in the hall of mirrors

Awake

Early, gray but with enough light to waken me. Among various work, and things not done, and a few things done: still a certain drift, this frequent anxiety that my inept use of my own time puts my life in the category of 'unsuccessful, also ran, not quite sound.' Not quite a failure, certainly not a success.

Woolf's diaries again: so comforting, so everyday. She is also disappointed in her life, between bouts of exaltation – of course there are things that seem now almost humorous in their incommensurability: "here nothing but odds and ends", in the midst of writing To the Lighthouse (still my revered favorite of all her books), and meeting with Hardy and one of the Sitwells. Odds and ends from some perspectives, maybe.

In little things – plane fares, what to do next with the book, days when nothing gets done – I of course want to turn to V. Have a fairly childish, peevish sense of missing somebody that I want to be around, somebody I need to depend on. An odd image that has drifted into my mind several nights, as I'm going to sleep: of me carrying her – she was very thin, it wouldn't have been hard to do I think; though I never did pick her up – and walking towards – I don't know what.

Memory of V.

[Read today at V.'s funeral, after other remembrances by H. and one of her French relatives.]

With Vanessa, the sheer range of enjoyable things to remember about her is a bit daunting – so much hard work, so much fun – writing, shopping, dancing – talking with people from all over the world.

The endless drive she showed in her research, her teaching, her projects: she was so involved, so energetic. She seemed always to be making passionately, and politically, committed articles, talks, symposia, concerts – she was always in the midst of things, always doing so much with so many people who could hardly keep up with her. I was always about six months behind her on the book we were co-editing, but she would push me back to work without rancor, gently but quite persistently nagging until I got back on track. She was instantly kind when we lost the thread – Ian talks about how she would sit next to him, rest her head on his shoulder, and say, “you okay, sweetie?”.

She seemed to know simply everyone: she wasn’t only part of every network –across the university, and across several disciplines, continents and time zones – at times it seemed as though she was the network, she was what held us all together, flashing around the room, meeting everyone, and introducing them all to each other. She recently finished an Internet center for her students that was so successful and so obviously beyond the call of duty that even the University administration was impressed. I honestly don’t know how we’ll stay in contact without her – the mass of e-mails from North and South America, Australia, the Caribbean, and across Europe, telling us how much fun they’d had meeting her at one conference or another, how lively and interested she was in such different things. Her blog has a photograph of her hang-gliding in Rio, when she was there for a conference two years ago – and that, as her mother-in-law pointed out, says it all.

One of the Latin Americans gave her a fine compliment, especially from a Southerner to a Northerner – that “she could not only talk the talk, but also dance the dance.”

Because she could dance, and she did have fun: she enjoyed a wide variety of things, most especially luxuries – chocolates, liqueurs and good wines, rich foods, bath oils and lotions – she taught me how to get through northern winters, strewing candles and essential oils in her wake. The sheer indulgence of shopping with her, or the movies and restaurants we went to in groups she pulled together with an organized barrage of e-mails; or just wandering among shops where she knew just where she wanted to go, and in what order. Picnics in the tiny back yard, where she and David would produce a variety of cocktails for a day-long marathon of fantasy or vampire movies, and you’d realize you should have eaten less of the first courses because there were always more. She bought wonderful things for friends, too – the impressive gamut of professionally organized Christmas presents; as Anne sadly pointed out, who will buy such birthday presents now?

And her clothes: transforming her thinness by making it an excuse to wrap beautiful fabrics in layers and scarves around herself like a model, using her own palette of oranges, pinks and browns, which she sometimes set aside for a dazzling creation in white silk embroidered in blue: a flash of southern France, of the Caribbean islands, brought to Newcastle, and Middlesbrough.

Lastly, an aspect of Vanessa that was remarkable, and one that, if you’ll allow me, I know something about: facing her own health, her mortality, without flinching. Of the people I’ve known for the past twenty-five years, including many dealing with terrible illness, Vanessa was among the most clear-headed of them all. She handled hospitals, surgery, doctors, and an obscure condition nobody understood with a firm hand, not allowing them to get to her, to stop her from living her life. It seemed as though illness and death were just – a thing: a difficult thing, an annoying thing, but not an important one – less important than her life, than the people she loved, than her work – far less important, in fact, than this lively, demanding, strong, affectionate jewel of a woman.

When we lose someone who matters, we try to keep a little bit of them with us, to keep us going, to remind us of what they gave us. The little bit of Vanessa I’ll carry around will tell me, when things get rough, to keep my head up; to get some work done; and, above all, to enjoy the day, and all that it gives us.

