in the hall of mirrors

Easter week

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

***

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

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

How could I have forgotten all that?...

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

***

Tuesday.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

B. asks me to feel my way into it.

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

***

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

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

B.: that is the electric fence.

***

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

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

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

*** 

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

***

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

Then what do you do?

I hold him.

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

Closing doors

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

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

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

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

So that's another closed door.

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

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

Temporal

Perhaps the problem is one of time...

Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival.

But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course.

Time awareness past: memory, and apparently modified memory. Patches of time remembered as such, which are distinct from those remembered as still, or non-active though still breathing and living, tableaux. Areas of emotional memory that have their own life – most of them not terribly charged, but reflective.

Time projection of the future – which for me also has embedded clusters of anxieties: that which is not completed, that which might happen.

And the relatively broad, seamless stretches of idealised future circumstances, of being in some situation I think I have wanted – Barcelona, a partner, a cafe with friends while traveling – and being aware, as I often have, that the relatively undetailed quality may suggest a problem: that my imagination of my own future future tends to have a bit too much fantasy in it, which accounts for some of the weaknesses and the scattered results in my life. But that is my nature, and I don't hate it: it just suggests a need to pay attention.

The vastness of death, of existence before a certain time, and then after a certain time.

Wanting to see futures: not merely to continue existing, which hasn't seemed terribly interesting for a long time, but to continue living into a time of interesting change, hopefully positive change. Because of the change, more than anything, I think.

(Recall that dream a few years ago: a half-drowned San Francisco – the one where I sit on the open balcony of a Victorian high in a hill above what was Noe Valley, now largely submerged by the sea –a warm, mild sun across the islets of the altered, now quieter city, and we see occasional small boats between them: I am old, and I can hear someone I love, but cannot in the dream see, making a small meal in the kitchen – a dream suffused with time: and the dream-me is happy...)

***

Today I was mildly groggy/cranky – after about a week of mild side effects each evening, after I take the more obnoxious pills – today I met with D. on my required report on research plans – then emails – the computer is slow, I send yet another irritable message about it – an afternoon dotted with current prospective students – most have problems easily resolved...

in the midst of this I played, on the computer, Chris Wood's 'Walk This World with Music'. Eerie, dark, and electric: the dull world comes alive, and time dances with sudden energy –

The music itself tends to do slightly strange things with time: double-stopped chords, lots of open intervals – which always makes the music reference eternity: flashes of organum, pedal points, drones, static harmonies – and beginnings and ends of phrases are sort of curled around themselves in pitch and rhythm to catch and carry you: this is one of those pieces that pulls you into the rhythm, and you dance, alert and fast and defenceless.

***

Some of this strange relation to time is from analysis: as though in the past year I walked, sometimes fell, into deeper caves in myself – times of floating awareness, of contemplation.

And the framework of anxiety that would normally make me anxious in relation to those times: that I am never doing enough – that armature seems to have fallen apart, joints rusted and weakened, the structure of embedded guilt twisted and disintegrating, fallen across the pavement in twisting, collapsing lines.

All this is sharpened by my rather cold reaction to the dull world – political stupidities on both sides of the pond, the sharp focus on what I want and how to get it: assuming governments, laws, economies and institutions will not be my friends, calculating –

Which means that this floating time sense, archaic chunks of unfinished selves, are not distractions: they feel like important realities – in any case more energetic, more alive, than the pathetic realities of a bemused and chaotic world.

***

Do you know Nowotny's Time? A book recently suggested by an analysand – and that led also to the International Society for the Study of Time, which she used to head. Yes, of course time is a mystery, of course we are embedded in, creatures of, time: but even thinking about it begins to illuminate the caves we walk through....

***

I hope I can finish the articles – I like my editors, and don't want to mess up their projects; and I also focus on the Jung-Institut, on writing and research and stuff that the university, the patient group, various people, want me to do.

But yes, there's a slightly disconnected calm behind it – a sense of: yeah, whatever.

***

Because time is so vast: I'd rather watch the world slowly wheel, clouds drift across the sky – the heart beats, and I know that it won't do that forever. My own life and death have seemed especially – well, contingent, or perhaps, incidental – over the past year.

