in the hall of mirrors

Focus

These two days I am doing a couple of presentations about art and AIDS, around a new production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

Though they are not in themselves difficult, or terribly important, nor do I expect substantial attention or audience involvement, I find myself fussing a lot over them – and not only because that damned cold still has not really gone away. What this suggests, of course, is that I simply don't have enough to do: yes, there's too much boring administration (but the problem with that isn't that it's difficult, it's that I don't care about it); and teaching (doing it is easy – the horrid, and dispiriting, part is chasing after the students when they don't seem to care about it); and of course research, which I mostly avoid.

But since my life here is too narrow ("If only we could go to Moscow!"), these little, easy things get too much focus, too much attention, and generate too much pressure – this is the opposite of that lively, somewhat crazed life one has in metropoli when things are going well, and busily. In such a vacuum, one becomes tiresomely fretful, petty – easily enraged, too; I've sent two scathingly angry e-mails in the past week to people who weren't at all prepared for them. All of this is a product of, not really stress or overwork, but a kind of peculiar 'underwork' – where work, however much of it there may be, seems rather trivial and ineffective. It's very Chekhovian, I suppose – and, although I understand the (kind of counterintuitive) claim that Chekhov writes comedies, I am not finding it all terribly funny.

Perhaps I'm also affected by spending time with the actors, who are all lively Londoners, mostly around the age of thirty (which slightly affects their reading of the play – they cannot quite believe that darkness, malice, and the power of money were quite as awful in the 1980s as they actually were). Actors, of course, always seem to live in mercurial worlds that are larger than life – and we like to think of that as artificial, as unreal (the celebrity, the luvvie, the narcissist). But maybe the truth is that they are right – if you don't see everything you do as immensely meaningful, and tie it to deep feelings, experiences, ideas, aims beyond what one might expect of you, then you probably are wasting what time you have on earth. Which is all too easy to do.

Ah, well: if only – if only I could go to – London?...

Dis/location

Late night television: at certain points – somewhere among the fragments of Robot Chicken, The L Word, and a long advertisement for a CD set of 'Classic Soul' – there are so many echoing fragments of Los Angeles: Industry in-jokes, with night views behind a talking head through a plate glass window, clearly in a house in the hills – Topanga, Laurel, other canyons; shots of the 405 above UCLA, in sight of the Getty; all the cloud of knowing references, tropes, common views and images. Because certain shows tend to emphasize their Hollywood sources – especially casually produced ones – the television screen makes watchers into inhabitants of a Greater LA.

Which gives me strange, disoriented sense of never having left LA... and, with the realization that I'm not really there, am in fact on another continent and a number of degrees of latitude to the north, there is a sense of being out of it: of being away from the center of things, in the provinces, in the boonies, uncool. Much as, in different eras and under different influences, someone would have felt far from Paris, or far from London, or far from New York.

But of course LA has better weather than any of those....

Elsewhere

My apologies for this post: merely another whinge about wanting to be elsewhere.

But first: where am I now? At home; the apartment is pleasant and, on the side away from the western winds that are bringing us a last dose of winter, relatively warm. Small patches of snow in the corners of my downstairs neighbor's plant boxes. It is nearing the end of the term; vacation days are coming – but there is plenty of work to do (especially an article to write), and I am disinclined to do any of it. I will probably go make some food in the kitchen – something comforting that makes me feel as though I've done something useful (lentils with some clever combination of spices, perhaps).

Catherine, my dear downstairs neighbor, has gone to New Zealand to join the reality program Castaway. I hope she does well in it – she is smart and learns fast, but they have made it a bit tough for her by bringing her in alone two weeks after everybody else arrived. (Prediction: the other women, most of whom aren't as good-looking as she is, will immediately discover reasons to dislike her. Sigh.)

Probably reading too much Greg Egan (Aussie science fiction author; lots of brilliant ideas, many of which imply enormous change and alternate destinies) plus sleeping too long the past few days (my digestion was miserable today, which always makes me conk out); and my desire to move on from northern England (no news, and probably no movement for a year or two or three) and even the news that my application for a salary increase was successful (which doesn't please me as much as it should, as this was in place of the promotion I really want – all of which makes me feel trapped in a rather dull little rat race); plus, of course, the general lack of V.; is moving me to imagine and/or remember an alternate reality for myself.

