in the hall of mirrors

Temporal, again

Reading about Chronos and Kairos: clock time and experiential, 'aware' time.

(It's only a couple of months since I first learned that Chronos is not Kronos... an error caused by the similarity of the English sounds; in Greek they are completely different, and represent different pre-Olympic deities. This leaves me a bit abashed, I thought I knew my Greek mythology... it does explain a lot of confusion though.)

Tonight there will be a gathering of old members of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus in San Francisco – I have gotten them to set up a Skype screen, organised by Jim, who was in the chorus in the early eighties, when I was there....

I want a haircut – I feel a need to look my least-scruffy for what feels like the equivalent of a high school reunion. I call Richie, at the barbershop he owns around the corner, to make sure he's available – he sounds rushed, is only staying for another half an hour (his brother will be visiting him with his wife and new baby). I throw myself together, ignoring the rest of the day's plans – it seems cold, so a flannel shirt –

•••

Outside it is sunny, breezy, not really cold at all. Memo tagged in mind: change shirt on return to apartment, before going into town; but now the focus on the haircut. The handsome, and usually more relaxed, Richie is moving unusually quickly across the barbershop, so I follow in a similarly sharply planned way, striding across the room to sit in the chair as I put down my glasses...

Near the door, the other guy, the massive and sweetly quiet body builder, is cutting another man's hair, the sunshine reflecting across both men.

•••

Back at my apartment, I change clothes to wear something lighter, more summery, and glance at the haircut. Messages back and forth on several apps: two surprising dreams from other people – unexpected discussions of resonant things: in both cases I can see that there's an impact, but can't entirely grasp it from outside – both dreams have symbols that are very rich for me (B. has actually dreamt of me, and in her dream I am being quizzed by Bebe Neuwirth... which sounds like a fairly dazzling guest spot), but it is clear that they mean something very different to the dreamer, and messaging about it is a slow puzzling.

At the bank near Monument: M. is not yet there, I text him and set off for the first of two large department stores, to return the teapot that is not the right color.

•••

The saleswoman feels like talking, we discuss why the teapot isn't quite right and look at various competing models.... I say I'll be back later today if I don't see anything I like better, and she's happy with that. Cutting through the mall, I am moving with a certain planned speed: I have not moved this way very much for the past couple of years, but I seem to have rediscovered that sharp, competitive energy that comes to me at times... dodging slower-moving shoppers, loitering couples, the ones who are wondering where to go next....

•••

A sort of temporal awareness is winding through everything today: an element of noticing degrees of consciousness and dissociation, of presence and imagination and fugue states, in everyone I see. Do they notice what they are doing, are they emotional, are they thoughtful, are they entirely elsewhere?...

•••

The café: M. and D. are nearly done eating; I just have juice and a snack. The blonde girl at the counter is younger than usual, and new; she is focused on the next step of each process of ordering and charging. Back at the table, we talk about what everyone's done this week, and compare plans for the afternoon.

We walk up through the old market, to the Spanish place where I buy dried beans – the husband is there, he doesn't speak English but gets me to try some cheese with brandy, which is good; we speak at linguistic cross-purposes, but are friendly. He's a bit surprised I'm not buying the cheese, but I wave him off, laughing.

M. and D. split off – they each have different plans; I know it will be easier to get through things if I'm alone....

•••

Dissociation: that's not hard to see.

But time with awareness, time with less awareness... I get it but... I suspect that any clear distinction is illusory: think more of bands of experience and temporal awareness. In which case the Matte Blanco theory of five levels is perhaps a bit manic/fussy – it reminds me of so many complex musical theories and compositional methods: hoping to pin things down absolutely, but ignoring the shifting and blurring of so many levels of psyche....

•••

I head more determinedly for the overpriced health food store in Grainger Market, for more snack food – of course I won't buy much of it, not here, where prices seem to start at three or four pounds and climb rapidly.

But gradually a cross-stream of perception and physical sensation are changing: a wave of dizziness, I stand firmly. But I am no longer entirely in focus: I will continue through my errands, but there is a halo of dizzy hyperawareness, and a physicality suffused with a sort of tingling, full-body presence... and weakness; I am definitely weak.

This is of course familiar, over the past two years, but in the past few months it seems especially familiar: I can cross into this state of diffused sensation without making major changes in plans – at this point I simply adjust all plans and actions so that I can go home sooner...

•••

Back to the teapots: there are two women enjoying talking to the saleswoman – they look back several times to engage with me in all this banter, but I actually have no attention to spare: I am holding myself up and finishing what needs to get done... I realise I have become more accustomed to just doing this: hold your position, pay no attention, and all these people will just have to get over it.

The green teapot is bought: it is now the choice, it now goes home with me, that question has its final answer.

