in the hall of mirrors

All of Us Strangers: a comment

All of Us Strangers (2023), a film that I found absolutely amazing...

Alexander Haigh is the cute-bearish writer and director of Weekend (2011), which was also amazing, in a way that had some parallels – layered, complexly real dialogue, a love of men who are in love, bodies and feelings and memory and loss, and an extraordinary awareness of how important all these things can be.

And Andrew Scott, who is wonderful (I still think of him as the extraordinarily scary Moriarty in his first short but astounding appearance in Sherlock), and Paul Mescal, whom I hadn't really thought much about before (despite Aftersun, which is remarkable of course).

But those are all just credits.

I wept, a lot, at this one; but was also more deeply comforted than I've been since... well.

Haigh said in an interview that the feeling of the film was connected to growing up during the time of AIDS, but he was careful to separate it from that, as though he couldn't possibly understand the intensity of being an adult gay man in that time, or being infected. I think he's too careful: this film understood everything it needs to about death and love; for me it was like Urbania – not about AIDS, but clearly written in its shadow.

Anyway. What do I really want to say.

For one thing, some people were focused on exactly what is real and what isn't – as though such a thing must be clear, or is worth making clear. I know I'm still, even now, terribly postmodern, and becoming a Jungian has made me even more so – every philosophy, religion, worldview, even scientific theory is clearly based on previous assumptions, postulates. Though I know the world is filled with people who are certain of one system or another, I doubt any of them can prove anything to my entire satisfaction.

And so: death, vision, dream, fantasy – reality – who is dead and when – I don't mind considering these things as essentially... uncertain.

That's something that makes this film different from those of, for instance, Shyamalan, whose plot twists are fairly definite – when he shows that what we had thought isn't what's going on, he clarifies the new rules, as in most science fiction. Clarifying rules is useful for religious sects and philosophical analyses, as well as in squabbles over superhero movies, but I find it slightly childish – for me it is the ego reasserting its ideas of the universe, sometimes with desperation.

Haigh doesn't do that: he purposely blurs boundaries and possibilities.

It makes sense to me. Who is ever sure that the dead are gone, or that they are present? Who is entirely sure that they are themselves awake and alert, or in a vision?

It does look to me as though only one person is alive at the end – two may be imagined, or real though dead; one must be real, though dead – I insist on that, though I know I'm insisting partly because I want it to be that way (I can't prove it, as if anything can be proven in this film). And the one who is living can comfort the dead, with passionate kindness and a certainty that it is the right thing to do.

Which is, of course, the really strange thing – and what is important to me about it is –

well, some background: I think and write about death a lot, and in the past decade reorganized my thoughts into: death is one of the largest of complexes and/or archetypal structures, and though every philosophy and religion (see above, note the parallel) is largely focused on explaining it in some way, we are never really certain, never really done with it. It's too big, and every answer leaves gaps and flaws; and people in hospices usually travel through a variety of uncertainties.

So, I've told myself that I'll never entirely know what I think about death, and I'll never be done with it. But, even when I have come to this conclusion, even that hardens into a concept, and I lose the reality of it – and so I fall into the illusion that I do know what I think of death –

and so it was an especially remarkable surprise to realize that I did not expect what happens at the end – and in fact I've never really thought through love and death in quite this way –

and that changed me: it actually changed some of the deep meanings of the past forty years, at least since Reid died on 2 December 1983, or even before that.

Yes, that huge, for me. Exactly that huge.

•••

The book the story is taken from isn't all that special – the parents do appear, but this astounding shift in the relationship of the living and the dead isn't in the book. I think Haigh keeps making a point of mentioning the original in order to be polite, and legally safe – the book reverts to the usual world of Japanese ghost stories at the end, as the protagonist is so drained by contact with a female ghost that he spends weeks in the hospital. As in many traditions, ghosts are scary and/or dangerous; they are always more about the threatening world of death than they are about the person who was lost. This fits all those anthropological and psychological discussions that show that not speaking ill of the dead, and elaborate funeral preparations, have more to do with an ancient fear of the dead than with respect or love for the people that they were – the dead generally don't remind us of themselves, they remind us of the world that they have entered.

But Scott's character has several instantaneous, knife-edge choices, and in each, rather than retreating in terror or self-preservation, he stays, and comforts (even lies, kindly), and holds – he stays with the dead, not in a desperately clinging way, not in a way that is about himself, but with love and increasingly assertive kindness: you're here, with me.

•••

I don't know why that seems so new to me: do I know books, or plays, or myths, where someone does that with the dead? I can't think of any.

And the idea that it could be that way changes me, at a deep level, which also amazes me.

What if our love for the dead doesn't need to be clinging or mystical – what if it is just love, a love that doesn't plan on giving up or falling into fear?

That could change everything – even our own deaths....

Temporal

Perhaps the problem is one of time...

Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival.

But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course.

Time awareness past: memory, and apparently modified memory. Patches of time remembered as such, which are distinct from those remembered as still, or non-active though still breathing and living, tableaux. Areas of emotional memory that have their own life – most of them not terribly charged, but reflective.

Time projection of the future – which for me also has embedded clusters of anxieties: that which is not completed, that which might happen.

And the relatively broad, seamless stretches of idealised future circumstances, of being in some situation I think I have wanted – Barcelona, a partner, a cafe with friends while traveling – and being aware, as I often have, that the relatively undetailed quality may suggest a problem: that my imagination of my own future future tends to have a bit too much fantasy in it, which accounts for some of the weaknesses and the scattered results in my life. But that is my nature, and I don't hate it: it just suggests a need to pay attention.

The vastness of death, of existence before a certain time, and then after a certain time.

Wanting to see futures: not merely to continue existing, which hasn't seemed terribly interesting for a long time, but to continue living into a time of interesting change, hopefully positive change. Because of the change, more than anything, I think.

(Recall that dream a few years ago: a half-drowned San Francisco – the one where I sit on the open balcony of a Victorian high in a hill above what was Noe Valley, now largely submerged by the sea –a warm, mild sun across the islets of the altered, now quieter city, and we see occasional small boats between them: I am old, and I can hear someone I love, but cannot in the dream see, making a small meal in the kitchen – a dream suffused with time: and the dream-me is happy...)

