in the hall of mirrors

Zürich in winter: 2025

Monday

The first night in Zürich.

The flight wasn’t bad; was thinking about small things going wrong while traveling, after reading someone who claims that such things are ruinous but one forgets them. I don’t really agree: for some people, at some times, yes, but…

And, finally in my hotel room, I break a glass – stupidly moving a tray with glasses from one shelf to another, with my usually shaky hands these days, which is obviously a bad idea (take the damned glasses off first). I look at shards of glass across the small entryway, call the sweet but somewhat at-a-loss guy at the desk – he seems scattered, unable to deal; an hour later I go downstairs looking stern. He apologizes – he hadn’t remembered my room number and was expecting me to call back – he comes up and sweeps it up…. He is indeed sweet but is standing in for the regular staff, as they are all away at a general dinner at a restaurant across town. I become less irritable – as with many aspects of this travel day, a certain anticipatory anxiety/irritation that I keep carrying fades when confronted with actual people and events – I keep realizing: things I don’t much like are, really, not all that important. This has a particular weight because I haven’t traveled for months, possibly since I was last here a year ago: weak and shaky, feeling a bit ill from time to time, coughing… evidently not signs of serious or dangerous conditions after the tests of the last few months, but – a sense of being older, less resilient.

Which raises the question: mental, emotional resilience, in relation to physical resilience? A good, a real question: I am at times not resilient at all (giving up easily, despairing, retreating) and at others rather (overly) tough-minded. It’s a complex barrier between states for me, I still stumble from one side to the other.

The restaurant I wanted to go to is closed by the time the broken glass is swept away; I wander for a bit – there are fewer choices at 10 pm on a Monday night in Zürich in winter. An Italian restaurant, one I’ve been to once before: stylish food, terrifically handsome tall bartender, smart and fast-moving waitress who speaks to me in Schwyzerdütsch, but I am not entirely comfortable, and the food isn’t quite what I want.

But it’s okay, or would be except – in the front of the restaurant a table of six or eight people includes two loud, truly awful Americans: a very loud older man telling weirdly inane and heavy-handed anecdotes in a southern accent that have a heavily conservative bent (he must be a bit deaf to be so loud), and one of the women keeps bursting out with disturbingly loud, shrill, long laughter. Being mildly annoyed by Americans abroad isn’t entirely new – one becomes unhappily sensitive to louder voices and inanities – and I generally get simultaneously irritated and defensive when this happens: this isn’t the totality of America, it’s a big country with many terrifically smart and kind people, and… But these two are exceptionally loud, and though I don’t want to catch many details of what they’re saying, there is a general tone that recalls Georg Grosz drawings of the more boorish Germans in the 1930s, those awful fat businessmen whose greedy loudness seems to threaten us with the whole world of WWII….

When I leave, I am tired: back to the room, which is okay though not wonderful, and rather overheated… the bed soft but unfamiliar. I am doing that thing one does: this is someone else’s bed, and despite its well-made luxury I am annoyed by the differences…

•••

I wake in the night, hot, a bit breathless. Going to the bathroom, some mild vertigo – I hold onto things, maintain upright stance with difficulty. Open a window, some fresh air…

And I find myself thinking: I want to ask V. what to do with all of this. Which probably won’t happen of course, but – when it comes to toughness and survival, she has been so clear-headed at several important points.

Well, that desire could be best implemented in writing, couldn’t it? So here I shall write…

Being ill, being fragile: and being not *so* ill, not really *that* fragile. Giving up, feeling one can no longer move forward. Or, really, move: A. reminded me again of moving to another country, wants me to be more optimistic and forward-thinking – but is it that simple?

It is of course usual for me (I tell the V. in my head) to stabilize this with the fluidity of my postmodern background: there is no knowing, it’s ultimately choice, we are so involved in every aspect of trying to know what we think that it is reasonable to, as it were, load the dice – they’re always loaded anyway. As I tell my analysands: death and not being alive last a very long time, so if you try to give an equal voice to both death and life, to going ahead and giving up, the scales are already hugely out of balance – it’s far more sensible to load the dice, put a finger on the scales, in favor of living and energy.

But I’m tired – a bit tired, anyway – and have my own, always-rather-childish tendency to retreat, to sleep, to do little, or less. I think that’s what I’m arguing with in myself: do I do things, get things done and get out and create and make and connect, maybe even move – or do I sleep more, stay inert?

A good question in this hotel room: I know in the past that hotel rooms can be places where one retreats from being tired, from too much unaccustomed wine and heat and airlessness, to live in a hazy space between sleeping and waking. When that is needed, okay, maybe, but I’ve spent too much time in that hazy space over the years – it faded for a time and is now back – and it seems risky to fall into that more blurred state.

I want an answer, from this V.-image: what am I doing wrong? Perhaps the answer is just that I’m letting myself fall, which at my age and in my solitude is risky: it would be easy, and we know how such a story ends, in the usual vanishing of the elderly person into silence, a few memories left behind among other people. Not awful perhaps, but not something to be accelerated, it will come soon enough.

And the grim edges of all of this – reading Dürrenmatt’s dark fictions on the plane, the stream of dark despair that winds under Swiss life – is it dangerous to read something so hopeless, especially in the face of teaching two seminars, seminars where I need to be On? Where I need all of my life and energy to get through hours of overlapping concepts and music, where I am a bit worried that the material isn’t tough enough, isn’t strong enough – that I may be a rather second-class entertainer… and perhaps have been that through much of my teaching and writing career: I can be mildly inspiring and connect ideas together, but it’s not really that solid, that focused.

And in stating all of this, it all becomes somewhat clearer: I am, as is so common for me and for others, trying to square the circles of my own patterns and complexes – which is always kind of a waste of time. Of course I feel a bit inadequate, of course I overreact to illness, to feeling dizzy at night as I hold onto walls and doors with caution. And I am also weaker, I really have lost some of my physical ease, my ability to ignore restrictions and just leap forwards. But that can always be opposed by being assertive, by the ego-strength of pushing oneself. And of course, that ego-strength can also be rather foolish – shall I handle old age as though I am in a business seminar on how to never give up? – but there is really no solid, defined space in the middle between these two things.

Of course, as always in complexes, we have trouble seeing what is between the extremes, because we have constructed ourselves and our universe in exactly that way. I understand this but can’t really fix it: is that, then, something I ascribe to the sensate, especially to some of the men who have been so calm in the physical world, the ones I have so often loved for exactly that? They might be able to negotiate this – they would have the ability to sense, to know, what was needed at a particular moment, and ongoingly through all the subsequent moments – is this weakness, is this strength, can you do this, or should you rest, with a sensate comfortableness that doesn’t mind that the answers keep changing, moving around. I am never good at that myself, and perhaps that is where the anxiety comes in: I know that I find it hard to carry myself across the momentary uncertainties of physical weakness and illness…

Can I create an internal image of someone who can help? That is probably why I asked an internal image of V., she is good at negotiating the physical world (I remember seeing her, irritably but attentively, holding I.’s arm in Copenhagen – I. was even more unconscious of her physical world, her needs, than I am, and the years they had between them left V. acting simultaneously annoyed and supportive). But for me, instead, an invented man, calm, sensate, who can help my make decisions: someone with warm eyes who doesn’t take me too seriously, someone who can help me decide what to do next in life….

