in the hall of mirrors

Alternative histories

Last night's dream: a music conservatory, walking between buildings in rainy autumn weather – I am a student working on my technique, talking with others – serious, committed and reasonable, as I never actually was in school... a surprisingly detailed, and strange, setting. Like another life, one that might have happened.

Today I was working, yet again, on the film scores chapter of my book on music and AIDS. The Velocity of Gary, a surprisingly inept but colorful translation of a play to the screen, which involved a number of fairly famous actors – a fragmented (and sometimes quite striking) view of a scruffy street life in downtown New York, chaotically strewn with hustlers and drag queens. Another possible life, filled with passion and despair.

Although I frequently (and while, unfortunately, whining too much) imagine various aspects of my life having gone differently, it is strange to imagine really huge dislocations: what if everything were different – what if I'd gone off on a sharp angle at some early stage, such that not a soul I've known would be a part of my life, not a cityscape I've loved would have been a setting for me, nor any of my smaller goals or experiences or homes... what then? What if I were entirely unrecognizable to myself?

It is amazing to think of – and not entirely improbable: more than most, I have blundered through my life, through many places and situations, without a clear sense of where I was going or how to get there. A few sharp turns, no sharper than the turns that I have actually made, could have landed me in vastly different settings, in worlds that would be utterly other.

I can't help wondering: and – would that have been better?....

Luck

It occurred to me today: what if I've actually been lucky over the past decade or so? What if I've actually been moved out of harm's way?

An odd thing to imagine, of course. Especially as I've had such a long-running story about myself in terms of loss and disaster, over the past twenty-five, but especially over the past ten years – all my money and choices evaporating in Australia, ending up in this rather lonelier place far from my old friends, and with a range of added health problems.

But what if I was taken out of the way of worse, messier problems – America's financial woes and its health care crisis, worse mistakes and behaviors and disasters, bigger and more dangerous money and security traps? Other infections, other deaths, other losses, other traps?...

A strange feeling, and one that undoubtedly comes from years of reading science fiction, alternate reality fictions, etc. But one worth considering....

Thessaloniki

I don't know where I got the idea that Thessaloniki was known for being the home of witches in ancient Greece. I read it somewhere, but can't find any reference to it.

My mother's family was from Thessaloniki, from a small town called Pentalofos ('Five Peaks') north of the city of Thessaloniki itself. My mother and father visited there some years ago; Mom told the story of buying something in a shop, only to have the woman who owned the shop snarl at her in Greek, You can keep your filthy American money. But of course my mother speaks Greek, so she was able to reply: Well, I will then; and scooped up her purse and left the shop under the astonished eye of the angry woman.

Strange dreams last night: of Thessaloniki, of witches, of a pointlessly malevolent curse visited on a stranger for a trivial insult. A curse which might lead to speechlessness? – my mother's stroke; or curses that might visit itself on her children – her eldest daughter, her youngest son?...

For me, the curse: when von Franz, in her brilliant book on projection and its transformation from religious and superstitious thinking, explains the group of related fairy tales of which one version was turned into Swan Lake, she speaks of the curse on the sons, that they are transformed into birds: rootless, without grounded lives, homeless and scattered across the gray sky....

And it's strange how, all today since I started thinking of this, I keep dropping things, my knee keeps bleeding through various bandages no matter how thick, the bed and laundry seem ruined with bloodspots and bits of lint, and small mechanical items stop working completely.

I have a strange feeling that I should be trying to arrange a flight to Pentalofos.

•••

So much for that... my cousin Joan has corrected me, saying that we are from a different Pentalofos, the one in Kozani, which is some miles to the west and I think out of the traditional area of Thessaloniki... a good thing I waited to look for flights.

Limitations; and, The Great German Novel

Even among these pleasant spring days, various small pleasant encounters, and the sense of positive direction I've developed in the past six months (related to Jung and analysis), I keep being made uneasily aware of limits, barriers, walls.

A sense of shortened time, news of health concerns: will I really have to inject myself with that miserable medication for eighteen months, starting this coming winter? It's something I've done twice before, never for longer than six months – and both times I was much sicker than I am now. (As Susan said of me in 2001: "we could almost see through you" – an alarmingly beautiful metaphor, making a sickly, darkening thinness into something transcendent, something ghostly).