***

Today I was mildly groggy/cranky – after about a week of mild side effects each evening, after I take the more obnoxious pills – today I met with D. on my required report on research plans – then emails – the computer is slow, I send yet another irritable message about it – an afternoon dotted with current prospective students – most have problems easily resolved...

in the midst of this I played, on the computer, Chris Wood's 'Walk This World with Music'. Eerie, dark, and electric: the dull world comes alive, and time dances with sudden energy –

The music itself tends to do slightly strange things with time: double-stopped chords, lots of open intervals – which always makes the music reference eternity: flashes of organum, pedal points, drones, static harmonies – and beginnings and ends of phrases are sort of curled around themselves in pitch and rhythm to catch and carry you: this is one of those pieces that pulls you into the rhythm, and you dance, alert and fast and defenceless.

***

Some of this strange relation to time is from analysis: as though in the past year I walked, sometimes fell, into deeper caves in myself – times of floating awareness, of contemplation.

And the framework of anxiety that would normally make me anxious in relation to those times: that I am never doing enough – that armature seems to have fallen apart, joints rusted and weakened, the structure of embedded guilt twisted and disintegrating, fallen across the pavement in twisting, collapsing lines.

All this is sharpened by my rather cold reaction to the dull world – political stupidities on both sides of the pond, the sharp focus on what I want and how to get it: assuming governments, laws, economies and institutions will not be my friends, calculating –

Which means that this floating time sense, archaic chunks of unfinished selves, are not distractions: they feel like important realities – in any case more energetic, more alive, than the pathetic realities of a bemused and chaotic world.

***

Do you know Nowotny's Time? A book recently suggested by an analysand – and that led also to the International Society for the Study of Time, which she used to head. Yes, of course time is a mystery, of course we are embedded in, creatures of, time: but even thinking about it begins to illuminate the caves we walk through....

***

I hope I can finish the articles – I like my editors, and don't want to mess up their projects; and I also focus on the Jung-Institut, on writing and research and stuff that the university, the patient group, various people, want me to do.

But yes, there's a slightly disconnected calm behind it – a sense of: yeah, whatever.

***

Because time is so vast: I'd rather watch the world slowly wheel, clouds drift across the sky – the heart beats, and I know that it won't do that forever. My own life and death have seemed especially – well, contingent, or perhaps, incidental – over the past year.

This is not a bad thing... it is not even an uncomfortable thing.

***

Looking across time: a widened view, not quite in focus; but taking it all in....

Easter

On the one hand, longer days, sunlight, a still-chilly and intermittent promise of spring.

On the other HCV medications, confusions, changing demands, papers to write –

Behind it all is still a greater calm, dreams that tend to move through anxiety to relief and resolution. Not an imagined change, clearly a real one...

But no, not anything you'd be able to call inner peace.

•••

As for medications: I spent a few days at the beginning of the month, plus a few more days at the beginning of this week, discovering things that are slightly wrong, or that need adjusting, and then discovering that I also have to revisit older medications, including some of the post-stroke medications I'd gleefully dropped last summer – and just when it all seems clear and I've pinned things down, very very firmly (hmm, are we in some way anxious?), there was yet another change, or an error, or an adjustment...

It's not that they don't know what they're doing – or that they aren't meticulous and caring, because they are – it's the tangled interface between HIV treatment, HCV treatment, post-stroke and blood pressure medications, and the extremely exasperating though apparently trivial fact that my 'miracle' HCV medication (not the really, really hideously expensive one, though I doubt it's particularly cheap, but hey I have citizenship so no one can claim I shouldn't be given it) cannot be taken simultaneously with any antacids.

Which is so exasperating because neither the miserable HIV medications I've taken since October, nor the new HCV medications, are at all stomach-friendly.

Therefore, at the very least, three months (well, I've done more than two weeks of my time already) of daily, self-induced stomach upset and grogginess and occasional shaking exhaustion, all of which always make me unconscious and uninterested in work, or anything else.

Okay yeah gripe gripe gripe.

A tangle of protocols and contraindications...

•••

My skin is just a shade closer to orange. It is probable that bilirubin will increase until I look fairly jaundiced for three or four months. And the self-righteous youngest-child in me thinks, That'll show 'em – anyone who thought I was exaggerating my anxieties about my current treatment will be Properly Ashamed of Themselves, when I end up the color of a mandarin...

(And this has a previous referent in my life-as-a-patient: in 2001, teaching as a guest lecturer at UCLA, I started Ritonavir for HIV - which came in very large orange capsules. So, when I started to turn orange, I thought it must have something to do with those pills. Nonsense of course, it was the appearance of HCV and bilirubin from a disoriented liver. What a disturbing time that was – so ill and disoriented, the injected interferon, fragmenting health... Susan later said, you looked like you could blow away in the wind. But that was a past, and somewhat worse, time.)

When I am more orange, I will sit in department meetings and scare the heck out of administrators.

I am only heroic on alternate weekdays...

•••

It may be the wrong time for the Jung-Institut to run an online Skype seminar on Aion, which includes some of Jung's major thinking on sacrifice, Christianity, and the cross. I'll admit I didn't much enjoy the discussion around Tarkovsky's last film, The Sacrifice – the long, dark dream, the imagined brutal sacrifice of his son, the vision that tells him that if he gives up everything, then the world will be saved –

So he burns his house down, and goes to the hospital, refusing ever to speak again.

The discussion went quickly past a usually important Jungian distinction, symbolic vs. real – which has little to do with the more arcane Lacanian developmental distinction; it is simply that we can imagine, dream, create images that have implications that don't need to be embodied in the real world...

But I was bothered by this, and burst out in irritation, disagreement – really anger: that we can't be too blithe, too easy, about images of death and sacrifice, because they can lead onward to realities...

Think of, for instance, the web of oblique, uncontrollable psychosomatic processes: if despair or depression induce psychosomatic states that can tend toward illness – including real, dangerous illnesses: cancers and such – then we can't really treat these casually. Because when something dark enters the ageing, damaged body, it doesn't leave easily.

•••

And yes, of course: now I can see (actually, I could see within an hour after the online seminar) that my insistence on emphasising that distinction emerged from my own anxiety, my own anger, my own panic over the return of serious health concerns over the past year.

