in the hall of mirrors

Dilatory

Yes, I know: don't I comment, far too often, on my own rather flaky, inefficient working life in this blog? It seems that both Michael and Patrick have been annoyed by my apparent inability to just get to work, steadily – Michael to the point of gradually removing me from his virtual list of those-worth-being-concerned-about. Oh well...

Perhaps this is one reason I enjoyed reading the journal by the woman known as Lady Sarashina, despite the irritable tone of translator Ivan Morris' footnotes. She was pretty flaky herself – lots of reading stories, sleeping, dreaming, wandering around and wondering what she should have done sooner, done differently, in her life... as the translator points out in the introduction, the busy and socially energetic Sei Shonagon, who was sort of a prom queen for Heian Japan, would have simply eaten her for breakfast. Morris can't help complaining, in fact, about this helpless eleventh-century aristocrat – a criticism that seems a little misplaced, as though he thinks she should have just put in an Honest Day's Work. Probably this is how some of my friends feel about me.

But during this past week, since returning from Spain, I have answered at most half of various important e-mails demanding a response; and along with a bit of shopping and lunch with friends, have done little if any Real Work, of the kind that justifies an academic's long breaks.

Oh, well: after reading Sarashina, all this seems mildly amusing rather than really serious. Tomorrow the students will write their exams, and then I'll have to grade them – 61 pairs of essays. I predict that they'll probably be pretty good – but nevertheless there will certainly be a lot of them; this will be the kind of marking where, after some hours of steady work, you think: Oh, this isn't so bad. And then you count how many are left, and it's always much more than half... sigh.

At least I'm not sick, which is good: it seems that half of the HIV patient group is out of commission with a variety of problems, and I'm sure the students have returned from their various homelands with a complete selection of viruses. But I don't have any of them, yet: ha!...

Although, yes, it's true: my punishment will come. Tomorrow I also have my second MRI, a particularly grueling medical test which will hopefully prove that my stroke symptoms are gone and forgotten forever. But the path to that hoped-for goal involves having my head clamped in a machine that bangs away at me, irregularly, for about half an hour.

Appropriate punishment, you say, for a week of lying on the couch?... yes, yes, I know, it's the Lord's punishment. Or something like that....

Craic

A lovely one-day-late Thanksgiving: Bennett cooking, Merrie setting everything up; I brought Annie with me; Michelle and her husband came, plus two of our new postgraduates from the US. A gorgeous evening, good food, endless laughter, lots of stories, everyone seemed engaged right up to the hilt – just what a social life should be like, among good and new friends who have a lot of old stories to tell and affection to share.

And a number of semi-embarrassing photographs which will probably find their way on to Facebook... but it was worth it.

Light and air

After an amazingly unproductive weekend – even for me (my excuses: last week was full of meetings, this week has too much student work that needs marking, some of which is good but much of which is distinctly disappointing) – I'm avoiding everything, and everyone, by looking through vast books of architecture. 1000 x European Architecture – yes, too many blocky, Miesian buildings; but some interesting houses and landscapes.

And I can't help but daydream, endlessly and rather sadly: what if I could afford a house of my own, one built not bought, in a beautiful part of Europe? Say, Barcelona, with a place in Sitges; or a Greek island; or even Zürich. Some place secure, pleasant, inspiring.

But it is improbable that I'll ever have such a thing... I should probably be looking at low-income housing instead. Or nursing homes?...

Wicked, wicked boy

So work on articles and book has dribbled to – not quite nothing, but very little. And, caught on the prongs of guilt over not keeping up with my energetic co-editor, I find myself reading pointless comics (Hellblazer) and light books... in between bits of Improving Literature, such as Jungians on dream work and Boice on, well on not procrastinating.

Hmm. Where does this sense of myself as bad – wicked, careless, slothful, useless – come from so strongly? All embedded in the general context of endless reading, reading like stuffing my face with junk food, and being criticized for the addiction or indulgence it represents.

Admittedly, if I'm going to waste time, reading Hellblazer is perhaps a bad idea, with its violence, darkness, cynicism and prevailing atmosphere of the general wickedness ascribed to both hell and heaven. That may be where I'm getting this strange resonance – as though my procrastination is tied to something in me that is all about feeling bad about myself. As though I can't work because I'm not worth doing the work, or something peculiar and not particularly sensible like that.

