in the hall of mirrors

Shadows

... I don't feel well....

•••

Bits of news and experiences, some silly, some exasperating, exhausting. Some vaguely foreboding.

I've mentioned my own error from late spring and summer, in taking charcoal capsules for stomach problems – which led to medications not being absorbed –

which is now turning into a chain of events that has been getting longer and heavier, for three, four, five weeks now.

•••

 

•••

I did actually manage to develop resistance to my existing medications – and to the entire class of HIV medications that they belong to.

Which is really unfortunate, as those were all in the More-Effective-And-Less-Toxic bin.

My doctor was... not best pleased. Frankly he was openly angry with me, and worried; I, of course, can hardly be outdone when it comes to self-righteous anger, so I made it clear to him that I knew this was my fault, but it could hardly be reversed now.

He softened a bit... not much of course, that's not something he does.

We are quite a pair...

•••

So, back to Ritonavir – only 100 mg a day, tied to two newer medications, each just once a day.

Ritonavir is of course hard on the digestion, depressive – in fact kind of miserable, even in small doses. I was ecstatic when I was taken off it in 2012...

Well, here we are again.

•••

And in the intervening years my digestion has become more fragile – I suspect, myself, it may be linked to liver damage from HCV (now around 30%, though that percentage isn't rising quickly – it's a good thing I've never done much drinking, and can't stand British stout).

Which means IBS has been happening with increasing frequency, dully, painfully.

And now Ritonavir is evidently enough of an irritant to cause regular IBS, for three weeks now.

I keep trying to wean myself from Mebeverine, but my body repeatedly shows me that I can't manage without it.

Of course Mebeverine is pretty miserable all on its own... Cure worse than disease? Not quite, I guess. A close race, though.

•••

Is this all a bit more disorienting because – although these health concerns are hardly new to me – my own psychoanalysis has been so disorienting, so fissured, for three months now?

At points I have wondered: how could I be just now experiencing such a shattered, deep part of myself, after all the analysis I've already had? Am I simply not good enough at this, have I not worked hard enough?

Should I be actually working with other people's problems when I am like this?...

But I have been repeatedly reassured: the wounded healer is not at all uncommon.

Sometimes it actually improves our ability to do this work...

•••

And there have been points in these three months of startling insight. Many of them, in fact: as things get darker they are also hugely illuminated.

How could I have lived so long without seeing my own internal mechanisms...

Not so much hope, but: astounding, vertiginous clarities.

•••

A letter from the hospital, two weeks ago: I am to get another MRI, because of... some biochemical indicator I don't understand.

I am blithe about it on Facebook. A., who is a hepatologist, asks for details. I give them to him...

A long personal message from A., beginning: 'Not to be sitting in the room with you as you read this makes me unhappy.'

I am properly warned, and read the long, complex technical message with a sinking clarity.

This MRI is to check for liver cancer, which is suggested by the change in my body chemistry.

•••

I know I shouldn't be shocked – liver cancer was always among the probabilities with HCV – and I thank A. calmly... and go to bed.

Sleep isn't easy.

For a day or two, I am... rocked off my foundations.

•••

 

•••

We don't really know anything yet, of course. These are but shadows...

And this has always possible. Since 2001, in fact.

My own hepatologist has also been anxious about the recent problems. We are scheduled to treat HCV next spring now –

which is seven months later than our most recent plans –

has my blunder lost me this time, when I needed it most?

•••

That is too dramatic. It is still possible to get a cure for HCV, it is still possible to treat liver cancer. Or a transplant?... it is still possible.

•••

 

•••

I sleep.

•••

 

•••

 

••• 

At night, because sleep is erratic, I read fragments of novels on my iPad, as the moon rises.

It doesn't interest me much to finish any of them... but paragraphs, sentences, ideas, fly through the night and evaporate.

•••

During the day I lay on the couch, wondering how I'll finish the two presentations that need to be given next week, in two different countries

Ah, and, before those two, a speech for World AIDS Day – what am I to talk about? Charlie Sheen?

Not very interested in him. I'd rather talk about other people, frankly.

Not about me, though.

•••

I remember Steve's funeral, when we drove far out of town for the ceremony – it was the last time I saw David, one of the other members of the HIV patient group who had done much of the work for ten years. David was anxious, even slightly frightened – not usual for him – he said he hadn't been well, that his treatments were not being successful... I was a bit shocked.

David was always calm, at least up until that day.

His funeral was – how many months later?...

•••

When my analysands arrive, I put myself together and pay attention – frankly it is often the most energetic, positive part of the week.

I am mostly doing all right with them, I think. Small glitches, impatience, they forgive me.

Other messages and decisions from the Jung-Institut are too hard to figure out right now. I let it all slide...

•••

Skypeing with M., who is filled with life these days: a prospective new boyfriend. He pushes me, gently, to go online and try to generate new romantic possibilities for myself! – but it is dark outside, it seems not to be the time...

With other friends, I am distant, too abrupt.

Then, I apologise – usually.

•••

I ignore too many emails...

•••

Yes, I know: Paris, politics, downed planes. The rising tide of online voices panicking, lecturing each other.

Not interested. On the couch.

•••

 

•••

November, the scorpion.

Rain and clouds.

Tonight, clear, and such a moon!

•••

I've been here before – or nearly anyway.

None of this is awful, none of this is a shock...

•••

 

•••

I don't feel well...

Gastronomic, hypothetic, erotic

Barcelona...