Memory

Do other people get as confused over the implicit values of their memories?... maybe it's because I've moved around so much, and am so dissatisfied.

When something reminds me of certain angles of life in LA: the Santa Monica bus as it passes that big, difficult-to-negotiate intersection near Rodeo Drive; the cheesiness of Santa Monica Boulevard in places – I wonder whether my desire to live there instead of here actually makes any sense, whether it is rooted in anything that actually exists. The extraordinary bleakness of such moments, the sense of suspended but pointless time....

A brief clip on television, that moves across sunny streets and intersections that are so innately, so casually, so perfectly LA.

And San Francisco: aren't my memories, when they are good ones, highly selective, based only on leisure moments?

Even Australia, though I may not have been there for long, I imagined myself so deeply there: and even a food program that shows a corner restaurant, of a kind I recognize from Sydney, pulls me into a space, a place, a set of smells and possibilities: a whole life that didn't happen, that nevertheless aches.

Dislocated

Feeling, late at night, peculiarly disconnected, dislocated: not merely in time and space, but in intention, in dream – I feel as though I don't know who I would want to have been, what I would want to have happened.

Regrets, as you no doubt know from the rest of my blog, are not unusual for me. Many things dissatisfy me, some grieve me, many things are not what I wanted them to be; I can be philosophical about some, others not so much, though I'm certainly not as angry or resentful as I used to be about it all. I would like for things to be different, but –

Trying to go to sleep: but my mind is, for some reason, trying to construct my life as I would have wanted it to happen. And I can't settle on anything at all: nothing looks right, nothing looks plausible – any place, any position I would find myself in now, seems like the most undeveloped of two-dimensional pasteboard fantasies, or something shot through with problems and flaws, or something that I doubt would actually have been good anyway. What if Dad had put in for a patent and we were all rich, what if I had gone into the sciences, what if I had moved to New York, what if the virus had never mutated, what if I had made so many different choices at so many different points, what if....?

Perhaps some of these feelings of vertigo are because of recent applications, attempts, dreamed-of changes: applications for things I may or may not get – and of course things that I may or may not want, and the wanting is largely contingent on where I am now in my life (which raises the query: am I working hard to get to places I don't even want to be? – a not unusual situation, of course) but hardly contingent on, well, anything else. As though there is no back, no solidity, to any of these things, or to anything that I might want or might have now: as though it is all pasteboard – it doesn't much matter what cards I draw – because they're only cards.

It is perhaps not unexpected, living alone far from anywhere I ever imagined living, in circumstances that aren't rooted in any of my earlier dreams or plans, that I would have the feeling sometimes that if I turned too fast or reached out carelessly, I might inadvertently rip through the backdrop. Or might accidentally wander off the set, into some dusty, incoherent backstage of battered plywood and discarded props. But this is more like an internal dislocation, as though I've lost some internal compass or gotten some internal rudder tangled, making me feel that I can't even imagine where I would want to be – or, more accurately, and more uncomfortably, who I would want to be.

Oddly disorienting. It's as though – I can't sleep, because – I don't even know what to dream about...

Snowstorms

Not real ones. It is colder, and there will be snow, but we haven't seen any yet.

But I kept thinking of one of Peter Altenberg's postcard poems, the one sung in the first of Berg's wonderful but rarely performed Altenberg-Lieder:

Seele, wie bist du schöner, tiefer, nach Schneestürmen.
Auch du hast sie, gleich der Natur.
Und über beiden liegt noch ein trüber Hauch, eh das Gewölk sich verzog!

Hmm, don't much like the translation in the CD notes – let me try; these texts should be short and neat:

Soul, you are more beautiful, deeper, after snowstorms.
And you have them, just like nature.
And over both a breath of mist, till the clouds blow away.

Good days, bad days. They told us in those 1980s seminars that, if we really lived our lives, they would be like roller coasters – good things would happen but also bad ones.

Sometimes I think I'm just not very good at life – it goes too fast. A good excuse, though: this is what other people are for, aren't they? – which is why you should have someone to come home to, someone who says, so how was your day?

But I'm not doing too badly. Life keeps happening....

[Painting by Turner.]

50

This is it... 3 am Eastern Standard time, which is 8 am here.

Huh.

Well, I'm having neither the "it's only a number" (i.e. it doesn't matter) nor any miserable "oh no I'm old" feelings.

Best articulated as:

Boy, am I fifty.

(I do remember telling my mother, when she turned fifty and was clearly a bit intimidated by it, "Hey, you're just halfway!". Actually a rather weird sentiment – halfway to what? – but I think she found it a bit comforting...)