If I do have to do these toxic, depressive, tiring medications, studying in Zürich will probably be delayed for a couple of years... do you think I'll finally get around to it when I'm fifty-five? Fifty-six, perhaps?

Sixty-two... or sixty-eight. Who knows. And, of course, how much of my current job/work/research will I be able to maintain for the two years I can expect to be perpetually tired; and will I even be able to manage these train trips down to Manchester.

I had an eerie dream of a nice restaurant, where I'm waiting to get a table, while a long line of people goes past me to be seated; and there are tiny insects in the carpet, which I can see moving around; I am barefoot and repulsed by the prospect of them crawling up my leg, fleeing across the room... my analyst suggested this dream might be a reaction to my medical news: those almost invisible insects as tiny defiling illnesses, and of course the long line of people are those patients who are allowed to try the new, less toxic medications. Because they don't have complicating factors: scientifically sensible, of course, but still exasperating from my angle.

In any case, whatever I imagine, this evening I had that weird and somewhat shattering physical experience – one that happens to me every few months, where suddenly I will burst into sweating, weakness, exhaustion, for maybe twenty or thirty minutes or so. I stumble around putting on lighter clothing, finding a thermometer, getting a towel so that I don't sweat on the sofa cushions... the very portrait of the fussy, overly anxious person in a momentary crisis.

This was after a tiring day on the train, going down to Manchester and back for analysis; somewhat stressful, especially on that home stretch where, no matter what I do, I can't seem to avoid the heavy traffic between Leeds and York. But still – I shouldn't have been so tired, so stressed, that I would have some sort of crise (to be terribly 1890s about it).

It's strange: perhaps this is a bit like a 'hot flash'? – I don't have a fever in any case; and of course the traditional night sweats associated with AIDS generally only happen when you're asleep. I don't think these things are serious; but unfortunately they always feel serious, at least for a time – the abrupt crisis of the body, the sudden failure of systems. The sheer weakness is amazing...

or perhaps the whole thing is a neurotic symptom. Could be, I suppose.

***

I've been reading Musil again; and read some Cabell today. Arcane, complex thinkers, who embedded the materials of essays into their novels. And strangely I seem to understand the characters, their emotions and justifications, far better than ever before – which tells you how limited my understanding has always been: even a few months of reading psychology is making me more sympathetic to a wide variety of selfish or unfair impulses and the reasons for following through with them.

However, although the Musil is much more readable for me than it used to be, and at points I've actually enjoyed it, I find myself rebelling against the idea that this is the Great German Novel, to be set alongside Ulysses and Proust. It's just too awkward, and not in a good way: the slow movement around an obviously ridiculous political committee, characters sharing their often loony pseudo-philosophies with each other, the slightly distasteful erotic passions of rather heartless, self-centered people – it is intelligently done but not striking enough. Yes, Musil was intelligent, yes he worked very hard at being a writer; but it seems that one has to give him, too often, the benefit of the doubt.

So: what are the great German novels of the twentieth century? Admittedly, I like Mann much more lately than I used to; and some Hesse is wonderful. And there are the crazed novels of Germanic decline, like Musil – von Doderer and so on; all impressive but exhausting, a long catalogue of the many horrible ways in which people can go mad. Böll and Grass are simply too miserable. (I won't count Kafka here: yes, he's writing in German, but he's not really German; and what he wrote weren't exactly novels, not in the sense I'm thinking of.) Arno Schmidt is impressive but unreadable – I do like difficult literature, but I draw the line at some texts (just as I love Ulysses but can't be bothered, ever or at all, with Finnegans Wake). And I know about Bernhard and Handke and all, although it's hard for me to get more than mildly enthusiastic about those Beckettian fragments. But none of them are quite... well, they're not Ulysses. They're not Proust. They just don't quite have that amazing impact.

So: is there anything German I'd put up there at the top?

Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil. It's years since I tried to finish it; the sheer poetic density made it like trying to wolf down masses of the richest Sachertorten. But it's one of the only major German works I know that seems entirely and utterly admirable....

