in the hall of mirrors

Promises

Friday: a day of things whose colors were muted, rather dull colors mixed with gray; but those things, quiet and apparently unimportant, were nonetheless good, and important.

Reading Sontag on Goodman and Artaud, for no real reason, just because it was the book I picked up on the way to the bus, on the way to the doctor. Thrilling moments, full of that fantastic intelligence, that honesty, flashes of depth that promise to answer the questions that have bothered me lately – that is, how to live in a way that is worthy of its own needs. And such balanced, fused glances at the entire history of the twentieth century – even when that's not the point of the article, her ability to put it all together in such powerful ways. And the dazzling images of how she wrote at the time, in 1972 – a small apartment in Paris, an ascetic approach to life, creating for herself a space to do absolutely nothing but make words....

Then the doctor: casual, a 'professional' visit, where we both know so much of what we're talking about that we practically communicate in telegraphic code. He'll check the tests to see if my worries about my liver matter at all, or are just illusions made out of transient winter viruses; he's a bit concerned about my cholesterol (a side effect of my medications), but we agreed that rather than adding a cholesterol medication just yet, I'll use this as another thing impelling me to get some exercise.

Best of all: Kaletra, the most obnoxious and probably most important medicine I've been taking for – what? seven years now? – has finally been 'reformulated'. It's still basically the same stuff – it still has ritonavir in it, unhappily (doctors like ritonavir because, although it has a miserable effect on fatigue, mood, and the whole gastrointestinal system, it stays in that system, and keeps everything else with it – just what we need, something toxic that sticks around). But the reformulation, reputedly, cuts down on side effects – he says all his patients keep sending him messages saying, thank God, this is so much easier, why didn't they do a reformulation three years ago....

So that's good. Promises of feeling much better.

Online was a Quicktime copy of Wender's Wings of Desire, which I've promised myself I would see for nineteen years, since it first came out – my most interesting teacher at the time, the aggressive but brilliant composer named Paul Reale, considered it a must-see (and, given his anti-minimalist polemics, I'm sure he thought it was an antidote to the whole postmodern wave of 1980s art). It's beautiful, shades of grays and shimmering music (and ideas – why didn't anyone tell me Peter Handke was involved in writing the script), much more surprising and textured, and much more about Berlin than I'd realized – I think I put off seeing it because I was worried that it would be disappointing. It is really a sort of beautiful heartache movie, not just because of what it is, but also because it's about Berlin... which was my first overwhelming experience of a real Europe: huge apartments and those great dark courtyards – a city that gives you so much sheer room – space to live, vast spaces to think and do and act, a city that offers genius amid the rain and the schnauze. But it's also a city that sits heavily on your shoulders: the excitement comes with a cost, that of the sheer heaviness, the darkness, of overwhelming histories, of traditions, of powerful minds and terrible cruelties....

In comparison, my beloved cities – San Francisco, Sydney, Amsterdam – are blithe baubles. And even New York merely seems young, almost tentative, next to Berlin.

So it was a day of promises. Such an important aspect of living – they used to say in est seminars that it was our promises to ourselves that were so important, as they were the sources of everything else in our lives. Unfortunately, I have always been a bit scattered about my promises to myself – not like an uncaring friend, but more like a rather helpless and inept single parent, one who confusedly promises that things will get better, that we'll go to the park, to the circus, and then when there's not any money for the bus simply says, sorry kid, that's the way it goes. Which may be why I am always so saddened, and angered, by my own bad faith with colleagues – books I am supposed to write, research I'm supposed to do, in order to keep promises to Gerhard, to Meredith, to V–....

But the change in medications, the depth of some of the things I read and looked at today, suggests a promise (even in a month like November!) of some kind of renewal: of a new set of promises, that could actually be kept.

Brief Encounter

A bit startled, and disappointed, by the film Brief Encounter (1945). The original one-act play (Still Life, from Coward's Tonight at 8:30) is so utterly wonderful – melodrama perhaps, but such spare, precisely written melodrama, where every character is completely outlined with just a few deft strokes, and the whole story progresses so delicately and inevitably towards its tragic focus. Besides, the whole point should be that they don't have many words for their situation, shouldn't it? – that their feelings for each other are strong but unmanageable – all much more believable, much more powerful, in the original version. Why add narration, flashbacks, foreshadowing, discussion?... ick. I'm afraid I can't understand why this is supposed to be a classic film.

It reminds me of what my friend Laura said, when her beloved youngest brother drowned in a silly vacation accident, and her family, which always expected her (and only her, not even her feckless parents) to be the Adult In Charge; they indulged themselves in the drama of the situation, weeping and wailing and such, and she said quietly to me: "It's already so awful, why do they need to make it awful?" I've always remembered that line – it says a lot about real feelings, and their resistance to being spoken....

Failed

Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly, which was quite wonderful. On my way out, I bumped into Jonathan, the handsome and successful young doctor who has helped me on some of the HIV presentations, who was headed into another movie; I was in enough of a daze that it was actually rather difficult to fake casual conversation.