So, history: frequently, between about 2003-4 and 2008-9, Susan and Rob and I spent some time each summer in Barcelona, or Sitges, which is nearby enough. Changing circumstances, the deaths of Chris and then Dennis, and my increasing preoccupations in Zürich broke that pattern...

And: a few years ago, Susan gave a seminar at the Barcelona music conservatory, and said they were really interested in her work – and that I should contact them. I sent a couple of emails – can we set up an Erasmus exchange? – but no answer. I assumed, well, you know: a large conservatory, attitudes between conservatories and universities – they probably aren't interested.

Then, a couple of months ago, the Barcelona conservatory emailed me out of the blue: they had heard of our department (ha! not because I had already told them about us, of course) and wanted to set up an exchange. Some fussing around, G. wanted to go in my place, I semi-gracefully capitulated; then he was too busy – so, fine: I get to go to lovely, strange, warm Barcelona again, to set up an ongoing relationship... that is intended to support going back and forth fairly frequently.

Uh, I mean, for the whole department, I mean... not just, like, for me. You knew that, didn't you?...

•••

Just after Easter is acceptable timing for them. I tell Norma about it, and she wants to go – so we set up an entire week, over Easter vacation. (Yes-I-know-don't-visit-a-Catholic-country-around-major-church-holidays... but that was when we could go; and it ended up being fine.)

Four days of Norma and I – some fantastic/exotic/complicated restaurants, including some modernist cuisine, plus its current avatar of Catalan-Japanese fusion. Various wonderful meals – at points it was as though that was the main point in being here (my fault, I think).

That first night, a series of small plates (Norma photographed the complicated menu) one after another – fifteen courses, I think? by a frantically energetic bunch of young guys that included some Adriá students.

A later evening, a plain modern café two blocks from the apartment – young people, trendy – great food: and I mean really great food. Small neo-tacos, experimental combinations by someone who really knows what they're doing. And, at the next table, two handsome, bearded Spanish guys talking energetically, kissing at intervals – and this isn't even the gay neighbourhood.

Two dud meals, which isn't too bad. Please read online reviews before going in.

Much architecture, much Gaudí. Parc Guëll was the high point – I'd never gone into the cordoned-off central area; Norma ordered the tickets, which was smart. Much calmer, much more beautiful – that park really works if you can experience it as a park, some place calm and quiet, without all the masses of tourists.

Good Friday!... parades; men and boys in black robes, like the Inquisition come to town. With mockups (I hope they were mockups) of flagellation; statues of Christ – one gaunt and bleeding, another more reservedly covered with a purple robe. A tiny, pale girl in a nun-like outfit, with a tragically pale cast to her face her eyes a bit sunken – she was part of one of the school group parades, and looked a bit too much the part of the suffering believer for my entire comfort. She caught Norma's eye and gave her a small card...

Walking, the harbor... some points where I got peevish with the walking; Norma is thoroughly energetic and likes walking. Well, I got better, after a while.

•••

Could I live here?... I really wanted to, seven or eight years ago. Then I thought: no, that probably won't work – I can't afford it; then with the rise in planning a late career as a psychoanalyst, the mildly anxious sense of the restrictions and qualifications on working in Spain (as in Italy), the number of Jungians in Barcelona (about a hundred?), and how long would it take for me to work out the language...

But I'm thinking about it again. I know, Bologna: but honestly this city is larger, more fantastic. I probably lose some clout by having a Sicilian name, which makes me just another foreigner in a city full of them. But I think it wouldn't be hard to work in English; and perhaps I could occasionally work in German or French, and eventually polish up some Catalan or Castilian... the psychoanalyst from another country, with a heavy accent: it's been done before.

Reading Claudia Roden and Zafón, Robert Hughes, Michener... all on Barcelona, on Spain. Rediscovering my desire to be here... and watching closely to see the good and bad points: a big, gorgeous city; shabby/scruffy in spots; lively, artistic in others; too many tourists; good weather, good food...

El Raval is much too scruffy. The Barrí Gotic is increasingly touristy. El Born – hmm, used to seem a bit boring, but now... except for the smell of urine on too many corners. The Eixample? Maybe, some part of it that's not too massive....

I do still like the idea.

•••

Then my plane home is canceled. Laurie and her family have no trouble getting home to southern England on the same day – but I don't have their luck: planes are full, I have to stay three more days.

And cancel analysands, appointments, students... move a class back a week...

Sergio, whose apartment we are using, has to come back – but fortunately we like each other, we share the apartment. Slightly more complicated are his old girlfriend, and then his new one – the first takes me as part of the family, the second is cooler, French, and clearly would prefer the apartment to herself.

But Sergio likes me, we manage. All a bit chaotic...

•••

On the last night: a small, funky restaurant on the quiet, dark side of El Born, with surprisingly good food; a charming young waiter, who keeps catching my eye and smiling, and laughing, as though slightly self-conscious; and says at the end, Adéu!...

So: I keep seeing guys, and it is erotic. Not exactly sexual, but instantly passionate, sensual: a sense of possibilities, which rarely appears in Newcastle.

Now, at my age (yes, Virginia, I am 58) it may seem a bit graceless – tacky? – to go on and on, especially as these men are often distinctly younger than I am. (I don't put much cachet on youth – it is fortunate that I generally find 20-year-old men uninteresting; which easily keeps me out of trouble on a university campus. Unlike some people I have heard tell of.)

Perhaps it's just that younger men are, themselves, more on the lookout....