This is not a bad thing... it is not even an uncomfortable thing.

***

Looking across time: a widened view, not quite in focus; but taking it all in....

Summa

A dramatic year...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketch of a conversation

...

You didn't really think you were having strokes, did you.

Well, if memory – no, I suppose not; there would be other symptoms?

Yes, there would. So: dissociation.

But more dissociation than I should expect, yes? That sense over the last few months, from the last year – more connected, more of myself aware of myself –

Yes.

But if I'm dissociating: if I pick up my watch and go to wipe it off, then come back to that little table near the stairs carrying a couple of bags, and don't pick up the wallet and keys –

Which isn't that strange.

No, okay. But if I'm more self-aware, more self-connected, why would I be dissociating? Unpredictably?

You mean you don't normally do that?

Well perhaps I do, but...

Everyone does, it's not such a problem.

I get that, but I'm not happy with it. I don't need the ego to be in charge all the time, but... at least there should be fairly consistent communication between levels?

Maybe, maybe not. This reminds me of the downstairs bedroom –

Alone, away from the rest of the family. Creativity but disconnection, those blank books with calligraphy and poems, my sisters' drawings, and also their encouragement.

And then the university interview –

Where it's clear that my notes and sketches are trivial, fantasies, they think it's all crap – I haven't drafted an opera, I've just messed about with pieces of paper.

So creativity splits away, falls into the unconscious.

I told you about the depression when I got the letter, that I wasn't accepted – going to bed for more than a day, something you just don't do in my family.

Well, dissociation... so, forgetting things.

And not keeping my attention on things: when I had friends over to dinner last Thursday, I forgot the onions – I was making a risotto – fortunately I asked R. for help, she fried them up in time and it was fine. And I didn't get as angry, as disoriented, as I used to when I screwed up with guests.

Dissociation?

At some point in talking to all these people, I just lost track – I wasn't going from one step to the next, I skipped one. Dissociated. I distract easily, and in the kitchen if I get distracted I can completely lose the –

This is part of your dissociative psyche; as you become more comfortable with parts of yourself it happens more – there is a kind of relaxation about it.

So, this is the price of being more involved with people and activities again – which I haven’t done very much for a decade, or more. Socializing at parties, and performing on stage: that wish to be seen.

But you hold back when you meet guys in a way that frustrates you…

When the Italian guy caught up to me in the mall, asked how the dinner had gone, I was a bit incoherent – cheerful, but babbling – probably he didn't notice. But that's twice in the last month: I think they see me and say, hmm, attractive, then look again and see old, out of shape. Positive. They're still interested, but... less so.

I'm going to disagree with you on that, again.

Well, nobody agrees with me about that, I still won't let go of it. So, when dissociation happens, it doesn't need to be a kind of blankness, it can be a presence in the world – the sensual, sensate world, or social or enjoyable – but one that doesn’t keep track of things. Doesn't need to keep track of things. Like Deleuze and Guattari – not paranoid, so a bit schizoid.

Oh, Giegerich’s take on dissociation in the neurosis book – denial, etc. –

But Giegerich gets trapped in consistency, which is very important for him. Not for me, I think he overdoes it.

Moments, or rhythms, of greater attention, then.

Connections between forgetfulness and control, social connections to attractive men, and getting up in the middle of the night to get some writing done… I was surprised last night, it was a good draft of an abstract.

You're still paying attention to nearby things, to important things: as opposed to drafting out a whole opera without focusing on the details, which seems to be the other extreme.

I have a lot of values and associations around the intuitive function – more than thinking or the other functions… many of my life stories of success or failure are tied to intuition, and its success or failure; I identify with intuition, which I suppose is linked to dissociation. I guess intuition is my secret love…

You share that with many Jungians!

It does have a magical quality… as though, is there even any such thing as intuition? See: I don’t check in with immigration in Australia – and my life is wrecked. Faustian, unreality, fantasy, dissociation… because I am depending on intuition: a sensate person would remember, as Faust does not, that there are steps to follow, debts to pay. A sensate person would keep track of things.