Back to bed, I think.

•••

Tuesday.

Up, breakfast – felt a bit unsettled but not bad – breakfast of bread, cheese and preserved meats, one of the things I like in central Europe. Butter and honey.

A post-breakfast nap, about two hours: I felt much better, slept well, a shift to much more settled personal happiness. Good dreams in flashes: in one of them going through a complicated, scruffy backstage, various people and rooms and furniture, all with a working, tentative quality to them; then going downstairs and going outside into nice weather – an athletic guy in shorts sitting at a counter, having breakfast with his back to me, says yes, it’s great outside.

Another dream flash: looking out of the back of a building, on an upper floor, of perhaps a home (my parents’ home?), down into a backyard that is flooded with water, several feet deep – but it seems like a good thing, a wonderful surprise.

As with most dreams the past couple of years: images may be unexpected, but not threatening or unhappy….

•••

I go out in the afternoon, but… I am really weak: this is difficult. A small, civilized city, but it is hard for me to walk even from my hotel to Stadelhofen, which is only about three blocks.

I need to allow more time this week, do less and more simply… be predictable.

But this is why it also seems difficult to move to a new city: in Newcastle I’ve been using Übers and deliveries; here, or in Barcelona, I might settle into a related pattern – but the move itself would be difficult: it’s hard to do things by yourself without much energy, while shaking a bit and holding onto posts and doorways.

Back in my room, a dreadful shock: the tap water is dirty! Rust and silt! An astonishing thing in Zürich, a cultural embarrassment, especially with the usual proud postcard on the room desk that says: we don’t give you bottled water because our water is excellent. It’s a result of street work – they are working on electricity, gas, etc. across the whole of the old town, for the first time since the 1970s, so a lot of work over a few years; it will probably be done next year. The hotel chief has brought up two bottles of water, which is kind of him, and helps preserve their reputations….

•••

Friday

Both seminars, one Wednesday and one Thursday, went well – with some stress at feeling weak –

Today I have heavier vertigo on waking but can lay on bed until I recover.

As I am pleased with myself and my seminars, I don’t mind telling you the high points of my brilliance – which evidently include breadth, as someone says to me: I think about that a bit. I know I worry about the current book, whether people will take issue with bits of it, but – I’ve always been best at big, broad pictures, and I know a lot of stuff: not with the precision of the sensate specialist academic, but – my comparisons make sense, I think….

The opera seminar (operas and musicals as a way to see complexes and individuation) went smoothly – dense material, alert students. The seminar on music and transcendence, which is newer, was quite different, but it also worked (mostly – the night before I’d replaced my last example with another from the same album, and that was a mistake – rather than dense/infinite textures reaching somewhere, these were more dense textures in chaotic turmoil; but no one seemed disoriented or upset).

•••

I remain particularly weak today. I walked across town – no, across the stretch between my hotel and Stadelhofen station, only about three blocks –

As I was walking, I put my hand on walls and fences, trying to look relatively collected, dignified, not about to fall. A scruffy old man with scraggly white hair was walking near me, almost circling around me, as he focused on digging cigarette butts out of the paving stones… it had a dreadful mirroring quality as in Death in Venice, as one meets a variety of figures that reflect one’s state, and what one worries one’s state might become…

•••

The night between Friday and Saturday, in darkness

Constant news of political scams and takeovers in the US. Where I am a citizen, but don’t live any more…

Thinking: after I gradually found Adorno too dark, too certain that we are always tainted, that we always fall into fascism if given half a chance – and finding the exasperating, chaotic general-hatred-of-anything of Zizek exaggerated nonsense – do they now seem, unfortunately, right? Is a paranoid relation to the world unavoidable and necessary, even the only ethical position, as some of my academic colleagues have always felt?

And when Deleuze & Guattari offer a different, less cynical approach – is it so complicated in expression, so chaotically ambiguous in direction, that a general populace cannot follow or be influenced by it?

Jung isn’t evil, isn’t a fascist. And I’m glad that I got agreeing laughter when I took potshots at Jordan Peterson in my seminars this week – he not only gets everything wrong about Jung, he is also trying to use Jungian ideas to build himself up, which is of course fatally stupid. He wants a Jung without ethics, without personal restraint, one that wouldn’t stand back from archetypal images, one that isn’t aware of the dangerous and uncontrolled aspects of their natures.

But is the larger responsibility of thinking about, of trying to respect, large and chaotic forces in existence – under the names of archetypes, etc. – simply too much for most people to manage? Are Jungian projects doomed to be tainted by fascism, not because Jung was a fascist, but simply because the greedier, stupider people who look at these kinds of ideas, and also at ideas from Nietzsche, and others – is it that they can’t help but grab on to the bits that can be twisted around to serve their interests, no matter how pathetically, shabbily evil?

This is part of what might be tiring about being a Jungian in a world that is increasingly messed up: it is a restatement of ‘this is why we can’t have nice things.’ We may not be able, as a species, to allow for an experience of power or energy, without trying to turn it into a greedier, more toxic attempt to steal these things for our smaller, less ethical selves…

•••

On Friday evening I went to the Institute reception – lovely people, good to see them. Kind of pushed myself there as I was very wobbly, but it was worth it. And then dinner with A. in the lounge of the posh hotel – an event was taking up both the large restaurant and the Gaststübe, which seems a bit excessive; but we had pleasant food sitting at a small table designed for drink and conversation.

•••

Saturday: I felt better today than I have all week.

Of course, I want a cause for this, so I can manage future moments – though in the past months that has often not been available, I just feel weaker or stronger and don’t quite know why.

I have been considerably more thrown off by bouts of vertigo all week. Not being able to stand and walk with a feeling of comfort and safety – the room rolling, even slightly – that is seriously unpleasant. Is it because I had a glass of wine with dinner most nights, but didn’t for the past two nights? Small glasses, normal for central Europe – perhaps that had some effect.

In any case, today I walked around and shopped – nothing particularly cultural, just tourist stuff. I made a point of walking through those beautiful small places on the west bank of the lake, the ones that look like amazing places to live, the ones tucked into shelves and corners above the boats. There were tourists, but not in horrible summer numbers.

Then a good solid lunch in an energetic restaurant, a large, bustling open space filled with tables filled with people, and good solid Swiss food. I had the Zwingli sausages and potatoes… hmm. No twinges of reformation, on my part at least.

I was packed into a table for six – a young Italian couple to my left, two women from Geneva on my right, a German woman across from me. Coasting through three languages, a pleasant table…. I worried that it would feel a bit crowded, but it was fine.

So, a pleasant, solid Zürich tourist experience on my last full day.