The difference between symbolic disaster and real disaster: because very, very real disasters do happen to people.

Easter is symbolic – of course anyone getting crucified probably wouldn't be satisfied with seeing it that way...

•••

When I did go to the HCV clinic, what started out as rational/discursive – we checked some of your ancillary medications, and it turns out you can't take this one simultaneously with that one – I basically went to pieces.

A rhetorical, still fairly articulate kind of going-to-pieces – running through the medications forward, then backward, repeating that I really, really didn't want these medicines to fail, should we be worried that the first two weeks of pills might have conflicted with each other, is this all going to fail?, I know that transplants are possible if improbable – exactly what do I do each morning then, how about evenings? Because it's not as though I can really –

In other words: tense, more than a bit incoherent: yes all right, more than a little hysterical. She watches me, calmly, a certain stillness in her face: she has moved into a, for her, familiar awareness that a patient is going to pieces, and will simply wait it out, on what is probably a long day...

•••

The humorous version of this was Jean Kerr, when she talks about being in the hospital, and going from being charming and friendly to a post-operative state that is more irritable and loathsome: "It's as though June Allyson had been transformed into Ana Pauker right before their eyes. And they feel, not unreasonably, that they have been betrayed. As a result, the whole staff gives me approximately the same brisk, gingerly attention they would bestow on an old bandage."

Well, the HCV nurse was more generous than that. But I'm assuming my stock in the various infectious diseases departments, which has been built up from years running the HIV group, has dropped a bit...

•••

She does respond at one point: well, the ribavirin does, of course, create anxiety, all on its own.

I want to roll my eyes and say, Tell me about it, sister!...

•••

All at a time of cultural and personalised stress – astounding how many people on Facebook and across the internets are raging, correcting, attacking – I don't mind a lot of the tension and anxiety, though it makes for tiresome reading, especially as it is so repetitive; but when my self-consciously ethical, idealistic American colleagues, brought up within the same wave of identity politics that organised much of my education and writing, start aggressively correcting each other, I can't help thinking:

we're all getting older.

And some of us seem to be projecting an increasingly you-damned-kids-get-off-my-lawn emotional stance onto current American politics, and gender complexity, and disability, and neuropolitics...

I don't much mind being judgmental and easily irritated, that's something I've always done. But I hope I don't end up spending as much time being self-righteous as some old colleagues.

•••

Today I am better: when I finally figured out that I could still take the stomach medications at night, sleep is easier. I am a bit more accustomed to side effects. Perhaps because I had a chance to go to pieces with the nurse, I feel calmer –

•••

Tomorrow is Easter. We will hold the online seminar, despite the holiday – well of course, who's going to miss a chance to talk about sacrifice on Easter Sunday?

I am perhaps not quite as resentful of the reading, or the ideas, as I have been.

As for anxiety, as for dreams – with the spring sun, I will take what I get:

I'm still a bit touchy about all these sacrifices, though –

To Züri

A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing.

My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this is what a long-term habit is like when its surrounding emotional complex is largely dismantled.

High points: patients – feeling the depth of winter in vivid dreams and rapid transitions, as am I; classes – including some good ones, ended with a student coming to my office to wait through several appointments to say to me, I wanted to tell you, I was dreading today's class on Freud and Jung, I thought I wouldn't be able to stand it, but it was wonderful; meeting with a local charity about our current explosion of activity in the group for people with AIDS, and having them be incredibly impressed, supportive, down-to-business...

oh, and our group's budget is nowhere near as depleted as I'd thought. Silly me, irrationally anxious about money.

Pack, refrigerator fruit & veg to the women downstairs, airport, plane, transfer in a slightly chaotic Schiphol (somebody decided on yet another refurbish?), buy Dutch cheeses, plane, bump into Cécile at the Zürich baggage claim, briefly meeting her family before they went off... and then the terribly organised train tickets–wifi–apartment keys–groceries bustle of that first day here. The one I've gotten down to a pattern.

When buying food, though, the bronzed, terrifically handsome, possibly Middle Eastern man at the checkout counter is friendly, charming – wants to know why I'm here... a moment of real warmth.

***

Somewhere in these past few days, somebody's Facebook reference led me to finally read Fight Club – malevolently funny, a very good book, but also – such deep red/black rage, such vivid, ruthless, demented passion embedded in it. It is a charge just to read it – and an unusual charge for me: when did I last let myself feel such blood lust, such impatient, visceral, imaginatively violent hatred of all things? Men, in packs....

(I haven't read American Psycho, and probably never will – I mean: ick – but suspect that's got some of the same fascination.)

And, because my iPad has many books scattered among its bytes, veered sideways to read The Enchanted April. A bit sharper than I'd realised – not quite sure I believe that these women would be so utterly transformed from their malevolent London irritability by the warm glories of Italy; or at least that those transformations would sit with permanence – but beautiful. And, uh, yes, somewhat different than Fight Club.

It seems that I read these things differently now – a slightly more psychological kind of reading: I'm not so much wondering restlessly whether I'm enjoying where I am in the book, but instead fascinated with understanding what's going on with the characters. So, perhaps, a lot of books I hadn't liked before will become more interesting – and not just in some chilly clinical sense, but in the sense of really wanting to understand the experience. And, perhaps, a more emotionally confident entry into that experience.

So there you are... Are they going to do a crossover movie of Fight Club with The Enchanted April? No? The scene where Russell Crowe remonstrates with Keira Knightley in the garden just before he goes to beat up the gardener?... no I suppose it wouldn't work all that well.

***

Back to last bursts of changes, and some irritation, around the Stäbler book: which supposedly is printed by the end of the month. Why such a messily updated projects list from him now?... ah well, you know how creative types are, roll my eyes and get on to it. Three sections revised tonight, two remaining...

but...

suddenly weak; extremely weak, shaky. To the point of leaving the computer, holding myself up across the seven or eight feet to the bed, lying down.

Up fifteen minutes later. Then another wave of weakness....

I told yet another friend the Story of this Book last week, that strange way my subconscious had become convinced that this book was tied up with dying for me.

I'm in good health at the moment.

Feeling strange, in a small Zürich apartment, snow on the windows... calm except when I stand.