But I don't want to act like Goytisolo. Or Capote or Genet, or (please, no) Burroughs. No tacky slavering over the young and handsome.

Perhaps I can be like Cavafy – of course his endless wistfulness does seem a bit pathetic after a while; and so many of the men he is watching have such disastrous lives ahead of them....

•••

But it is the last day. I could live here, I think. (Let's check those regulations again.) And it is pleasant to see the buildings, the sun, the food – the men....

Solstice

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

Men in autumn • fragments • a flash

I haven’t written here for a while…

somewhat preoccupied, fairly busy. Walking through what feels like several lives at once: the university (with various changes in upper-level policy – an annoying time for British universities, as upper-level business savages try to extend control over non-business systems), my analysands (and another new one, and new chairs for them, so professional!), the HIV patient group’s expanding activities (and I finally seem to be letting go of control), questions over HCV treatment (deferred until April, perhaps; but I am not worried, as I was), a cluster of impending conferences and collections (including some surprising gestures of respect, as though I am considered a known figure), a film series to introduce…

And, in October, there was a long burst of passionate feeling: for some weeks I was fascinated with some men, and (more than usually acutely) imagined living with someone again. At that time when people notice that winter is coming, and instinctively, or rationally, decide that they might want to settle down with someone.

Which didn’t happen for me, but which didn’t feel utterly impossible either.

One day in that period, I stood and spoke to a handsome Irish bear working at the Apple store. Everyone else was with customers, but relaxed, and things were quieting down toward late evening; and it seemed as though he wanted to talk specifically to me, to hear what I was like, what I wanted to say. I thought – and I know, I may have been imagining things – does this mean he likes me?... who knows.

•••

Another day in that period, I wrote:

Pleasant/melancholy: at the corner store a hand taps me on the back, someone says how are you? A charmingly good- and intelligent-looking man with glasses and a shaved head, it takes me a minute to remember that he's my former doctor, who moved to another practice. He looks even more like someone you would want to live with for the rest of your life now, standing casually and smiling, than he did sitting behind his desk then. We talk about the book I suggested to him at our last appointment, Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man, which he has bought but not gotten to read yet, which is about a remarkable doctor who, like him, pays attention to the details of his patient's lives and behavior in interpreting their symptoms. It is pleasant to talk to him, despite being somewhat distracted by thinking how very much I like this man. We say good to see you, take care, I walk home... feeling a bit lonelier than usual, wondering if his obvious pleasure at seeing me means anything, wishing....

••• 

One day a train to Sheffield, the next a train to York. No rain, quiet journeys.

It’s a (bit of a) shame I haven’t written about it all. There are indeed some interesting fragments among my dreams and notes from analysis, as well as some journal entries and (possibly overly personal) Facebook posts. But it would be hard to put together a coherent story out of the past two months… which implies it’s not a particularly coherent time (which is reflected in analysis, where we have spent a lot of time wandering around the fragmentary, the incoherent, the multi-linked – and around memories I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten).

One thing that does seem true: although I have bursts of anxiety about not finishing things, about projects, about sleeping too long, about some intermittent disjunctions/disconnections between sleeping and waking over the past few weeks…

nevertheless, these all seem – well – not particularly important. I was thinking today: there are indeed the familiar anxieties and problems, but somehow they feel shallower – the pool of worries has an odd quality, as though the bottom is only two or three inches deep.

As though my anxieties and losses, my bursts of concern about HCV treatment, my embarrassment last month when I was too irritable in the HIV group meetings (how could they forgive me? though I know that these things are rarely as bad in the real world as they are in the projected one) – as though all of these things are just... a couple of inches of water.

And I walk through the water, my shoes getting slightly wet, mildly annoyed by that – but feeling something so far from any experience of deep worry, of shattering anxiety…

•••

During last week's discussion in analysis, that same image kept coming to mind: of a circular pool, a few feet in width, dark water that shines with reflective light; occasionally drops of water falling onto it, or ripples… but clearly shallow, only a few inches deep…

An unexpected online clash with the gentle R. one Saturday that left me incredibly unhappy – and which was my fault; we shared various back and forth comments over perhaps five or six hours, ending in a healed relationship. My analyst points out the implicitly relative shallowness of my anger in this – only a tenuous connection to the young boy I once was, walking around and round the damaged pine with its bleeding, wounded bark, arguing and gesticulating in a theater of rage and frustration.…

•••

A dream, from 2 November:

I live in an apartment, small and dilapidated, in a large low apartment building that is old and worn – old paint, peeling in places; not in disastrous shape, but it looks as though poverty has left walls dull, bluish, slightly dirty.

Early in the dream I meet a handsome young man, intense, with pale skin, dark hair and eyes, spare muscles and tattoos, who has just moved in towards the east side of the building with his girlfriend; we are immediately comfortable with each other and become friends. He looks like someone who may have grown up poor, because of the wiriness of his frame, but seems healthy and strong, attractive to look at.

I work in the same large building, which has many apartments, and which looks back toward another large old building across the street. It all has a New York or Chicago feel, or some place that has always been industrial or poor.

I come back to my apartment during a break or lunch, and the door of the single-room apartment next door is open – and he is there. Alone, he has moved his things in, with no explanation. We talk, not referring to his girlfriend – perhaps they are no longer together. I say I’m happy he is there, and he says he is happy to be there.