***

All simple enough: instead of standing by this window, looking out at the rain that keeps transforming itself into snow and then back, I'm standing in an apartment in San Francisco. A neat, pleasant, light apartment, books strewn on the table and the pale sun of City afternoons coming through the window; neat because of me, not because of Paulo – he is of course a hopeless slob, but I've managed to keep him in line. (Necessary corrections to occupy this universe: I returned Paulo's calls, and he never met Christian.)

I work part-time for Apple; we live in a heavily, trendily computerized household. (Necessary correction: I got some computer chops at some point in the 80s, having realized that music was a bit of a dead end.) At Christmases I help my sisters with their Macs; sometimes the world seems a bit too digital, a bit too variable, too unstable and unreal; but it remains pleasant, a constructed reality that works for both of us. And we feel in the midst of change, near the center of what is happening right now, where the culture really is: not on some distant periphery of unimportant makework.

There is money, and not much debt (my only debt is student loans, and I'm nine-tenths of the way through paying those off); and there are friends, casual dinners in favorite restaurants (of course there are people who now matter to me whom I've never met in this alternative; but instead I don't lack for friends, and have had to say good-bye to fewer of them). Australia never happened, Hong Kong never happened – even Los Angeles and Berlin are places I have only visited (I don't know much German – just what was left from a year's study long ago – but have enough Portuguese to chat with the in-laws, and fairly good California Spanish). Travel for us is a rather bourgeois pleasure (I haven't grown through travel, loneliness, and the repeated necessity to start over again and pull myself out of various disasters; but am, nevertheless, not entirely shallow; and less susceptible to depression).

And Paulo comes into the room, limping as always, curly black hair and warm grin: a sweet, sexy guy, and the one I managed to figure out I could love (in time, rather than too late); rattling on in his charming, boyish fashion about his new idea for Palm software, one of many that has made him a guru in the computer world. A hug....

***

Lives like slides in a projector, flashing past: as production assistant in LA, in the film industry; as research scientist (that one branches away from 'reality' around the age of sixteen); as....

Here, the snow is thick and swirling. A story by – was it Leiber? – about the need to be careful when leaving the house during a storm: because the storm is actually a shift in realities, a turbulent blend of the interfaces of different universes, and you could end up – anywhere.

Absent / present

Sleeping incredible hours: a week lost to dreams – maybe not lost, the dreams aren't unpleasant, there is plenty of food, and the house is kept clean, as am I. But a week where my life is passing in a dream world... a week where I am basically absent....

There have been times when I was guilty, confused, over this kind of situation – it is perhaps an unfortunate aspect of my life that much of it has been slept away. I'm not so guilty about it any more, but it remains true; and it's not just a matter of ill health, it is very much a deep pattern of my mind and body – which is why I have imagination, but don't get much done.

And today I received an e-mail from someone about a book I was supposed to write a decade ago, which may change shape or be taken out of my hands – I had a flash of guilt/worry (as I had months of, over the anthology that didn't happen five years ago), but mostly just relief that it might no longer be my problem. But it is all merely a matter for rational decision, not guilt/panic... at least I'm finally clear that, as I sometimes tell a student in trouble, I am more important than the project, rather than the reverse.

But mostly: sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. Easy when you live alone, and the sun's on winter holiday.

There are, however, unusual presences just as there are unusual absences: 'tis the time of year for people on the other side of the world to think of their memories, relationships, old friends – and since most of my life is still elsewhere (hmm – San Francisco and Los Angeles and Washington of course, but also Phoenix, Berlin, New York – I think that's probably all of it now), those same people call me or send me cards and e-mails.

In most cases my reaction is happy and wistful; I'd love to see so-and-so again, I'd love to have dinner with, talk to, hang out with. In some cases, I deeply wish I were spending my life around that person again. There are also a couple of uncomfortable bits – an old friend I simply cannot relate to any more (some people do outgrow each other, and become impossible strangers), and another whom I care about a lot but who is now in a peculiar relationship (and I want to be there and watch, and listen, and talk, and see if it all works out).

The hard part is the wish to be somewhere else. That's the problem, the mistake, of moving too much: it is possible to move away from your life....