***

So, I'm actually in a good mood – even a very good mood; gearing up for, after my birthday luncheon with ten friends, three days straight of working on the article before traveling to present it. However, although I'm cheerful, a remembered fantasy keeps crossing my mind in the past few days; it's admittedly rather pathetic, but I think it deserves a place here, and should have today's date.

I think this is from the late 1980s –or possibly the early 1990s; this was a repeatedly imagined and elaborated scene, like a sort of video clip, of a future which, of course, never happened.

A part of the fantasy was that it happened ten years later from whenever I was imagining it: so, if it was the late 1980s, some time in the late 1990s – and I think this first crossed my mind on a sad birthday, when I was not in good health. It was the image of me, ten years older, healthy, happy, on another birthday, surrounded by friends – and a lover, whose outlines are of course rather blurred (Reid was long dead by then, and it was impossible to imagine Larry, Paul F., or any others in this role, I suppose).

The center of all this is simply what I say as I look around at them all – something like: Excuse me everybody, I need to say something. (Everybody around the table quiets down.) You know, ten years ago I was alone, with no job and no future, very sick, and I thought I'd be dead soon – a lot of us were sick then; I know I thought I'd never be happy again, and that I'd never – (and here I would look at the lover, not saying anything, but everybody understood) – and then I'd say, sort of tearfully but laughing a bit, So: I guess I just want to say – here's to hope. And everybody would laugh, and drink, and say: Hope, yes, here's to hope.

That fantasy sequence no longer has the pull on me that it once did; it feels like somebody else's fantasy, not my own. But I do feel a definite – not pity, but – compassion – for the younger man who so desperately needed to make up that scene in his head, and imagine that it might play itself out, at some birthday, some day.

AIDS and Memory

[Speech for the second World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2005. My speech for the 2004 vigil is here.]

It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone… but we still have the stories, the memories.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a fairly large package from an obscure address in the California mountains. I was expecting this – some weeks before he died, Jay had e-mailed me to say that his friend and executor Marilyn was sending me something – but I didn’t know what it would be.

It was a photograph, packed in way too many Styrofoam peanuts in a box too large for it – maybe because someone thought it was very precious, and needed to arrive intact. The photograph is frankly pretty amazing – it shows a man with a long drooping mustache, wearing a neatly wrapped nun’s wimple on his head, plus a vast, ruffled, elaborately constructed dress that looks like it could have been the style in the French court two hundred years ago. The dress is patterned with all sorts of music signs – notes, staves, G-clefs, and so on; he is carefully buttoning up a pair of very high, very fancy boots, each of which has maybe forty buttons on it.

It’s quite something, believe me.

I recognized the man in that amazing dress – it was an old friend of Jay’s, and also of mine. Bill Graham was his name, but he was known as the Reverend Mother – he was a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the hilarious male nuns that were such an important part of 1980s San Francisco life. You may know them from Maupin's Tales of the City – they’re the nuns roller-skating through the streets, putting up political posters and handing out condoms and safer-sex brochures. Bill himself was called Reverend Mother because he was such a kindly father- (or maybe mother- ) figure for all the other nuns, and for a lot of other people too. As you can guess, Bill was beloved by many – including of course Jay, who apparently hung the photograph over his desk, next to the window. Bill died in the late 1980s, rather quietly, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; for Jay the picture was a reminder of a source of wisdom and kindness in the midst of disaster.

Jay himself was startlingly handsome, in a Prince Charming kind of way – blond wavy hair, strong chin, dimples. He was also amazingly kind, wise, and helpful, especially to ditzy youngsters like me who needed somebody to explain what the hell was going on in life. In the late 1980s, he left San Francisco for a series of sometimes mysterious new directions – he lived in San Diego for a while, and worked with psychiatrist Jeff Leiphart on documenting and publicizing alternative health research related to AIDS, including good and bad stress (apparently they’re different), hyperbaric diets, and so on. When he left San Francisco, he became more of a loner, partly because, as he admitted, he found it unbearable to spend so much time thinking of dead friends; he avoided contact with old acquaintances, he purchased a boat that he used to sail around the world. He always had big ideas and launched into them with great energy, leaving them behind when they no longer seemed interesting or fulfilling.

He was diagnosed as positive in the mid 1980s, probably not long before he left the Bay Area. I had looked for him intermittently over the years, chasing rumors and often losing the trail; but it wasn't until the winter of 2003-2004 that I found him again. He had moved to a house in Hemet, a tiny town in the California mountains, where he stayed until he died. He was working on a massive historical novel about Charles Dickens. He described his life – very solitary, very quiet – a beloved dog, an elaborate irrigation project for the land around his house, reading and no television, a landlord he seldom saw. He told me that he didn't look well – lipodystrophy, wasting – but as I hadn’t seen him face to face since the late 1980s, I was skeptical, thinking he probably didn't look so bad. He started going into Palm Springs to see doctors, and also started working with a writing group – I believe some of them have been looking to see if his novel can be published in some form.

