I smile, we chat, and we walk out, and part.

•••

Walking down from the middle of town toward the area near the station, where the gay bars are, I detour through the small but crowded side street with the comedy club/restaurant where M. works – he is there as I walk through the door: he pushes back at the air in front of him, gesturing for me to keep back, as he has a cold (but is working anyway). We exchange a few sentences, laugh, wave, I turn to leave and walk further through the busy town.

•••

In the plaza, people are outside at tables – it is not freezing, but it still seems a bit cold for that... Fortunately everyone I've met today is inside:

the bar is wide and long, a plain space, but a number of people from the LGBT conference are there – dressed down, more animated, the ones who worked all day calmer, relaxed, happy.

There is a warm connection operating across genders, ages, appearances: this is community, which can indeed be created on schedule by those who have a talent for it. I talk to D. and to K. and my favourite lawyer and the woman who ran things, and various young men and older men and women and...

An intense young man with a big smile, A., who asked a question after my talk that pointed towards a huge set of ideas around Galás, performance art, madness, and experimentation, wants to talk. And we do talk – for at least an hour or more; there is a constant, unstressed density to the conversation – because we each almost immediately get nearly everything the other says, the artistic, the emotional, the bizarre, the psychological, the fragmentary. Personal stories, art works, philosophies of existence.

Others around come over and joke with us briefly – A. is known to them as someone with strange tastes and ideas, someone fascinated with the edges and dark transformations of imagination – but A. and I are moving so fast, in such an endless tangle of exchanged possibilities, that everyone soon backs away and leaves us to keep talking. As from a fire that is burning a bit too hot for it to be comfortable to be near it.

It is, throughout, remarkable, for speed, for ideas, for... even if at first there is a hint of mutual measuring, some can-you-handle-this on both sides, it rapidly becomes clear that neither of us has anything to fear in this conversation – least of all being misunderstood.

Dazzling....

•••

After an hour or so, I still haven't gone home – so much for that plan. I don't feel tired...

Some of the men move down the street to the leather bar, the Eagle – usually the place where I would feel most comfortable, in this neighbourhood where all the gay and lesbian bars are strung along a single, long, curved street.

I have not, however, been in here for at least a year, or two, or very possibly three. I really don't go out these days.

Which tells you how low my expectations have plummeted, and my connections to the everyday gay life that is here....

•••

Which is probably why the continuing life that fills this day and night, this time of connection, is so surprising.

I continue to talk to the men who were involved in the conference – we are gathered in a small raised area, up a small staircase, at the front of the bar: the quiet, alert man who ran the Twitter feed, which apparently was second-most-popular in the UK for the entire Saturday – second after football... which, if you think about it, is seriously impressive. He put a couple of my best lines onto Twitter – rather proud of that, made a small splash.

At points I am assertively lecturing K., and then D., about how well they did today, about their skills and talents, about the rather larger splashes that they each have made. It's an interesting tone – I'm being the Old Man, pushy and a bit aggressive, but in an entirely encouraging way: telling them, no, you don't quite get it – these are talents many people don't have, and you must realise that you have them, in spades.

It's a bit like when I've pushed some of my own students – such as the ones who have that peculiar talent for leading and encouraging that makes a good conductor; or talking to M., who now studies in New York, when he showed that he could join practically any musician or ensemble in the department and make the performance vastly better just by getting involved...

D. looks at me intently, surprised but attentive, as I tell him what he is capable of doing: I am the old man you bump into after you have gotten lost in the fairy-tale forest – weird cackling, gnomic words, the forecast of the castle won, the golden future.

•••

Down on the floor of the bar I can see F. – a big, friendly, charming Irish bear, the one I always love talking to in the vitamin store. I haven't seen him for weeks, he's hanging around with people I know...