In the food hall, I have my list, but there are also other things I want, already listed in consciousness – and even in my altered state the list appears as a series of commands: I choose quickly, not wanting to spend much more time out in public. At this point I am mostly separating paying attention to other people from my main awareness: I will try not to be too aggressive in getting past the shopping baskets, but a brief curving of the lips is enough to quasi-greet/smile at the older woman negotiating her cart in front of me.

I have bought a bit too much, but cannot do anything as complicated as returning things to shelves or making decisions: I can only go forward, in this sharply detached mode. But I am brought up a bit short at the checkout: a pleasant young woman is detailed to pack our bags – this is new? – and I need to come up with coherent answers. This feels as though it would be pleasant surprise – if I didn't have such a reduced sense of how much energy I can spend on changing circumstances. At one point I look directly at her and say with a smile, as I do periodically these days: I'm not quite managing at the moment, sorry about that. As usual, it deflects confusion.

Move.

Through.

Crowds.

Bus.

•••

Sitting in the bus, I partly relax, holding the three bags on the floor: there isn't much more to do to get home, as long as I don't drop things. As I sit an elderly woman comes on in a wheelchair, pushed by a younger woman; I start to stand but they will take the space across from me – I make the usual phatic noises ('are you sure?') and they cheerfully brush them off, neither particularly engaging nor being irritated – they must get that kind of slightly-unnecessary-fussing a hundred times in a day...

Gradually I seem to be returning to more awareness of my surroundings; muscles remain in their sort of dazzled, fuzed state of weakness, but the pressure is lower, and I can observe again:

Is the old woman's accent slightly German? Why is the young man with red hair moving down the aisle entirely dressed in motorcycle leathers?... the questions fade, I am still tired.

But traffic is a bit slow, and awareness returns again, in slow waves: I listen more closely to the woman in the wheelchair – that is not a German or even Geordie accent, but only a slightly Northern version of a distinctly 'taught' British accent, phonemes as smoothly sharp as the serif curves of a well-designed font. The women – there are three, not two – are having a conversation that is both relaxed and mutually interested – a quality of real speech, real engagement, on this afternoon bus between stops.

Turning my head, the young man is looking at his phone: the black leathers, the red hair – he is skinny, with a light beard – and somehow an awareness of all that he is and all that he means rises around him like a series of multi-dimensional frames: what he intends us to see in the leathers, his sense of pride and identity, the body underneath, when he wakes and looks in the mirror, what he thinks about during the day – all the simultaneous structures that continue in relation to each other, as his ego focuses on his phone message...

I turn my head back, the vision disintegrates: it is my stop.

•••

Walking home, through the windy summer day...

Overlapping frames of that structured drive to get home – measuring what strength there is in my hands, in my legs, holding the bags, aware of which side is heavier – the feel of summer, the evaporation of any worries about getting things done in the presence of the suffused moment: and that sense that I cannot expend any attention on anything that is a waste of time...

•••

I can see my front door ahead: the flow of the air, the leaves in the street....

Und Zürich wieder

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, a light backwash of sadness....

•••

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

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

Then more airport shops, airport food....

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

Which may be explained in a moment –

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

Tiramisu (of course).

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

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

Anniversary, again

The eleven-year anniversary of this blog....

Well, hey, it matters to me. A bit.

•••

After a brief but unpleasant virus – probably caught on that hasty train south and back – everything has a slightly disconnected feel to it: still coughing occasionally, but so what?... work to do, but really, who needs it?...

Shower, laundry, get myself dressed enough to go buy cough drops... then home and a Skype workshop, prefaced by a 'recovering, so everyone go away' message, and watch without participating.

The overlap in the past few years of analysis, the resultant digging in deep cellars, a vast increase in meaning, followed by a recurrence of that life pattern where fantasies of things I thought I wanted are taken away at a level beyond my control – perhaps this is the pattern I struggle with: a pattern about which I'm happy to make stories (like that last blog post), but uncomfortable accepting as truly mine.

And maybe that dislocated, dissociated, quasi-schizoid space between waking and sleeping, between sick and full of medications and awake and recovering, is always and innately the best place to see all of this...

Yet, disconnected. Not quite like a Kafka, or PKD, story – this is calmer, but it highlights the slight unreality of things....

•••

Spring, with clouds and some rain.

Awareness, with some darkness.

Return to health, with some coughing.

•••

Eleven years of occasionally writing, here – 753 posts, so that makes... 1.3 posts per week.

Time, space... a nearly Buddhist sense of the contingency of decisions and actions.

I may cancel some plans... that seems reasonable enough. Like reducing noise levels.

•••

You'd like the sun: that North Sea slanting, pale light, but brighter than usual – it would be beautiful to paint it....

Easter week

Maundy Thursday. In the night I wake coughing – side effects I think, but perhaps I also caught a minor cold on the train back on Wednesday. Paracodeine (given to me by Antonio, a couple of years ago – I had the flu in Zürich, missed most of the classes that month; on the last day Antonio, who is also a cardiologist, wanted to meet at a café before he went home to Milan – I kept coughing, he finally threw up his hands and said, Enough!, got up and walked into the pharmacy next door, wrote a prescription for this codeine...) – it helps, the cough gradually winds to a stop, and I sleep...