I think I'll put Musil back on the shelf, for an indefinite period; at least I got about two-thirds of the way through the first volume, and I can see there's a great deal of the same ahead. I'll take Broch down from the shelf... and try again to challenge myself with five hundred pages of overwhelming, indigestible beauty.

...

I am disoriented by the awareness of great chunks of time: time that is going by too quickly, time that is long gone, time that is frozen.

Why, for instance, in these sleepless early mornings, should I remember the amazingly loud tropical birds outside my Hong Kong apartment? And my unease when I woke because of them: anxieties of things to do, responsibilities, people. Or my pleasure when I woke because of them, the weather, the sense of possibilities, excitement: it is all bound together, caught up in the frantic calls of those strange birds, I can't even distinguish those old feelings one from another.

During the afternoons I continue to destroy time, after freezing it solid, by repetitive games and passive television watching. At points this week that has created a frantic misery, an existential anger: I am arguing with ghost figures, wrestling with forces and needs I can't visualize, can't conceptualize.

I am remembering no dreams. That is strange; and I know that I am dreaming, but there is nothing available to me on waking.

I cannot, of course, bear what I have made of my life when I think about it: its tediousness, its aimless fragmentation; its many rich experiences that I allowed to peter out into this experience of vast chunks of past, all only partly remembered, all disturbing me with their inappropriate demands.

But it is disorienting and difficult that even when I don't think about it, I still cannot bear all the moments, at the moment: that my life actually feels, in a textured, material way, fragmented, unhopeful, dislocated.

I suspect that I am frightened that my unconscious, that my dreams, have nothing to offer, have no help: that they don't know what to do either. That it's all a howling wind; that everything deep within me is as confused as everything that is on the surface.

I am amazed and disturbed and disoriented by time and memory; at their call, at their mercy.

Projective

A burst of anxieties and slight despondencies: after several days of talking to students about their futures, and in a few painful cases having to tell them that their marks were not high enough to allow them to go abroad as exchange students – which feels like telling them: no adventures for you, my boy – I'm having a small cluster of imagined futures, projected worries, about going to Zürich.

As though I will also be told: sorry, no dice... you're too old; you don't have a psychology degree. And, of course, feeling that someone will say: if you really wanted to study to be a professional Jungian, you would travel three times a week to Lower Bumsrush to meet with a supervisor... which, at this point, I simply won't. At my age, I don't respond well to peer pressure.

So: another day of students, most cheerful and engaged, a few flaky and unhappy... and a flotilla of e-mails from people who suddenly want me to do a huge variety of things for them, just before I'm leaving. Typical.

(There is also some anger involved: after all the things I've done over the past three or four weeks to get ahead of work, to prepare what people may want before they ask for it, now various people are forgetting to do things due to me... ach wohl.)

Or maybe this is just how the world feels sometimes, to an introvert....

Nights of power

The solstice is soon: Sunday, at a few minutes past noon this year.

And Imbolc, Beltane, Samhain, and the rest... nights when the winter wind is sharp and powerful, or the spring starts to appear, or the supercharged midsummer night takes over –

David kindly helped me to put up my small, but brightly lit, tree, and, for the first time, light my fireplace. I will put up photographs – but tomorrow; it is too sleepy, too deep a night, tonight, to bother with computerized detail.

Music is playing: the intense passions of Chris Wood's folk fiddling and antique English images in the poems – that sense of power, of deep resonance: when, as Hugh Lupton's beautiful writing points out, we are embedded in time that circles, that reaches strong points in the year and fuses with the past there.

When I was young, I most dearly loved the now slightly archaic style of British Arthurian fantasy: not only Tolkien and Lewis, but also Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Lucy Boston – all writers who were sensitive to this kind of midnight power, this feeling that the great forces of good and evil that have ruled, or tried to rule, this isle, and through it this world, are given their strong times, their years, and even their great cycles.

It all comes together in the eerie last stanza of the opening poem for Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, which I – oddly – quoted to the people who shared my taxi when I first arrived in a green, rain-drenched Northumberland six years ago:

She is not any common Earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare.