Beyond his one-room apartment, toward the north beyond a window, is another apartment that seems to have been closed off, and is unused – a single room with a high ceiling, abandoned, and some high structure in the middle. We both wonder why it is unused, and wonder whether we can get into it, whether it can be added to his apartment. I see his tattooed arm next to mine; I stand and say I have to get back to work, and go, happy that he is here, happy that he is around.

•••

Since that dream, I have only remember fragments of other dreams – it is three weeks now: I sleep long and deep, I know that I am dreaming, but I don't remember, except in incoherent bits. My analyst and I aren't worried about this... there is an easy rapid flow to our sessions....

•••

Today, I had only one thing to bring to analysis – not a dream, but a flash, a vision:

Just before bed, in a combination of figuring out how to do some things and worrying about them and being elated that they were going well, and that the psychic pressure of tasks seems so much lower since the book crisis – a fragmentary vision while emailing M.: of visiting him somewhere warm, taking a nap – I am clearly older, more wrinkled, but happy – and dying in my sleep in the afternoon sun. M. comes to call me to dinner, and finds my body…

When I tell my analyst this, he is silent for a few moments. We talk for a while about its simplicity, its calm quality. I point out that in the past two days I've done two public presentation/discussions on AIDS – the one on Monday for the clinical psychology students at the RVI, and then today in my class on musicals, to talk about Rent and other musicals related to the crisis. And about how easy they were... a sense of lightness...

He says: is there really not any more to say about it? I say: I'm not avoiding things – it just seems that it is in itself light, clear. Any more interpretation seems... heavy.

•••

There is in the past weeks a quality of release from weight I've held on to since I was three years old – and in fact (I have a flash of articulate, highly complex insight, and try to explain it to him in a rush) there are only a few times in my life when the weight lifted: in high school, from the time I suddenly felt handsome to the collapse of not getting into the university I wanted; in the garden San Francisco apartment, during the time when Adam would visit, and I was happy; in darker Berlin, during the days when Hans-Rainer would appear at my door, and we would be in bed for days; and that first year in Hong Kong – I can remember that first night of torrential summer rain, when I left my bed naked, walked onto the twentieth-story balcony overlooking the sea, and exulted in the rain, amazed and drenched....

But those were different states than this feeling is, now: they were releases through anticipation, through excitement, through passion. Now, things are calm and not unusual, and I am merely released back into my own everyday life, which is not terribly exciting or passionate, at least at the moment – but which is nevertheless not weighed down, either –

I think of an older dream and try to explain it; can't remember how it ends, and so open my computer and look for it – the one in the jungle, sitting and talking to a woman in ruined huts underneath trees dripping with rain: it is from January 2010, several years ago now. A dream early in analysis, a dream like a promise, a dream like a vision of something I could perhaps someday reach. But I remember it, and its intensity: in that dream small animals, not cute but gaunt, scruffy, who have been living in the wild, gradually, slowly come to trust me. A kitten curls up under my arm, a small green snake rests next to it....

My analyst is smiling. What else is there to say, then. I think we're done for today.

Pieces

Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot....

*

A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience, difficult to describe because of its purity – this was not dark, or nonsensical. Could it be related to Jambo's work on my liver – if some of the body's long, depressed toxicity cracks and fades, is there an imaginative/psychological response?....

As for what I experienced: a sense of all the ones I've known who are dead (there are many), and it was as though they were standing around me – but charged with the extraordinary knowledge that I am alive, still alive, against any odds. And I could talk to them about it, tell them I missed them, though not with sadness; and they are happy – no, actually joyous – about this: not the envy of the ghosts one sees in a Japanese fairy tale, but a strange feeling that all of the dead are glad, even exultant, that I am alive. Blood flowing, the body with a vivid, concrete pulse: my body seemed so solid, so bright....

*

Nomi wants to chat on Skype: I realize that Mitchell, when he goes to Northampton for a year to teach at Amherst College, will live right near her. Two favorite people, and they would get on so incredibly well: and she is a Jungian analyst, and Mitchell will have left his analyst in Los Angeles – this might be quite wonderful. There is a feeling of family, of the connections that make the world hold together and grow.

*

Thursday I was angry: really angry, at at least one colleague, one I usually like. Possibly undeservedly: I felt as though I'd had enough from him, and couldn't even speak to him. Consumed by it: and that evening, when a parent of a student called to harangue me about something over which I had no control, I was not pleasant to him. Nothing I'll get in trouble for: but the whole problem of the irrational 'customer'...

I didn't want to talk to anyone later that evening, about anything.

Friday morning was still darkened by this; then it passed, when I went to...

*

It is Monday night at my favorite Italian restaurant: the usual Italian lesson, though Barbara looked tired – perhaps it's good that she's off to Italy for two weeks; I hope she enjoys herself, she is a good and pleasant teacher.

After the beginner's class, while the intermediate class continued behind a curtain, I relaxed over a risotto and a glass of wine – and talked to all my favorite people there: the dark-haired, smart girl who is working on her dissertation (of course I always say: so have you gotten some work done? and then we discuss everything she is doing), the wiry one who plays football (and needs to take care of that knee problem, but he shrugs and throws his hands in the air), and... the one I'm always kind of in love with: a good man, with a charming face only slightly thrown off by a long nose beneath his warm and kindly eyes; he stops and makes up jokes with me, and I would like to just spend time with him; but I know enough to leave, laughing.