A bit harsh, but all right. So: what will you do when the Italian guy speaks to you again?...

...

At this point

A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years...

in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that appeared again, in heightened post-Confucian forms, in Mao's revolutions...

Across a time where I have expanded and perhaps more broadly experienced certain spaces of my existence, my psyche: where illness and health are seen to be two sides of the same thing, as are living and dying, being and not-being, creating and not creating, closeness to others and distance from them.

Where memories of people – Terry W. seriously explaining something from across a table in Los Angeles, Mark R. still alive and grinning with glee in the living room of a Victorian in the Castro, my sister talking to me in the garden of a London museum – Norma walking energetically in front me in the park a couple of weeks ago, Ma Jaya holding her crowded court in the back room of John's house in West Hollywood, Bill G. looking up at me from the piano in a small club in San Francisco with his kind, ironic eyes –

where they all fuse, in some way, while still remaining distinct...

Strangest of all – and it is strange because I have spent my whole life judging what I am doing: and so there was not enough practicing, not enough writing, not enough work – and later not enough joy, too much being alone yet still not creating, much – that space of time that seems from one angle to be either wasted or celebrated, or – but as we know those judgments merely fold back onto themselves, endlessly burrowing into tunnels of never-enough, so there is no point in extending the discussion of them –

strangest of all is the sense that, looking back, and across, from this late point in life, near my sixtieth birthday – that if I had done everything completely differently: performed, written – stayed with people I loved, landed luckily in some happier houses in warmer climates, smiled across the guests at a dinner table at a man I loved who was sitting at the other end –

that it would have actually been no different: that this awareness of time, of space, of what is and has been, would not actually have an altered nature or substance, merely because it focused on different events, different people. Different raw materials.

That our lives are all, really, very similar cloths, even if made from different threads....

•••

Some visions go to this place, beyond the point of seeing life whole: where the contingency of what actually happened becomes self-evident – the later parts of Nabokov's Ada, Kate Bush's Coral Room – Iain Banks' Excession, Mosley's Hopeful Monsters, Jane Siberry's Oh My My, Malick's Tree of Life – even Spielberg & Kubrick's A.I.: the Buddha would have been pleased.

Where the fights and attempts to win and lose have not merely been resolved in one way or another, leading to a triumphant or tragic ending – but where we have seen that they could have been not only different, but even more: they could have been anything: that we could have reached this clarity from any set of points....

Glory, glory

Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced...

Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones, something with a rather trendy shape, sort of like tiny hairdryers. I think they're the earphones I bought in some airport or other.

I disentangle and wrap up three pairs, then take the newest ones and plug them in, looking for the jack socket... just testing.

And... at first I think, a bit loud. And then – oh this is gorgeous: yes it really is.

Stunning sound. Chris Wood's version of Jerusalem, which was making me sad a couple of weeks ago, but now with such rich, vivid tones and undertones...

Mesmerising.

•••

1980. I am in San Francisco, I am young (about 23) and, I think I can say with some accuracy, cute.  I mean, yeah, clueless, but... cute.

It is a San Francisco Halloween – perhaps my first, or second? – and I have met some guys who Actually Own a major Bar, which means they are extraordinarily cool. Older of course, but hot. Everyone is gradually getting ready for a Halloween party, so there is much delay and smoking of pot as people change their minds on costumes and times and places and drinks and whatnot...

I am sitting on a white leather sofa with men who come and go and discuss plans. One of the guys sits down and shows me something new that is very, very cool: a Walkman. Apparently Sony has created a leetle teeny cassette player, and you can play whatever you want, and walk around with it. You listen through the earphones – here, go ahead, try them.

I have never seen such a thing...

But what is absolutely, utterly amazing, for me as an ambitious if rather lazy musician, is that when you play a new album I've never heard of – Guilty, by Barbra Streisand and a blown-dried Bee Gee, with a trendy white-on-white cover – the shimmering partials are so beautiful, it is just...

My impression – and everybody's impression: none of us have ever heard anything like it, the fidelity is extraordinary, and the album full of high, sweet sounds – is that I've never, ever, heard music like this.