***

Good Friday. I wake, only a bit groggy, coughing intermittently; wonder should I cancel my one analysand today... The news mentions a largest bomb, non-nuclear; I make tea. A few minutes before she arrives I am dressed and presentable, the middle room vacuumed. We return to a dream from the previous week, her church and its stresses, old emotions and managing strategies, and I say: it's Good Friday, an interesting day to look deeply into this – getting in touch with the fear seems terrible, like death, descending to hell, but  then....

When she leaves, I am steadier but still a bit tired, and so sleep on the sofa for an hour. I wake remembering – something, some dream fragment now evaporated – and I realise – thirty years ago this month, April 1987: I was thirty years old. Diagnosed HIV+ at the Gay and Lesbian Community Centre in Los Angeles. The psych student volunteer who gave me my results was in training to be a Jungian analyst, and I agreed to start analysis with him, which would continue for five years. I gave up on composing forever, after finishing a set of small songs based on Japanese death haiku. And I won a travel grant from UCLA to spend three months in New York, finally meeting some famous composers I'd always wanted to work with... a visit where, walking home from the bars late at night, I saw the black-painted storefront of the Theatre for the Ridiculous covered with flowers and candles and cards, mourning Charles Ludlam after he died of AIDS.

How could I have forgotten all that?...

***

Back to the Saturday before Easter week. In the middle of the day I am angry, astoundingly grim with M. and D. as we sit having lunch on a lovely sunny day. They put up with me somehow, eyebrows raising as they look at me.

That evening I go to a bar where R. and F. are celebrating R.'s birthday – everyone is there, and glad: glad to see each other, glad to be here. At one point I am euphorically happy, sitting on a bench at the small dyke bar that we pass through later... I go home a bit earlier than the others, and sleep deeply.

Such changing emotions. What charged energies have been appearing, what dominoes falling, in these weeks?...

***

Palm Sunday. The previous week's analysis session was so charged, so emotional: not because of any story or memory, but because it reached into something... too hard to explain, I'll leave it aside. I'm not surprised when I start to remember intense fragments of dreams, after months of remembering almost nothing – although I am surprised at their elemental incoherence: not stories, but a more basic level, from unexplored distant islands of the unconscious. I record:

At one point I’m looking at myself – that me is facing or looking at something else; from my viewpoint I see myself sideways. Later there is some kind of electronic gate between us; he/I tries to come through it towards me, somehow in a threatening or dangerous way, and is horribly burned: it is an electric fence of some kind – he will be very deformed when he recovers…

I have a sense of seeing myself split off in some way (which seems connected to last week, and to Legion, with its schizoid subpersonalities and possessions.) I’m not upset when he’s burned, I’m relieved that he can’t get at me.

***

Monday. I wake impatient with myself: email all three editors, apologising – briefly (a couple of weeks ago I got a bit hilarious with an analysand who was apologising, telling him: you can say sorry just once to me, you know, you don't need to take care of me; my impatience folding out across work and life). All three editors respond within an hour, not irritated – kind, but clear: you're still okay, but not for much longer. A sense of easy clarity: anxiety recedes.

***

Tuesday.

Another dream fragment, just as vivid, but from a very different direction.

A recurrent image; comes up twice, as I wake twice on the same morning – some television travelogue about something called a cughol or kughol, something that looks like archaic Korean. The narrator describes pots for fire or for food, or both – they are on pillars, about one and a half to two feet high with a covered bowl on top, all pottery or with wood or reeds beneath – they seem to have been floated on rivers or the sea, weighted to stay upright, with fires burning in them – they are seed, which is obviously both symbolic and physical here.

That morning, I launch into the third article, the one that is the least finished but soonest due: and then there are five pages of... well, stuff: it needs to be made coherent. But there is something being said.

***

Ash Wednesday. I awake and push myself through the morning, some combination of impatient efficiency and – well, frankly, weakness: my hands are shaking slightly, if I could I would just lie down. Though I am wondering, should I cancel the train to Sheffield for analysis, I keep getting ready – print two copies of the dreams, microwave frittata for the black bento box, shower, even some actual shaving (okay, trimming). I leave, exasperated that I have to get on the train at all –

Table seat, computer. After some reasonable work and email answering, the pad and ebooks. By the time I arrive I am no longer shaky, though I intend to talk about my circumstantial irritation....

In the room, I tell him that I had a doctor's appointment, and was frustrated by my doctor's disinterest in side effects. For nearly a year I'm talked of changing doctors in some oblique way that won't annoy anyone (okay, only one person might be annoyed); as I'm speaking, I think: to hell with it, I'll just do it.