Not frightened, not depressed: but somehow curious.

So, is it actually going to happen?...

Tomorrow, supervision with Kast... this week classes, colloquia, a visit to Lucerne to check on a new exchange agreement...

And of course finishing these last corrections.

Snow falling.

Could this, by any weird chance, really be it?...

I am curious... but I won't stop.

I'll just... pay attention....

Rocky Horror

Between Christmas and New Year...

Tonight we showed yet another musical at the Tyneside Café, our regular Sunday night event, which is linked to teaching my course on musicals – something I'm teaching for the first time in ten years, to my surprise, as I discovered when I looked through old records.

Musicals are, to be brutally truthful, a bit hard to take, especially for an entire year – the melodies are too catchy and they stick in your head, and there are emotional ties for me that are – well, hard to bear, actually. A lot of famous shows don't mean that much to me, but my favorites, especially a lot of Sondheim, are deeply plugged in to strong feelings of vanity, anguish, excitement, loss – all those things that get a bit much after a while, especially if you're on a schedule of classes and events where they come up regularly.

Our choice for the time between holidays was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Strangely enough, although we've just had to revise our winter schedule of screenings – the café has a glass front, and Tyneside Cinema management suddenly noticed its implications, meaning that we can no longer show any films that have problematic ratings, because the management can suddenly see, as if in a vision, an eight-year-old waif wandering the streets of Newcastle late on a freezing Sunday night, suddenly horrified and ruined by, say, Chicago, which we showed before we got the news about the ratings, though all of this should get fixed when they create a screen curtain at the front that can be lowered, which is promised in a couple of months, and hey, you don't complain about sentence structures like this in Proust, do you? – despite a lot of things that suggest it should have a Pretty Definite kind rating, Rocky Horror is unrated!

Which just goes to show you.

•••

M. had never seen it – and, strangely enough, C., who runs the film series, had never seen it either; though his wife had. Which makes them, in Rocky Horror parlance, virgins.... M. loved it, fortunately.

As for me, I remember being utterly dazzled by Tim Curry's performance when I first saw it in the late 70s – and it remains absolutely astounding: the density, the web of cross-references, the manic energy – his ability to completely grip every second of a scene, the intense and constantly changing surprises... obviously the role of a lifetime.

(Annoying that we can't just say Rocky, isn't it? – as though I would write about a Stallone film!...)

And the madness of various scenes, which I'd half-forgotten – although the whole does have too many endings, it really is a powerfully constructed piece of work, an amazing film. Two young women came up to me afterwards and thanked me for showing the film – they'd seen it before and loved it, had in fact become the kind of fans who looked for midnight showings and dressed up properly for them; but they were glad to see it straight through just once – though they really wanted to shout out the appropriate lines in response to what was going on onscreen...

•••

Walking back in the icy night to get a taxi with M.; he has given me a birthday gift – Nietzsche, of all things, in a nice edition – but he is concerned that I may be irritated with him. I laugh at this – don't I express my irritation almost too easily, with him? – and we always get over such things very quickly.

But, perhaps because of the contiguity to Rocky Horror, it reminds me of the links between drama and actors, narcissism, emotions unbearable or fascinating, and exaggerated projections that are so hard to handle –

•••

Home. It is only 10 pm, but for the past three days, I have been recovering from Christmas very, very slowly – today's major achievements were showering, changing the bed, and vacuuming, which suddenly seems like quite enough. So: early to bed....

•••

But of course I usually wake in the middle of the night these days. My cue for getting up is needing to pee – since my 2009 stroke, the fragile neurological processor that slows renal functions when you sleep (from an evolutionary viewpoint, it developed so that we could sleep through the night) has been broken, as it generally breaks in older people, sooner or later. And I've gotten comfortable with this – there is historical evidence that many people up through the 18th century thought it normal to sleep in two segments, with a time of reading or drinking tea or some such in between (do those choices sound a bit elderly? oh well: you could do other things with your time awake in the night, of course) –

And all the above – musicals, theater, narcissism, death, shining brightly on stage – are clustering in my imagination.

I look up Charles Ludlam online. If Rocky Horror in 1973, and Richard O'Brien, who is now openly (partly) transgendered, and a lot of flamboyantly sexual gay/trans theater before the 80s, all seems to cluster around certain themes – and, in fact, to be an especially flashy aspect of general truths about theater people, and problems of narcissism – and yes, I know my sentences are exceptionally long and diffuse tonight, but hey the connections are cross-linked through a number of levels –

then Charles Ludlam, and the great, lost Theater of the Ridiculous, also seems to be connected to all this.

Do you know how sad it is that there is so few fragments of films with Ludlam in them? As I tell my students in the musicals class, it's amazing how much major theatrical and dance work is utterly lost – stills are mere suggestions, video is a late invention, film is expensive – and so many, many people have burned brightly on stage, then vanished forever. Ludlam exists in a few YouTube videos – a Madeleine Kahn sitcom, horribly written and in low resolution, but well played by the two of them; two more sharply self-conscious short films – the rest has evaporated. As in the haiku: snow melts into air....

But you must read the book of Ludlam's stage plays. Especially the eerily, wisely existential/Buddhist/camp Caprice, and others of the middle and later plays.

Ludlam... I never saw him perform; when I was given a grant to live in New York for three months in the spring of 1987, just after my own HIV diagnosis, I was confused, overwhelmed but excited and envious, about all the famous names and buildings. I still hadn't processed my own diagnosis (is there a continuing link between death and acquisition here? because I bought a lot of books in New York, then didn't plan a way to get them home to California – a mess cleaned up by L., who was not at all pleased about it at the time); and, in 1987, New York was as much stalked by death as was San Francisco, as was, increasingly, Los Angeles – among many other cities...

And that spring night when I was walking home, through the Village; and passed a black-painted store front, obviously an off-Broadway theater – I now know, the Theater of the Ridiculous itself – and was stunned: it was covered with candles, with cards, with pictures, with flowers – Ludlam had just died, and this outpouring of love and grief, hundreds of candles lighting up the silent, empty street...

•••

Yes, I am trying to get to my point. Or points. Sorry.