By May 2004 Jay and I started regularly e-mailing each other - supposedly once a day, and always at least three or four times per week - to keep each other working, to try to inspire each other, and to whine about our various minor HIV illnesses. He was a great comfort to me at a number of points where I just needed somebody to kvetch to about feeling tired, old, or whatever. This exchange ran for more than a year, until he found out, in June of this year, that he had liver cancer. After allowing himself a brief time to get upset, he started focusing on what time he had left: how could he plan for the future of his book, how could he responsibly leave behind his family, his belongings, and the handful of people with whom he still kept contact? I last heard from him in September – after that I sent a few e-mails, but didn't get any answers until a friend of his told me he had died the week before.

I don't know if I can sum up Jay's life: he was clearly remarkable, in a lot of ways – a born hero, in fact. He remembered so many of us from his earlier life, dead and alive, in such detail – he had a great love for his friends of the 1980s, and the fact that he went off to be by himself in his last years was not because he didn't miss us all. In fact, it was a result of one of the most powerful forces in his life – his need to look at the big picture, even the great picture; and his insistence on trying to live in such a way that his life would have a bigger meaning, and a greater impact.

***

Stories inside of stories. The memories and the love we held – well, really, the love we still hold – for all sorts of people who aren’t with us any more. That’s become a big part of my life – I know I can move on, but my memories are precious to me, as they should be.

On the other hand, there are all those people who haven’t left us yet – or who shouldn’t leave us yet. In the past two years, I’ve worked with, and come to know, a lot of people who were born in Africa; some of them have been sent back, sometimes ruthlessly, in the past few months; others have been threatened, pushed around, and as far as possible pushed away. The British government has sent back people with AIDS, many of whom have been on medications here – often ignoring the fact that those same medications aren’t available back in Africa, which means deportation is essentially a death sentence for most.

For those who have died, we have our stories and our memories. But there are a lot of people here – and a lot more out there, in the city, across the country, even across the world – who haven’t died, and who don’t need to die. I love my stories, my memories: I love those photographs, and I love remembering Jay, Bill, and many others. But I don’t want to be left with only memories: so many people in my life, in our lives, should still be here in five years, in ten years, in twenty – we should get to make new memories and to see them often, healthy and happy. I hope we do.

[December 1, 2005]

Journals

In seeking (I am, undoubtedly, what religionists would call a seeker, in many ways) some strategies to get me out of my slough, to get me writing these two articles which are both so overdue and on the verge of being too overdue to publish, I went to Anne LaMott's Bird by Bird, which is both the most neurotic of books on writing and, paradoxically, one of the most comforting. It led me somehow to look at old journals – I don't have many but, in fits and starts over the years, I have left myself a trail of breadcrumbs (which lead back to me, I suppose). I was also looking at the old journals in order to cheat! - to find something I'd once written that I could put into this blog, since I didn't feel like writing anything new (two aborted posts are still waiting to get written, or not as the case may be).

It was strange to look at the old journals – amazing, and frustrating. They form several broad groups – there are the early, oversized accounting books from 1975-80 (when I was, let's see, 18 to 24), which are insanely primitive from an emotional standpoint; they do however show a remarkable number of collisions with men, most of which I'd forgotten, and most of which I handled very, very badly indeed (hmm, not much surprise there). These oldest journals are by someone in such pain and confusion – it is lacerating, and frankly embarrassing, to even glance at their pages.

Actually, though, those aren't the oldest – the oldest is my charming, pretentious literary scrapbook from when I was about 14, which is both ridiculous and kind of wonderful – very clumsy, but aiming very high; such refined interests, but such a lack of awareness of the resonance of those interests – I wish I could support that kid somehow, as I wish the 1970s kid could see a good therapist, someone he could trust, who knew how to encourage a young gay person.

(The scrapbook shows a lot of my sisters – a watercolor by my eldest sister, some woodblock stamps by the younger – and, in many other ways, it shows a lot of their influence and love. Funny that I thought of my eldest sister, even then, as exclusively a book/language person – I really didn't notice how visually oriented she was, partly because I was kind of visually clueless, partly because my younger sister was always identified as the [visual] artist. Especially significant because when my eldest sister finally published a book, it was about color and light....)

Then such a burst of energy, of experience, in the journals from 1993-4, when I spent a year on scholarship in Europe – such great material, in such chaotic form – seeing my expectations transformed, my perceptions so expanded.