My analyst, who retired from psychiatry in the NHS last year because of his own health, says: you have looked jaundiced at times lately; it would be good to have someone paying attention to that.

Other people keep trying to treat me either as ill, or as not ill: which doesn’t work – I’m partly both, and battling over doing things and not doing things, being energetic or not, is exhausting. B. laughs in recognition: his MS has given him the same experience – people have such an exaggerated capitalist sense of working all the time, or doing nothing, they can't simply... back off, be flexible. I remember first being in Darmstadt, in Berlin, in a villa outside Rome, and seeing that continentals don't feel they have to work all the time... they do far better work, too....

B. is very interested in the dreams. Technical discussions: dissociation, charged emotion. I think of Kime's lecture two years ago, his startling approach to shadow: that it is dissociated fragments of memory and self that have been lost to time and consciousness. Such fragments may not seem dark or dangerous, just... incoherent.

***

We talk through the first dream, my psychotic self, the electric fence. B.: This is the defense. P.: watching him isn’t connecting emotionally – we are really detached, there is no sense of twinning or anything like that. B.: You’re really frightened of him… You know, it must be terrifying to be a sub-personality: no one else even sees you. P.: It's like the image from Legion: a personality locked in a box, underground. B.: The defense system is so powerful that it burns him. P.: And in Legion, as he tries to marshal his strength, the enemy becomes exactly as strong, because....

B. asks me to feel my way into it.

I do what seems the only thing there is to do: this howling, scarred fragment of rage, that is just like me, that is me: I reach for him – imagined production values recall various television and film images: crackling with power, irregular explosions, amazingly chaotic noise – things exploding off shelves – pull him in to me. (The real and present me is tearing up). I hold him, it’s the only solution and the right thing to do. It’s like holding a horribly wounded animal or child – I don’t expect him to understand, I’m the one who must hold him, because I’m the conscious/human one: he/I is only a lost fragment that doesn't exist in time, or reason.

***

P.: The abbot’s story was also about dissociation: I am arrogant and careless, not paying attention – it’s not until everyone is dead and I’m sitting bleeding to death, and can’t do anything except remember and understand, that I am forced into awareness. B.: the electric fence – trying to keep out this part of yourself – in the same way the abbot dissociated when talking to the pirates; but there comes that moment where it turns around and you can’t avoid it any more. P.: This is the chunk of raw emotion that stands behind the abbot – raw because thoroughly unconscious, unprocessed.

I am extremely tired, sitting here, in this room. The room is saturated with a sense of recognition: I realise why I have been so impatient with everyone else, for weeks – this is so important that they mustn't distract me.

B.: that is the electric fence.

***

A sense that both dreams are from the same place – opposite in terms of light and dark, but at the same deep level: and one of them opens up the other. The second, almost Vedic – old rituals, life, fire: I wouldn't have dreamed of that, unless I had dreamed the electric fence, the burning body and raw screaming face....

Legion is a useful source of images: especially because so much of the processes suggest intense dissociation – it does of course add ideas of invasion, magic, superpowers, but the writers are rather casual about all that, and are clearly really going for complexes, dissociation, the schizoid....

After the session, going home on the train, I can still sense that raw pain that isn’t caused by anything – which is what makes it raw, and why reason doesn't touch it: it is a chunk of unaware darkness, unconnected to time or memory.

*** 

Good Friday. In the evening, after a relaxed Skype with M. and R. – who have become so comfortable together, and M. is always smiling when we speak these days... I make a mixed rice with smoked salmon and leftover vegetables; it feels like comfort. I sit and write in front of the television.

***

To bed. The same images arise, as they have for the past three nights:

Then what do you do?

I hold him.

And, as I have been doing, easily, as the most natural thing in the world, I roll onto my side in bed, holding him still... until we sleep....

Closing doors

So: in a burst of extraordinarily blinkered and sociopolitically aggressive pettiness, the UK government pulls us out of the EU.

I've been joking for months that I have two passports, but unfortunately they're the ones nobody wants... but just try to trade them for something more respectable, better. Slovenia? Great, flat trade, or shall I give you money? Or how about if I add – marmalade?...

Eventually moving to a warmer part in Europe – Barcelona has been my target for a year or so – is not completely impossible as a result; but it will be considerably more difficult. The tangled requirements of professional licensing, work, a place to live, moving – and, of course, more than anything else: health care....

Which is also the most significant reason why returning to the US would be insane. Aside from not wanting to be under the current loony regime in any way at all, I assume I would have great difficulty ensuring HIV medications – even if there were state programs (but how could I afford to move back to urban California?), their stability would be based on the assertive strength of the state government – which is good now, but.... well, you wouldn't want to, you know, bet your life on it.

So that's another closed door.

•••

On Monday afternoon, walking in town, I had an odd, tense sensation across my eyes, my face: it kept feeling as though I were squinting, or grimacing – was this some kind of generalised tension showing up in the muscles? I don't know; but after a couple of hours in town I went home to rest a bit. It didn't feel like a health problem, just... tension.