As though some stupid thing some adult said to me when I was young, or some misinterpreted situation from which I drew some neurotic conclusion, is running me....

Which is, of course, probably the case. Sigh. Onward....

What Barcelona and a cat have in common

No, it's not a riddle.

It's also not a forgotten manifesto from the Surrealists.

I still want something... feeling relatively healthy though still not energetic (especially yesterday and today, oddly and inexplicably tired after short errands and walks); but I am restless, and childishly rebellious that I should expect myself to get back to work on The Book (let alone work on editing the other two Books) without some sort of bright spot, something different, an amusement, something exciting.

First impulse is a trip to Copenhagen, or perhaps Barcelona; or something uncrowded but pleasant in southern Europe. I want the place to be: charming, beautiful, different, and probably not completely unfamiliar (which means Barcelona is a good choice, I already have a whole collection of favorite places to go there; Amsterdam is also good for that, but probably too aggressive for my current mood). But I wouldn't be able to leave for at least a week, and I really couldn't walk around a great deal, and....

Second impulse, strong but fraught with complex decisions, is to get a cat. It is years since I've had a cat: my beloved Ralph, whom I found as a kitten in the middle of the night in San Francisco, wandering the streets (as was I, and I couldn't tell you which of us more needed rescuing), somewhere in 1983-4; who came with me to Los Angeles, in a dramatic airplane journey with a remarkable amount of meowing (I'll tell you about it some time); and who was tragically hit by a car on my too-busy residential street, when he was only about three years old. He was truly a good cat, affectionate and calm (as my roommate Russ said, a True Friend); and, although I've missed him for years, I haven't lived with a cat since then.

Of course a cat means a catbox (and I hate those – Ralph went outside, which is of course why he didn't live long though); or some sort of cat door (a double cat door to outside? one cat door through just the kitchen door on to the back staircase, with a catbox on the steps? so would the first make the house cold and the landlord annoyed, and the second make the cat and possibly me annoyed, especially when it's cold outside? yikes).

And there is the danger of becoming responsible for a crazed cat, an unhappy neurotic or frigid taker. How do you know what kind of foundling you're taking in? I definitely need a friend, not just another demanding mouth lined up next to all the students.

And naturally, having a cat would make travel, such as taking a trip to Barcelona, that much more difficult.

What could I do instead of either?... a train trip to York (too much walking I think). A trip to London (way too stressful, no). A brief escape, or a new responsibility, or....

Can't decide. Aargh.

Flowers in the water

Hot bath with oils, flowers embedded in the solid blocks of oils... I haven't done this for very long in my life, just the past four or five years; and I've mostly thought of, explained, them as indulgences and as survival: as pleasures that help me get through the northern British winters (and springs and falls, and probably summers too).

But, while reading late Borges on immortality (much influenced by Schopenhauer); after thinking of what to read for Vanessa's memorial next week; while Twelve Monkeys, with its terrible end-of-the-world qualified by a love story, is on television; and after feeling so tired, so weak and generally unable, but more awake the past few days, I feel another meaning to them....

If it is all transient, life and breath and happiness and illness and misery etc. etc., including both the bad and the good, and none of it lasts; then every pleasure, every flower, is spring, is rebirth. Obvious, really, and something many people must find utterly banal: but this is the kind of meaning I, with my obtuse focus on some sort of permanent happiness that is always out of my own reach, would always miss.

But it is obvious: these fragments of flowers in the bath are flowers on the Ganges, are pleasure and spring and joy; and we do these things not to stave off darkness, and not to try to engage in some kind of endless pleasure, but simply because we can always, at every moment, start over – and so why not with spring, with flowers....

End of the holidays

And the holidays are now officially, by almost any count, over: 4 am GMT on New Year's Day. (I suppose we could hold out for January 6, and Twelfth Night/Epiphany, but that's probably pushing it these days.)

Rain, on what has been a surprisingly warm evening here – and a lovely dinner at Beate's house (a colleague and good friend of blahfeme's). Pleasant talk, good food, good champagne (I supplied Moët! – I thought what the heck, if you're going to buy champagne on New Year's Eve you might as well do it right. And yes, I could have spent another £6 and bought Veuve Clicquot, which always seemed attractive for me because of the name – who wouldn't want some blowsily comfortable, cozening widow making their champagne?).