*

Two weeks ago Saturday: Michael asks me over for dinner and a movie, while Andrew is out with friends. At first I think we're going to see an adventure movie I don't care about much, then he flips over a DVD of All About Eve. I pick it up, and say: Mitchell told me to watch this years ago – he even gave me a book about it for my birthday... Michael, incredulous: and you've never seen it? Are you sure you're gay?

So, after heating M&S Asian dishes and arranging them on trays, we watch this famous film: and it really is remarkable. Cooler and more controlled than I'd expected – the sniping is less overt: I was expecting wig-snatching, but what we get instead is sharp looks and obscure anxieties as the creepy Eve extends her web. A startling cameo by Marilyn Monroe, who turns a few dumb-blonde lines into memorable gold. Then of course the end, when Eve lies on the sofa uncaring and exhausted: for the first time in the film she isn't poised and acting, and it is brilliant...

now that she has all she wanted, it's ashes.

*

I run another session of people living with HIV, speaking to medical students – we do this every two weeks, January to June, for the past nine years. But I'm colliding with one of the guys: he is intensely intelligent, but he likes to take over and run the show – and a third guy, new and shy and not very articulate, is bowled over. I am sharper and sharper with the talkative one – and yes, you don't need to point out that this is shadow stuff for me: he is like me at my most irritating. By the end, the talkative one is in a barely controlled rage, the shy one shut down: and afterwards the shy one suggests maybe this isn't for him, and the talkative one sends out an enraged e-mail.

And I answer calmly, professionally, that we're grateful for his contribution, that we need to give everyone some space to talk. He is still not happy, but slightly mollified. I know I was careless, and this is partly my fault: but I can understand all that without anxiety.

And I am privately amazed that I can construct such a cool statement of reason: only slightly affected by the storm of feelings, it is as though I have a way to walk through such things, without them tearing at me....

*

Thomas telephones from Zürich on Wednesday evening: he has passed the last of his exams, and is now a Jungian analyst! He wants to thank me for helping him – I feel like a proud father, full of praise and affection. I tell him to say hello to everyone who is there for the winter semester. His graduation will be this summer, in the week after I take the last four of my first-half exams – hopefully I will have good news then, too.... I look forward to that party.

*

Last week: a tricky and exasperating administrative task, sitting with Jo at the computer – but we gradually get more and more hilarious over the ineptly designed university software, over the piles of work she has to do, over everything, really. And it all turns into a great joke, a familial burst of joy: and, as the audio technician at the next desk watches us amazed, this silly administration turns into the most fun I'd had in days...

*

No dreams. This worries me: an analytic session in just three days, and I remember no dreams at all?... yes, I am dreaming, I know it: but the door clicks shut just as I wake, and I have no idea what happened, not a fragment or a figure or a street. What is going on, how can I get back in touch with... but of course I am always too heavy-handed with this relationship between the conscious and the unconscious: which is probably one reason that the door sometimes stays shut for weeks....

*

A student comes into my office – in his years here, he has always been especially smart, especially alert, hard-working – and darkly cynical about everything: life is hopeless, people are stupid, nothing ever gets better. He and I have argued about this a number of times, in lectures and seminars, and his attitudes have softened a bit... but we give each other a certain polite distance.

Today he is disappointed in his mark, which is high, but not as high as he would like. We talk, and increasingly something unexpected pours out: among the rapidly shifting opportunities and losses that he is crashing through in his last year, he is feeling despair, a strange grief: he is nearly in tears at the complexity of the impending successes and failures of life. And I pull us away from the discussion of the mark to tell him: go home and write down how you are feeling. Yes, write your dissertation, write your papers, work on your recital: but this is serious, you must face it, catch it, stay with it. And I'm here if you want anything, at all.

There is a clarity on his face, and a frightened but excited sense that there may be a way forward, as he leaves...

Left behind in my office, I realize that I couldn't have planned my response: it was intuition, not training, and I still don't know how I could do that as a professional analyst. But it was arrestingly right: and with no time wasted looking for the solution....

*

Laura Mvula, on Graham Norton's show: while two other stars were pleasant and professional, and Mark Wahlberg made a fool of himself, this exquisitely present young singer, with her passionately alive instrumentalists and singers, came in like a ray of real beauty in a tired chain of media commercials. Not so much a matter of virtuosity, though she and they were all hugely capable: but of a deep, full connection to the music – that sense that they could inhabit it completely, without doubt and confusion, while aware of everything that it could mean. And, of course, shift from one thing to another without professional concerns: watching the guitarists clap in counterpoint... beautiful: her song 'She' has this quality.

After she has sung, she comes out and sits with the guests – sitting straight upright, slim and fresh-looking, paying attention to everything: it is all new, she doesn't want to miss a beat. But she answers Graham's questions with confidence and grace: looking like the most real person in the room...

*

Another acupuncture session yesterday: again, an experience that was rich and strange, though not so ecstatic as the first. Lying there, I was looking back through my life, at particular scenes, in so many cities and towns, on four continents: and the results were...

well: it was as though I knew that what I needed to do was to take back parts of myself, from all these memories, from all these selves. It will come as no surprise if I admit to a great deal of living in the past, in memory: I am always tied to the dead, to places where I was happy or excited or sad, or had great expectations of what I would do with my life, what I would become.

And, of course, in this small northern city, I have tended to live for ten years as though everything is already over: as though my real life happened in San Francisco, in Los Angeles – in Berlin, in Hong Kong, in Adelaide. In Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen; in a field with a gamelan near Ubud; in streets at night and sunny avenues, in bed and on a bicycle and, more than thirty-five years ago, in a small, nearly vertical apartment in the Village in New York...

