in the hall of mirrors

Calm air

A flight to Zürich that was bizarrely quick and easy...

Did you know that KLM doesn't even check passports a second time, while getting on the plane, any more? The American TSA must be absolutely furious.

Swift, sunny, calm. Roggenbrot, Käse; quick laundry, buy food. Go through documents on computer, transfer to phone and iPad so that everything's handy.

And the rest of today: study. When Annick arrives from Lausanne at 5 pm, we'll have a 'working' dinner in the little satellite of Hiltl (doesn't it have a different name?), and quiz each other on the different exams we have tomorrow.

Of course, yet another meteorological shift tomorrow: three days of intense heat, forecasting 91/33... hmm. It wouldn't be very classy to go to the exam in shorts, would it...

Could-be-other

A beautiful day. A list of things done. A meeting, minor enough.

A couple of days ago, finishing up a preparatory paper for one of my upcoming exams, I realized I was tensing up enough to make myself uncomfortable, and in some actual pain – took a medication I had thought I didn't need any more. Perhaps that has made me feel slightly unreal, the past few days...

And being reminded that my exams are a choice, the entire project of studying at the Jung-Institut is a choice... that the very idea of becoming a Jungian analyst, of engaging in individuation (not just therapy, not just the helping profession thing, not just patch-them-up-and-put-them-back-into-the-rat-race) may be a goal, but it may also be an illusion. I want this to be about really moving towards something that is more real, more solid and with a real impact, than most things that we normally do in later life (retirement? being comfortable? gardening? going to see the kids... but of course I don't have kids, so...) but perhaps it is never quite that.

The alternatives that we do have. We are always deeply impressed by those dramatic life events that are not free – things we are thrown to, things that can not be any other way – diagnoses, firings, street accidents. Is it generally true of these serious, unavoidable, real things that they are always bad ones?... maybe not, I suppose it would be possible that one could win a lottery. But even then, that would be a not-quite-real thing – suddenly there is a lot of money, and then one would spend that money in various hallucinatory, not particularly real ways... or even being moved to another place, the same life with some different elements... at what point does change or loss or gain become more than protection, continuity, modification?

The sense of unreality, the sense of – contingency rather than necessity, I suppose: and even among the pleasant day and the pleasant people, nothing I am doing feels particularly real at the moment. Like a movie set, or more accurately the set of a long-running, not terribly successful situation comedy, an ensemble show with no major stars. Even the life I am (perhaps?) aiming to live, something in southern Europe, where the casual materiality of the daily world, the pleasure of it, would be greater – that of course does not guarantee its importance, its reality, its solidity.

The dream world, the world of illusions: it doesn't take much reading of Buddhist sutras to achieve that sense of vertigo. It is familiar also from years in Los Angeles, the pleasant not-quite-city, where being not-quite-real is a common state of being. And perhaps a lot of travel, a lot of living in very different places, helps to make everything seem even more contingent.

It is not that there is anything essentially wrong with the not-quite-real world, either; but it does feel as though there is literally no 'bottom', no core to it all.

Playing games, doing as-ifs... What is my next line? Can we run that again?...

Glorious

A glorious day – as we name it: yesterday was like this too. The first few days of June, and England seems to have remembered what it has been told by other countries, in those pubs where they all hang out, that in June it is summer, and in summer it is sunny and warm and pleasant.

Given how often it forgets all of this, that's a big deal.

I would compare it to California, but this is a much softer, gentler air – not the sea-chill of San Francisco, nor the desert blast of LA. This is a weather for vicarage parties (I believe this happens more often in the south of England, where vicars used to infest the copses and lanes – before the cull).

I have a lot to do today – there are still sixty-odd essays to mark, and I have to finish turning my erratic and incompetent preparation for the Jung-Institute's development exam into a short paper. The marking is slightly exasperating; and the short paper makes me feel like an idiot. But I can finish both today, I think.

And still it is sunny... which begs the question: how about all those people in their nineties who say, I wish I'd stopped working and gone outside more often? Understood. I get it. And this is an error I've committed repeatedly in my life – anxiously working at something while joy sits waiting somewhere.

Oh well; one justification – perhaps I can eventually end up in a sunnier clime, where it's like this fairly often.

And perhaps I feel more sharply attuned to time, change, awareness today – which makes it slightly hard to act on these immediate projects: yesterday's analysis session in York threw me way off balance, making me lie on the couch and snooze for hours afterwards. Keying into old sorrows – S. wanted to hear entire histories and stories that I'd forgotten I hadn't yet told her (and, frankly, wasn't really in the mood to revisit); we spent so much time on them that my list of dreams was put aside for next session.