Perhaps that was one of the things that distracted me from making a sensible start in life when I was young: I was waiting for the magic to happen, to catch me up, and sweep me into the depths of a story....

Questionnaire

In trying to recover from the dismay and depression that resulted from yesterday's meeting; and the sense that my work is going to be taken even more out of my control; and that as a result I'll never, ever get out of here...

perhaps it's worth copying in yet another writing exercise, this one from a different workshop, that had a very apposite result. It was a nice exercise – well worth doing; you may want to do it yourself, to get you through the full moon. It is also good to do near a birthday – as it is about time, age, and the future.

Proudwords was the annual Newcastle lesbian and gay literary festival; its funding disintegrated and the whole imploded over the past couple of years, but when I first arrived it was impressively healthy (mostly because of massive participation by women – there weren't ever many men, and they weren't central to its operations until the final year, as a sort of stopgap after the lesbians all left in an elaborately multi-directional huff).

In 2006 there was a Proudwords-sponsored series of evening writing workshops, where I met the lively and intelligent playwright Tess (who, incidentally, has been talking about creating some workshops of her own). She and I, among others, were at the final workshop of this series on March 28, 2006. The exercise was unusual....

***

Part one: imagine a photograph of yourself in twenty to thirty years. Look at the photo, and answer these questions, in the present tense.

Where are you?

I am in San Francisco, in the garden behind a house, in the pale spring sunlight. I am looking relaxed and a bit weak, but in a comfortable enough way.

Is there anyone with you?

Although I'm alone in the photograph, there is another garden chair beside me. Someone has just left the chair....

Describe your face and expression.

My hair is completely gray, a sort of iron-white; the wrinkles around my eyes are relaxed. I look a bit sad, but calm enough.

What are you doing?

I am looking into the camera, amused and expectant. I can't seem to help posing a little bit, looking up from the book that is on my lap.

How are you dressed?

I'm wearing a worn denim shirt over a deep red t-shirt. I'm also wearing old-fashioned black jeans; but, in the spring sun, I'm barefoot, shoes carelessly pushed aside.

What is your hair like?

My hair is much as it's been for decades – brushed to the left, a traditional semi-military haircut that makes me look a bit like my father.

What is in the background?

A green, battered trellis and a few plants are behind me, one flowering plant climbing the trellis.

What are you holding in your hands?

I'm holding a book, an old hardcover book with irregularly cut pages, with a brown cover.

What single detail in the foreground is most interesting?

There is a mug of coffee on the arm of the other garden chair; it has a hand-painted, multi-colored sun on it.

One thing in this photo is surprising – what is it?

It is surprising that I am there....

***

Part two: imagine that the photograph has been taken, and write about it, before and after....

Since I came back to San Francisco ten years ago, things have moved slowly, rather quietly. After the war years, shifting economies and climates left the city itself slower and quieter – as Reno and Santa Rosa boomed, San Francisco became a backwater, an archaically unfashionable refuge for a wave of aging gay men and women, hippies, and tattooed ex-punks, dreaming away the now warmer days. The rising waters took back large parts of the western suburbs, but the hills around the old, now mostly submerged Castro are still home to ramshackle Victorians, small boats moving from hillside dock to hillside dock.

It was a jump, at least a slight one, in the continuity of our lives when I came back here to find Paulo. It was after I'd heard that Christian had died; and after I rode out the war years in London, occasionally having to defend my legal status as an alien from one of the countries at war, flashing a tattered passport that seemed to protect me less and less. I'd become increasingly determined to return to San Francisco, and Paulo's loss galvanized me into action: I would indeed go home, where I hadn't lived for thirty years, and see if, by any luck, there was space in his life for me.

We had approached each other warily – years far from each other in different worlds, and without youthful sexuality to pull us together, made any close connection seem odd and almost unnecessary. But I had become more easy-going over the years; and, after we fell back into our shared enthusiasms, he invited me to stay with him indefinitely – at first as roommates....

Phantasmata

A day of haze: last night my guts were grinding and exploding, from what I don't know, so I took a tiny pill of codeine phosphate – it worked, but as always it made me hazy, put me to sleep, and then this morning I was still groggy until afternoon.