So I go down to mix with them, with increasing energy, for several hours. F. has quit the vitamin store, but we are glad to see each other – and now we have contact, we know names and Facebook feeds; and I'm seriously glad of that – he is not only intelligent, but – beneath the slightly Irish exaggeration and brief flashes of anxiety, he is very – how would I say it – grounded. Adult. Strong – if still a bit uncertain how to present that to the world. His boyfriend is an energetic, talkative (yes, that is me saying talkative, so the word really means something) American – charming, daring, constantly testing small boundaries in a non-threatening way. They are (in at least two senses) with a solemn but pleasant Spanish man, who occasionally smiles and joins the conversation (the limits are linguistic, but when he catches on he is lively, imaginative).

S. and his partner, and their gang of friends – always a fixture at the Eagle, but a friendly one. Various rounds of shots revolving – you can tell I haven't been to the bars in ages, because I am surprised that shots are now varied and mixed (which, I suppose, gives the bartenders something amusing to do as they dash around keeping up with things – and they are indeed having at least some fun, trading laughing backchat with patrons as they pass).

(But perhaps they are merely responding to this day, this night: and perhaps it isn't just me – the world seems to be alive tonight: Eros is present, and everyone has energy, hope, plans, life.)

At one point, a man in a wheelchair, small and very crumpled, comes through the crowd – we move aside to let him occupy the corner of the bar. He sits, head on his shoulder, for a while – finally a guy sitting at the bar and I catch each other's eyes with that look of: okay, somebody needs to do something, and it looks like it's up to us. As the guy at the bar calls over the bartender, I lean over – in full right angle, because he is sitting that low – and ask if he wants something to drink, if he needs anything... he says, clearly but shyly: I have to tell you something – I've never been to a gay bar. (A sudden sense of walking into deep waters, but with no threat of drowning: I know I can, and must, keep my head through these moments.)

We talk for a while, I wave away the bartender – the man in the wheelchair really doesn't want anything to drink – and we talk directly about being nervous and being comfortable, about how bars are and how men are, what it's like to be out in public – when he worries about being treated badly because of his wheelchair, I choose the realistic option: it's true, that might happen. But everyone in a gay bar is usually a bit self-conscious anyway, so if it does happen – ignore it. And he is fine with that....

There are increasing numbers of guys, familiar ones and new ones – everyone is a bit alive, an electricity running through them. The shots keep coming in strange colours, mixed reds and greens, peculiar and sweet flavours – which is good, I'm happy with sweet, as always.

Two guys who just got engaged – and they are absolutely in the world of sensation: they both radiate a combination of sexuality and innocence – a sense of some kind of perfect match... The taller one is energetic, happily loud, has lived in many, many places – he's way ahead of me, having lived in more than ninety countries, but at least I have my four continents, the fifth one coming this summer. He is friendly and funny and talkative, with an utterly masculine joy: he seems archetypally a man of repairs and tools, of the most immanently physical chunks of the physical world. A bit later, his boyfriend, the short, hot one, confides to me, his arm comfortably around my waist: his 41st birthday is Monday, and he knows his partner has surprises ready, but he doesn't know what they are. I turn to smile at him, and say, vividly oracular: it will be amazing.

The joy in his face...

And a very tall, handsome man, but with a closed, private face; who knows all the men in this circle, though he stands slightly alone, like a cautious animal – he is shy; and even during a few minutes of talking with him – but I don't quite know how to explain this: what is it about reassuring someone who obviously cannot realise how extraordinarily beautiful they are, that makes you feel as though you are doing exactly what is needed in this second?...

•••

The street, still fairly busy, but soon there is another taxi. The driver at first a bit irritable, a bit anxious – chaotic traffic, people wandering in and out, he is repeatedly waved down –

I tell him, look, this will take a bit more time than usual, and I don't mind.

He relaxes, and drives me home.

•••

Sunday: a floating lassitude, not up until early afternoon. Laying in bed reading. Enjoying recovery from something I rarely do these days...

•••

The early part of the week is pleasant, though working comes and goes.... I push myself a bit, some bits of administration vanish into a couple of quick spreadsheets... the list of to do's shortens, a bit, though the article at the top of the list is still there, and I keep walking around it, looking at it with a sort of friendly though guarded caution.