Which all means: a subtly layered version of existential uncertainty – the sun and the birds at one level, the anxiety of the paper and exams at another, the comfortableness of the body lower down, the memories of failures and losses and deaths giving off a cloudy pedal point, like the background noises in Inception – seems to keep lurching along, various fragments shimmering to the surface, and fading again.

Anxiety-confidence-fear-pride-resignation-...

So: a bit too many appointments, too much teaching (though it is not going badly); editing the book; studying for four Jung-Institut exams, with two papers; taking over the HIV group's peer counseling...

I have been thrown from worry to a more steely determination, and through everything between, in more and more erratic and rapidly changing cycles, over the past two months. I suddenly wake in the night, think about one of the exams, what there is to do to get ready for it; I make tea, wondering what book article I should edit today; and, too frequently, I drop everything to go teach or sit in my office, waiting to reflect the all-too-similar anxieties of students....

It is of course difficult to arrive at any conclusion about any of the given tasks in the midst of such chaos. I could of course delay exams until winter, I could find out what would happen to the book schedule if I didn't finish until July... but I know that those protective, but negative moves wouldn't win me much breathing space now.

Above all, I do know that I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in comparable states: getting things done, and also not getting things done. Despairing, anxious, excited, proud. Utterly confident, at points. I would not want to be that person again, though I know that before my own Great Crash of 2001-2, I still had such expectations of my self and my future that I could keep going more easily. I am always exasperated at my own inertia over the past decade, but it remains hard to move beyond it, either physically or emotionally, or almost more importantly in terms of actions.

Now, in my mid-50s, the emotions tied to these things have a certain detachable familiarity: I can look at them and keep walking, though they do throw me off my stride at every point. (It is easier to see their illusory nature, of course – complexes, illusions of the world, you can pick any context to interpret them.)

I suppose, like a hamster in a plexiglass ball, I need to just keep rolling forward: not in a straight and rapid line – I'm not capable of that, I'm frequently off course, but then I may roll back in the proper direction – but just to keep the ball rolling....

Beautiful men

After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a first meeting with Rumana, Norma, and Susan of something that may turn into an actual writing group –

today I did some e-mails and admin, plus a bit too much procrastination, as usual. Then yoga – which, over the past six weeks of trying to reconnect to something I haven't done for about fifteen years, keeps consistently transforming itself from a duty into a joy – and then a taxi to see a play about AIDS by a local writer (Steve Burbridge), performed in a pub, which I thought I should see...

The play was good – solid, a concrete experience of diagnosis. It reminded me that, for all my work with HIV training and counseling these days, I do tend to become – abstract about the experience, distant from my own stories, which gradually turn into memories that are dusty as old library books. And, of course, that so many of my later experiences are about isolation... and yes, I get by without the added pressures of other people. Or of relationship. How easy that all makes it. Or... not.

But at yoga the extraordinarily beautiful young man who worked in the health tent at last year's Pride – actually a beautiful puppy, but still very distracting – was for some reason in my class, though I know his abilities are years ahead of all of us.

Then after the play a very tall, handsome, almost exasperatingly charming bear of a man, with dark hair and a trimmed beard, stood at the door with a bucket to collect donations for local Pride festivities. (Yes, I spoke to him – and, as you might imagine, I was not entirely... coherent, throughout. But I suppose men like that are accustomed to people not completely making sense when they talk; they must assume that most people have some kind of mild neural damage. Probably located in their speech centers.)

Oh, and he runs the local Pride festival. So he's also intelligent, organized, take-charge... yeah yeah okay.

Then finally, since it was after 9 pm and I hadn't had dinner, I walked a block to a tapas restaurant I pass everyonce in a while. And yes, you guessed it: a disorientingly handsome, unexpectedly dark-blond, Spanish waiter – friendly, charming, personable... he told me his name (as did the handsome bear) but unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to actually remember it. (Albañas? Something like that.) With that Spanish bearing – a clean, slightly soldierly intensity – a bit more sternly noble than my ancestral roots, with their more slapdash, self-indulgent Italian and Greek styles.

Are these men crossing my path just in order to confuse me?....

In spring, a (young?) man's thoughts turn to...........

Visceral

And so: since the chilly equilibrium reached at the end of my previous post, there has been a feeling of negotating the curves in existence, but with certain blinkers, or speed governors, removed from the engines, from the windshields...

(Hmm, I wonder if my brother would appreciate the car metaphors. He'd probably manage them better.)

Yesterday I was reading Erikson on child development, for an exam at the Jung-Institut this summer. One I'm still not sure I'll be ready for... ah well, keep going until you hit the wall.