The things there are to say – brief fragments of several larger structures, that fit into each other in complex ways –

this particularly ecstatic presentation of the self ('don't dream it, be it'); the excitement of theater –

narcissism, not because self-regard is a bad thing, but because it suggests a wound, a perpetually painful bleeding that lies beneath the theatrical self –

that time of an intensely exaggerated, eroticized, gay/trans stage self: of Tim Curry's work, of Ludlam's, of fellow-traveler Madeleine Kahn's – though of course this is merely an example of the vast world of theater, which has always, or at least often, been like this –

and the sense that we connect to these things partly because of their glorious energy and passion, but also because of the narcissistic pain that we can sense, underneath –

that we may find these things easier to see in those who died in midlife: Ludlam, Heath Ledger – that it may be harder to see an older Tim Curry and not think, so what have you done lately?, but that he has then had the time, the life, to continue to grow and change; and that is even better than symbolic power followed by too-early death –

and my own change, my own shift in being: that, although all these things are still in me, in my own versions and with my own referents, they are no longer unbearably painful:

that I can perhaps talk more easily about my favorite dramatic scenes and their associated emotions;

that riding out the emotional breakers of a class on musicals, or if I were to teach it again a class on AIDS, without being utterly overwhelmed by the emotional/existential tangle of the narcissistic universe that always has that black hole in its center, is more possible –

and so –

•••

The larger tangle here is clear enough, to me at least. Connections between myself, theories of narcissism, my own changes over the past months –

and the awareness that there is that in me which is really healed, which is changed enough to be experienced without unbearable pain.

Which is, I guess – although admittedly subtly, structurally, at a level almost vast enough to be impossible to perceive – a big deal.

•••

And now it is only a couple of hours until a midwinter dawn... and I am satisfied that I could only make this clearer, more logical, if I spent hours on it. Which isn't going to happen tonight.

Good night; back to bed....

Solstice

In the dark of the year, I had the task of introducing one of our series of movie musicals at a local café. We'd chosen Meet Me in St. Louis – always an odd one: sentimental, structured – but at the same time there are strange, dark eruptions into the story: the youngest daughter in tears, destroying the snowmen...

Probably because it's made in the winter of 1944-45: the war has gone on too long, people need something to cheer them up; the end of the war seems as though it might be soon, but no one is certain. A lot of terrible things have happened to everyone; and a story from that time will inevitably get flashes of something darker, sadder, more real...

Though, at the same time, the movie is simpler and sillier than I remember, at least for much of it. My introduction is probably a bit off base, too much from my own point of view; but no one seems to mind, they watch, seated, as the café fills with a standing post-film crowd, then empties again. I catch the eye of a student who is often at these films – she always seems so in touch with their emotions; for once she is there alone, not with friends – and smile and nod reassuringly, as the Christmas segment ends, and I leave before the final coda at the fair.

•••

Home, putting my wallet down and hanging my coat up, undressing – the apartment is warm, but my mind is still moving onward: suddenly I become aware, as I haven't yet been this season, of being alone at Christmas. And also aware of the structure of stories, climactic events, happiness and unhappiness: at the end of the movie, for instance, is everyone really entirely glad not to be moving – hadn't any of them gone through a process of resigning themselves to the move, of anticipating the excitement of the future? Was anyone left behind by the family's change in plans, by the group decision?

We are beings in time: intellectuals often hate stories with structured endings – but of course there are great changes, strong endings, and characters that come together for the rest of their lives, in real life. The only thing is: after the ending of any particular story or event, we continue to exist, and must reconnect with the next stage of our lives, our imaginations – because time keeps going, the fairy tale closing is followed by more days, months, years, even after we think we have gotten what we want.

Or what we don't want: if I have tended to become an extraneous character, someone left behind by too many stories, that does not leave me outside of time and change. What if the family had moved, and the young man next door had lost his connection with Garland's character, and was offered a good job somewhere – and he moved, a modern figure making sensible and apparently necessary decisions, ending up living alone in an apartment in a big city? Not an ending that we would countenance: but a realistic one. An ending we would normally see as... well, disappointing perhaps, or proof that Marx and Adorno and Foucault were right: someone accidentally, casually, left behind by the rise and fall of existential currents, in a modern state where rational decisions often disconnect us from what matters.

And I think of Buddhist responses to this, which are generally more absolute, possibly to protect ourselves from uncertainty: it is all illusion – but isn't that an attempt to avoid pain completely? What if it is all illusion, but therefore we can take some of it as important, and ignore other parts that don't seem to move forward, to help us?...

•••

At that point, I am tired... and go to bed early; it is not yet 10 pm. I read a page or two of Steiner's After Babel, which cuts across these ideas at an utterly different angle, but in an enlivening way: the original 1975 edition was an electrifying, inspiring favorite of mine, then when my life and apartment were disintegrating in San Francisco in the late 1990s, the book was badly damaged, with many others, when a pipe blew – something that went right to my heart: the dried book with its damaged pages, almost unopenable, has sat on my shelf for years, touched with regret.

But now I have its third edition in electronic form, which is perhaps harder to destroy?...

Which may seem unrelated, to you: but again, time, visions of history, existential joy and loss, and change: the possibility of existence that we retrieve from these fragments.

•••

And then, even before midnight, a dream, uneasy and fragmentary, wakens me again: walking along a hallway with a young man in glasses, a student – or possibly one of my younger cousins: what is it when someone is a child of your actual cousin – is that a second cousin, or once removed?... anyway, I have several of them. And they are a distinct group in my personal universe – my nieces and nephew are definitely part of my immediate family, and my actual cousins and their daughters are a friendly bunch that connects to me easily; but these younger male sons-of-cousins are slightly further removed, mostly known at a distance. The three boys are all intelligent, lively, handsome – if I may be egostistical here, I tend to project aspects of myself onto them, more than I do my nephew and nieces: the cousins, with their Greek profiles, all faintly resemble me, or at least undamaged, happier, more successful versions of me – all three are more in-the-contemporary-world, though all are subtly distinct from each other. So, if they show up here, it is clearly a projection onto some part of myself that remains, after so many years and events... what, perhaps, I could have been, in a luckier universe.