•••

The last night’s dinner… another fine Swiss restaurant that one could call bustling, but in a very different, classier key. It seems as though the entire staff is men, some bearded, some not, but all definitely guys. I’m shaking a lot this evening, after a day of not doing so – not much, anyway – so I feel a bit self-conscious, especially with the tables so close. But as I come in an elderly (oh come on, he *must* be older than I am) man comes out very slowly with a cane, and I think okay, I can fit in here.

Hirsch! Game in an intense ruby-brown sauce… fantastic. I’m using the knife very deliberately, watching my hand as it shakes a bit with the fork, but I can manage – it all has the definite focus of an old person’s movements: nothing is thrown away, nothing assumed, no movements that happen in the midst of other, crosswise movements.

The beautiful friendly waiter, who when, at the end of the meal, asks where I’m from and talks about himself, turns out to be Greek. The maître d’ is more serious and bearded with a long scarf, like a youngish sage or an older rock star, and he also seems to become alert to getting me a table that is comfortable and out of the way…

At the end, a glass of sherry and an uncompromising Kirschtorte. A dessert that’s not messing around, it is intensely about the liqueur, which reminds me of those powerful apple liqueurs (the ones where you think, Oh, apple, that must be nice! Then it comes and knocks your socks off).

Walking back through cobbled streets….

(10-15 February 2025, Zürich)

Year

A strange year. Or, an expectable year. A year that was opaque for much of its length, but which now seems transparent as glass....

A sense that thoughts and emotions, and in fact much of what I call myself, has settled into something more... well, integrated, simpler.

The awfulnesses on the horizon – two wars, a friend who no longer speaks to me because I wasn't vociferously on his side; the unbelievable election – they remain on the horizon. I voted correctly, but I am not in the US, so; I'm sorry for family and friends, but I don't live there....

It's a bit like those biographical passages, memoirs and such, from the 1930s – large and terrible things happen, but there are also people who are just living in rooms, at the tops of staircases.

I am also in my own mental space: not merely detached, or in line with one of the ego-based philosophies; but the weakness I've had over the past eight months appears to be permanent, and it has narrowed my horizons. It's not awful – just lung damage – it won't kill me, but I tire quickly if I walk any distance (yesterday's trip into town was hard work, and I treated M. to a litany of worries over a sandwich – a litany he's heard before; I am of course operating as an irritatingly older person).

I am supposed to exercise, but – in this cold climate, with that weakness – I won't fool myself that it's not my fault, I am that honest at least, but I don't know that I'll be very effective at taking care of myself. I'll try not to make anything worse, though; and I may well be here for years yet.

I think about the February trip to Zürich to teach: how much rest will I need, do I need help in the airport? A hotel near a favorite station, an extra day on either side of teaching days....

For several months, there have been things waiting for me – the new web page (the designer wants a response to drafts), the will (the lawyer emails to know if I got his draft), the doctor's appointments, an accreditation for an analysand who wants to train, the photographs, the broken desk chair –

and the bigger things that float around on the horizon of the imagination, such as moving to another country (not impossible, but is it reasonable in this condition?), or, of course, writing the current book –

I will try to do the first group, at least, in the next few weeks. Younger people are being patient, I have a feeling I'm giving them an image of fragility. Which is fine, I often feel fragile – not, I promise, close to death, but just – not robust, and not up to pretending to be robust.

And that is really what 2024 has been.

But no, I haven't really explained the center of all this yet, have I? Really, the important aspect is – there are all these things, but – there is also a larger sense that none of them are disastrous, and none of them pull or yank at me. Which is rather Taoist, really.

And that is all right. I'll get what I get; and try to keep up with people who are trying to be helpful.

And I'll be blunt when asking for help – hopefully without being tiresome. An important skill....

A letter to a younger self

A few days ago, I was reading The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to their Younger Selves. It's a collection of, well, exactly what it says – which suggests 'it gets better' messages, and many of them are. But it was interesting that they also do different things, take different tones... I thought I should write my own. For several days I thought its tone is a but too personal or odd to put in this blog; but it is my 68th birthday, and it feels like something that I would like to do.

***

I want to caution you not to do certain things: I know this letter can’t do that – it is to an internal image of a younger self, it is about kindliness, not information…

I want to tell you: go to Brown, not U.Va.; if you must go to U.Va., do *not* move into the fraternity.

Going to San Francisco will be glorious, but it will also put you in the oncoming path of the freight train of AIDS. Strangely enough AIDS will define your life – it will ruin it, several times, then start to give it a deeper, more difficult but larger, meaning.

Once you are HIV+, be careful how you move from country to country; getting deported is no fun, and is a financial wrecking ball.

Slow down and spend time with the men you have sex with, the men you think you love. Try to find out who they are – and who you are. It is better to take the time to get to know men who like you, rather than chasing after men you don’t know: they are really only images, abstract ideals, until you do know them.

Above all – I wish I could tell you to be less rigid, less driven and despairing, less judgmental of yourself. You’ll actually be handed a lot of opportunities and connections over the decades – you’ll ruin a lot of them by hesitating too long or grabbing too tightly. You aren’t enough of a composer, but you are a writer and a thinker, and there is a lot of kindness and warmth in you, though you’ll have trouble believing in it. You should do more, you should have done more: you actually have a lot of talents and abilities, and you would have been much happier (and more successful) if you’d just waded into them and treated them all as wonderful play. Collaboration, experimentation, many apprenticeships… that would have worked better than trying to be brilliant in focused ways, in isolation.

Though you’ll have many fantastic experiences – more, I think, than most people – you’ll also have a lot of depressing, stale months and years, coasting between things, not quite being one thing or another. Fortunately, you’ll turn that into its own kind of wisdom, and see the flow between states, the depth of being, even in apparently dull brown spaces. But there is a cost: you will learn by not doing – you might have learned more by doing.

I’m about to be 68 years old: amazingly, even in the shadow of AIDS, you do live that long (and it will be still longer, I think). This life with all those years means a lot more to me now, it all makes a kind of meta-sense. I would have liked more immanent experiences of sense, of pleasure and content and confidence and safety – but perhaps it would have been harder to see the greater, the meta-sense, if there had been more immediate happiness.

On the other hand, from all the above – you are never greatly harmed: you overestimate the importance of some stupid situations, you wander into administrative traps. But you don’t get beaten up or attacked or jailed; you are never really in danger, and the only times you seem near death it is in hospitals, with people trying hard to take care of you.

I wish you would better realize what you have: ability, awareness, empathy – not as organized and powerful tools, things that lead you to specific goals, but really as larger contexts. The book given to you by Mamie Spruill, your third-grade Parklawn school librarian – there’s a reason you didn’t win one of the usual prizes, but she made up a special prize for you: she was trying to tell you that you really are remarkable. Those remarkable qualities – there are a lot of them, though none are obviously focused or uppermost – would all have been best served, and you would have been best served, if you had just done them, had done many things…

And even now, a few days before that 68 birthday, you can still do a lot of things.

Doing: that is what you could have spent more time with, and what you can now spend more time on.

So: do. Be more passionate about doing.

Don’t worry about having, it will seem difficult for years, but it will ultimately work out; and I am glad to tell you that you have become, ultimately, especially good at being.

P.