•••

Tonight I listen to some of the music I added into the computer last week – a collection of ars subtilior, some Jai Uttal...

Uttal's kirtan – this I haven't listened to so much since the early 90s. Wandering through Facebook, I see that L. is closing the house where he has lived for years, where I first met the guru Ma Jaya – and first heard such things as kirtan, the entire cloud of Hindu and Buddhist teachings that made me yearn for comfort, for enough warmth to get me through the death I spent those years expecting.

The music – more casually edited than I remember, but full of life and passion – returns me to a younger self: I find myself emotional, but as in memory – not grieving, but remembering grieving. And I want to tell him something, as my analysands do when they become aware of their memories as shades and echoes of earlier selves –

though I admit that, among the several things I consider telling him (you are going to live for a long time, you want to finish that degree soon) is an instruction that I wouldn't be able to fully explain to him: ambition yes, travel yes, but remember: love is better.

•••

Days full of light. Not a bright light, but light that keeps flashing through, and among, various people and exchanges and moments, that keeps showing up in sentences and eyes – as though there is really such a great deal of light, holding constant under all the surfaces of things: and it keeps appearing, glinting, through everything....

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....

Summa

A dramatic year...

One that stank for the world, of course: major moves into aggressive idiocy. But it's not very interesting to talk about Brexit and the UK, Trump and America. Or about dead celebrities – some good people are gone, yes, but that happens always. And many of them were old enough that grieving doesn't seem all that necessary – just a sort of 'vale': that was a good life, thanks for what you did with it.

My year was unavoidably influenced by all that, but its essential nature was different: from sick and sleepy for ten months, to better, to much better. With, as I've said, a new ruthlessness: if illness and death have reminded me that they're always close by, life has sharper and more definite edges – the university, the Jung-Institut, at least two governments, and other large and semi-inept organisations will just have to accept as much energy and attention as I bother to give them, and not whine and ask for more.

Which is just fine: the greatly increased clarity that has clicked into place comes from my analysis with B. more than anything – a direct connection to dustier, more broken parts of myself across the winter of 2015-16 seems to have gradually given back a lot of energy; it has also clarified what I can hope for, what has fallen into time, and what can at least be remembered and enjoyed in memory.

But I do feel relatively healthy: even the weakness of my legs, which has been basically mechanical rather than caused by illness (surprise! if you sleep a lot for ten months your muscles fade) has itself been shifting – not because I'm disciplined enough to actually exercise, but just because I am walking around and doing things again.

Any plans for the next year don't seem quite like resolutions: they're just what I want – though they resemble standard resolutions: get some weight off, write a lot. Finish the Jung-Institut degree.

And ignore, or at least respond only minimally to, the restrictions and demands of the chaotic world....

But best of all of this is certainly that larger context where it all seems to happen, now: a broader awareness of how everything in me, and in past and present and in the world, shifts and balances across time, across levels of consciousness and being.

Because that makes all change, and any apparent stasis, interesting....

28 December

Shopping, shopping: but the sizes keep being wrong. A bag is missing: where did I go yesterday, where could I have left it?

A shower to recover clarity, remembering the handsome young man who caught up to me in the mall yesterday to ask how was my dinner with friends last week – a sense that this friendliness will need to be enough, it is too late.

Bus ride into town, bags in each hand – and it all cracks apart as I realize I don’t have my keys, I don't have my wallet: I think, mini-strokes? Third forgetting in as few weeks. Strategies unfold across town: I could call him, or her, I see that without a wallet I can’t open some gates –

University, security guys kindly and cheerful, but I am anxious: this is happening too often. How would I know if my consciousness is deteriorating, if that 2009 stroke were recurring in tiny bits? Luck with combination, keys, door: home again, wallet and keys are indeed lying there, innocent…

But questions remain. Where is my attention? Calmer lately, a shift rooted in analysis: despite the security guy’s reassurance it is dubious to blame the usual complexes, preoccupations, even holidays. How could I know if awareness were becoming… intermittent? Can I work with patients, should I continue with plans and actions…

Settling down. Patient notes, vacuum, dinner. If the personal might be fracturing at the same time that the world is doing the same, perhaps… it doesn’t really matter.