So it was strange to – so rapidly and assertively, though with kindness – go back to all of these selves, tap them on the shoulder, and tell them: it's time to leave this place, and come back to me. And somehow they all seemed to come into me: the lonely boy walking near the golf course in Virginia, and the laughing man wearing leather chaps while working the door in the Berlin bar at 6 am – even the intensely tired thirty-five-year-old looking at his face in the mirror in Joe's bathroom in San Francisco, up for a visit that showed me that my past was already getting lost.

Hardest of all was a version of me from the early 1980s, sleeping in that beautiful small apartment with its green garden through the glass doors: morning sun, and I am next to Adam – he is asleep, but I am happy...

But even that self gets a tap on the shoulder, and I say to him: you have to come back to me now; Adam is long dead, this place is gone. This is all memory, you can't live here any more.

When Jambo came back in, I told him about it... Of course I was crying. What did you think I was doing?

That was all about twenty-four hours ago: I am still strangely awake, relaxed, working fairly fast.

As though I have more blood, more air: more life....

*

Sun today, and the past few days. The light of the North Sea: and the sharp clarity of the promise of a northern spring...

If we really...

At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or... – those clouds have moved into something unexpected...

If, when we die, there is some place to go, where others are who have died already... (what was that film from last year, The Tree of Life? Like the ending of that, then); what will we say to each other? How will we look, do we hug in the same ways, or want to?

People who died at very different ages, in different times....

Somehow I can see some of the lovers and friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. For one thing, they are of course younger, fresher: naturally they would encounter me and be, well, a bit shocked, perhaps repulsed. Rather uncomfortable: they wouldn't quite know what to say, would want to exchange a few conversational fragments, then get away to be back with... people their own age.

Or is there some kind of ecstatic reunion, followed by confusion: the world changed, after I died? Well, how, what do you mean? And why are you different now – did you change, too?...

And yes, of course: those other fantasies, familiar from many imagined and implied afterlives, where we are all at some central point in our lives: where we are reestablished as beings who have an ideal state, who don't live in time. I can imagine that, too: but perhaps I don't think of myself that way enough these days – my analyst, my medical doctor and my acupuncturist, all of whom point slightly testily at my collapse into a weaker and older image of myself than actually exists, would probably be in agreement about me here.

A somewhat muddled afterlife, then: where there are young people and old people, who remember caring about each other more than anything, ever.

But who don't quite know what to say to each other any more, or whether there is anything they can do together that would make sense... And then the clash between increasingly fantasized, love-imbued images of people, and their complex realities. It's true that the reality is (almost always) better; but you also discover that you don't quite know how to connect with that reality...

As though we no longer know our lines. Or, more acccurately, as though, even among the people who matter the most in the universe, we don't quite have... a place.

In between

Trying to catch – somewhere between the things I did in town today, and the many things I didn't do – the list is long at the moment of research and marking and administration – and sleeping and waking and working on the sofa, and the light, as the days are long – which might be why I think more in this way: because of the long light –

there is a sort of European-ness, or no, that's almost too specific: it's the existential sense of thinking/existing across an array of similar but different time segments and thought patterns – hearing about Schütz and thinking how much I used to love some of his works, but I only owned LPs so that must be a long time ago, something like the late seventies or early eighties; am I in a place where one goes to a corner and buys a CD, or one where one goes online and tries to download tracks that recall the past –

and reading now about Jung; a cross-wise glance at another self, at a range of other selves, arranged either in time or in the imagination – you know that both are possible at once, don't you? – it's sort of like those kaleidoscope mirror mechanisms, or like a program that arrays a photograph in variations across the screen, or anything that repeats fragments of an image in different directions, and if you move your head just an inch you're looking at a completely different set of images – that metaphor is this shimmering array of pasts and presents –

some of which existed, some nearly did, others didn't but might as well have existed – hearing certain recordings and doing certain work, different apartments, high ceilings of large, dark rooms in Berlin and the eerie fog of an early morning Hong Kong skyline – and is there a clue or miniature betrayal of the fabric of time in the strange fact that this morning an I Ching coin throw gave me exactly the same reading as yesterday's? an odd occurrence, or possibly a clue –

tonight the coalescence seems to be among elements of study, of work, that are particularly, even peculiarly, German: seeing myself working on or listening to certain musics or books (you see how hard it is to clarify, given that the points that kaleidoscope outwards are not the usual objects or thoughts or identities, but their larger and implicit structures) to selves that are sitting up in bed reading in a German night, or sitting reading here in England, or California, southern Australia –

I can see myself refracted along different lines: just as solemn, just as gray-haired, having put my glasses down to look across a snowscape, or this spring evening; the long English northern day echoes across many others; watching myself work, read, think – and look up – outside the window it is raining slightly, or it is dry, or there is a wisp of late sun... if I were listening to a recording of Schütz (which I haven't heard for years) or reading Jacoby on narcissism or, as of course I actually should be doing, marking student papers –

the different selves: some more settled and successful than this one, but all of them a solemn man in his mid-fifties, grayish hair repeated in the steel color of his glasses, thinking or reading, until he puts them down by the bed; the quiet, solemn colors of a northern European academic –

and also, at these moments, the sense that if I could only step sideways into one of these near-selves that are so similar, I could choose an echoing number of presents, pasts, futures; the differences between them aren't vast (are there some of them where there is someone in the next room, or are most of them a man alone?) but have more to do with the linearity, the continuity of a life; and how disjunct or how smooth, how stressful or how calm the line of that line is –

whether that line crosses through various cities, various places: cool gray stone streets, tall apartment buildings, turning back into the room from a foggy day, awakening in a slightly warmer seaside town with a row of boats at dock –