Augusts

[The previous post is actually based on a piece I wrote about a dark August in 1991 – one of those painful prose pieces I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s, all under the shadow of AIDS and death.]

My father’s birthday is in August, near the month’s beginning. This fact tends to establish the month’s meaning, its varied characteristics and echoes – aside from the obvious ones such as vacations and unbearable heat. My quiet, gentle father, with his rooms of shelves of memories on film, of papers in disarray.

Two years ago I slept through the month of August. That sounds like an exaggeration, and perhaps it is one. Basically, for some weeks of the month and well into September, I rarely left my bed, and even more rarely left the house. The mechanism seemed quite simple: I just didn’t care what happened to me. I spent the entire time barely holding down an overwhelming guilty panic, which had many facets: would I be evicted, would the piano rental people come and take back their shabby upright? Would my friends besiege the door and not let me sleep, and would everyone stand in a row, horrified, pointing at my wasteful lethargy, this disgraceful depression?

I actually did panic enough to do something about it: I went to the university’s psychiatric clinic to ask for anti-depressants. But it took several weeks to get an appointment, and by then my tendency to sleep was fading – not gone, but distinctly lessened. And the idea of the pills themselves was making me as nervous as anything else. So I argued against myself with the kindly psychiatrist, and we finally agreed that I could survive this one without drugs.

Characteristic of that time was the obsessive fear of systems collapsing, of walls falling in a heap of plaster and dust. If I didn’t take better care of my skin, my psoriasis – which already covered most of my body and, most of the time, disfigured my face – would become even worse, and I would have no days remaining on which I could pass for normal or healthy. The tangle of unpaid bills, the disastrous pile of mail: my income would collapse just ahead of my credit. Selling everything, getting in the car and going far away – these seemed like distinct possibilities. If the web of people and actions that held me in place was slowly disintegrating, its strands cut by unreturned messages and the dead weight of my trussed-up body, then perhaps I could step away from it entirely. Somehow I would magically get rid of ten thousand books and the computer, and the battered furniture, the shabby bed I slept in; walk away from everything, carrying just some cash and the car keys, my eyes heavy with sweet, forgetful sleep.

No, I couldn’t see it either. Walk away from my library? Unthinkable. And, of course, how long would it take for me to construct any sort of new life anywhere? I have never had a talent for making money or for making a home for myself. For me, the mere fact that I was living in a place that was beginning to look like a home was cause for celebration, and for careful movements, making me hoard the present against a probably worse future.

For anyone in academia, August has the awful, dead quality of the Sundays of my childhood. Reading the Sunday funnies as the dreaded afternoon slogs on, everything is depressing and tiresome and the sunlight through the trees a fake, mocking the emptiness of the day. Your vacation time is up and your freedom and happiness are ending. And of course you haven’t done the work you promised, you’re not ready to start all over again. You’ve wasted this time, and it will never come back. Perhaps bitterest was the realization that the free time hadn’t been very free, that you’d made no special trips, hadn’t had fun, hadn’t hopelessly debauched yourself, or perhaps sat on a hill somewhere watching things grow. No work, no play – the proverb seems intended to reflect some progressive present, but it’s so much worse when it’s all in the past, and unchangeable.

Somehow I got through that month in bed, really five weeks or so, August leaking vaguely into September. It even seemed rather wonderful in retrospect: I discovered I could drop everything for a month and still survive. Nothing was repossessed, although the bill collectors took a certain amount of convincing; no one freaked out, although people wanted explanations of where the hell I’d been. I didn’t lose everything, I didn’t go anywhere. I could pick it all up where I left off, though perhaps a bit more selectively. I’d been dangerously irresponsible, but the results weren’t too different from those that came from being energetic, being good.

That was a psychic watershed. I’d given up, and found that I could change my mind. My therapist said I discovered that I could survive alone, that my desire for some father-figure to save me fizzled, as always, and I was thrown back on myself....

Throughout the past month of July, the flashes of heat seem to be echoed by glints of coldness inside of me. I don’t like opening the mail. There are several bills that have become quite seriously overdue, and I dislike the cheerful, greedy voices on my answering machine. I don’t always respond to my calls this past few weeks.

My father’s birthday is in two days. Today I slept all day, putting my head under the pillow when the answering machine whined. I’m sitting on the sofa, looking out into the darkened street. My car keys are in my hand, my books in rows behind me. I wonder if I’ll make it to September.

[Los Angeles, 7/31-11/2/91]

Another August

Yet another interesting time...

In mid-June I saw my HIV doctor, the kind, meticulous Scottish one, the one who managed our large teaching hospital's COVID care through much of the pandemic. (The department is Infectious Diseases, so, there you go.) I was surprisingly tired and weak – I'd asked to see him out of the usual rotation of appointments, and he was kind enough to indulge me.

He took my complaints of weakness more seriously than friends did, which was a bit surprising but made me pay attention to him – he was focusing on my lungs: he heard crackling through the stethoscope, near the bottom of the lungs. I think of war movies and such where someone has 'water on the lungs' and gets weirdly weak. This was, obviously, startling news....

Two weeks later, after a handful of tests, he shifts the focus a bit: something between heart and lungs – perhaps more about the interface between intake of oxygen and its pumping into the blood than any problem with either of those systems. He tells me that really, heart and lungs are better understood not as two things, but one – one single system of oxygen transmission, of energy creation. I think of the whole process of putting life into the body, which is so obvious that we forget about its centrality: it recalls the time I pushed a class of neophyte writers to bend and stretch before an afternoon of first-time readings, and how much better, how much more articulate they sounded, just because they had moved the body more – the automated birth-to-death action of breathing was given more raw power than they usually knew....

There will be a variety of heart and lung tests, a more in-depth x-ray – and he is a bit, well, off, to be frank. Distracted. He tells me he will be off work for six months, in treatment for a cancer of his own, and he needs to refer me to another doctor in the HIV ward.

This is a bit startling, but we pick another doctor – I choose the big, talkative, gay, fairly rambunctious one who, like many people on the ward, has become a familiar friend over two decades of teaching by our patient group, as well as being cared for. This man is opposite in terms of technique – my usual doctor wanted to go step by step, ruling things out before going to the next set of tests, but the new one will blast through all the paths he can think of at once. That sounds all right to me, I wouldn't mind moving ahead at full speed.

***

After I go home that day, I have two patients of my own, and then go to lie down – as happens daily this summer, a deep sleep of several hours, waking in the late summer twilight to think of what to do for dinner. But when I do wake from this nap, I am angry: after years of being reasonable about health and death and all, I don't feel at all reasonable about suddenly worrying about my heart.

Really?

I feel ambushed, to be frank: another of those times when it is as though I am in a dogfight, and a third dog bites me in the butt, and I spin around in confused, activated rage....

There is passion and intensity in this anger – it’s another kind of ‘body that wants to live’ – and not despair. I feel that I won’t be able to move to Barcelona, or anywhere, because a heart condition may tie me to local health care. That pisses me off – though it isn’t a shock, and doesn’t lead to any grayness…

M. is out of town, and I feel weak, so I don't go into town; instead I spend a couple of days luxuriating in this rage, which feels like it's full of life. I don't go for rage enough, I suppose. And over the weekend it fades, I recover... there is life in having the feelings, in being willing to be angry, and the graceful curve of a natural recovery seems better for me than would blocking it with anxiety and reason.