And, although I cannot quite coherently reproduce our exchange in the dream – I have noted some of it for my analyst, but won't bore you with incomprehensible detail – in that dream hallway, we talk about realizing that things are, in their essence, all right: the younger man, whoever he is, insists that I explain what I mean by that, and I try to do so. I can't quite remember why it made sense, but – this realization that things do hang together, that things do make sense: and the long stretches of my life where I couldn't see that were my own myopia, my own existential error – I just didn't get it, as it were:

that my recurring sadness is merely a mistake in perception...

And the long, gentle night continues, behind the tree outside my bedroom window.

For Jarman

In April 2010, I gave a presentation about Derek Jarman, where I worked through The Garden, Edward II, and Blue, showing the closeness to death in each film.

Or maybe: not just showing. When I polished the presentation to give in New Orleans, I felt close to something....

I promised, last year, to turn the presentation into a published paper for Gus Subero, who has been waiting for it since August. On Monday he sent me a deadline: it must be done by 8 a.m. tomorrow, or it isn't included. I have actually been grateful for this deadline – I've tossed everything else aside to polish an already faceted stone.

And now I'm polishing the last page, which I haven't gone near in months. I'm proud of the page – but it feels on the edge of – something: and as I'm copying out the text of Jarman's elegy –

“I fill this room with the echo of many voices / Who passed time here / Voices unlocked from the blue of the long dried paint / The sun comes and floods this empty room / I call it my room / My room has welcomed many summers / Embraced laughter and tears / Can it fill itself with your laughter / Each word a sunbeam / Glancing in the light / This is the song of My Room.

David / Howard / Graham / David / Paul / Derek / Graham / Howard / David"

there is the musical background of gongs, and I am crying a bit, and my nose is running...

No, my nose isn't running: it is bleeding.

Heavily.

And it is as though this is a mark of what is given to me: I do live, still (or: I seem to), waiting for some useful purpose perhaps; but when I come this close, I can't help but show some sign of it. Heavily.

Is this why I haven't been spending time on these pages... at some level I know that this is risky. I'm allowed to live, but there are... warnings.

A tissue in my nose; and no blood has gotten on my shirt. It is late at night, and the living neighbors are watching television, which noise hums in the background. My last paragraph, which clearly doesn't need reworking – just, perhaps, one more comma placed for the reader:

If the eye is a camera, perhaps a series of transformation shots could be filmed, following each other in a slow-motion series: a transformation of soldiers dying in World War I, into gay men dying of AIDS; a transformation of Christ into a man attacked and humiliated by laughing policemen; transformations of Tilda into Mary, of Edward II into Jarman, of externalized rage about death, about war, about violence and repression and inequality, into an internalized identification, even a kind of defiant acceptance. And finally, a transformation shot that turns Jarman, in his garden, into everyone who dies: into blue…

The paper is done – the tissue is holding the blood – and I can send it in.

Not a close call, exactly: more of a long-expected visit; but by a friend....

South

... a conference in New Orleans.

On an airplane, headed from northern England, via Amsterdam and Atlanta, to the real heart of the very South.

Unfortunately, I keep being surprised at the sloppy, smelly American passengers in my last couple of air trips to the States – and they always seem to be so loud, too; and they take up so much room – pushing bags aside for overstuffed suitcases that obviously should have been checked, on flights where the service is slovenly, offhand and obviously depressed.

Of course, I know that I am too loud, for the northern English city where I live, and often for the norm in various cities across Europe; D., for instance, although we are friends and colleagues, often expresses barely covert (really, virtually passive-aggressive) irritation that I don't shut up more, or at least tone it down a bit. But perhaps I'm not used to hearing American volume en masse any more.

On the plane, they show a couple of films of exaggeratedly heterosexual American life – lots of families and children and relationships, and grandmothers and sons and wives, and such. Common denominator, I suppose.

I am, as it happens, reading Erikson's book on child development in preparation for my Zürich exams next summer... And some combination of all this makes me wonder: if many human lives, and many problems, are characterized by the dense knotting of several levels of positive and negative meaning between people, distributed across complex events and life stages – then can we say that I have unfortunately had a later life characterized somewhat differently – by unraveling, by a loss of meaning?

People dying; moving too far away from knots of lovers, friends, family... there is a sense of dissipation: by which I don't mean drinking and such, but simply the process, as a gas dissipates into thin air. As though the sorrows and confusions of my life have ended up lying a bit too far from their original objects, drifting tenuously through empty spaces – or perhaps it is like unraveling strands of rope. It becomes possible to see what happened in the past, but the results are a bit abstract – this is all like looking back over a story, and polishing details, when you already know the ending... or, perhaps, the lack thereof.

***

But there are a lot of rapidly shifting feelings and moods during this trip of nearly a week – so many changes, places, people: at first I was a bit shell-shocked, partly by that long plane trip. (How did I manage to go from northern England to New Orleans via three planes – eighteen hours total in one direction, then twenty-two in the other? It honestly seemed worse than those old trips to Hong Kong, which were at times twenty-seven hours long... but back then the airline was much pleasanter, the attendants happier and more helpful, and there was more space.) On the first day or two there was a lot of wondering just what I was doing at this conference – nobody seemed to remember me, nobody seemed to want to talk. Fortunately, this changed a great deal during the conference, and I was no longer another forgotten foreigner by the end.

And it is the kind of city where you can walk around and look at houses, and think: Ah, I wish that I could live here... in the French Quarter, the small buildings have an aliveness that you could imagine as part of a beloved home. In every street, you change your mind: no, I would rather live there...

***

In any case, New Orleans is enormous fun – in a frankly rather rough, often visibly poor kind of way. But they truly do know how to enjoy their lives: the Discworld book Witches Abroad is a blithe parody of a trip that Pratchett must have taken to New Orleans... including the wonderful food that is made out of anything (scrapings from the bottom of the bay, or rivers), but which has a real sensual magic to it. A wonderful scene in a market, where Nanny Ogg meets one of the local witches – who has a big pot of gumbo sitting outside her tent, a plate next to it for coins, and that plate is overflowing: Nanny Ogg tries the gumbo, and says: so, they pay you whatever they think it’s worth? The witch says yes, they do... and Nanny Ogg says, tentatively, and you don’t get loaded down with a lot of diamonds, and gold, and such?...