If I just step sideways slightly, it all changes: or perhaps it doesn't –

The house, far from the city

Among large plans and changes: British citizenship, Zürich training, a big financial transfer – and small: a new jacket and shoes, a trip to northern Italy paid for by the the university, and most startling a re-engagement with two research projects that had dropped off the radar (just as though I were as productive as I actually ought to be) –...

an ugly backwash into the chaos of ridiculous mistakes I've made in my life: simply enough, a phone call from a student loan collection agency, with a long lecture from a clearly tired, exasperated woman about my irresponsibility and the ways that the US government will come after me. Not, of course, the first time I've heard disquisitions on this subject; but the timing is a bit nerve-wracking, considering all the financial moves I've made lately.

And the result, an anxious, tired couple of days, with bad dreams... and a guilty, spooked sense that whatever plans I try to make for a financial or healthy or professional future are doomed by old messes, all of which were made by me of course. (And it doesn't help that the Tories are now, horribly, in power – pretty dispiriting: like a return to the eighties and nineties, to what was for me a chain of unsuccessful jobs managing performance groups whose money was being taken away, with a miserable denouement in an apartment building that had barely graduated from its past as a meth lab, surrounded by neighbors who were homeless, babbling, disintegrating, or on the edge of disaster...)

Probably all this sounds ridiculous to you: but there are things that follow you like the Furies, the Erinyes; and of course there's the problem of being a slave to the modern world of banking and interest. It is strange to read the new collection of 'lost' stories by Ernest Bramah, where he speaks of fictional imperial Chinese who have to somehow get out from under poverty, the enmity of high officials, the sheer oppression of a vast and ruthless system; but of course since Bramah writes amusing stories there is always a sudden and near-magical release from bondage, as the evil mandarin has his head chopped off, or the inheritance appears on the doorstep.

I dreamed, again, of that last episode of Dollhouse: not the one where the world disintegrates, but the one after it, where a small body of people have retreated to a house in the country without electricity or running water, where they can reconstruct a possible life while the world goes mad. I know I've badgered some friends lately about living in a group on retirement – it is derived from this image: that when the world gets to be too much, or when my alternative is living alone in a small room until I qualify for a rest home, that there might be the possibility of creating family in some distant place. (And yes, I know: this may merely resemble Aesop's grasshopper trying to convince the ant to make the entrance to the anthill bigger... hmm. Entomology recapitulates schizogony, or something like that.)

Is it possible – even probable – that many writings about revolution, change, anarchy, represent at least partly a barely hidden wish to escape from one's own official records and duties? (Not, maybe, something as trivial as student loans; maybe more like old convictions, associations with the politically dangerous, and so on.) Although it's always been difficult to take Ezra Pound's Canto XLV against usurers entirely seriously – yes, it certainly is powerful, but it's not exactly poetry, is it? – maybe some of his mental disintegration and strange decisions came from that same desperation, from a need to escape old mistakes. Or think of Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, that beautiful but eerie novel, and the sheer madness of Europe in the 1930s: it is certain that people, among their fears and desperate plans, were also hoping, maybe only in their dreams and secret fantasies, that their responsibilities would also be exploded when governments fell and armies marched past.

I'll get over this, of course. I'm already halfway over it: I know that if the letters become strident, the demands become impossible to ignore, I can get away with small payments – although it is hard to believe that I would ever pay everything off.

But it's disorienting: just when parts of life, of existence, feel more optimistic, more possible, and even when I stop mooning over long-lost wishes to focus on present realities; when I feel, after a long time of helplessness, as though I'm in charge of my own future; it's so maddening to be bitten, once again, in the backside, as in a dogfight you can't win. If only life had a rewind/erase button....

From Berlin

[Something I wrote in 1989... and now it is the twentieth anniversary of these events.]

Amazed, sitting in a restaurant and reading of the collapse of the Wall, that vast shift in the meaning of our world’s past.  The bizarre responses of people, Easterners who stay up all night and see real, free capitalist stores opening, Westerners bursting into the national anthem, children taking chunks of the Wall for souvenirs.  It draws me back into the Jefferson Airplane’s grand anthem: "I smell incense and balloons...  People dancing everywhere, people shouting: I don’t care..."  Their grandchildren will perhaps see a sort of monument, a mile of the Wall preserved in memory of those who died, those who couldn’t wait long enough – a weather-beaten concrete mass, in front of which their elders become oddly quiet...

Over my chicken teriyaki I am subjected to a subliminal flash, a momentary nightmare that draws out and expands:

Tonight’s edition of News 4/North includes interviews with the citizens of West LA. on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wall... they speak to our reporters of the strange pressures of living in this opulently capitalist territory, bounded on the west by the sea, on the north by the radioactive ruins of Encino and Tarzana, and on the east and south, by the massive gray concrete of the Wall:

Kimberly: “I had a brother in Culver City before the war; when I was a teenager, we always went down there for Sunday dinners... I get mail from him about twice a year, but most of it is deleted by Orange censors...”

Scott: “My student activist group was really freaked when they started imprisoning the AIDS patients in Silverlake, but we feel that the riots by West Angelenos helped in forcing the Orange government to release them to the North...”