***

Various heart and lung tests, one of which is especially peculiar – a breathing test is a closed glass booth, gases pumped in; a young woman pleasantly but quickly explains a bizarre series of steps to me. She clearly gives these instructions to everyone who does this, and everyone finds it counterintuitive, so she just make sure we listen as she fires these bizarre orders at us – which include taking deep breaths several times, but in a couple of them the breathing tube is suddenly blocked, so you're trying to breathe in a wall of nothing.

I get a compliment, though – there's still some of the breathing left from my years singing, and I can fill more deeply, and am somewhat less clumsy with the instructions than most, so we finish in half the scheduled time.

When I ask what the results look like, she refuses to say anything – results are sent to the consultant, who will talk to me about them. I often ask the people testing for results – they aren't supposed to tell me, though the woman who gives me the first of two cardiology tests (also young but quieter, more serious; she was wearing a head covering in the week of the anti-Muslim demonstrations in the UK that fortunately fizzled out dramatically, but seemed thoroughly focused on what she was doing) did let me know she wasn't seeing anything remarkable.

***

11 July, fragment of a dream – mostly remembered in bed, but after some mild restlessness I get up, and by then have forgotten most of it: I am in some kind of hospital/clinic; I am figuring out what tests they are giving me. At one point I walk down a corridor and around a corner – at the corner there is a room where a woman is at the back of the room, staring in my direction; I try to say hi, but she doesn’t seem to register me; her area is well-lit, but mine is not.

***

I have received an email for an HIV long-term survivors retreat – I've ignored these for a few years; they are far to the south and didn't seem worth the time and expense. But it occurs to me that this time I want to go: I want to lean on people who know what I'm going through, and see if it helps. The timing is good because this is one of the first retreats in the north rather than the south – it is in a large monastery up in Perth, further up Scotland than I usually go.

And there is no fee for this one: someone in Scotland whose partner died of AIDS is making a major contribution, so the main requirement is a train ticket. I decide I will go....

In the background I think of not moving to Barcelona: a heart condition would make it inadvisable to go to another country without health care. And I think unhappily of the days drawing in this fall in Newcastle, the increasing cold, and mild dullness of winter here, and how my body dislikes it…

***

16 July 2024: not a dream, but – visionary time: a very present, very real imagined state; I’m surprised at how natural and clear it is between dream and waking.

I got up very early, the light is pale, a harmonic drone from a website of background sounds; I have a relaxed communication with a kindly male figure in a light orange robe – asking him questions: what am I doing, what should I be doing, relaxing the body. A sense of what being in the body is for, and finally: learning to accept the tension, the uncertainty of living, is the point.

Visionary experiences, though taken seriously among Jungians, aren't things I generally, or ever, experience, but this one seems extremely transparent: a clear sense that problems on 'this' side simply don't exist in other places, and therefore don't matter....

***

The retreat has several aspects that are unexpected.

The train trip is chaos – unfortunately we are doing this in early August, and going through Edinburgh, with the arts festival and fringe festival, involves crowds of people who are savagely bent on having fun. Even after I'm past Edinburgh, the second train didn't allow me a reservation, though some people do have them... I sit at a table with a woman who also pretends to belong there to dissuade interlopers; we talk about everything for a couple of hours – she is going up to the wedding of one of her sons, a grand and heavily planned celebration. When I arrive in Perth, the station is huge, dark and largely empty. It actually takes some time to get out of the station, as every direction leads me into a different no-man's-land, but two athletic Scotsmen are friendly and helpful, and I finally reach the entrance.

I need to sit, as walking any distance wipes me out; I end up on a bench with a friendly man, talkative, ex-military, a bit skittish, whom I half-recognize from earlier retreats. Various other members of the group show up, we are taken in cars to the monastery...

which is huge, beautiful in a grand 'let's add another turret' fashion. It is a real Catholic monastery with rooms for visitors, and gardens and chapels and meeting rooms; the garden walks tend to deposit you near small shrines with benches and statues of Christ, the Virgin, and scattered angels, but mostly one sees vast green trees down steep Scottish hillsides.

On the second day, walking in the grounds, I realize something I should have guessed: no one here can tell me anything I don't already know. But it is good to talk to them; and it's good to get away – though I haven't been traveling much because I am tired, it is clear that it is worth going places, any place that is not home: the break does me good.

It seems probable that my anger and anxiety from the last couple of weeks has not only faded, but that I may actually be stronger/more together than many of the people here.

By the way, the guy in the room next door is sexy, charming, fun, likes me, in his 50s – but of course he lives in London….

***

On the last evening, most people have gone into Perth to see an unexpectedly gay musical, something based on the life of Elton John. I don't want to go, and end up with the others who stay back, in the grand meeting room with its plush sofas and paintings and fireplace; we sit around talking. The guy in charge has brought whisky and chocolate; everyone relaxes, and things are pleasant; it all coasts along for several hours.

But in the back of my mind I have a sense of determination: what I wanted when I came here is not really here, it’s not among these people. It’s also not in a lot of other nearby places and situations. If I want to move, if I want an adventure – Barcelona would be much better, but even that may be… minor.

Another direction is needed; and it may need to be inwards. The answers to the impatience and anger and anxiety of the past few months/years may not exist in any place that is external to me – which is a bit exasperating, but not really surprising.

***

A few more weeks of quiet, of tests.

Finally, a meeting with the doctor: there are minor glitches in heart test as well as lung tests – but they aren't enough to be different from others my age, and nothing clear is showing up. The lungs are indeed crackling, especially on the lower left – something about brachioles that are damaged; he asks several times if I ever smoked (the answer remains no).

So, no heart problem, hopefully. (More tests to come, though.)

The lungs... he doesn't know what to say at this point. The tiredness is clearly from there, though.

He wants more exercise; which makes sense, there's no heart attack in the near future.

***

Dream, 31 August. Moody, tropical, damp – a family house near the shore, somewhere southern like New Orleans. There are two rooms near the back that are like patios, but locked, rarely used; I finally cross through them to see how the doors and locks and outside windows work; they aren’t really unusual when I finally see them – clean, not used much, with some patio furniture in the middle of the room and a table.

***

Reading in bed at night, I fall into books that seem too grim – I want something else, but it is hard to know what I want to read.

I read up on bronchiectasis, which sounds like what the doctor is suggesting; but I don't really know.

The quietness at home is all right: fewer appointments, more space around each one. I think of the image of the old man in the forest from the early days of COVID – this is the same, isn't it.

Just a bit smaller, a bit quieter....

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....