Associated with a slightly dizzy sadness, disconnection: it is sunny out, but I don't quite feel it. Tired...

Tuesday, the feeling seemed to continue... or was it fainter; or not? perhaps....

•••

A sense of being cornered in the UK, unable to leave: I know, I shouldn't complain – I rent a pleasant apartment (I don't own it, but that should remain a relatively safe choice); I have nice friends and a job, I have my analysands, I have medical care....

Of course, with the NHS under heavy attack, I wouldn't be surprised if that also started to get shaky. When I started my current medications, I was handed a cheaply photocopied notice that they were being changed because these new ones were cheaper – it did turn out to be a better choice for me, and my doctor reassured me that he would never (never!) actually change my HIV medications on the basis of cost, but – well, let's face it: what does he know about the future? He's thinking of what would happen if structures remain relatively responsible, supportive: which is an opinion and not a fact.

Indeed, everyone has reassured me that medical care couldn't possibly change, or of course end, but... as we know, sudden, shocking changes do indeed happen in the world. Those 1930s stories....

The past few nights, I'm reminded of my old vision, the Story of the Abbot: the tale of how, in an earlier existence, I was horribly careless with the lives of others – resulting in a stricture on this life, and others: that those in charge of my well-being will also act carelessly (getting deported from Australia!) – and this will teach me what it feels like, so that I remember the lesson.

Another round of the wheel: another, not especially palatable, lesson....

•••

The BBC has been weirdly silent: we've known for only about a week what day had been abruptly chosen for the break – and then there was astoundingly little discussion: which doesn't feel as though no one has anything to say – it has a much more disturbing quality, as though Murdoch and his cronies decided that the common populace knows enough, and should just shut up.

Which is how this whole thing has gone... so much for that Magna Carta nonsense, it just got in the way, didn't it?

Tonight, a brief mention that the document is signed. All a bit like getting a single-page Notice of Eviction. Sign the divorce papers. You agree to give up all rights to. Yo are ordered not to come within one hundred yards of....

•••

Tonight, again, as I am sitting on the sofa, my energy sudden evaporates, I become a bit shaky – that weakness that hits me once several times a month: I sit, then lie down... I have gotten better at this; I know that I simply stop doing things, turn things off, and if it's particularly bad I head for bed, whatever time it is.

Not terrible, not disastrous. But not exactly the condition one should be in to plan a new life elsewhere....

•••

In Stoppard's play Jumpers, there is a strange moment – one not in the dialogue, but in the stage directions, and so something liable to vanish in performance. The secretary looks in a mirror:

"For the following speeches, the SECRETARY is the only person moving on stage. She gets up. She is going to go for lunch. Perhaps a clock has struck. She comes down stage to make use of the imaginary mirror… a grim, tense, unsmiling young woman, staring at the audience."

It is a disturbingly sad vignette: the other characters talk and jump, there is dazzling wordplay, and emotions and passions as the world disintegrates – but this minor character, who is silent throughout the play and acts practically as scenery for most of it, suddenly shows us something painful: so closed, so without hope....

In that play, of course, Stoppard is also attacking the redbrick universities and their damned working classes, their Labor supporters, those lefties who ruin everything. In other words: vile, irresponsible lefties like me. For him, at least when he wrote that play – because the early divisions in his life were between a beaten-down Eastern European communism, and a luxurious Oxbridge creativity – symbolic representations of power were noble and important, as they are for too many in conservative southern England.

Of course that devolves into the assumption that people and their needs can be disposed of, as long as the symbols stay firmly in place. Which sounds just like the more old-fashioned Republicans, who are so disoriented at the moment by the Neronian chaos of the current regime in the West...

•••

That sense of being lost, of spinning in space – in a culture, in an economy and a political system, that uses you as nothing but a cipher, a functional unit of income and control.

•••

We will shift, manage, there will be changes in everyday life – a weakened economy, fewer opportunities, paying for health care – and a mess of denatured laws, remnants of EU regulations with the bits that bother rich people taken out of them. We'll putter along, I suppose: and if the rest of my life is here, that is of course not such a bad thing.

But it is so sad: to have dream spaces, imagined futures and hopes, collapse into a heap of rubble....

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....

Summa

A dramatic year...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it to...

What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'?

I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new.

•••

Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back to back, two or three a night – it's very good, I'd never seen it when it first aired. Kyra Sedgwick is really excellent – entirely natural/realistic, flawed and energetic and believable, at times remarkably cold, but often passionately empathetic, even with the criminals she catches. One of those rare cases where balancing the entire show on her character just works – as good as Vince D'Onofrio, for instance, though such a different style.