The book has always been one of my favorite Philip Dick novels (with Ubik, the first I ever read; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is a sort of parallel to Scanner; and, above all of course, the mysterious The Man in the High Castle, which has a climax that I always find far more disorienting than any of the basic concepts that run the novel). I couldn't help identifying fairly deeply with the film – the anomie, the sense of decline, the sense of confused waste and the constant return to the repetitive, meaningless, draining actions that create that waste.

I also spent an appreciable part of the afternoon arguing with a postgraduate applicant who seemed to be dooming himself to failure through doing everything backwards, and complaining about the results; and I had the mild shock two days ago of having my opinions dismissed by a colleague, a fairly frequent experience during the school year (I become unused to it in summer, but will have to deal with it again on the usual regular basis, starting in a couple of weeks); and of course the previous weekend in London, and the week in Spain, spent with colleagues and advisors who have great affection for me, but not much in the way of expectations, and two of whom have made some promises they will clearly not bother to fulfill – not out of any malice, just out of a combination of forgetfulness, plus the implied sense that effort spent on my career is effort that is kind of wasted. Good money after bad, I suppose.

They all acknowledge my potential – but of course I've been playing the potential card since my early teens. Potential instead of action: a disastrous exchange. As I think backwards through time – the past few weeks, even months, and most certainly the years, the evidence simply continues to collect....

All this, with various other minor and fragmentary experiences, plus my normal obsessive concerns about writing and failure, came into focus as an acutely lucid morning dream and waking vision of my current position: that, although it is true that I am not a dramatic failure, it is no wonder I am powerless at work, not invited to preside at pretty much anything, simply not considered by a great many of my colleagues, locally and internationally. It is all simply a natural and accurate response to the figure I cut in the world, to use a rather eighteenth-century phrase – people do not think of me because I myself have not made enough happen; I am indeed perhaps in the middle of the scale of normal academic failures, not someone anyone would need to fire, but someone who will simply be in the back of various pictures, someone who is not really suitable for promotion, or attention, or being asked to speak in a professional context.

And this is not experienced with my usual inflated, narcissistic tragedy or self-pity: just an edge of horror at how clearly the picture develops, if I look at it straight on – that, whatever excuses I can drum up around health and history, I have firmly cast myself as an also-ran.

And even this blog, of course, is simply an ineffective attempt to bypass the work that would have a significant effect on my position, in favor of the casual, ephemeral – the failed....

Onyegin

Got some work done, working off of a precise list of Things To Do over the next two days. (As they used to say in seminars: it's amazing how much you get done on the day before you go away for vacation – and wouldn't it be even more amazing if you could be that effective all the time?) But my resolve to go to bed at a decent hour failed before the prospect of a late movie – Onegin, the 1999 film with Liv Tyler and Ralph Fiennes, was too tempting.

I've written elsewhere of the impact on me of Marcia Haydée's Tatiana, with the Stuttgart Ballett; it was an amazing performance, and I'll always associate Pushkin, and any version of Evgenii Onyegin, with that one. Especially appropriate because I was a lovelorn adolescent when I saw it, and Tatiana is the ultimate lovelorn adolescent (at least in the first half of the story).

But the movie didn't quite work. Yes, polished, yes, classy, yes, well acted – but they got it wrong: the first half, culminating in Tatiana's letter to Onyegin, should be more anguished; and the second half, ironically climaxing in his letter to her, should be cooler, more wintry. She says in the poem, "I can't help these tears," but they are sad, not anguished; she is not shattered when they meet years later, she is reserved and articulate, asking him to leave with her dignity and, undoubtedly, her makeup intact. Although Liv Tyler acts beautifully and well, it doesn't fit the story or the situation – she is simply too broken up in the movie for it to be properly satisfying.

I realize of course from my translation, and various explications of it, that non-Russians can never find the poem as exciting as Russians do – there's no way of recreating the impact of a newly made, supple, modern Russian, which this poem literally achieved, in languages that developed so differently (and frankly so much earlier). And all the poem's scenery, all the detailed moments and minor characters, just don't seem as interesting from a non-Russian (or perhaps from a modern) point of view. So, what we experience ends up limited to the plot, which in this case is really just the two great love letters and the supercharged scenes they create – even the duel is actually subsidiary to them, as it is the ironic break in power relations that will change everything, so that we must move from the first to the second.

Which means that, by "properly satisfying", I really mean that I think that Tatiana wins, she has her revenge. I know that she doesn't seek revenge, that she doesn't even want it, but despite his name in the title it ends up being her story – and that is what makes the story so attractive to heartbroken adolescents: the prospect that someday, somewhere, your situations will be reversed, and that arrogant bastard will throw himself at your feet, begging you to come away with him. And you'll have the confidence, the strength, to tell him: no.

Solaris

Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn't go to Catherine's birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I'm sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider studying, that it wasn't wasted – for her.

Later: less weak, but a headache that won't go away. Perhaps it is an overburdened liver; I obviously need to cut back on the supplements to find that out (unless I have the nerve, and it would take a great deal of that, to go into the clinic and demand a blood test on liver function).