Politics of border crossing

I tend not to believe much in politics; only in the past few years did I begin to think about my own past, and why that might be – after all I was sixteen when Nixon made Watergate; a few years later I moved to San Francisco, to a thriving arts community, just in time for the disastrous Reagan years and the slashing of all arts funding, which left us without work or vocations in a world of rapidly increasing homelessness and greed-oriented inequality. And of course the dramas of my life have occurred around AIDS – being left in the lurch by Reagan/Bush administrations in the 1980s, and being deported from Australia by the Howard administration five years ago. Not to mention that, although I normally vote Democrat, I've had so many experiences of the contemporary weakness and cluelessness of that party – Carter, Clinton, etc.; if only they had backbones, if only they cared enough to actually change things – a vain hope.

So I tend to assume that all politicians are either ideologically against anything I care about, or far too wrapped up in their own selfish needs to give a damn whether the segments of society I occupy are taken care of or not. My default position tends to be: keep your head down, maybe the government won't notice you – because if they do they'll certainly nail you to the wall.

Two weeks ago we did one of our AIDS presentations, this one for a group of psychology students; one of them asked the (faintly irritating but very perceptive) question, What are you most afraid of? The other two speakers answered as you might expect, talking about death, illness, incapacity. I said – and you may not choose to believe this, but it's true – that death and illness no longer seemed particularly frightening to me; unpleasant or frustrating, but not frightening. Perhaps that's why I got named Nachiketas; to most people it must sound as though I'm pretending to not be scared of something that supposedly scares everyone on earth, or as though I'm simply fooling myself – but, quite honestly, I think I can imagine my own death and illness fairly accurately (I have a lot of experiential data, after all), and it really doesn't worry me.

What scares me – and I was a bit surprised myself, to hear myself say this – is the prospect of being sick far from home, in a country that has decided not to take care of me, and unable to leave. (There are, of course, plans to wreck parts of the NHS, or national health system, that has taken such generous care of me in the four years I've been in the UK; I do notice the news when it refers to that.) Essentially, the fear of being stranded: having learned from the Australian debacle that governments don't care about abusing foreign nationals (after all, you can't vote them out, can you?), I am wary and somewhat careful about living overseas. The illusion that all rich, developed, mostly white countries would never maltreat members of other rich, developed, mostly white countries is just that: an illusion – think how quickly that could vanish in any atmosphere of political change. And no government in their right mind would regard a foreign national with AIDS as anything but a liability.

Does this sound implausible to you? Think of it this way: I fall ill, and become incapable of doing my job; after some months my medical leave ends, and I am terminated. My access to UK health care ends with my work permit and national insurance number; or, of course, changing laws mean that, even with employment, my UK health care ends. It becomes impossible to pay the rent here, and too expensive to move my belongings and books back to the US – I sell them all, at of course an enormous loss (who buys second-hand stuff?), while still too ill to really figure out what's going on. And on my return to the US, since I haven't worked there or paid taxes in ten years, I am not eligible for many disability or medical programs; it takes some months to get this even half straightened out, and what I am eligible isn't enough to cover medications or care; and meanwhile, if I have moved back to a big expensive city (where I can't really afford to live), there might be local grassroots programs to help me out – I remember the boxes of old medications at Body Positive in Los Angeles (probably acquired from people that had died) – or alternatively I don't land in a big city, and have no support at all. Trust me: I've been to this place before – it really does exist, even for middle-class citizens of a rich country; and there aren't many ways up from there.

I suppose all this avoidance of politics sounds odd, and as though it doesn't fit with some of my professional work: after all I support a journal on Music & Politics, and much of my work is supposedly political. But that's all about identity politics, and my approach is very much focused on identity, subjectivity, personal freedom: which is, rather obviously I suppose, a politics that is based on the assumption that "real" politics (i.e. governments, armies, courts, etc.) cannot be productively influenced. It is, admittedly, a politics of retreat: but one I've come to in an honest fashion, I suppose.

Of course, you can't always keep your head that far down: rapidly developing, potentially enormous, war scenarios in south Asia, the Mideast, and of course now North Korea could easily result in a world war polarized along religious lines, or the kind of nuclear scenario that we worried about for decades during the (former) Cold War. But again, I tend to assume I can't do anything about it, and can only hope that none of the selfish, fanatical, power-obsessed people in charge does anything too terrifically stupid –

Anyway: I keep my head down.