Long lunches and dinners, astoundingly rich food – and, most unexpectedly, the people are all so sweet and charming: as you would expect, the many tourists are mildly obnoxious (it is like Amsterdam or San Francisco, where tourists expect to have raunchy fun they wouldn’t ever have at home, and therefore behave accordingly – unfortunately, as when we had to convince German tourists in San Francisco not to piss on the street corners); but everyone I meet who actually lives in New Orleans seems truly civilized, charming, and friendly. And they flirt, also charmingly, which is always good for an aging ego. (The most unexpected case of this was the hotel clerk in his late twenties who said, So, young man, how can I help you?... I did snort in amusement.)

Best meals? There were a number of them, over six days – a rough-edged, loud diner full of tourists that Dan chose, because he had heard that the ‘blackened oysters’ were not to be missed. And he was right: a wonderful dinner of oysters roasted with spices on top – we devoured them, overseen benevolently by the bleached-blonde biker-chick waitress (she clearly missed getting to have a cigarette hanging off her lip), and then headed out into a Halloween night. Bourbon Street was busy and crazy, in a hectic and overcrowded way – there were a number of truly amazing costumes, with astounding craftsmanship; but it was even better at the eastern end of the French Quarter, in the trendy/scruffy/young/gay neighborhood, where Dan took a lot of pictures. We told people how good their costumes were, too – a blonde woman who had drunk so much that she was slurring her speech, an elegantly dressed Colombian man with painted-on scars and bruises (I forget what he was supposed to be, but I think Dan recognized the reference).

A number of times I went to the wittily modern/traditional mix in the café Green Goddess – possibly too often, given how many other restaurants were available – five or six meals there? Well, it was nearby, and it was (though you are getting sick of strong comparatives) really, really good. By the second time, the waitresses knew me, both the gentle dark-haired studious one and the brasher, rougher blonde one (a youthful, possibly lesbian, version of that biker chick). I went there with Mitchell, Susan, Rob – the food was good enough to make Rob happy (always a tricky negotiation, so it’s lucky that went well) and it was outdoors, which on most days was wonderful. Because it is in a street that has no cars, the tables merely face another set of charming houses and restaurants, painted in pastels and with flower baskets here and there – a good place to spend some time; I think Susan and I sat around for six or seven hours one night, joined for part of the time by others.

***

Bookstores ranged from excellent to scruffy, but they all exhibited a real affection and passion for books, used and exotic and bizarre. I went back to one of them several times, a large, dark space filled with shelves; the pleasantly talkative proprietor looked through my list of books-to-find-someday, and managed to pick five or six off scattered shelves. It was a pleasure when he complimented me on the list, which was evidently fairly esoteric and interesting – there were bursts of tourists asking for more standard current hits, and he dealt with them quickly and casually. I did find Beerbohm (although I still can’t ever find an affordable copy of that small multi-volume set of the collected essays – perhaps I never will), an older edition of Katherine Mansfield’s diaries (I was a bit uncertain about this one, as there is now a completely revised edition – but on the other hand, I’ll probably never get a chance to compare versions next to each other, so I bought it); and a book on Anne Rice, which seemed a particularly guilty pleasure in what used to be her city (I didn’t quite feel I could read it until I came home, as I would look like – yes, horrors – a tourist).

There was also a gay used bookstore in the scruffy-trendy neighborhood – but the exceptionally casual (apparently demi-stoned) proprietor left the place closed with all the lights on, then later had problems with the electricity going off, then finally let me look through a mostly dark bookstore. My sense was: a lot of uninteresting junk, plus some unexpected knockoffs… but it was too dark to know much by the end of that visit.

Incidentally, you could tell from the guidebooks – even the conservative ones: Frommer's was surprisingly dramatic – that the writers from New Orleans were still deeply angry, deeply grieved, over Hurricane Katrina. There is a lot of extraordinary writing that reflects such a lot of sorrow and pride – that they survived, that they weren't helped more, that they are fighting their way back up, inch by inch... the passion behind this is remarkable.

Dinner with James (one of Mitchell's students, therefore instant 'family') on the last night, back in the trendy neighborhood: excellent food, a number of different dishes – a bar/restaurant with a playful interface between those carnally intense seafood dishes that are always so good here, and subtle postmodern variations that didn’t ruin them. Most surprising was the band – a pianist, trumpeter, and an oval-faced young singer, doing 30s jazz; they were absolutely excellent (jazz as casually played on the street in New Orleans is far more remarkable than the most skillful stage performances elsewhere – it is the expert local language). The singer really caught my ear: you know how those old recordings have particular overtones, a quality I had always ascribed to the technology – missing spectra, or amplified ones. She was recreating that with her own voice – which raised the interesting question: when it originally appeared, was that quality a matter of training, or of technology? Probably an unanswerable question now – if the recording is all that is left, how can you know what the sound was before it was recorded? A great musical/culinary experience, at any rate (and a fairly powerful existential/Jungian discussion with James that came into sharper focus after we walked the length of the French Quarter to get back and sit in the big, brightly-lit hotel lobby, as people watched football, interspersed with bulletins on the election).

The last morning, I had time to go to an old-fashioned Southern-style café with tables outdoors under the trees, and a huge buffet designed for tourists. The waiter was a sort of elderly black character actor, enjoying his professional role and playing with it – again we became friends during the brunch, and he started to make recommendations and steer my choices. At the next table was a family from Atlanta, with a big, loud father who kept talking about Romney and the election – and was pushing the waiters around in a way that was just a hair away from outright racism. My waiter started to get a distinctly and visibly sour expression: we exchanged looks of sympathy, but when I commiserated he said: I am a professional...

I had to leave a bit too quickly because it was getting to be time to go to the airport; but it was still a striking experience.

***

My paper was surprisingly successful – I was nervous during it: parts seemed to me too dry, too lifeless; and I realized during the course of it that, because there were so many things to explain about each slide, my examples and text were both far too long. But I managed to skip over two pages smoothly, without anyone noticing; and I cut both of my later examples short – rather unfortunate that the audio didn’t fade out evenly, but oh well, no one seemed to be too upset.