In midwinter there is always falling into the warm snowdrift, the quiet dark of the year, into sleep and drifting clouds of dream.

The Experience of Emotion in the Age of Digital Reproduction

So, Benjamin's late work!... well, not really.

Listening to Tippett string quartets on earphones (earbuds, headphones, headbutts, whatever).

Easy access to music of various times and moods, of high quality, doesn't really have such a long history: even in the 1970s LPs, and then cassettes and eventually CDs, represented only a small part of the musics that are now easily accessible.

So... if politics gets rougher...

Well, what I'm thinking is: rather obviously in, say, 1917, it might have been unusual to hear music that was blithely cheerful: recordings were rare, performers may not have chosen sunnier pieces that they would have sailed into five years before, and perhaps if they had played them there would be a bit more in the way of wistful slowing of tempi, etc.

And it wouldn't be so very different in, say, 1942, or perhaps in 1970.

•••

If things were to get rough for many people across a wide area, then... access to recordings of ecstatically searching music, like the Tippett 2nd quartet, might still be quite easy: would we hear music, watch digitally downloaded films, that were more cheerful than our surroundings?

And would that be a different experience – as though one could literally step out of one's own time into another, step out of dangers or troubles?...

Please note: I don't mean this as a Marxist or Adornoesque scolding, either – you can imagine Marx's scorn at the escapist bourgeois, or Adorno's scathing contempt for someone who is so weak that they step out away from engaging with cultural darkness.

Having not only our youth on CD, but also our feelings about it....

•••

But tomorrow I will be sixty. That's as in 'years old'. Quite astonishing really – bizarre to be one of the 'long-term dying' (that's a phrase I just coined, so consider it copyright).

And lately people are cheerful: my Friday class is smart and alert and engaged, friends are in lively moods....

We can ignore political problems and enjoy the now.

Which, it occurs to me, is what I shall demand for my birthday:

that my birthday present is: everyone must have a good Friday.

•••

Yes, I do mean all day........

Drawing-in

From crisp to cold...

The past couple of days when I've left the house, it is chilly; I think each time, I need a scarf.

A brief hospital visit, the doctor is late, I don't need the x-ray any time soon so I take the request for it with me and walk quickly out and grab the next bus.

I get back to the café next to my office just half an hour before my lecture, breakfast-less – I ask for speed but the cook forgets and lets my panini burn, and the contrite woman behind the counter throws together a tuna sandwich and most of what I had paid, and hands it to me as I rush to the lecture theatre.

(Why isn't it a panino, I always wonder. Is it perhaps because there are two pieces of bread.)

"Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear, and, as far as possible, for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flower beds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their levelling and rinsing."

As the students are filing in, I take a few bites of my portable brunch.

Barthes: the lecture seems okay, but the students are sleepy – are they still recovering from the time change? It's all right, it's good enough – at one point I lie on the floor to show them the end of Mark Morris' Mythologies, they wake up enough to laugh – at the end they roll groggily out, as though they are headed straight for bed.

I walk down through the university, buy some of the new line of sturdy soups at M&S, and get on the bus. I sit next to an elderly lady, we talk about travel and weather – she tells me she is 81, I say I'm nearly sixty, she says, predictably, oh that's nothing, with a laugh. I say good-bye to her as I get off the bus, come home –

but behind everything I'm doing is already a kind of cozy retreat-and-relaxation: even running around I'm already in a late fall / early winter mood, stocking the pantry and closing curtains.

"It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own."

I haven't brought in the rosemary and oregano and thyme from the back patio– but I must admit there's plenty in the freezer, both dry and in olive oil. I make some nettle tea, on R.'s orders.