Jerks In Space

So first the context: I was rather pleased with myself today, and feeling almost capable of the hard work ahead – I liked my own entry on blog aesthetics (and could I say that about a published work? no, which shows what I mean about blogging); the meeting went well and no one argued much; and then the mail came, and it was the third anthology I've received in the past month that includes an academic article of mine, so that was proud-making too. As it happens, none of those three articles are very solid scholarship – they're more belles-lettres (as John P. told me his London colleagues would say of my work; but again, see below for why blogging makes this seem acceptable to me) – but they're expressive and interesting (which is why, though their scholarly apparatus might have been a bit thin, they were all placed at the beginnings or ends of the anthologies).

So I was feeling pretty good. Well... then we had our first guest speaker of the semester. Intelligent, no doubt about it; not very prepared, rambled a lot, in a journalistic/polemical/monomaniacal way – someone who has had a difficult career; but the worst part was his need to attack some things I care about, including postmodernism, Heidegger, and especially Americans (he complained about a book that disagreed with him as "the product of a typically lousy American education", or words to that effect). What a jackass, I thought. I couldn't leave, though I wanted to – it's always unfortunate when you don't sit near the door; and since the room was full of new postgraduates, it would have been a strategic mistake to do anything unprofessional. So I sat there and took it (while blahfeme tried to argue with him, rather unproductively as one could have predicted; and spurious was actually quite reasonable with him, far more than I think he deserved).

It reminded me of the sheer difficulty of living here sometimes: I'm lucky I guess, because being in the north of England is better than the south for this particular problem – the south may be more cosmopolitan, more entertaining, and frankly more gay, but too many southern British intellectuals do seem to think that attacking things and scoring off each other are appropriate means of discourse. It's kind of an Oxbridge-in-the-fifties thing – I associate it with F.R. Leavis, Cambridge criticism, a particular kind of rage that tries to identify with the working class, and a polemical pseudo-Marxism that can only attack. There is, certainly, a brutality, a cynicism, a savagery endemic to British postwar intellectual culture that seems such a powerful reversal of Victorian manners – after all, this is a place where Martin Amis and Will Self are major novelists.

One of my favorite examples of this, which I sometimes show to people for fun, is Martin Seymour-Smith's New Guide to Modern World Literature (3rd ed., 1985). It's an impressive volume – nearly 1,400 pages of small print, where an astounding array of world literatures and authors are explained and analyzed (which of course raises questions: how the heck can he know so much about the Estonian novel in the 1930s, or Korean poetry before the war, or Polish essayists who have also written short stories?). But, weirdly enough, it is also 1,400 pages of dismissals and bad reviews – here is someone who has looked at an amazing range of world literature, and made a point of attacking virtually every example of it as inadequate and unsuccessful. It's almost like the alien in Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who has decided to spend his vast life span insulting every being in the universe, in alphabetical order.

Oh, well; so he was a jerk. But it's harder to take this kind of crap when you're a foreigner: not because cultural difference itself is so hard – frankly, I usually like it – but because when there are conflicts, you are always the loser, by force of sheer numbers. Which is why, even though the Brits around me are often kind, or sensible, or wise, or intelligent, the occasions when they aren't put me so much on edge – one feels overwhelmed in any question by sheer consensus, by the fact that whatever you think that might have its source in a different culture is always already a minority opinion.

And simply going back to the United States is not a real solution to the problem: not only because my country is going through an exceptionally unattractive time in terms of politics and social support; but also, and more trickily, because when you are in foreign countries too long you change shape, as it were – you become neither fish nor fowl, and can't quite fit in at home any more than you fit in abroad. You can see this in Elizabeth Bishop (though she was a diplomat, of all things) and in James (though he was the toast of the town) – that they end up, ultimately, isolated in their own universes.

Yeah, yeah: he was just a jerk. But it's a bit like being mugged at the bus stop: you can reassure yourself that the people doing it were thugs and beneath consideration – but it can still be hard to get past it....

What if...?