I was curious about the ending, so downloaded it – she ends up caught in an unresolvable conflict over a case, resigns to go to another job... since she shot a suspect through the side of the oversized, frankly rather dowdy bag she always carries, the detectives who work with her buy her a new bag. They give it to her in an extremely well-done scene – emotional but social, balanced between the difficulty of expressing feelings in a work context and the fact that they all do have a real connection. They apologise if the bag doesn't look exactly like the right one –

she smiles, looking at the bag, and says, 'It looks like love.'

•••

Of course, although in the world of the television show and its successor, she is going to another job, we know that she is resigning after seven years of a very successful acting stint. So it's really final, an exit. That comes through in the scene, because the actors are also dealing with the tricky internal state of leaving a frame of imaginative experience that they won't be able to reenter, except by watching video, which is quite different for them.

•••

(Incidentally... the sentence 'It looks like love' is also her first line at the beginning of the first show: but in that case a murder victim. So the dark, twisted beginning is transformed, over seven years, into an honest connection between the character and the people she works with.)

•••

Last night, I opened the window when I went to bed: a chilly, calm, autumn night. Unquestionably autumn, for the first time: no more feeling of transition, surprise that it was still warm, or that it was cooler but one could still wander around in a light shirt.

•••

I responded to a current meme, choosing three fictional characters (apparently they need to be from film/television, as pictures are expected); my choices made sense to me, though I hesitated – they probably seem pretentious, especially in Britain, where anything that isn't self-deprecating or self-mocking is considered pretentious. (I always note, when people say 'pretentious', the distinction between what the word actually means and what people have imposed on it.) But, after the past year, I find myself fairly uninterested in how the Brits view existence, at least when it clashes with my own views or feelings.

I ended up choosing Prior, in Angels in America, during his eerie visit to a heaven that is both reassuring and terribly sad; Chris as played by George Clooney, in the remake of Solaris, when he is sitting on his bed, watching the rain; and, because I knew that those would be seen as too serious – and perhaps inflated – and thus of course pretentious – but also because it made a kind of edgy, comic sense, the wonderful Dr Linda Freeman as played by Jane Lynch, the sardonically bitchy psychotherapist from Two and a Half Men (back when it was funny, before Sheen's pathetically narcissistic side took over from the other parts of him).

She really was incredibly funny, and so very, very bone dry:

Dr. Freeman: So, what else is going on with your life?

Charlie: Not much. I've been gaining a little weight for some reason. Maybe 'cause I haven't been sleeping well.

Dr. Freeman: (looks at him, as he keeps stuffing himself with another pudding) Yeah, that's probably it.

Charlie: Oh, and this one girl I've been seeing pretty regularly decided to dump me.

Dr. Freeman: Huh.

Charlie: *Huh* what?

Dr. Freeman: Oh, nothing, it's just... sometimes I feel like I'm stealing your money.

 •••

And reducing work load at the university... and concerned that that may put me in a dangerous financial position.

And trying to analyse the body and its strength and weakness: though my biochemical mood is so much better, the body remains shaky – as Sontag said: the way we live now.

And looking at the two articles that are due, then friends who have kindly given me more time to write them, and wondering if I'll finish them soon enough anyway.

And completing the paperwork to register for final exams at the Jung-Institut, while wondering whether I'll finish them, at least as soon as I want to...

•••

A burst of torrential rain against the window; then, soon after, sun.

•••

Plans and aspirations are still chugging along: will I finish at the Jung-Institut, will I retire from the University in a year or two, will I move to Barcelona, or another city?

I got rather – well, direct – with my landlord about repainting the damaged stairwell – which was finally done last week, in a single morning, after waiting for two years...

If I don't move anywhere – if I can't – will I be able to stay in this apartment? Will I have health care?...

Of course all of these aims and concerns are framed in a series of if-clauses, of codified uncertainties: a necessary set of caveats – and the inevitable internal judgments: if I never finish this, if I never finish that, if I never move, this hasn't been so bad. If these things never happened, I would be all right.

More, perhaps, like Prior than like Chris: and perhaps more like Prior than like Linda....

•••

What does it mean to end things, to go on, or finish, or say good-bye to, when the focus is no longer on a future event or context?

When the good-bye feels like the main element of meaning in the entire process?...

A Hollywood ending

So: although it has been a bad year – illness, anxiety, possible collapse of plans, disconnected from a culturally suicidal Britain, feeling cornered by the future – hospital, new medications, side effects –

that year is now having a big Hollywood ending: after three or four days of some of the worst side effects I remember ever having, they are suddenly dissolving with bizarre rapidity – headaches and allergic reactions become transitory, suddenly milder, nausea vanishes, reflux decreasing, head clears.

Soaring violins as the sun rises behind THE END.

It is clear that there is a very, very real difference between those October-August medications, and these that I have been taking for a week now: that vicious drain of energy is simply – absent. The body feels oddly whole, defined, out to its edges – I hadn't realised how long it had been since I felt quite like that.