I hear firecrackers outside – and check the calendar: yes, tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day. People tend to mess about with fireworks from a couple of days before Halloween. Seeing whether the matches really work, I suppose...

A casual mention of a short story on Facebook led to buying a cheap copy of an old paperback, which came today – exactly my kind of thing, though I don't remember ever reading it: Bradbury edited a collection of Timeless Stories in the early 1950s that was then reprinted for decades. After a brief encounter with television proves uninteresting, I turn it off and, in the dim light of the living room, read the first stories...

"He put away the nets. He stacked wood against the wall by the stove for next spring, and for anyone who might be shipwrecked on the island, and he tied down the woodshed with ropes because it stood so near the high-water mark."

There is a little bit of time travel in all of this: though most of these stories aren't familiar, the tone is – and so is the cover: this is a 1970 edition with artwork in a style that is familiar to me. That is also when Ballantine Books began to splurge on Lin Carter's idea of bringing back fantasy classics – so many of them are on my shelves, so many of them are so important to me.

In fact, there is a library-rescued Complete Storisende Edition of Cabell piled up, in order of course, next to my fireplace...

"The gales began to howl around our lonely island and the weather was cold. All of us now lived in my house where there was naturally a good porcelain stove and where we intended to sleep through the winter."

I wake up to the doorbell: a late night delivery of groceries, half an hour early because the driver wants to go home. When I open the door it is really cold, and I say so, though it is perhaps something he has already heard this evening: he is cheerfully energetic, a friendly Geordie lad who makes the usual jokes about it being 'fresh'. I tell him he wants to get home in this weather.

I have bought a bit too much food – solid and healthy, autumn fare for the most part. Except the mango, that's an indulgence. It's a bit of a fuss to put it all away, but I make room, packing away everything securely, preparing.

"It wasn’t raining at the moment but the forest was covered in mist and looked very beautiful, and it got thicker and thicker where the hills went down into Moominvalley, and little by little the pools became rivulets, more and more of them, and Toft walked between hundreds of streams and waterfalls, and all of them were going in the same direction as he was."

Seasons of mists...

I fall back into my book.

Unexpected...

[8 July 2016]

I am in Zürich for a week, at the end of the normal Jung-Institut training sessions…

I went to the graduation ceremony; there was an unusually large number of graduates, including a lot of friends (some of whom started after I did, but oh well). Hope to be up there in a year – it is still possible; we’ll see.

I talk to the new director of studies at the Jung-Institut, who is a big, tanned, muscled, pleasant-looking German man. He’s friendly but very serious, and slightly preoccupied – you get the feeling that he’s still nervous about all his responsibilities; he stumbled a bit on his introductory speech for the ceremony, but with an earnest commitment to get things right.

So, yes, basically: hot.

And, possibly more importantly, since he takes things seriously but is trying to be supportive, it’s not difficult to discuss strategies with him for completing the various requirements to be completed this year.

•••

It’s true, though: I am doing a bit more on this trip than is easy to manage, as I still feel ill fairly frequently – but also fairly regularly, mostly after taking my medications; otherwise the body seems calm, three weeks after I’ve finished the HCV regimen. I would even say that I am gradually feeling better, but there is still such a lot of veering up and down from hour to hour on any graph of well-being that I hesitate to commit myself to any predictions….

•••

A couple of days ago, I left the HIV patient group – not in a huff, but definitely. I feel surprisingly calm about it: I was increasingly argumentative in meetings over the past year – as were others – and I didn’t really like where things were going – not because they were awful, but because they just didn’t fit my idea of the group’s purpose.

It actually felt like the splits that have been going on in political parties such as the Democrats and Labor – with me as the cranky old, inflexible, marginalized contender from the socialist left… But enough of all that; it’s not a government, it’s a patient group, and as I’ve been involved and/or running things for thirteen years now, it’s fine if I go and do other stuff.