Having washed the dishes, put away laundry, showered; and having written the previous blog entry, which was like taking an emotional shower – an awkward metaphor, but what I mean should be clear, which is: having removed the emotional dirt and dust of the past week by writing about it; and it being still and late at night, in a northern clime, at a time of year when the weather is reminding me of what winter has in store –

I can't help but think: what if I were to simply go home?

Yes, I know: the link is to an advertisement, something for new Sony televisions; but it is also a beautiful portrait of San Francisco. It's unusual in several ways that people who never lived there wouldn't realize – it was taken on a sunny day, which isn't easy; and the streets they chose look almost like the ones around Portola Hill, a relatively plain part of the city, without the elaborate luxuries and fripperies that are scattered around the older and wealthier districts. (It can't be Portola Hill, I think, because it somehow goes down into the financial district, but faces the Marina on the other side – I can't quite recognize the street; perhaps it's coming from Telegraph Hill instead.) But its peculiar specificity (all those bouncing colored balls), the kid, the dog, the alley, the woman in her apartment; even the way they have to curve the pavement so that driveways are possible on steep hills – they all caught at my heart when I first saw it, and frankly I burst into tears whenever it appeared on television. The music helps, of course – the softness, the introspection, the acoustic beauty of the José González song – blahfeme had to correct my first impression, which was that it was indigenous northern Californian (González is an Argentine from Sweden), but it remains a song that perfectly captures the best qualities of the city (and his name even sounds like he's someone you'd meet in a Mission Street café, with long hair pulled back, and who always carried a guitar).

And I have learned about what one does when life doesn't make sense any more: reading through the David Tudor archive at the Getty archive, I noted how often he had simply changed direction completely – dropped playing the organ in the 1950s to play the piano, then dropped playing European serialism in 1961 (just in time to drive poor Barraqué to distraction, along with probably many others who had been depending on him to present their works); simply dropped everything, and moved on. That took immense courage: of course he was a success at all of those things, which helps... but then so many biographies tell you that it is too easy to get stuck, that no one was ever harmed by dropping everything and walking away.

So wouldn't it make more sense for me to simply get on a plane and go home, then to continue working half-heartedly at things I don't care enough about? I've already turned a lot of talent into a minor academic career (my university clearly agrees); my life as it is, though not bad, is obviously unremarkable and drifting. It would mean giving up academe, of course – for nothing, frankly; I wouldn't be able to aim high in any kind of employment or way of living if I went back to San Francisco.

But I can imagine it – in fact a flood of plans pours over me: rather than spending a fortune bringing all these books and belongings back across the world, I could just give the books to the university, and the other things away; and go back, and look for a small, unimportant place to live, and work in a bookstore. I might even go to the SF Conservatory and meet with the dean, and make up some cock-and-bull story about my health and not wanting to die abroad (not so untrue, but no less true than it has been for twenty years) and say, well, if you can use me for a few basic music history lectures here and there, I'd appreciate it. I'd use the same story for family and friends, pretending that my prognosis had changed or something – the City itself won't much mind, people who have dropped out of their former lives are a part of the background there.

I wouldn't mind living around Portola Hill. I could work at SF Hospital, maybe.

It could even work....

I'll dream of the City tonight, I know I will.

Flash of bitterness

While running around today – office, meeting, shopping, home – several things, pleasant and un-, came into my head to write about; but instead –

just one small thing: those New Zealand tourism commercials are running again, with their seductive jingles, beautiful landscapes, and happy families (especially the amazingly hunky, athletic dads with their shirts off); but they make me really angry: the promise of happiness, the possibility that Oceania represents, the utopian image of that (non-Amida-Buddhist) Pure Land – irrational it may be, but they brings up all the bile from my Australian deportation (for being HIV+ – long story), the disappointment of aging, and perhaps most of all envy of those who seem healthy and happy....

I didn't say they were attractive responses. But they are, unfortunately, real.

Two places at once

The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact  the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but also about possibly helping to get past it, about writing through it.

Lying on the couch, here in northern England – which reflects similar days over the past four years since moving here – also has a more distant mirror (shades of Barbara Tuchman): a scratchier couch in a warmer climate, from the late 1980s through 1992 in Los Angeles. There is a strange way that my mood, my memories and ideas, are merged with the ones from that time – as though it is difficult (especially when I am half asleep) to tell whether it is 1992 or 2006.