Yes, okay, the pot probably helped... but really: what sounds.

•••

It's been true for a few years: I don't seem to care about music quite as much. I teach, I write, but often I can just... well, take it or leave it. (Would my colleagues, my students, be scandalised by my apostasy? Let's not tell them then.)

But this... it is past midnight, I should be in bed, but I'm still just... listening:

Miles Davis, Nefertiti.

Nightnoise, Bring Me Back a Song.

I haven't heard some of these things in ages, they take me back to... well, the 80s.

Tippett, String quartet no. 2.

Kate Bush, A Coral Room.

Slightly drunk with some of the music by now, I think.

Marco Beasley, Tu bella ca lu tieni lu pettu tundu.

Dieter Schnebel, Schubert-Phantaisie.

The sounds just glow.

Sun Kil Moon, Trucker's Atlas.

Gamelan of Cirebon....

•••

And now it is past one, I really have to go to bed...

Earphones.

Who'd've thought it.

•••

I'll go to bed in a bit.................

Negative capability

Analysis, a couple of weeks ago.

For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything.

The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our confidence.

Later, when I go back to my room – a round room in a stone castle, with ancient hangings, a modern bed in the middle of the floor that looks awkward; my suitcase is open on it –

he is there, sitting in my chair, and he refuses to leave. I am angry, I pick him up, in an ungainly fashion, holding him in front of me with his legs folded – I try to drag him to the door – but then as I wake we begin to talk, as though we haven't been fighting –

•••

My analyst starts laughing (he is usually gentle and polite, but today he is... I don't know: a bit rambunctious?). He loves this dream: the teenager is obstinate, he's at my desk!...

He’s bright, he’s curious… he doesn’t do things the right way because well, dammit, that’s the point of adolescence – that’s why we need children, to invent the world anew…

And he says something unexpectedly direct, out of the blue:

'How have you ever gotten anything done? You're the problem, not him!'

•••

I am wrestling with the teenager in the dream: Jacob and the angel?...

My mother used to wake me in the morning by turning the radio up loud in the kitchen: I was always angry, wanting to stay asleep.

My analyst sees: in that intermediate place between sleeping and waking, the young man and I are able to communicate: that feels so dramatic, as though my control is down.

It feels as though there’s gold in the dream, but it’s out of my reach...

•••

A strange couple of sessions: these images and feelings vibrate, are alive with energy –

but at the same time there is a dark line around them, one of sadness: I keep feeling sure that, fascinating as all this is, any real energy or understanding that is embedded in these strange images will not be available to me.

Why not?

Because... because of the story of the Buddhist abbot, and the resulting promise: that I will have lifetimes where things are out of my control, so that I become less arrogant, so that I pay attention to those in my care.

Because I am too old, because I waited too long, because I have been too slow in my analysis, avoiding the hardest things and their sensations, their emotions.

Because I'm so tired lately, feeling ill with side effects, worried that I'll have to retire early, give up on moving anywhere, on any future change or hope –

Because, when I went to the local funeral in Bali in the late 1990s with an Aussie boyfriend, he could see them dancing and cutting themselves with knives, but not bleeding – while I saw nothing, just had a sense of several hours passing, looking at the stage, where I felt antsy and uncomfortable, but I couldn't remember what had happened.

Because, although I don't disbelieve in the transcendental, I can never see any of it: and that may include my own power, my creativity, my happiness –

•••

My analyst says: is this something the young man would know something about? He doesn’t want to leave because he wants something from you.

I mention meeting with a struggling student last week: I told him he might go into the depressed place, like walking into a cave with a torch – just to see what is there, not to solve anything.

My analyst continues: you know exactly how the young man in the dream feels, or nearly… He needs empathy and help, rather than coercion.

•••

When I finally finished my PhD dissertation in the summer of 1997 in Hong Kong – thirteen years after starting graduate school, when no one thought I could do it – I don't even remember the summer. It was written, by me, but I don't remember doing it.

I wasn't at my normal level of consciousness.

Which is something like not being able to see the Balinese knife dancers...