In fact, since this change, there is an enormous reduction in the noise of anxiety and aggression in my life… which is very welcome: paying attention to one’s shadow in analysis is one thing, but staying in a constantly reactivating situation doesn’t seem worth it. And, of course, with everything else going on in my life (and in the world), I’m glad to have less to do.

•••

[12 July 2016]

I am on a train between Zürich and Einsiedeln, heading to a session of supervision, aware that my ensuing ticket to another supervision session in St. Gallen leaves from the wrong station and needs to be changed, and that I need to get some cash, and…

Looking at Facebook on my phone, I see that a friend in San Francisco has posted an article: ‘No Linked HIV Transmissions in Long-Term Partner Study After Couples Had Sex Without Condoms’.

I glance through the article, and – I start crying: and can’t stop.

No one is near me on this quiet countryside train – I have a napkin from my packed lunch…

By the time I arrive in Bob’s office in Einsiedeln about fifteen minutes later, I have partly put myself back together – he asks what’s wrong; as I try to tell him about the headline, I start crying again.

It’s amazing, really. As I’ve casually told friends, the main question that I cannot really answer that comes up in my own personal analysis, and even in supervision, is: so, have you given up on ever being in a relationship again? – on ever being happy?...

I generally answer, with varying degrees of terse irritation: I know that I’m doing this, I don’t know how to fix it, I’ve been asked that before, look it is what it is. Let’s get on to other things.

There is some link… There is some disjunction in my memory and conscious patterns: when I look at ‘myself’, at my attitudes and responses to this, they go back perhaps ten years or so. Which however implies, as I realize on the train: I tend to forget my direct experience of the rage, despair, loss, of the previous twenty years – of knowing that everyone is dying, and in any case I’m infectious and so are they, and…

I mean, it’s all very familiar, I write and talk about it all the time. But I don’t ‘go’ there anymore – it’s not really available.

Basically, I don’t have an immanent experience of who I was before about 2006-8 anymore…

There is a link here between a mindset that became so familiar it was no longer visible, and later conclusions that were reached on that basis, as their forgotten foundation: this article heading, which reasonably (but, to me, almost mockingly) points to huge numbers of couples, men who have lived together for a long time –

and also to the emptiness, to the brutally trivial inaccuracy, of my assumption that unsafe sex was dangerous, especially in a relationship… that the commitment itself would cause you to infect, and thus kill another person: so the commitment inevitably would lead to its own violent end…

You don’t get into a commitment, because if you do you’ll kill somebody. Eventually.

Or, well: something like that. Something never exactly reasoned out, something that didn’t quite operate as a line of thinking, but – a cloud of implicit experiences and anxieties that long ago congealed into a pattern, which has been suddenly, appallingly, triggered by a nice newspaper headline that certainly looks happy-making, doesn’t it.

I suppose, for a long time, I’ve been able to handle the death part; but losing the possibility of relationship – no, less abstractly: of love and comfort, of a reason to go to bed at night and get up in the morning – is truly painful…

•••

I do know that this emotional crash occurs partly because it is available to me: much analysis, and especially the internal fusions and transformations of the past year, have left me… open to seeing such things.

Which is, frankly – and unquestionably – a good thing.

However it might feel at any given moment.

•••

Back on the train, Einsiedeln to St. Gallen. The clunky little I Ching app on my phone gives me:

24, Turning Back. Turning back or returning. Reaching the point of no return, and returning.

Changing to:

2, The Receptive. Receptivity, acceptance, facilitating.

•••

[13 July 2016]

Supervision is good: because I’ve stayed a week after everyone else has left, my supervisors are calmer and more relaxed – surprising insights and corrections, and a general sense of respect and being respected.

Evenings are hot, the café outside this small, stylish urban apartment is noisy – I take the computer to a trendy, student-y Italian restaurant to work on the paper I need to finish for Greg and William. It is going quickly, I feel fluent, this should get finished soon –

•••

[14-16 July 2016]

4 am, I wake, in pain. A lot of pain: I take stomach pills, they do nothing.

My plane leaves around 11 am.