Zürich 2.24

NCL-AMS-ZUR

A brief trip to Zürich, just five days, to teach a seminar at the Institut. I really don’t travel much these days, do I?... dusting a suitcase, running through the list I made years ago when I was studying so I wouldn’t forget important things…

First of all, airport security in Newcastle has been enormously redesigned. This is actually interesting, because it is much more high-tech and faster – it is also more sensible, though no passengers are ready for it. The man at the last desk tells me it’s only been in place for six weeks, so they’re all getting accustomed to it. Actions and spaces are grouped, they seem to look at everyone in the same way – it is actually more complete, but also faster, which is an interesting combination.

The flights and the stop in Amsterdam are quite smooth, elegantly efficient, without the sweaty, chaotic crowds of summer tourists. The Swissness of Zürich airport is easy and clear, and I have been given a taxi from the airport without a fee. The driver is a garrulous grandfather (I suppose there are strong similarities between us) and an interesting one – we talk all the way in about countries, weather, grandchildren – he is a former immigrant who has been taken care of, and he would never want to leave Switzerland.

The hotel is new to me – a good location, it is designed a bit for the agile young (attic ceilings and a low bed), but pleasant.

I realize I want Swiss winter food for a late dinner – there is a restaurant still open two blocks away –

It is small, energetic, and quite crowded. Is there room for one, I don’t have a reservation? But I’m the only one in the room being diffident; the energetic, fast-moving proprietress practically pushes me into a chair with generous impatience, and that sense that everything will be taken care of if I don’t dawdle.

I get a generously homey plate of rösti, sausage, mustard, on a long central table that has small groups along its length. I soon realize I’m facing a table of ten brawny Swiss lads, probably a winter sports team. They hand a smartphone to the proprietress, who aims for a photo – they all smile and look their hearty, stolid best, and she stands on tiptoe to do it, because she is also tiny.

They aren’t the only boisterous ones in the restaurant – across the room, a bit behind me, a group of old ladies with white hair are laughing at their own jokes. It is a fun crowd, on a cold winter night on a dimly lit side street in the town center.

The Swiss look healthier, more energetic, in winter than the English – there is a brisk sense of getting on with things, and often there are various winter sports in the background. The town is not crowded; there are a few visible tourists but not many, and there is a general sense of well-being.

***

On Saturday, I do errands – train tickets, bottles of water – and then fall into a long, somewhat broken sleep. Of course, I feel guilty for spending a large part of the day in my room, but it seems that I need it.

An analysand is having a crisis around working on his thesis, which parallels my own smaller but still neurotic relation to the presentation I have to have for Monday (plus the final corrections to the Bussotti article, which I’ve been complaining about for months, and which will, when I get to them, probably take two hours, if that). We have several points of contact during this trip, and I even call him, across Europe – I’m not normally so pushy, but it seems necessary in this case.

When I wake in the afternoon and finally get into the shower, a flood of water covers the floor of the bathroom, then goes several feet into the main room. I’m dismayed but get dressed before calling the front desk for help. The pleasant Ramon, who is really intelligent and charming – and fortunately apologetic and helpful – comes to clean up, with a mop; this is not a first time and is indeed a major problem on the top floor of this hotel. I have strong opinions about just how adequate this is for a modern, and above all Swiss, hotel, but I save them for the hotel owner on Monday.

In the evening I go off to my favorite tapas restaurant – a popular, rumbustious place that always leaves me with a sense of sangria-fueled well-being. Oddly enough I am seated at a large quarter-circle table that already has six people at it – it turns out that consists two groups of three, each a couple plus a friend, one group younger, one older. I am at first a bit worried about this arrangement, especially as I am at the center of the outside curve and thus in the midst of strangers, but they are all very friendly. Already nearly done with their meal, they offer me what’s left of the tapas, though I feel this might be going a bit too far…

I talk for a long time with the young, dark-haired, frankly beautiful woman on my left, who is there with her husband and their (obviously) Gay Friend, who is an amusing cosmopolitan with a shaved head (see, we are clichés). They are from western Switzerland, the area between Italy and France; their Swiss German is relatively delicate, and she shifts smoothly into a graceful French at points. On my right, the other group of three are from further east, and have more heavily Germanic accents – the older woman, who talks a great deal, is originally from Russia; what she says has more of a demand for attention in it than any real content, but everyone gives her that attention without working too hard at it. These three are older and more sedate, but pleasant, and everyone talks and has a good time.

***

It is Sunday, which is made known by the church bells – you can’t tell by the sound but I know there are probably as many Catholic as Protestant ones ringing. I am feeling better, more coherent and rested. I know that I need to do some serious work on Monday’s presentation, but on closer examination realize that what I have is actually quite solid – though I still want to make some tweaks, add some examples. Opera, musicals, some other songs and possibly a dance number, used as ways of looking at complexes, archetypes, and above all individuation….

But today is a day on the train to Geneva to have lunch with Barbara. The ride is fairly long, a bit over three hours each way – I will want a table if I can get one, somewhere to put the laptop and work on the presentation. A cloud of mild anxiety – have I handled the day pass correctly, did I remember to check it in the electronic slots? – but it all works out eventually.

Barbara and I go to a restaurant in the middle of town – one that is very French, and also a bit arrogant and weary of tourist trade. But the food is good, and of course I love talking to Barbara about, well, everything.

On the train back to Zürich, I sit across from an older woman who is wearing mildly spectacular clothing. She lives in Fribourg, with her daughter who has recently gotten a position on the faculty of the university there – I tell her it’s a good choice, Fribourg is highly respected but also a pleasant, relaxed university, from what I hear.

We speak in French the entire time – it is amazing how much I’ve forgotten of my high school French, but it is also amazing how many words pop up out of nowhere. She is Portuguese but lived for years with her Swiss husband, who died last year; we talk about changes in later life… there are traces of desolation when she talks about his death, but they are only part of a landscape of personal energy, enjoyment, and various memories and plans for her future.

When we have talked for about an hour, we reach her stop; at the last moment she gives me an entire bag of cookies she brought from her family in Portugal – I promise that I really do protest, but she insists, as she has more bags and boxes of food from home to share with her daughter. I admit to her that, as the youngest of four children, I find it easy to be given food. Then she is gone.

***

Monday contains a four-and-a-half-hour seminar on opera, musical, song, archetype, and individuation, at the Jung-Institut in Küsnacht. Although I’ve taught this topic four or five times in the past few years, this is actually the first time I’ve ever taught it live – which makes it a lot more fun, more relaxed. I know I will scribble on the whiteboard and wave my arms around a lot.

And it goes well, although I do trip over a man my age who keeps interrupting the class for thoughts that usually turn out to be distant from the main topic – I don’t really catch on enough to redirect the class until the third segment, and about forty per cent of the material goes unused. I promise the class I will send them the slides later – I’m especially proud of the series of different frames I’ve shown around the large and loosely defined world of individuation, so I suggest they spend some time with them.

That evening, impatiently looking for other interesting restaurants, I find one on the other side of the river, in a quiet, dark neighborhood. It is remarkably quiet – I am late, there is mist and occasional rain – but the restaurant is a fine one, self-consciously but successfully so. The owners, though they have very different class styles and accents, are as assertive as the woman was in the first restaurant of the trip, certain that they have really good food and all the skills required for hospitality – and they are right. The large, dark room has only a few patrons in it, and I read and eat, pleased at both experiences.