•••

My analyst: this dream feels different from my other dreams – the same, but different… it’s emotionally much clearer.

I note that this is a castle, which is unusual – the hangings are tapestries, not something modern. It's very old: is it almost like the broken stone platform far beneath the surface, except we are inside it this time?...

My analyst: the teenager is fairly inarticulate, because that’s what teenagers are –as are complexes when we try to engage them.

I say: he’s too angry to articulate it – the others in the dream are exasperated that we can’t convince him to do what we want. He looks civilised enough, well dressed, but we can’t get him to fit into our social conversations...

My analyst: he’s not even shadow, he’s you from the outside! This is big…

•••

Since before the session, all day, in the train coming here, the tram, I've felt something else, there is some other meaning here: I am having some sense of something I can't quite define –

my analyst makes suggestions, I tell him sharply to stop: it's not clear to me, and if we keep talking about concepts and specifics I'll lose what I'm trying to see in myself –

almost like a shape, like a shape of my own internal world and ideas:

I've told my own analysands that sometimes the hardest things to understand are like the astrophysical nature of a black hole in space, of space/time that is distorted, but invisibly so: and that distortion, that extraordinary gravity and pressure, controls us, but can't be seen by us.

This feels similar: I can't quite articulate it, though I keep trying –

I don't want to let these things, this mystery, collapse into some concrete solution: fall into something merely two-dimensional, when my experience of it is – well, clearly a lot more than two dimensions.

I am fighting to see this – whatever it is –

•••

My analyst, who has backed off from ideas and questions, sees that I need to be allowed to go my own way in this (I rarely snap at him – he's very sweet, we get along very well) –

he tells me about negative capability: Keats' comment in a letter about the special, difficult ability – really, the willingness – to keep something suspended, unknown –

it is like Jung's ideas of holding the tension: the difficulty of being willing to not know what is going on, to stay with it until it becomes what it needs to be.

In Keats' famous letter, he uses Coleridge as a counterexample – Coleridge, older, a critic, more certain, who instructs the younger poets in the ways of the world: but Keats recognises the flaw in Coleridge, that he needs to reach a conclusion, he needs to decide how to do things, what things are for, very quickly. Which means he loses any possibility of understanding something he didn't already understand...

My analyst says it's also like Nagarjuna's stanzas on emptiness. I'll take his word for it – I can look that one up later.

•••

I want to change everything.

Do you know that I moved often in the late seventies, and in the nineties? And then for the past fourteen years I haven't moved at all – a loss of momentum, in fact too much anxiety over the exhausting moves of 1992 to 2002.

I can even list them - fourteen, or fifteen (depending on how you count them) homes in the ten years between 1992 and 2002:

    4/85-11/92                Spaulding Avenue, LA, with various roommates, especially Paul P.

    11/92-8/93                Cumberland Street, SF – the most beautiful hillside apartment

    1993                            Kiel – six weeks for the language course for the Fulbright

    1993                            Darmstadt – the first part of the Fulbright

    1993                            Berlin – renting a room from a pharmacist who had a habit – kicked out

    1994                            Berlin, Alexanderplatz – the huge streets, the old-fashioned Ossi apartment

    9-12 1994                    Irvine, CA, for the seminar with famous musicologists

    12/94 – 3/97             Market Street, San Francisco – the shabby druggie building; expected end...

    3/97 – 5/98               Hong Kong, above the ocean – a professional, age 40! A glorious apartment.

    8/98-7/01                  Hong Kong, Central – more high-density, closer to things.

    7/00-1/01                  Los Angeles, Westwood – visiting professor; intensely ill... a strange time.

    1/01-7/01                   Hong Kong: I plan to move to the job in Sydney... which blows up in my face.

    2001-2                        Adelaide (Sydney) – living with handsome John, but no job...

    2002, summer          Los Angeles, Susan & Rob’s – with my boxes, for another huge move

    September 2002        Newcastle: at Ian's for a month, then this apartment...

with the money gone on the move and the year without a job... and a sense of having climbed to something, and crashed: life is in ruins...

No wonder there has been such a feeling of lostness in the past fourteen years.