I lie in bed, roll around –

I get up and walk a bit –

lie back on the bed –

lie on my other side –

•••

After three and a half hours of this, I decide the plane is moot, I must get a taxi to the hospital. I dress, a bit sloppily, with shaking hands, throw things into my backpack (it will turn out that in choosing what to take I make some very smart choices, yet completely forget other necessities) and go down three floors into the streets.

It is sunny; it will be a lovely day. Zürich is quiet at 7:30 am in this neighborhood; a few people are walking around.

I approach a couple – I am of course looking rather messy, dissolute, which is rare in Zürich – and ask in German where there is a taxi stand, to get to a hospital; they look at me in confusion. They are British, I translate back into English, they don’t know. They look sorry and slightly guarded… I walk onward, three or four, or five or six, blocks… and finally a taxi…

•••

I shouldn’t do the whole story; memory gets chaotic for some hours after this anyway.

The Universitätsspital, early morning; a kind nurse, a lot of pain, a lot of waiting. Emergency room, curtained bays around a central block of offices, pleasant, alert, and remarkably good-looking young doctors of both sexes come in and out.

(See, CSI isn’t so unrealistic after all: there are indeed public service systems where everyone looks as though they are taking a break from their modeling career.)

I have a tube in my arm, it turns out that I am being put to sleep by something in the tube; I am fairly groggy all day. Young, smart people come in and go out, they shake my hand when they enter, I explain health, HIV medications, HCV medications, pain on a scale of 1 to 10, we talk about my UK health care (and Brexit, and whether that makes a difference), I find my health insurance number in my phone, my University travel insurance is on an email from a month or so ago, my diagnosis, procedures, things they might do, medications for pain.

By early afternoon, I am awake and in no pain. Somewhat groggy.

Around 7 pm, they are satisfied that they know what to do – at this point things are quiet, and the shy, friendly young man who keeps checking on me has obviously gotten a bit tired of waiting for return calls from Urology and from my insurance. They finally take me to a ward, an exceptionally gay nurse with a wicked sense of satire finds me a dinner, I ask about showering but they say, firmly: tomorrow. I fall into deep sleep…

•••

Friday. A different nurse, also male and gay (though not quite as gay as the first one, but hey it’s not really a contest). A big, serious German – good, controlling advice about everything, a definite approach that involves ordering me around…

Enough. Let’s turn the next pages in quick succession.

Shower, the nurse sneaks me a pair of nice rubberized socks, food. Young doctors come in and out: you can’t fly today, in fact you can’t fly unless…

The brashly handsome one, like Brad Pitt with Top Gun glasses, asks if he can examine my genitals before the procedure – he says, you wouldn’t believe what we find: rings, tattoos, all kinds of… I say, oh yes I would, I would absolutely believe it.

He finds no rings or other paraphernalia.

Trolley, elevator, anesthetic unit…

(the film reel runs out…

•••

and after an unmeasured time it is replaced)

I wake, relaxed: I have a ‘pigtail catheter’ invisibly inside me, near the right kidney – without it they won’t let me fly, as the pain of another kidney stone would mean the plane would have to land. (Really? It’s just pain, isn’t it?)

Another twenty-four hours: bed, boredom, walking, chatting to nurses, reading on the iPad.

Friday evening, a big, bluff Swiss guy – a nice guy, an athletic young dad, like a big, uncomplicatedly friendly dog – is wheeled in to the other bed; we intermittently joke and chat, he falls frequently into deep sleep.

•••

Saturday morning, more of the same: young doctors come in and out and explain things, we settle insurance.

The woman whose apartment I’ve been renting actually packs my luggage – including sweaty clothing from several hot days: well beyond the call of duty, but she is kind about it. Brinda, another Jung-Institut student, is even kinder, bringing me my suitcase and taking the apartment key back to the woman.

Five pain medications: the German nurse says, don’t bother with the last one, it’s got too many side effects – and walks me downstairs to the pharmacy to buy the first four, talking about his plan of visiting Berwick-on-Tweed, just north of me, in the next year. Yes, he has my card.