A day of confusion and avoidance, unwilling to respond to e-mailed requests (fortunately few).

Then tonight again, my stomach exploding again – what? – what's going on? – I don't know, but I do know this: I ate grilled chicken and root vegetables for dinner – what could possibly be undigestible about that? So: don't blame the food.

And no, I refuse to believe that I'm allergic to pepper and salt and a mix of herbes de provence.

In between these nights, sort of floating. Thinking of various things, nothing in a very focused way; on television, French and Saunders do an amusing (and obviously expensively produced) parody of Fellini – but it just makes me want the real thing.

So I make a list, and am surprised to realize I only have five of Fellini's films on hand – I want to see them all, at least the ones after 1960. Did you know that Fellini read Jung in the late 1950s, which is what made him turn from his neo-realist style to the fantasies of La Dolce Vita? My friends Merrie and Bennett managed to shock me slightly when they said they tried to watch Satyricon and didn't like it – how could anyone possibly not like Satyricon? I forgive them, however.

But, as I've taken another codeine pill, I won't be able to stay awake to see a film. Started reading Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars (and this should tell you how much of a book fetishist I really am – I own both versions; and, despite any apparent gender inequity, the male is filed before the female on the shelf. Well, they can't both go first.).

I don't really like most magic realism in books; which is peculiar, because I love 'real' fantasy, when it's well done (i.e. Tolkien, or Mirrlees, or Cabell, or the books in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks – not that garbage strewn across the shelves of W. H. Smith's.) (In fact, last week I had a £5 coupon for a book at W. H. Smith's – I went in there and, for the life of me, couldn't find anything worth buying).

However, I'm enjoying the Pavic a bit more than I thought I would – perhaps I'll get into it more this time.

Perhaps it helps to be thinking more of Jung, and archetypes, and dreams, and fantasies.

And perhaps it helps, most of all, to take a little pill of codeine....

A dream fragments, fades

Awake at 5 a.m., thinking of this possibility – this goal, this plan, this dream, this path, this vision, this fantasy – of becoming a Jungian analyst.

It is still hard to tell which of those various things it is... but right now I'm thinking: probably a fantasy.

I'll continue to check into it – web research is hardly enough; Melinda says she knows a woman up here who will know more – but I suspect that it is really a place holder, a marker, for a larger desire to go somewhere more interesting in my life. Which, given my situation in the past six years, is hardly surprising.

Here is the question formulated to help myself decide just how real it is: If I were living in a busier environment, with more friends around, events, groups I was involved in, things I was doing for work or leisure or such – if I were, in fact, living in a city where a program in training in Jungian analysis were actually available – would I still want to do it?

Given that such training probably involves at least six, seven or more years of tuition, clinical work, analysis, all of which would almost certainly have to take place somewhere other than here (because it's not offered here)... the closest possible location would probably be Edinburgh, and even that might not work – the truth is this is a fairly difficult thing to do anywhere in the UK that's not London. And many, many train trips would cost much money, and be stressful, and to some extent impossible to keep up with over a long time, given that I do have responsibilities here.

I suspect that, given the fact that it would take more years than I had thought, and that it would require money that's not really lying around here – although large parts of that six or seven or so years sound just fine to me – the whole is probably too vast a commitment, and one that stretches out too far from where I am now. Although I like the idea of a second career, and this one would be pretty wonderful, I'm not delighted at some of its realities – including getting involved with a new set of institutions and conflicts and limitations and bureaucracies.

This idea is probably more of a desire to get out, to do something different, something worth while. (And perhaps, embarrassingly but typically, it's an avoidant move away from writing this book – in fact it is probably that, given my normal patterns.) (Oh, and if you were going to tell me that a University lecturer does do something worth while – yes, of course, perhaps; but I might agree more strongly about that if I were in a place that needed me more, used me more and for more sophisticated things, and responded more strongly to the abilities I have to offer.)

It's a bit disappointing to think of it in these terms. But not shattering, and not depressing: at least I imagined something that seemed really worth doing. And started to realize that I may need larger goals – that I need something better, something bigger, to aim for, than merely surviving the bureaucratic requirements of a provincial university.

Even if only in my imagination....