I insisted on making everyone say what they planned for the new year – annoying of me of course but responses were in good humor.

And now, post-champagne, and post-homemade-Limoncello (made by blahfeme – amazingly good, but also deadly), I'm sleepy... a hot bath (with mango and vanilla oils) and bed.

Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night.

This endris night

The candles are burning, and some old carols are playing; dinner is cooking – rice with saffron, cranberries and almonds, topped with a breast of chicken rubbed with paprika and nutmeg. Tomorrow I will go to blahfeme's for Christmas dinner, but tonight is quiet and at home.

***

I love Christmas stories, poems, plays, vignettes.

All right, not all of them: when Project Gutenberg re-publishes newspaper schlock from the 1870s, I am frankly not amused. But the brilliant ones, the well-written ones – starting, of course, with

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

– those are worth their weight in tinsel. Although there is actually no other Dickens I really like, that particular one is endlessly rereadable, and brilliant – I don't know if it's because I was trained to like it or what, but there are so many wonderful sentences, images, and moments.

And some of the other familiar ones –

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

But she hugged them to her, and at length she was able to smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim... Oh! You haven't seen your beautiful present! Isn't it a dandy, Jim? A platinum watch chain, I hunted all over town to find it. Give me your watch, I want to see how it looks on it."

A letter saying so merely confirms the news that some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose, like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across the campus on this December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, almost like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.

It came a floweret bright / amid the cold of winter, / when half-spent was the night.

And some of my own favorites that you probably don't know: sentimental, funny, sad, or even sinister –

Here were the popcorn strings my mother strung when I was the youngest child, and the paper bells Larry and I made when he was so small it seems unbelievable now, and the jigsaw Santa my husband cut out the same year, and the painted candy canes, and the red ribbons, and the green paper wreaths. "Oh, my," I said, looking at all of it. "Oh, Mom, just sit down," Jannie said. "You just don't remember, that's all. You sit down and I'll do it."

Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say, she made the most of it: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!" And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid – of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

Why should I have my premises made a scapegoat for administrative incompetence and I don't care who hears me! And it's not just the inconvenience – it's the downright inhumanity that makes me so upset. Like this poor girl from up north – all that long way in such terrible weather, and the baby due any minute.... Well, what do you expect me to do? I haven't a room in the house. I don't know whether I'm on me head or me heels – just look at the place, a madhouse and I'm run off me feet! You'll have to find somewhere else, I just simply can't – oh my, she can't really travel any more, can she? Oh dear, oh dear – Look, would it be all right if I was to put you in the stable?...

"We sent them something on the twenty-second, so they had to think of us. There was no getting around it." "Well, what did we send them?" "I forget – good heavens – I think it was a calendar."

"Only there ought to be a star at the top," the woody's uncle said. "Do you think so?" the woody replied, looking thoughtfully at Moominmamma's red silk rose. "What difference does it make once the idea's right?" "The rose should have been a star," Moominmamma whispered to the others. "But how on earth?..."

The sun is shining, the grass is green, / The orange and palm trees sway. / There’s never been such a day / In Beverly Hills, L. A. / But it’s December the twenty-fourth / And I am longing to be up north...

"It's an ominous present," Suzy said. "Aren't you going to open it?"

And, of course, one of the best lines ever written:

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

Winter pleasures

A rather tired day, as a result of the usual gastro problems. (I've been impressed by my secretary Jane's recent adventures with a homeopath, who has hugely reduced her long-term allergies – I may try that myself.) To brighten myself up, I did various at-home things:

Henry James, Washington Square. I'd never read this short novel all the way through – over the past week, mostly on the bus, I was actually getting fascinated with it; I suppose as one gets older the Jamesian aesthetic gets considerably more attractive (long, complicated sentences; intricate relationships; and the sense of what time does to people). I was surprised to find myself actually experiencing suspense: as though the winding path towards a fairly obvious ending was as exciting as any action movie. Strange: it means that perhaps it's time to finally launch into his longer novels – if I've read any of them, it was so long ago, and so duty-oriented (a shame that so many powerful writers end up with their work turning into a demanding task – for instance I never have the patience for Conrad, or Meredith), that I've forgotten everything that mattered about them; but maybe now I would enjoy Golden Bowl and suchlike. Have to watch it, though: the inevitable, Jamesian, fall of dreams and loss of hopes might be a bit hard to take....