Most excitingly: it seemed as though that people thought it was really beautiful, which is what was intended. I keep feeling as though much of my writing in the last decade has perhaps become academically rather sketchy, casual – but it does tell stories, and reach points that seem to me more important than merely technical detail. And in this case it was successful: working through Derek Jarman’s last films, even with several pages and examples missing, in order to come to some more sympathetic understanding of his point of view in the face of death, actually came across...

I may not be the most useful of musicologists: but at least I seem to be talking about things that people find actually interesting.

***

And there was time spent with Mitchell, after too many years (he is always taller than I remember him, as we usually only talk on the phone these days); and with Fred – who is now happy with a sweet-tempered boyfriend. And a ridiculously brief encounter with Andrew, absolutely in passing – I think we only exchanged quips with no greetings. And many other friends and acquaintances… and no, I didn’t do a perfect job of remembering people's names, but I can’t do that even at home, so you can’t expect much at a large conference.

And the trip home, as bad as the flight out – and the background anxiety over the election – I didn’t hear that the Crazy Psycho Brutal Boss had lost until I got home, geographically far from the loony politics of modern America; and then that was a pleasant relief. Late evening after many hours, a frigid apartment because the heating had been off – but it was pleasant to lay on the couch, turn on all the heat I could find, and drag together some food from my own kitchen.

I do enjoy the best parts of travel, but as I age I have become quite a homebody…

***

Ah, but the food – and the people and the streets and the houses – of sensual, relaxed, slightly crazy New Orleans.

Packing

... no, not *that* kind.

I'm off to Zürich in an hour – the Jung-Institut, seminars, and my first series of exams. The weather is very warm there at the moment – entirely unlike here; trying to pack a variety of things, of course.

Do you remember Sunday Bloody Sunday? Peter Finch and the incredible Glenda Jackson spend the first few minutes of the film getting ready to go away for the weekend (with the same younger guy, as it happens, though they don't know that yet). It's simple but absolutely hilarious, and impossible to forget – Finch, with the exquisite trio from Cosí fan tutte playing in the background, carefully and calmly puts things away, packs meticulously, makes sure the kitchen is clean, and walks to the door. But Glenda throws junk across the room, yanks clothes from a closet to toss them in a bag, walks through a kitchen that looks like it is at the end of a three-day party, tosses a cigarette butt toward the sink without looking to see where it lands, and strides out the door.

I, of course, do the Finch thing, though not as calmly.

... Is that the taxi for the airport?...

... double vision...

It is years since I've seen this...

A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir... and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you by the end. As do manyof the other characters – even ones whose names you don't learn; even some who pass by on the screen without any lines at all.

I hadn't seen it in years. And then never straight through, as tonight...

But hey: I'm trying to finish a paper for the Jung Institute on the personification of Nachiketas and Yama, that is to say Death, in the Katha Upanishad. And preparing an exam for the Institute where we have somehow ended up with me being quizzed on healing and Buddhism (why did I not choose a more material, or more everyday question for that topic?). And then of course I always wonder if I'm sufficiently in touch with (insufficiently in touch with, overly concerned with, confused by, obsessed with) death and illness – in the now nearly twenty-nine years since Reid's death. Or perhaps in the twenty-five years since Mitch told me my HIV diagnosis over the clinic desk. Or in the twenty-four years since I met Ma Jaya Satai Bhagavati – I use her full name with respect, as she herself died last month.

And most of all of course in the months since my mother's death, the several years since my eldest sister's, my father's... My aunt's, my uncle's. Memory, change and loss resonating out like rings on the water, then bouncing back, breaking and overlapping rings on the water.

In the film, at the beginning when he has survived a plane crash, the noise of the plane, the roar of engines, or perhaps it is just the sound a seashell makes – the roar of eternity – is behind everything. There is a sense of strange and utter clarity, of ruthless reality, with everything slightly slowed, slightly strange: Bridges is afraid of nothing, nothing at all. Walking through death, through life, as though not quite sure where the feet are landing. Allergies, appointments, family, plans... going home... all entirely unimportant.

Not that he is against those things, but... they are all behind the haze of a slight roar....

I have been a bit dizzy myself the past couple of days.

There is this strange double vision: fussing over doing things, putting things in order, the anxiety of demands and wants and needs... and having all of that vanish with a faint roar of engines, a muffled feeling...

This thing: the thing of having some awareness of life and death, of time and no-time. Of dreaming as much as waking, where one's dreams may be more important than anything going on out in the world. The double vision occurs when one doesn't quite lose this contact with (forgive me if this seems arrogant, you may put it into the subjunctive if you like) eternity, with death, with nothing – and yet also walks through life, talking to people, doing things. Putting medications into bags, as I am doing tonight (although admittedly the film has slowed me so much that the pills I started putting out at about 7 pm are still not quite put away, nearly at 1 am).

Another aspect of the film that gave me a shock of recognition: the people who were on the plane telling their tales to each other, to various people, the frictions and resonances of them. Reminds me of the HIV patient group, which is a bit exasperating these days: many of our group members have gone beyond wanting to explain their experiences to medical students – indeed the ones that remain are mostly people who are teachers or therapists in waking life, and therefore are more accustomed to reiterating lessons. Even lessons that are attached to the deeply emotional.

Even when they want to move on, at some level, to talking about... something else.

I wonder if I ever understood before tonight, or partially understood, what really happens, when Perez reexperiences the crash and realizes she couldn't have saved her baby; and then at the end when Bridges makes his final, wild, personal... experiment: and then when they both cross back out of the limbo of standing and chatting with Death, so easily and comfortably – when they walk back into living: actual, real living. A shock of course, to come back: but the shock of being alive....

I never had such a dramatic event, of course. But it is true that the past few years have been a slowed-down version of this process for me: coming back from perpetual limbo, from a familiar wasteland of death – or, at least, partially back – to these studies at the Jung Institute, which are inevitably and unavoidably predicated on working towards something. I know I've felt, in body and mind, returned to living: not particularly amazing living, but real and concrete living, nevertheless.

I also know the reason I haven't come all the way back: I remain alone in this, even with my lovely friends, and the various good and real people scattered about the world. Living alone, it is hard to come completely to earth – especially for someone who hasn't spent a lot of his life completely on earth: it was perhaps all too easy for me to emotionally vacate after 1983, after 1987, after 1992, 1996....

Well: I do know, this is what I have to work with. We will see what I can do with it.