***

Tuesday is remarkable free of demands. I have a pleasant lunch with Robert, who has brought a belated graduate gift, a new book by Renate Daniel – both Robert and Renate were my supervisors. We talk about everyone, sitting in a sunny café next to the Opera that looks out on the Zürichsee – everyone around seems happy, voluble, energetic, as the Swiss have been throughout this trip.

I know that I need to go to Läderach, and even better Sprüngli, for really good chocolate to take home. The woman behind the counter in the small Sprüngli near the Stadelhofen station is in a mood – a very energetic, fun mood; we fall rapidly into comic multilingual banter, and I give my choices over into her hands. It is obvious that for her, today, a life of selling chocolate is the best life imaginable.

That evening is my last night in Zürich, and I realize that a number of rich and interesting meals have left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. Where can I go that is pleasant and quiet, and of course near the hotel, where they might give me the equivalent of – I don’t know – a small bowl of rice, with a few sesame seeds?...

Refound

An unexpected rediscovery....

A new masters student wanted to talk about archetypes and music – she is composing a set of songs, she came over on her bike today, when it was cold and windy, when trash had blown onto my front porch. I showed her a pile of books and gave her a video of the seminar I've been teaching for Johannesburg and Zürich on individuation, archetype, and music, which will give her some useful basics.

But to dig up that pile of books - well, five books, to be exact, plus one ebook – I unpacked the two boxes of books in my living room that were kept back after I moved my music office into storage, early in 2022.

(And yes, it's exasperating to pay monthly rental on forty-odd boxes of books, as I continue to be uncertain over where to move next. The cost of making decisions, as well as the cost of apartment living – no, let's be fair, the cost of owning too many books.)

In the past few years I have made several of the usual presentations on AIDS and history; each time I've looked for a large booklet from 1993, one with a remarkable series of personal black and white photographs – a booklet I treasure, and one for which I also know that, if it were lost, I would never again find a copy. The archives that have grown up in the past two decades in San Francisco probably have copies, but only probably, as it's just the program for a fundraising dinner – but it has beautiful photographs by Annie Leibovitz, a bit in the style of Avedon portraits, though these are much more human.

The cover photo is especially remarkable in showing two women, one of color – as there were far fewer lesbians with HIV than gay men or straight women or men in the 80s and 90s, there remain far fewer representations of any kind from that time. (And you have to treat this with care these days – contemporary youngsters are easily enraged by any representation that doesn't include all categories; they don't seem to understand the vast distance between reality and representation in a pre-phone world, and they assume that any cluster of pictures that focuses on white gay men must somehow reveal a calculated ideological exclusion of others.)

But the pictures are so beautiful, aren't they?

Since I've dug through shelves looking for this pamphlet in the past few years – to the point of taking all the magazines and ephemera off three or four of the shelves in my middle room, where the philosophy and AIDS and psychology are – and had actually thought, with unhappy irritation, that I dropped it somewhere, or someone pilfered it when I handed it around in some library or lecture room – it is a great pleasure to find it again. And, of course, it was only missing because I had put it in a box with other things... which ties it to my current, private and admittedly slightly ridiculous, concerns: not merely, how will I move all the books, if I move, but – how much will I lose track of the ones that matter most. Exaggerated anxieties, I know, but – I still feel fairly helpless, physically and energetically, in the face of a major move.

But here is one of the pictures – several are astounding and important, but this cover photograph is worth seeing.

So, you see: things can return from being lost.

Alternates

A night when, wakeful from minor physical discomforts, I think of different paths, different ways my life might have gone.

I’ve done this before of course – as someone who spent a lot of time reading science fiction and fantasy when I was younger, the idea is utterly familiar. The most important alternative path was the one I imagined some years ago, a timeline where AIDS didn’t change my life, where I found a reasonable creative career and a partner and a home, a timeline where I am living through a pleasantly busy later life in a less damaged San Francisco.

But this is a bit different: some of the slower surface of my life over the past couple of years, and the gradual and large-scale shifts in the depths, open up ideas of many paths: what are other selves I might have been?

This is in the midst of a blurry August, where I am neither one thing nor another – not quite well but no longer really ill, not exercising enough but getting out occasionally. A lot of the weather is dull and chilly, some of it verges on warm and pleasant… there is much less to do than in former years, as I let go of so many committees and jobs, and almost the only things on my calendar and lists are patients and writing.

Thinking what-ifs: and realizing it is interesting to generate some, and see where they go…

***

One is on an island, Bali or Hawaii, or better some place quieter, more out of the way. This follows some line of change that flowed through Hong Kong or Australia, or leapt direct from Los Angeles, or perhaps something changed earlier.

(I don’t, in this version, worry about HIV medications. Perhaps HIV isn’t a problem in this timeline.)

I’m casually dressed, thinner of course. Days float by; I have work, but not much. There is a small, sunny, rather shabby apartment; some books, though most of the books I’ve lugged around for the past forty-five years are not here. I don’t know where they went, it doesn’t seem important in this line.

I avoid contact with family, old friends: there isn’t anything like Facebook in my life. There wasn’t any real loss, but at some point, I just couldn’t explain what I was doing or why; we all made less sense to each other, and I dropped out of their sight, they out of mine.

Days and time float. Working in a shop or a bar, I’m a good enough worker; things aren’t expensive, some of my food comes at a discount from the shop. We sit and talk at times, sitting outside; or I stay home and read when it rains.

The reach and content of my thoughts are vastly different in this version… less self-examination; a mostly calm tendency to look at what I see – island, sand, sea, town, people who seem a bit abstracted, or a bit stoned…

***

Or Vancouver. The perfect job offer that went wrong in the mid-1990s did not, in this timeline, go wrong, and I teach in the music department at UBC. A beautiful city, a kinder politic, an overworked but civilized department – a lively gay community – I probably still wouldn’t have had the cautious sense to get a permanent home before prices skyrocketed, but perhaps a relationship or two that might have faded away on relatively friendly terms would leave me living in something not too small that couldn’t be taken away. Because I had fewer crashes and losses once I’d gotten into academe, I am steadier, more conscientious, hard-working – there is too much work, but I do it; my life is busy with institutional and personal incident.

And so there is less self-examination, less time to fall into pasts and futures. This life is productive, if a bit blurred – I haven’t had so much time to spend looking at time and meaning, but the materials of academic life, of a more civilized bourgeois and gay social life, are present to me, with less of a sense that they could be taken away at any time. The existential background is not so clear, but that is all right – I am busier, better at taking care of others and myself… if perhaps a little bit at sea with larger things…

***

There must be a timeline where I stay in Los Angeles, having fallen away from UCLA without finishing any degree; it is a kind of floating haze.

Am I still in the three-bedroom apartment near Melrose? Perhaps, and it is shabby but not a terrible place to live; perhaps it is less dusty than it was in my last years there. Though rents have soared, I have somehow managed to stay where I was. I have roommates, and that is steadying, or chaotic, depending on how their lives change or stall.