•••

When I try to throw the young man out of my office, I wrestle him, I hold on to him – like the legend of Proteus, who will only tell you what you want to know if you hold on and don't let go:

like negative capability – holding onto the shape of myself that has formed out of all the events of my life –

No, I know better than that: I wasn't formed by the events.

I was formed by what I thought of the events: what I made them mean....

 

Saṃsāra

So: massive stupidity, an inchoate, unthinking drive to flee into some imagined, nonexistent past, and an extraordinary amount of manipulation and intimidation that finally imploded on itself.

It no longer even seems interesting to me to pretend that everyone has a reasonable opinion – it's clear that many who voted for Britain leaving the EU were confused, deceived, or simply stupid. Certainly many with little long-term awareness – this was a great victory for Murdoch, more than anyone. Which tells you about the structure of power these days.

•••

For me – and yes, I am furious and disgusted – the primary associations and meanings are not only structural chaos, financial disaster, conflict, restriction, loss of possibilities, and even increasing potential for moving toward a new era of war.

They are also that cluster of personal anxieties that I associate with poverty, illness, instability, and living in places that are either too expensive to afford, or too foreign for one's rights to be established: where things may be okay one year, but cancelled or denied the next. The instability of life in a more narrowly constituted nation, that doesn't have a broad base of support and flexibility across a number of borders.

So, for me: temporal points in San Francisco and Los Angeles when money fell apart or health care was denied; or later in Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney, when government departments told me: you're not our problem, you're just some foreigner....

Now, very often things have gone well for me – even a late rent payment was almost okay, and the pills eventually came through the mail.

But a few times larger disasters would hit, and security, home and money would evaporate, and I'd start thinking: exactly what are the transitional steps that lead to living on the street?...

But I've never actually had to do that, so: lucky me.

•••

(Incidentally, don't you love the diacritics? One of my favourite facets of Wikipedia...

Small pleasures: they keep us going, don't they – sometimes through an entire life: like the fussy apartment of an elderly concentration camp survivor in the Village in New York, where there is a shelf of small plates that were hand-painted in an Austrian factory that was destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid...

Are the plates saṃsāra? Or the memory? Or the great political decisions and battles that led to those memories, this place?

All of them are, of course...)

•••

However, I remain acutely aware of a substantial difference between a protected environment, one that you expect will remain protected (we arrange research trips, climb aboard flights without thinking about visas or permissions, focus on the charm of a city rather than the border we can't cross – and if you break your arm you go to the local hospital), as opposed to a more uncertain environment where you need to apply for rights and permissions.

And you may be given those rights, or not; and the decision may change because of the elections next month, or perhaps something goes wrong and the local police decide they'd rather that you go to the airport, then...

Now, political apologists, and certain everyday people, will insist – usually in ways that try to shut down the discussion, so that they can control the anxiety of others – that Everything Will Be Fine, that you will just apply and it will probably come through, it practically always does, it will only take six to eight weeks or maybe ten at the outside, it will get handled.

I think those people are unaware how a life that is lived contingently – that is, one where the world rocks and spins in an uncertain fashion, one where stability and that which can be defined as 'home' aren't really present: one where you can find your balance, but you have to frequently adjust your stance to keep it, and your muscles have a slight twanging tension because you are always ready to leap or roll to the side when something big starts barrelling down towards you – is itself an endless ache, a drain of energy and focus of anxiety.

Thus, for me at least: a drug-dazed Berlin landlord whose new boyfriend wants me out, right now, in the middle of the night, with everything I own; a San Francisco apartment in a wrecked neighbourhood, where the guy across the hall who has been doing more crystal every week vanishes one night and never returns, and the schizophrenic guy upstairs pounds on the floor in the night when his psychotic visions become unbearable; or unpacking in a beautiful, sunny apartment in Hong Kong, as droves of foreigners close British businesses and pack up the money, sell houses, and fly away, while daily rumours of Beijing's power shifts, in the dark shadow of the malevolently sharp-edged Bank of China skyscraper, filter down through a chaotic network of Putonghua, Cantonese, English...