And still later: an episode ('Strain') of Law & Order/Special Victims Unit on television, about AIDS, gay men, clubs, a new deadly strain, murders, drugs. The killer targeted PWAs who had infected his brother: and although he was convicted, I was a bit dismayed that no one seemed to feel very strongly that he was a madman. Of course it's an ambivalent situation – but not that ambivalent, I think.

And, still with this headache, I finally switched over to the last ten minutes of the 2002 remake of Solaris; I had known it was on television, but since I have the DVD, it seemed silly to watch a broadcast. That was, of course, enough for me for the evening: although I understand some of the complaints about the film, I nevertheless think that the remake is extraordinarily beautiful – the colors, the slow, calm words, the eerie, half-unexplained plot, the shimmering music, the bruised, haunted look in Clooney's eyes, the emotional resonance of the whole: the truth is, it is virtually my favorite movie.

Complaints? Of course: popular culture belongs to everybody, and everybody always has opinions, often negative ones. Film is collaborative, negotiated (like opera and musicals, and much theater); there is hardly a film that doesn't at moments step down to a lowest common denominator, and slightly spoil its own taste. Most of the complaints are comparisons with Lem's 1961 book, or Tarkovsky's 1972 film; I'm not willing to fall for those – the book is too heavily, scientifically conceptual (though brilliant) and the music for the Tarkovsky is not as successful (I can't hear the Bach out of context; it seems to me more like the quasi-parodic use of classical musics in Kubrick's 2001).

Yes, towards the end, there are two mistakes: the hand held out to the phantom child is too overtly Sistine; and Rheya's final speech is too long. But the whole is such a beautifully constructed poem: all the words of the book have been stripped out, and only the emotional core is left – all played out in a claustrophobically narrow range of images, and supported by an utterly beautiful film score by Cliff Martinez, which seems to use what must have been a vast amount of time studying Ligeti's orchestral works from the 1960s. The music is, in fact, so beautifully made and so hypnotic that, this winter, I listened to it over and over....

Those final words: up until the extra sentences that slightly clutter the ending, they are entirely perfect. They are, in fact, answers to the griefs and nightmares of the past twenty-five years, at least for me. Kelvin has apparently somehow returned to his home; we see a repeat of the first scene where he is making dinner, cuts his finger, etc.; but this time it ends slightly differently – as he washes his finger, the cut vanishes. When he sees that, he knows things are no longer as they were: he turns to see his dead wife walk into the room, and he asks her, his eyes huge with love, grief, and a hint of fear – "Am I alive, or am I dead?" And Rheya, smiling up at him wutg love and comfort, gives the perfect answer, which I have found so strangely consoling: "We don't have to think like that any more."

I identify almost too completely with the film. It's heartless of me to say so, of course – not as my reaction to that student interview was heartless, but in a different way; because friends and family inevitably find it important that one not have a heart that seems utterly broken. That's why I don't share this film, or my other favorite Urbania (also about grief and the aftermath of loss) very often. But the truth is: those shots from the opening of Solaris, of Kelvin sitting on his bed looking out bleakly at the rain, are just too utterly real for me. And too familiar.

... My headache is – not gone, but – fading....

X-Persons

Went and saw X-Men III tonight. Enjoyed the gay metaphor at the beginning – rather touching really, especially with the lonely teenagers – and some of the setup was impressive; the ending was rather flat of course (why, in an age where fantasy and science fiction films are so amazing looking – finally; I love science fiction, and it's great seeing certain things come to life – do the makers of these movies show so little skill with resolutions and aftermaths?). Fairly fun though; of course the Juggernaut was sexy, in an overblown, male-Pamela-Anderson kind of way, and Ian McKellan had a lovely moment at the end. (Why, though, don't any of the women characters ever complain about getting called X-Men?)

What was more amusing was afterward, in the pub, making up powers for ourselves and for imaginary mutants. The best was undoubtedly I–'s 'The Stylist' – he waves his arms rather airily at people and they suddenly look fabulous. A close relative of his was 'Gayman', who can flap his wrist at an army and make them all gay. Pubman is of course able to instantly fill everyone's pint with their favorite microbrew; Organization Man makes everything suddenly very neat (he is often accompanied by his partner, Cleaning Woman).

As for us: R– became Countryman, who could make people weepy and nostalgic with a single twang of his high-tech jaw harp. L– was Philosophyman, who made people rather thoughtful (imagine distracting an army with ontological questions...). Couldn't find anything for P– – don't think he really wants to parallel the Juggernaut (perhaps he'd like to be Good Friends with him though). I decided my power had to depend on putting my fists on my hips and giving people a stern look – I– said it would make them shrivel up. (Stern Look Man?... Testyman?... I'll work on it.)

Which recalls similar silliness following the Harry Potter movies, where B– and W– tried to match up characters and members of the department. They decided that I was Professor McGonagall – which was actually quite a compliment: after all, as M– said, "Well, who wouldn't want to be Maggie Smith, if they could?"....