Erikson is kindly, expressive, interesting – and yes he was a Freudian, and I've always been irritated by Freudian and Lacanian theories; but Erikson's fluid, non-academic, non-medical-school background made him quite comfortable with using some aspects of Freudian theory while loosening up others to fit the patients he was seeing in the 1940s and 1950s.

Reading him, this time, I was pushing myself to work harder, and thus really digging into his partially Freudian child process structures – and finding them plausible, sensible, inevitable... and somewhat frightening, as reflections of myself. (And yes, I know: as we are warned, it is common to overidentify with many patients, concerns and problems in psychological literature – but there are also times when you read something and think: good lord, I'm on this page.)

I was, after all, the serious, often anxious youngest child: it is possible that I wasn't always as depressive, as judgmental, as intense as I am now, but (despite one remarkable picture of me with straw-blond hair and the sunniest smile imaginable, at the age of four) I was probably not a child who caused everyone to think: Oh, he'll be fine. I tended to be more the one who would elicit reactions like: hmm, he's not going to take life easily...

So it was eerie to read the child cases in Erikson's Childhood and Society, and recognize a certain fellow feeling. I don't much like the ruthless determinism implied in Freudian ideas, but I have to admit, there's no way around certain primal aspects of the real and demanding parts of the body, of learning to be human – and it's deeply saddening to realize that I was obviously one of those kids who struggled to get from one step to another; and who held onto the resultant anxieties and angers in a vast array of actions, for years afterward.

[Incidentally, notice the very beautiful picture – that is a photograph, and not a drawing, by one Joyce Tenneson, the cover to the current edition of Erikson's classic,which is worth buying for it alone. And it fits beautifully – it reflects Erikson's gentleness, plus his ability to see right into what is going on...]

***

So after that: today I took a few more notes, hastily resolved a research portfolio update for the university, answered a few e-mails... and slept. A lot. Doing nothing, when there's so much to do.

And at five started to put myself together to go to the yoga class I've been taking for a month with Conrad, and with Dan: all the while a voice in the back of my head trying to convince me to skip it, not to go. But I did go...

I had a lousy time of course, fighting every step of the way, skipping poses and steps, filled with disconnection and inertia and confusion, a desire to run away. I kept pushing away at Conrad and Dan when they came by to offer help – didn't want it: this was going to be a Bad Session, and that was that. Fortunately, they were kind enough to allow me to be that way...

And by the end of the class, having done perhaps forty per cent of it, I was a bit more relaxed, but my head was still swirling with these tangled, incoherent complexes: all the while rapidly firing questions at myself in mid-pose, about my body, about my existence. Near tears, even...

***

And collected myself, changed clothes, and went to the funky-Japanese restaurant for Deb's birthday dinner, where I drank – hot sake, something I love but rarely have these days; one of the few alcoholic beverages that actually feels sort of healthy. And which does indeed knock me off my pedestal, quickly and painlessly: I repeatedly joked about feeling like a Japanese businessman in one of those tiny Tokyo bars, quietly falling off his stool after a few hours of draining a bottle that has his name on it...

But also I was actually a pleasant companion, I think, after a cold start: long conversations with Deb, with Andrew, with Katrina, a few comments from  a quieter Michael. And I was relaxed, more present, happier: all the while thinking, at the back of my mind, so how does this fit in?...

***

So: why might this be worth writing about?...

Well, I was not always as I am now. (Does that sound like some sort of ancient mariner? So be it.) I've often done the reserved/severe thing throughout my adult life; but during the long, wilder, warmer years of living in California (1979-1997) I frequently went out with friends, I went to bars and restaurants and clubs. I went to parties and pools and walked around neighborhoods, I sat and had long, earnest conversations –

I had lovers. And, of course, more casual than lovers.

That richer, more sensual life – I've frequently complained about its loss, I know. But it is perhaps especially valuable for me tonight, in the face of this painful look into my own original self – that disoriented, unhappy, angry child – to resurrect all these living fragments of pleasure, of happiness, of joy.

Because – though my current friends might not believe it – I do remember actually enjoying my life in these ways: and I do know that it is my fault that so much of this is missing from my life over the past ten years.

And I know that I can get a lot of this back: if I'm merely willing to step aside from my own path, for a moment....

In-the-midst-of

A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between.

Liminal, perhaps.

With students, cheerful or as though awakening from long and confusing slumbers – talking about their lives, dropping by, doing good work: flashes of pride and movement and change, amplified by the spring weather. Today they all seem like friends of one type or another, I can almost feel them leaning against me as though I am some kind of support: students who are just getting used to me, and students who will graduate this year, figuring out what to do next – an unavoidably big step – and one of the last of them reflects back, asking about my studies at the Jung-Institute; and my explanation of how that is going begins to outline an exactly similar movement and change....