•••

Most of the time, it's not the individual disasters that are tough – though when they happen, at intervals of a few years, it can be hard to recover.

It's that constant slight tension, that sense of not being taken care of – the sense that, for years or decades or the rest of your life, you will need to watch where and when the wind shifts, and relocate yourself to corners that seem more protected than others.

And that is a tiring way to exist....

•••

That, I think, is why I'm so angry: I know perfectly well that it can be exhausting to hold oneself ready for loss, collapse, and the evaporation of support systems.

It's a lousy way to live, really; modern governments get away with this far too much. Perhaps, for someone like Murdoch or Cameron, it's useful because it keeps the public perpetually distracted – a little fear, a little uncertainty, is useful for keeping people tractable.

But it stinks. I honestly thought I was mostly done with that kind of life – it appears that may not be true...

so: toss the British passport in a drawer, use the American passport, and start finding out how to get to practice or work in other countries – get information on applying for citizenship in those places – and see how many years you have to wait until stability is once again available...

at a price.

Depths... or dregs

Continuing to go through everything in my office... preparatory to moving.

Which will be delayed a few days (hallelujah) and will be to a relatively large office at the quiet far end of a corridor... hmm my luck seems to be improving.

(Don't get too excited, I'm only there for two years, then they move us back to probably distinctly smaller offices... though if they're like the ones on the second floor they're also very pretty. If all too open – the modern boss's fear of not being able to observe the wage slave.)

 ***

The books and scores – handled. About 15% removed, to the university library, students, or trash.

But papers, now...

Papers are of course either more pointless (a 2004 board of studies? dump) or – and this is the nub here – considerably more intimate.

My old compositions, and arrangements. Yes, my late 1980s decision was appropriate: they are small, often flimsy – and it is now obvious that I kept trying to move from writing small, brief pieces directly to multi-movement monuments: a shame I couldn't figure out that I needed to work through a range of mid-sized works...

Or perhaps, more simply, it wasn't within my range of abilities.

***

A rather strange but obvious interpretation: in the four years in Hong Kong, I was ambitious, energetic – I didn't finish everything but I did a great deal. It surprises me how many projects I created, or worked with, that came through, that were successes, public events.

The collapse of Sydney, the year when John took kindly care of me and my disintegrating expectations, when I kept doing professional things but in a more fragmented way... and then I landed here: and the truth is, I fell into a certain amount of background depression for some years. Though Newcastle is an intelligent, energetic department, funding and major urban musicians have never come through as much – big cities still suck up culture (and regard themselves as generating it).

Or, in any case, I, at least, was no longer able to connect to interesting projects...

(I do always remember that RMA conference in London, a couple of years before I left Hong Kong: I was, not to put too fine a point on it, the Flavor of the Month – surrounded with postgrads who wanted to know what I thought of many things. A few years later, in Newcastle, they didn't seem to remember my existence...)

•••

So many other papers, so many other concerts, poems, events, reviews, students...

and yes tedious meetings (all of that can be instantly dumped; but the swell and ebb of meetings in the British academic system is also marked in these piles of papers).

Fragments of the personal – people I barely remember (and sometimes people I don't remember at all, sorry about that). Others I remember with great affection, sometimes loss. Cards, letters...

Folders, well-made or dusty. Flashes of creativity and fun, or of collapse and diffusion.

***

And it's true, many projects and people were tied to my sense of self: no surprise of course.

But these spikes and thorns barely catch on my skin: it's true, I am less (or, somewhat less?) anxiously attached to my own success. But the memories of these processes and feelings in my life...

(We already know the worst of the seven deadly sins for me was always pride. Or, in times of failure, envy – but for me they're two sides of the same thing.)

***

Is all this stuff why this week's analysis session was – well, unexpected?

I had walked in, already a bit pre-bored with myself, feeling diffuse and as though I didn't know where this was all going – dream fragments not very interesting, dull and vague irritations over move not at all interesting – when suddenly a different, bigger picture began to appear:

I could see the shape of the space wherein these things are happening – and suddenly any dullness seemed a predictable part of a process....

Yes, even that counts as a vision.