And I sleep so deeply! It is strange – I had forgotten what it was to fall into a deep sleep, no restlessness.

Not to mention – if I may say this – when I urinate, it is a strangely pale yellow – I keep catching another look to see what's wrong: where has all the blood gone?...

It's nearly a year since that's been the case!

•••

Today I was a little shaky still, but it didn't feel weak, disturbing – more like part of a gradual recovery.

In fact, I saw my analysands today! – I'd warned them that I might have a short session, but lasted throughout, and was fine.

•••

Of course, the abrupt evaporation of my psoriasis is still distinctly weird – transformative? –

All right, I'll bite: is this one of those movies where we gradually figure out that I'm actually dead now, which is why everything suddenly seems to be so easy?

I guess that's a bit of a cliché since The Sixth Sense....

•••

I still feel a more ruthless, more self-centred relationship to my job, to the university, to Britain, than I did before: a sense of urgency to make changes remains, though there is more space around it.

I will continue with the Occupational Health interview for the university – I'll tell them things are much better, but I still want a report and examination on file.

In relation to the university, the government, the Institut, I am now feeling a bit more 'what is this organisation doing for me?' than I have been for some time: so many systems and structures are so skilled at telling us that we owe them, deluding us that we should organise our lives and decisions and happiness around making sure that All Of Their Work Gets Done.

After twenty years of business and nineteen years of universities, enough: let's draw some boundaries. The university gets what it pays for, the Institute gets just what it requires...

And I will tell them to take care of what I want, now.

And try to get to something – something new.

•••

I have thought, several times in the past few months: even when I've felt ill and anxious, the times when I was sitting with my analysands felt right: like something I wanted to do, whatever other things might dissolve.

Of course all of them protested, in one way or another, that if I needed to cancel it was fine: but I said no, and I meant it.

•••

... It may seem peripheral, but – the vanishing of the psoriasis: that is just so bizarre –

when things change, that we already know will never change –

It's like healing.

At the moment...

things aren't bad today.

My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that.

I sort of remember dreaming last night – if I'm sleeping deeply for the first time in months – perhaps I'll remember some dreams...

This is indeed different. Not great but different.

I know, early stages yet: but this might actually work.

•••

Let's go back to the beginning of these five days....

•••

Health/time structure 1: renal catheter inserted seven weeks ago was removed last Thursday. They put in another temporary one for what was supposed to be three and a half days...

Health/time structure 2: as I've said I messed up my medications last summer, was put on new toxic ones in October 2015, and have assumed since then that my doctor couldn't change me to anything else... and still feeling poorly enough, often enough, that I've worried whether I can keep working at the university. Or complete the degree at the Jung-Institut. So, ten months of dislocation from plans, hopes – a sense of disorientation and collapse.

Health/time structure 3: I first got psoriasis when I was 18, and freaked out (not surprising, only older people are less worried by unpleasant but trivial body problems). It increases or decreases over the years, treatments aren't particularly effective, and when my immune system has been more or less a mess (for instance, the mid-1990s) it was far worse – though there's no clear direct relationship between it and anything I can see.

•••

So, Thursday, catheter out, catheter in. Feeling a bit beaten up.

Having contacted Occupational Health through my head of school, I am scheduled for an appointment on Tuesday.

Having emailed my own doctor that I was seriously having trouble with medications and worried about (unplanned and sudden) retirement, was talking to the university, Occupational Health, worried about the Jung-Institut, he responds! – and says, come in and talk to me.

Friday morning, I stagger (a bit) in to see him. He actually has a new alternative medication: it's not nice – the flyer bluntly says, same side effects profile, but cheaper – but he suggests it. Great. Pick up new prescription, take it home.

Friday night, take pill. Hits me like a ton of bricks...

but it is different: the body's response skews off in different directions. Toxic but not draining in the same way, perhaps? Still shaking, but only temporarily, it seems?

Almost as though – though I couldn't be sure yet – the eerily destructive quality of the last ten months' medications isn't present in this one – it's just the kind of medication that slams its way through the body, careless and heavy and even violent, but not... poisonous.

•••

But the renal catheter ain't great either, and everything feels very, very rough on Saturday. And Sunday; and on Sunday night I think, I cannot take that pill tonight – the catheter is out tomorrow, I'll skip it until then – and don't tell me I'm not supposed to skip medications because at this point I do not care.

•••

We all know the traditional conversation around HIV meds, that they're so hard to take – medical gossip is that more than half of the medical professionals who take prophylactic, one-month treatments never manage to finish them. So there.

(I wonder how many cancer patients stop taking their meds?...)

As for me, over the years people have often, blithely, said, Oh you've lived so long, you must have been so good about taking your meds! I just roll my eyes of course – my first time on AZT in 1991, I gave up after a month, convinced that dying would be better. And the awful meds of the 1990s – the one that caused kidney stones (hmm, there those are again), or the stupidly designed one that you had to crumble up and swallow in liquid, except that it never dissolved (did no one ever figure that out?) – I was utterly careless about taking those... in fact I wasn't very good about the major meds until the late 1990s.