On Saturday afternoon, I step into the pleasant Zürich summer day to take a tram to the airport. People are walking around, enjoying themselves – I am suddenly in the outside world: I feel as though I have come to miss it –

even though over only three days –

•••

As I’ve written a brief, Bravely Bearing Up notice of hospitalization on Facebook, Norma messages me to say she’ll pick me up at the airport.

Home. Norma carries my suitcase upstairs over my objections, comes in to check that things are all right… we chat, I make her a cup of chamomile tea…

I tell her I don’t think I can travel any more – at least not much: is this the fourth or fifth time in a decade that I’ve done wheelchairs in airports, delayed flight plans from hospitals, emailing my doctor?... my health just isn’t so good that I can traipse around the world, or even around Europe.

And, frankly, I’m not sure I can finish the degree at the Jung-Institut – if I can’t really travel, can’t dependably go places, do things –

Norma is lucid, direct, corrective: giving up is pointless. You’re taken care of – you never know what’s next with health, or life –

She’s right, in one direction at least; I remain slightly uncertain, but mollified.

And later, sleep, in my own bed.

•••

[…]

Sunday. I cancel all travel – I won’t go to Spain to see Susan and Rob, I won’t go to the August conference in Japan. I won’t take a train to Sheffield for analysis.

It is sunny, warm. I am relaxed… pain medication, my usual pills after missing them for two days…

I walk to Gay Pride, but walking is not quite so easy: and I have misunderstood which end of the large park is the right one. Long walking, late afternoon, the health area is closed, things are winding down. I walk, looking for a taxi… home… sleep again…

•••

Monday. I finally, actually, start volunteering at the hospital dementia ward: I sit, walk with a lonely, anxious woman in her eighties – the nurse takes me straight to her when she hears I’m working in psychology: the woman is unexpectedly paranoid, and keeps talking about her husband, who is either in another ward or hospital – or, as she doesn’t seem located entirely in the present, perhaps he is dead.

A restless, lacerating grief floats through her running monologues: at times she wanders the ward, picking up other patients’ belongings, which I cajole away from her as I lead her away – the other ladies look at me in grateful relief: she is familiar to them by now.

But it is not unpleasant, or difficult, being with her: as I’ve only been back from my own hospital visit for two days, there is a direct and guiltless empathy – my body remembers what she feels, as she twists and mutters on her bed.

And I am, without trying, detached: not uncaring, not overwhelmed – there is a sense of ongoing time, of the inevitability of our last years and months, and a knowledge that she will not become miraculously happy and relieved –

but just sitting here, occasionally chatting, rearranging her clothes as she pulls them out of her locker and drapes them on the chair where I’m sitting, is in itself calming:

pain cannot be removed, but my own breathing calm makes time itself less acute, makes its passing hurt less – for her; and for me.

•••

Monday evening. The paper I was writing is no longer in my mind, but I know the chunk I’ve got, plus all of these notes, will be enough to get me restarted.

In the ensuing days, I catch up with things, rapidly, briskly. I ask my doctor when the catheter will come out, translate the reports from the Zürich hospital (except the arcane medical bits that aren’t on the web), see my own patients, meet friends in cafés…

Perhaps Norma is right; perhaps I don’t need to remove myself from my own life. Not yet, anyway.

•••

[27 July 2016]

Finally, the hospital, and Urology!

An astoundingly fast-talking, sharp-edged, decisive doctor, a woman in a restrained but classily dark dress, absorbs information instantly or a little bit faster than that, turns on a recorder and reads back, evidently from her meticulous memory, a five-minute history plus diagnosis plus procedure plus planned outcomes plus instructions to phlebotomy, nurse, and anesthetist.

(She does crack a smile at one point, as I explain the past two weeks...)

She walks briskly out; the gentler nurse and I get to work.

The catheter will come out in a week or two…

preparations are made…

•••

I walk out into a different sunshine and go home.