Jason: “We met this old woman in a bar the other night who said she saw the firebombing of Malibu... she said the really big stars used to live there... I don’t know if any of it was true, but we bought her a drink before we went dancing at the club...”

DeeDee: “I was only seven when the Wall went up, right after the War; but I still remember my father being able to drive straight through from downtown to the beach, with no soldiers and no checkpoints...  He was one of the ones working downtown, trapped down there when they began the Siege; there was nothing we could do...  We heard about him once a few months after the war, but nothing in the years since...  I hope he’s still alive somewhere.”

West Los Angeles residents rioted again today along the section of the Wall that follows old Highland Avenue; they were protesting the execution of five East Angeleno workers who tried to escape Orange-controlled East LA at the Santa Monica Boulevard checkpoint...  This is the third riot since April, when the Prime Minister in Anaheim instituted the new Race Reform Laws, prohibiting members of the Hispanic population of all Orange territories from Party and management positions...  Executive President Brown, speaking from the Northern capital of San Francisco, spoke against what he called “this outrage”...

Citizens of the Free City of Vancouver today declared their solidarity with the workers of West LA in the current airlift crisis.  In this declaration, they join Federation officials in San Francisco and the President of the Republic of Greater Texas, who spoke yesterday in Tulsa to a large crowd of supporters...  Grateful West Angelenos cheered the announcement at city government headquarters in Beverly Square beneath a memorial statue of freedom fighter Sean Penn...  The airlift is rapidly becoming crucial to the life of the city; it is said that a half-pound container of tofu costs four hundred and eighty New dollars, and precious avocados are hoarded by West LA housewives...

This issue of Harper’s/North is dedicated to new young writers living inside the Wall in West LA.  Since the Wall went up twenty-five years ago this month, West LA has become the center of the avant-garde in contemporary art and literature...  The strange feel of this beleaguered city is captured by young people who have known no other way of life: a city characterized by a frenetic night life, frequent and open drug use, political rallies, all-night parties, riots, and a peculiarly defiant capitalism that has created the highest rates of consumption and inflation of any city in the Northwest Federation, comparable to that of the city of New York before its destruction...

Maybe we already have a Wall.

[11/16/89-11/30/91]

Smart guys

(First of all: I'm sorry there have been no blog entries for what, a month – no, five weeks. I am improving, especially rapidly lately, though I did no traveling this summer; I am still intermittently tired and fretful, but more often just fine.)

Tomorrow is the first day that we face all those new students; masses of meetings, receptions, instructions, spreadsheets, and so on for three days, then a rapid quietening, and then next Monday the first class.

This evening, I received an e-mail from Michael, the brilliant choreographer from New Zealand – who is going to go to Paris to do a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne. If that seems odd to you, let me explain: Michael is not only one of the most imaginative dancer/choreographers of the last couple of decades in New Zealand – perhaps anywhere – he is also one of the few people who, when I visited them in their homes, left me feeling slightly devastated at his obvious intellectual superiority. A dancer, and an (intellectual) genius? Yes; and yes, it is indeed slightly intimidating. Energetically handsome, too. And a few years older than I am.

So, the news in the e-mail is that he is passing through while moving to Paris, and wants to visit. I accept, gladly; Michael is definitely one of those guys I wish I had ended up with over the years. Of course, most of 'those guys' tend to be easy-going sensate types, who would leave me with my books while they worked in the gardens....

But my restlessness, perhaps my being wound up over tomorrow's responsibilities, perhaps the slightly disorienting impact of hearing from Michael, has me thinking: what about the particular subset of prospective or wished-for lovers, those men who have left me impressed with their brilliance? The attractive ones, I mean.  What would life with one of them have been like?...

Well, Paolo, whom I've mentioned before, is a software guru in San Francisco, someone whom software experts from around the world ask to examine their more experimental ideas. Warm-hearted and charmingly silly, embedded in a wealthy industry, he very much wanted us to be boyfriends at one time – but I wasn't paying attention, and by the time I realized what I'd missed (after I finished the PhD at the age of forty, when I was living in Hong Kong) and visited him to announce that I was finally ready for him, he forestalled me by telling me how happy he was to be having a civil partner ceremony later that month with... some guy. Another guy, who was of course not me. Ah well; I suppose I should be grateful that he spoke first that day; I wonder if my face fell when he told me?

And Richard, who is of course heterosexual – at least, from what I hear, now he is heterosexual – different timing, meeting him earlier in our lives, might have affected him as a possibility. But on the other hand there is a dark, grim coldness in Richard that comes out in his edgy, brilliant compositions, that is perhaps a bit frightening – although his relationships with women seem to work, I would have been anxious about investing my heart there.

And so back to Michael, this choreographer... it's strange: he is one of few who seem to be simply too good for me. Terrifically smart, creative, intellectual (the books floor to ceiling in every room of his large, dusty Wellington apartment were such that I felt awed and distinctly outclassed), handsome, energetic... ah well, he's generally attracted to younger, more athletic men than I in any case.

But the prospect of a visit from him, on this early autumn night that seems to hold no sleep for me, reminds me of the kind of vivid, enlivening, challenging (and admittedly imagined) partnerships I might have had, partnerships where I was definitely and humbly second fiddle, helpmeet, in the background, which would have been okay in these remarkable cases. If only I'd been in the right places at the right times, if only I'd asked the right questions – if only, I'd....