(At some point, clearly, I realised I was going to live for a bit... and perhaps it was worth actually taking care of myself. Huh.)

I also think, with some guilt, of how I've blithely said that HIV meds aren't so hard to take these days – at training sessions for medical students, radio programs, and so on. I suppose the truth is that of the current twenty-five or thirty in use, in various combinations, most are nowhere near as bad as they were in the early, or late, 1990s...

but now I've been bumped to a bottom rung, the dregs, the old stuff. Like returning to 2001 – very unpleasant.

•••

As for these pills, it seems strange how much impact a little pill can have on the body –

and then I think, no: many poisons are pretty chemically simple, aren't they? And although some of them do only very simple things to kill people, others rapidly create a cascade of destructive effects. So maybe some small things are considerably bigger than we are.

•••

So, it's Monday. I'm still in poor shape – I email Occupational Health to cancel Tuesday's appointment, copying in my head of department, and saying: sorry, I just can't do anything now.

Around midday, my head of department calls, kindly agrees to treat me as on sick leave for a couple of weeks: don't worry, we'll figure it out. Which is the best I can do now.

In the afternoon, a doctor from Occupational Health calls: not unpleasant, but – well, bless his heart – he must be The Most astoundingly Boring person I've spoken to in forever: extremely long and extremely complete statements of everything, including the highly obvious. But he is also quite helpful, and not at all unpleasant, if you can wait from paragraph to paragraph for the obvious point.

I call the urology clinic in midafternoon: sorry to miss my morning appointment, I'm taking new and awful meds – they say don't worry, come in soon.

Which I'd love to do because even the catheter is pretty miserable.

And they say, you could even take out the catheter yourself! ... I think not.

•••

I don't take my meds on Monday night. I'm walkin' on the wild side... okay, not a good idea.

There's a certain who-cares fatalism floating around all of this... as too often in the past ten months imagining how to make getting rid of all the things I own easier, so they don't all need to be taken care of... Will? Charity shops?

•••

Floating through all of this is an acute sense of time: time in suffering, time where the body flings pain or ache or mere discomfort from one area to another – often across parts of the body that are hard to map: the dense structure from throat to crotch, the many organs.

I very rarely vomit, but over the weekend I do so twice – the second time a startlingly, utterly clear stomach acid, that comes up like a burning poison. We are always so unaware of what goes on as food descends into us – I realise there are parts of the body that are designed for this apparently deadly stuff, but that is hard to experience when it comes up into the visible body, the part we think we live in...

And of course I'm aware that, though I like to think I'm less frightened of death than many people, I find the slow, stretched-out time of suffering incredibly difficult. You cannot skip seconds, or minutes: it pins you to time and holds you, moving through each moment without flexibility.

Think of the shape of life: the latter part inevitably has this suffering – and of course modern medicine allows too much of it to continue. Which is why we fantasise about the brief heart attack, the sudden accident – anything but the months in a hospital room, its smells and discomforts, made endless...

An end which is fairly probable for many of us.

•••

(I came back to talking about this on Wednesday, in a brief web session with my analyst: he had been reading Jung' Nietzsche seminars, liking them a lot – as do I, I still think they're among the best of the seminars – and pointed me to 1936, Seminar 4, where Jung speaks of how incompetent the early Christian intuitive, mystical types were with the body, in the sensate world.

Which is where you would get the dominant traits of a religion, and later a culture, that would end up being so disembodied: in a world split between the transcendent/evanescent and the concrete/static, how could we possibly know how to be in our bodies?...

Which links to that entire modern capitalist world where I live in a large, pleasant apartment, but without close connections to a culture, a 'village', where it would be easy to say: take all these things when I go, use what you want. And I know you'll be around at the end, so I'm not worried.

We don't have any of that, do we...)

•••

Feeling less awful Tuesday morning, though still very weak. In four days I've lost nine pounds – hmm, the New Late Summer Diet.

And, okay, this is weird: in four days, my psoriasis, for the first time in years, has virtually vanished....

Isn't biochemistry odd.

•••

The clinic: a sympathetic nurse, a guy who may be Filipino, or Chinese? – tells me about a guy who had the same procedure last week, and his boyfriend there to hold his hand. (Clear cultural cross-connection here – we are automatically linking my HIV, and perhaps my evident foreignness and living alone, with being gay. Which is of course true.)

Home. Shower, wash sheets, wash clothes, vacuum. Slowly, not energetically, but everything gets done. Food in refrigerator has gone off of course, can't keep up with it when you're not eating anything, so give up and toss things. Which is always a shame but oh please I can't do everything.

•••

I am weak, but not miserable; I don't feel that bad.

I take the third pill – in five days – and –