I give a preparatory lecture on the changes of 1968, political and perceptual and cultural and (thus, eventually) musical: not quite the energetic circus ride I will show them on Wednesday, but a warmup that leads to it, ending with Jefferson Airplane at their most flamboyantly bizarre. As I have students read paragraphs aloud, statements about change and the excitement of that time dotted around the room like a 60s performance piece, I feel their awareness of being-in-time becoming sharper, fuller – perhaps if they really wake up, they can live differently....

I have a brief meeting with David, looking over paperwork documenting the past ten years of my activities with the HIV patient group, which I'm putting forward as a Research-Linked Community activity of some kind. Redoing this stuff is tedious, but the project does mean a lot to me, so... and that is both reflective and (sort of?) productive. Paperwork, yes, but about a reality, and one that also recalls many emotions and real changes, and real losses.

And in the evening I go back to Barbara's Italian lessons at my favorite Sardinian restaurant: afterwards there is of course the handsome waiter, a good and surprising pasta, a welcome glass of wine: the waiter wants to read what I'm reading, and it is Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler – I tell him I have the Italian at home (it's too difficult for me, of course) and I will loan it to him. On the condition, naturally, that he treats it with care... and so this sweet, charming man will owe me...

All of these things and words and papers and events piled in, like too many people in a Volkswagen Beetle, along with brief explosions of writing over the past few days, writing that is only part of what must get done in the next few months: graphic scores, string quartets, Meredith Monk, Gerhard Stäbler. And studying for four more exams in Zürich in June, can I get ready in time? It's a shame I'm not an efficient and forthright worker, but that is hardly news: and if I'm at least dealing with my procrastination by launching into topics that I know well, so much the better. Skype sessions with Mitchell and Nomi, rearticulating these projects, and memory and change, and discussion, spinning it out further and further....

•••

What is remarkable, what brings a sense of complex time and possibility to this messy pile of activities and papers, is the eerie quality of remembering or envisioning that appears whenever I close my eyes a bit: for I am falling asleep after that glass of wine, almost, no not quite, yes, no, I'm still awake, or not completely.

Memory tangled with vision tangled with awareness: dark city streets in Parma and Basel, some flashes that seem to belong to Berlin or perhaps San Francisco, Adelaide, Hong Kong, Los Angeles; dreams that might have arisen in Zürich, while walking around in a group late at night. A quality of watching, of getting that deep sense that people live in all of these places, and that I want to live there too: and yes perhaps if I lived in those places I would still have the same kinds of work to do, anxieties generated out of bits of paper; but I would be part of this tangle of people, of energies; and, maybe, perhaps, some one might be wondering when I was going to come home.

And through all this strange time awareness is shot the changing realization that, as I grow older, the possibility of being part of such a temporal/personal network does, admittedly, decrease. That may be what will happen, too – perhaps any hopes and wishes that I am on my way to yet another life, another career, another city, other sets of people, perhaps even living with someone who cares whether I come home to them, are not going to be fulfilled – perhaps the truth is that one of these present realities are actually the last stages of my life, and my life is not in transition to anything.

But that must be the proper definition of this feeling of transition: that it may be imagined, but not invalidated; that expectation does indeed spring eternal....

•••

I get up and, while am trying to figure out how this all this ties together, or doesn't – and not incidentally how to end this blog entry – I realize that I should pack my case to go to Leeds tomorrow for my last analysis session with John. Because I am changing analysts, I am going to meet with Sybil in York next week, and that is also a change, and another potential set of conversations that rattle through my head –

and I notice that, unusually, the plastic bag of fruit and nuts which I usually toss into my case isn't there – because the last bag tore, and I threw it out; and while trying to recreate this simple transitional object I suddenly stall in the middle of a step:

and the pause itself causes me to hold the sink for some moments, to breathe in and out and be aware of it, even to panic a bit, to begin weeping, in a passing stretch of disconnected sorrow: the same way that coming down a set of familiar stairs, but missing the last step in the dark, suddenly makes everything everywhere seem unpredictable – new but also unknown, and unknowable.

And all the casual joys and anxieties of a crowded day are turned inside out for a moment: because these transitions and changes suggest, in their oblique but merciless ways, that the entire set of processes, the various machines-for-living, can suddenly stop at any time

•••

So, perhaps that is where all of this gels – the young people starting in on their lives, my looking back on ten years of activities with people several of whom are now dead, my endless anxiety over finishing things: that reminder that transitions do not necessarily reach out to a solid point. That so much of life must be prepared to stop being life, often without much warning.