Kaidan, or Kwaidan, the Japanese movie (on my computer). Gorgeous, slow, fascinating: so many beautiful pictures, so many eerie turns in the tales. Since it's basically four ghost stories, it reminds me of how peculiar Japanese ghost stories always seem to me – although I'm finally getting used to some of their basic principles: ghosts are really, physically, dangerous; they prey on living beings with an arrogant, aristocratic hauteur that suggests samurai culture; and the transformations can be anticipated, as they almost always fall into certain patterns (fox into woman, badger into warrior, black hair, white skin, distorted faces; and of course beautifully appointed houses that are seen to be rotted ruins when daylight touches them – all homes for the ghosts that drove the capitol from Kyoto hundreds of years ago).

Such a wonderful movie – the ending so wittily inconclusive – but my favorite passage by far was the climax of the third tale, 'Hoichi the Earless', when the long-dead clan of the Heike recreate their haughtily beautiful court to listen to Hoichi tell them their own epic story. There is the amazing use of red banners – torn, rotting; whole; changing from moment to moment as the ghosts remember different times, or as they gain or lose power with the dawn. Such beautiful, vast pictures – touched with cold, of course: all of the memories of Dan-no-Ura (the famous place of the final battle of the Heike and the Genji – sort of the Japanese War of the Roses, except considerably more violent and tragic for the losers), all the formal arrangements of seated courtiers, are slightly blue, and the acting seems to come as though from a deep well – but then of course: they are all seven hundred years dead....

Candles and incense. The bowl of joss sticks next to Hoichi reminded me to burn some of my own incense; the picture of my fireplace, with its background of tiles that were an inexpensive 1930s imitation of the arts and crafts style, with the two candles and incense smoke wreathing upwards, was as beautiful as anything in the movie.

Dinner was also somewhat Japanese: there was leftover rice, with too much soy sauce in it; so I mixed it with leeks, cherry tomatoes, and eggs, and baked the whole into a small meal, with some roasted pumpkin seeds on the side. I should cook that way more often: vegetables, small things, in small combinations – I am usually too impatient and too hungry to eat that way, but it's certainly better for me. And, as with most real Japanese (restaurant) food, I feel a lot more alert afterward.

Then, having finished the almond butter turrón from Barcelona, I opened the last of the egg-yolk turrón. If you've never seen this, it's basically a sweet made from egg yolks and sugar, all roasted into a dark golden slab of candy – actually, I don't know if there are any other ingredients in it at all; in any case it's pretty wonderful. V., last year, had warned me that the egg one doesn't keep forever – since I bought it about two months ago now, it should be fine for another month I think.

And reading stories, in comfort on the couch. Naturally the movie led me back to Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan stories (I assume they transliterated the movie's Japanese title with the W, because of the Hearn stories?) – which, for all their slow movements, are really enjoyable now. (Try them on Gutenberg.) And another book of old stories I found in a charity shop last week – Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara (excerpts only I'm afraid – the whole original is apparently ten volumes of Sanskrit – thank goodness for Penguins). A lighter touch than the Japanese tales, and more comical – though it has a lot of peculiar moments (and can they really say those things about Parvati? – they seem to verge on heresy – of course that's what's so nice about polytheism: you don't have to like your gods).

And that's how I'm spending my winter night.

Afterthought (after bath)

I used to tell people (this is also in the context of noticing, over the years, my increasing tendency to organize my thoughts into neatly packaged anecdotes – a suspicious tendency, but useful at parties, if a bit artificial) that, before I moved to LA, I knew what it was like to relax over a drink, and I knew what it was like to relax around the pool; but I hadn't known that drinking around a pool is a multiplicative not an additive function.

Okay, I didn't say it that way – I said they multiply each other instead of adding, so that essentially drinking around the pool is relaxation, squared.

Some years later, in a relaxed gay resort on Gran Canaria, I discovered that drinking around the pool, naked, is relaxation cubed.

A hot bath with spirits is in the same ballpark: no sun or pretty men to watch, but still....