That time did produce some of my darkest stories – I was involved in Terry's HIV+ writing workshop, I was fairly permanently stalled on my PhD, and I certainly wasn't expecting to live for much longer (I was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and this was well before the 1996 medications changed the shape of the future).

1992 itself was a strange time, sunny but  with a deep internal darkness: I knew I had to leave Los Angeles, was moving to San Francisco – what I don't know was, why did I move? That summer was so bleak, I was so fearful and tired – the move was so difficult; I can't even imagine why it had to be done: what possible good could it have been for me to move back to the Bay Area, expensive and complicated as it was to manage? Perhaps I felt trapped between pressures of keeping the apartment, maintaining a car and part-time job, in Los Angeles, when I thought I could be better taken care of in San Francisco – if I were to fall ill and die, not having a car and being able to connect more closely with the gay community would make life in the Bay Area easier. And probably I thought I would be able to connect with a person, to make a relationship during my last days – I can't figure it out, and don't remember enough... but certainly none of my thinking from that time involve anything about career or long-term plans.

It is strange: such complete despair that year, such utter surrender to the end of my expectations. It may seem odd to mix my attitudes now with those – now I am frustrated at my disaffection around writing, and getting promoted, and living somewhere where I'm happier – how could those be the same?

Perhaps that is what is so confusing: suspended between being despair and anxiety, between work and dying – and I still haven't made the difference clear to myself: probably because, no matter what seems true on the surface, I'm always caught between those anyway....

Fragments and overview

At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There's no battery in it, there's no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I'd watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is a standard trope in LA novels and poems. And somehow, because it's the middle of the night, and the bland white plastic cover of the smoke alarm has a strong metaphorical/cultural resemblance to all that bleakness, I am bothered for hours by visions of a land without magic, of culture without depth, of imprisonment in the leisurely and meaningless.

Although I've lived in Los Angeles, and was comfortable there, and even wanted to go back there to work; and although I ultimately distrust Atlantic cultures more than the Pacific ones (I kind of like the Mediterranean ones though!); and although I think the Western European dismissal of Los Angeles culture, especially films, is motivated as much by a sense of jealous competition as anything else; nevertheless – that bleakness does exist, and there are times in LA when everything seems to have that disturbing depthlessness, even the plants and the sky.

I was reading some minor books and stories by Alexei Panshin, whose one excellent book – Rite of Passage (1968) – is still rereadable, a delight, and won awards at the time. His other work is hardly worth keeping (or worth ordering through the Internet - there's a few pounds I won't see again). I get the impression of a pleasant and intelligent guy, interested in growing up and in ethics and in society, but whose development as a writer stalled in a certain amateurism or pedantry. But the ideas of the short stories – not the stories themselves, they're alternately clunky and sketchy – suggest that disturbing disparity between what we want and what we have. Panshin and his wife were the kind of 70s counterculturists who moved to a farm; they reminded me of my vague, intermittent desire to see copies of the Whole Earth Catalog again – though I was too young and self-centered to take the counterculture very seriously, its values have colored much of my imagination.

Of course, I'm more of a child of the 80s – I was just too late to really connect or identify with 1968 and its aftermath, except as a bewildered spectator and younger brother. So, for me, the dominant experience of the post-1968 era is a Reagan/Thatcher one of yuppies, mirrored office buildings, rapid upswings in heartlessness, corporations, and hostility, and equally rapid downswings in naturalness, social supportiveness, and the arts.

It makes me wonder: how does our contemporary urban Western culture look from the outside? It's not a good era, of course, by any means; probably not as bad as, say, 1930s Germany, or the late Roman Empire. (Although, admittedly, some day we may look upon this as the last golden era before climate change destroys everything.) But it is hard to really take our own temperature; would it be accurate to see us as comparable to, say, mid-19th-century France, an era of dull prosperity and desperation? No doubt about it: a certain bleakness is the norm in our time – and I don't think that's just me imposing the images of my own problems on the world.

And I can't help thinking: the way out is... what? Imagination? I can't manage the extreme exits of high spiritualities (meditating one's way to a world that makes more sense requires immense discipline, and a willingness to ignore a lot of things); but it seems as though simply imagining our world as somewhat different than it is would give us a great deal more flexibility. And, perhaps, the possibility of transformation....