No, it's not news. But sometimes we just see it, whole.

Baked goods

A surprisingly intricate, but entirely pleasant, encounter in the bakery area of Marks & Sparks, near the bus station... I was wandering around rather haplessly, my usual graying-academic look, with the relaxed but indecisive style I evidently have when presented with a huge array of possible meals. Although I don't eat much bread, I thought it would be nice to have a loaf of something hefty – something with seeds and such – and so was scanning the shelves, and having to move around a slightly older woman (50s or 60s) on a ladder, who was moving loaves from shelf to shelf. She had glasses, and was wearing the store uniform, but seemed relaxed, like someone's mother or grandmother working in her own kitchen.

She and I engaged – some humor, some banter, some where-do-you-come-from, some what-are-you-looking-for. It must be a good place to work – she was completely relaxed about stopping what she was doing and talking to customers (and in fact other people working in the store would occasionally, politely, ask if I needed any help – also in a relaxed manner – they must have a good manager). The speed, the rapid changes of topic, persona, rhetoric, and relationship that older and more experienced people can indulge in for their own social amusement – we were both having rather kaleidoscopic fun with each other, moving from the breads to the Battenberg cakes and their status as unhealthy temptations... anyway, I did buy one (as usual, it was gone within about twelve hours, whatever I promised at the time).

Hey, it was out of my control, she handed it to me and said the more gracious equivalent of, 'G'wan.'

A fine passage of the everyday made lighter, more enjoyable....

Flashes

A long day, with flashes of light in it, crossing before and after the full moon.

Analysis, this time in Manchester, which means going to the train station early, realized I hadn't bought a ticket in advance, bought one fast at the machine, got going, arrived, we talked about dreams...

But the day did have a certain lightness, a sort of weightlessness about it that was pleasant. Sat and talked to Felicity afterwards in their new apartment – they've only partly unpacked, but it's on a top floor. I told her it seemed like a Scandinavian watercolor – lots of clean wood furniture, bright but pale sunlight through the windows as she worked at the table.

They were going to a new film by the people who made Les Triplettes de Bellevue – but it would have made me take an incredibly late train, I'll see it another time.

On the train, two subcontinental boys, who evidently didn't speak much English, sat quietly across from me with luggage; tried to help them get their connection – my phone couldn't get a signal, but at least they were reassured (I think? how many words did they understand?) that it would be easy to find their way to Bradford from the Leeds station.

Reading some poetry, sleepy, but the train had gotten quiet; dozing off and on...

And the train was delayed – half an hour or so; but soon before we were finally to get home, a young man walked by in a startlingly fashionable shirt – a sort of loose cowl-collar t-shirt that seemed really fairly avant-garde; and beautiful, blond with a fuzzy beard, and muscular – he must have chosen the shirt to show off his summer body.

When we finally got off the train shortly before eleven at night, I saw him with his buddies, all of whom were wearing similarly odd but stylish clothing (the low crotches on the pants don't work as far as I'm concerned, but okay that's what they're selling this year). And all of whom were in shape and tanned, with interestingly cut shirts that showed off muscles from various angles – but not I think gay, just, well, metrosexual I suppose. Nice to see: a bit of beauty, as self-consciously constructed as girls used to be...

Of course one doesn't watch for too long – so it is for the older gay man! – but it's nice to see anyway.

Sunny

Two days in a row of actually steadily sunny weather – hot, by Newcastle standards (above 70º, a bit at least). Lovely... a tendency to sit outside at cafés and talk, and eat...

And the men of northern England (and perhaps the women, I haven't really noticed of course) are looking their best: this is the time of year, around August and September, when they seem relaxed, muscular, handsome. Okay, well, some of them at least.

And yes, I know: other places, from San Francisco to Zürich, have had blazingly hot summers – well it hasn't happened here, most of the summer was rainy. I still think the rich of Switzerland and Monaco will be elbowing us out of our homes in a decade or two... all right it's a joke. Maybe.

But everything seems relaxed and sunny, as does the day... with all the geographical and temporal resonances of those memories: how many places the sun has seen, far more than I of course, no competition really.

No doubt, this fall, when classes start, I'll regret not going away somewhere fun. (At lunch, a woman asked: so do you miss your students in the summer? My yell of astonishment... how could she think such a thing?) But the days have been relaxed enough – despite all the procrastination over the work I want to finish before November – that I do feel as though I am still on break from the most onerous aspects of life.

And maybe, depending on medications and moods, Christmas will happen somewhere else....