Work is mildly tiresome, bank jobs are meaningless, I am still not good at getting up in the mornings; or perhaps I did a bit better than the banks, like the last office manager job in the architect’s office. I move through jobs, buy groceries, don’t talk much about the academic work I don’t do any more. I sometimes have to get away from overdoing drugs, which are not wonderful but an occasional distraction; as I’m older I can’t experiment and still get to work in the morning.

A life that is a bit flat, but not awful; I get along, I pay the utilities, I go to bars on weekends…

***

Perhaps there is a version where I end up in Germany, probably in the 90s. I could apply for citizenship in the midst of the growth of the EU; and would I be in a minor role in academia, or what other life? Some possible choices and vocations are similar to others here. I am foreign, and American, so considered a bit annoying but also a bit interesting. And the bread and cheese are so much better….

***

Can I imagine who I would have been if I had landed in New Orleans?

When I was there it was surprising how quickly I fell into the richly chaotic hot afternoons, the food and old shops, and drinking in the gay bar among wild guys who didn’t seem to have the shadow of a thought about whether they should be doing something else somewhere.

I would have another shop or bar job I suppose, perhaps if I’m lucky a bookstore job and a shabby but comfortable couple of rooms above a restaurant. In this life I drink more than in the others, though still not constantly, and drugs are no big deal; my sense of time is at the other end of human possibility from my Zürich training, and indeed is not so much a sense of time as a sense of breathing, of walking, of leaning over the bar to grab a bottle. This I is more casual about people, though he moves cautiously around those who seem really dangerous (as does the one in Berlin, in east LA, though the versions of dangerous people around the Quarter are less aggressive but more deeply crazy).

Entertaining, chaotic, casually sloppy. And I know a lot more jazz.

***

(I can see that I am allowing each of these lines of development to follow relatively predictable paths – which has that narrowness I despised in academic colleagues who couldn’t imagine that a famous composer could be queer or unusual in some other way: there are always those who simply can’t understand that people live very, very different lives. And here I am positing versions of myself who don’t, say, have a stroke, or travel to Zürich while teaching in northern England, to launch a third career as a Jungian analyst – which is weird by any manner of judgment…)

***

M. has told me that he thinks New York would have been bad for me: though when he said that I sensed a wish on his part to close a door that might only cause pain, as he might think that imagining other lifetimes is not good for me, it has too much painful yearning in it from his point of view. But if I’d gone to New York rather than San Francisco in the late 70s, I might be more intricately linked with the dense world of Village creativity… and writing, publishing; performing; the involvement with music would have shifted easily over to more fluid performance, towards things I’m better at – voice, stage, moving among skills rather than honing one of them.

Versions of this life are divided by: do I end up connected to someone or something productive and alive – a theater company, an artist with a group – or bitterly irritable, at the edge of things, another frustrated Village nobody full of stories of might-have-beens? Do I make it on my own, or am I too restless and unfinished in too many things – the scripts, the notes, the ideas…

I think at some point I do manage to make, to do real work. Not a lot, not terribly important, but enough to blend into a community, to frequently work with others, stage work, writing, performance art…

Of course, I’d also be in the midst of AIDS in its New York manifestation. There was more anger, more politics than in San Francisco, and that overly familiar conviction that the New York story is the most important one anywhere (even San Francisco itself means little to me in this lifetime, I can’t imagine living there, and the Pacific half of the world is covered in a distant, foreign haze; while Europe is just Europe, another kind of ‘over there,’ a place one hears about all the time but rarely sees). Some entanglement in HIV support groups, more than political ones, and I am also one of those who have lived longer than expected, who talk about it endlessly… I am another ‘old soldier’ in this one… an also-ran; but busier.

As for emotions, this one is more rigid, angrier, more judgmental. He is not great with people, though he talks to them… he talks a great deal, in fact, and is funnier or sharper than kind.

Assuming other aspects of the timeline conform to this one, my sister also lives in New York. I probably argue with her occasionally and am not as consistent as I should be about seeing her and her family, except perhaps on holidays. Of course she, with her husband and son, are all a bit different in that timeline, having connected and molded each other a bit more than in this one, partly because of my zigzagging intermittent presence adjacent to their lives…

***

And, to see the exercise come full circle: how does this particular lifetime, the one I am in now, the one that winds through SF-LA-SF-Berlin-Hong Kong-Adelaide-Newcastle, appear to all those other selves?...

It may look too quiet, far from things and rather sad – though they would all look surprised at the choice in this timeline to become a psychoanalyst, wondering: what is that like, it’s unexpectedly interesting, if of course rather weird… a Jungian, really? Why did you choose that?

The timelines who follow alongside this one through the late 80s will see how I got here, because of the work with M. in Los Angeles; but it will still seem a bit peculiar. Peculiar, but real: it is obviously a real life, a real vocation – you wouldn’t be able to do it on the side… they would all wonder: what is that guy like? He seems lonely, but his eyes are a bit different, as though he looks at more things at once…

And some of them also engage in this exercise, of imagining other paths. The Vancouver academic finds it interesting, but also rather distasteful – why would you imagine ending up in places where you aren’t taken care of, places that aren’t so beautiful, places where you might not even know where your health care is coming from? He’s glad he became a Canadian citizen in the late noughties, glad of his friends and projects.

For the New Yorker this is all material for a performance piece, a play, a small-press series of vignettes. For him the other selves all seem to live in backwaters, but at least they have unusual stories. He realizes that he can turn their images into something, an essay or a more experimental piece: perhaps there is a theme, perhaps he can pull it together in the final paragraphs, something about the search for, no, perhaps a reflection of the current malaise of, or maybe…

And the guy who lives at the beach… he has bought a lined pad at the five and ten; there are already several notebooks, with fading or blotchy covers, on shelves next to what books he has, and this one will eventually join them. He writes notes on some of the other selves, but then feels a bit overwhelmed at the busy, crowded cities where they live, their anxieties that he doesn’t want to know much about. He puts down the pad on a shelf where he will ignore it for some weeks; picks up a beer and walks outside and down to the beaten-up wood chairs that face the sea; and watches another sunset, with images from these other lives floating and fading into the haze of the sky….

Bernstein

The prospect of the new Bernstein film is dislocating me a bit, back to the late 60s and 70s....

 

recordings of the Rite, Sinfonia, El Salón Mexico; Stravinsky, Beethoven, Copland, Foss, many others... my record player in the room shared with my brother, between the dressers; concerts, then later playing on stage at Wolf Trap Farm Park. The electric strangeness of Mass, at the Kennedy Center in 1971, when I was 14....

 

This stuff is all deeply embedded in me: my dad liked his records too. When people later talked about Bernstein bringing Mahler back to everyone's attention, it always confused me a bit, because these things seemed to have always been famous.

 

Even the pictures they're showing before the film premieres: they've got the photographic tones of the time, it all has that slightly heightened glow, a bit too much of each primary hue....

 

In the middle of the night (during a summer that already feels temporally and existentially blurry), it feels like a chunk of history fell out of the sky onto my head, and I wake with uncertainty as to what decade it is.