There is the year living in Australia with John, 2001-2. In that journal, the tone is strangely simplistic, obsessive, unhappy – repetitive – I really felt trapped by my circumstances in that year, the year I lost the Sydney job and so much money and (what seemed at the time like) all my hopes and dreams. I wish I'd been clearer in that journal about how wonderful John was, and what there was to love about our domestic life in that time – the pages yammer on and on, egotistical and miserable and angry and depressed. I hope he never looked in that journal – there's nothing but complaining, even about him.

What is really bizarre, and definitely unexpected, in all the journals, is the immense change in tone from 2002 on, from my arrival here in northern England. The writing suddenly grows up, becomes interesting (to me now, at least); the style, the attention span, the subtlety, all suddenly increase – a lot. The content is not so different from previous journals – dreams, boredom, frustration – loneliness (it is disturbing, by the way, how much acute loneliness shows up in the 1970s journals – pathological, really). But in 2002 the general level of awareness goes way, way up, and my own interest in what I have to say increases so much – the contrast is weirdly striking, the change in depth enormous.

Reasons for that change? More experience writing journals (it is soon after I started writing regularly, no matter whether I had something to say or not – a strategy learned from writer's books, which I'd started several months earlier in Adelaide). Then there's the whole shock of the Aussie debacle, which closed so many doors, it seemed permanently, but also kicked me into myself, into my own now more solitary but also less fragmented inner space, in a way that was clearly salutary.

Maybe another reason was running out of testosterone and human growth hormone injections (given to me by my LA doctor, who thought it would cheer me up, which it did). There is a slightly hardened, heartless tone to some of the Adelaide journal, which suggests a change in body chemistry – although I would now want the strength, the sexuality, and certainly the weight loss that the testosterone and growth hormone brought me, I'll admit I don't know if I liked myself so much when I was undergoing that particular swerve in body/recreational chemistry. (The other day I saw the handsome Jason Statham in Crank, which I thought was a wonderful movie, in a perverse, demented, funny, testosterone-poisoned kind of way – whatever the New York Times thought of it, it was a great comment on male chemistry.)

Maybe, ultimately, this life I have now – four years of it – although I rebel, revile it, find it dull and limiting and exasperating – is very good for me. Being alone so much, having so much time and space for reflection – in this pleasant home, perhaps the best I've ever had; its competitors in San Francisco and Los Angeles were actually much more limiting, because too small – and even my tendency to waste too much time and attention on passive TV watching and Internet surfing is giving me space to reflect, in a way.

Or of course, maybe I just, finally, partly at least, managed to grow up....

Touched by trendiness

For some obscure reason, tonight I remembered being friends (acquaintances? - at least she seemed to think I was amusing for a time) with a gorgeous, extremely chic, rather wild, very sexy party girl of the highest order, while living in Hong Kong. I can't quite recall her name....

I'm the kind of person who remembers, for instance, briefly meeting Sondheim. I am rather boastful that I know Meredith Monk pretty well, and several major European composers, all of whom would recognize me if I said hello. I've had repeated luncheons with Diamanda Galás, with Alfred Corn and with activist Larry Kramer, and intermittent sex over the years (yes, I am, in my small way, a star-fucker!) with the most popular and famous of living gay writers (no, no names). So I've done pretty well when I've been touched by greatness (okay, Steve Reich ignored me, but he does that to lots of people.) That's what makes me think I'm (at least somewhat) cool – I'm thrilled to know certain writers, artists, and geniuses. Of course, in certain contexts, they all look like nerds – and they are – the ones I like best do tend to be among the nerdiest (I'd have been incredibly impressed to meet James Joyce, coke-bottle glasses and all).

But, a few times over the years, my world has accidentally crashed into an entirely different world, a world that would dismiss all of these people as pathetic losers – the wild, fabulous world of the high flyers, people who look perfect and have lots of money, who go to the right parties and clubs because they were actually invited. I never manage to maintain such contacts for long, because I obviously don't qualify under their value systems – it doesn't take long before I get too tired to party, and besides my conversation's all wrong – I inevitably talk about the wrong things and have the wrong reactions.

But, for a few months, because while I was living in Hong Kong I had a brief fling with an investment banker who was both smart and trendy, I became part of the circle that included this woman. (What was her name?...) And she found me amusing, so when the fling ended I was dragged into her orbit, sort of as a novelty item: oh look, she's got a university professor on her arm to take her to the opening of the new membership club. She was huge fun, as long as you answered questions correctly (and the correct answer to all questions was, of course, yes – let's face it, what other answer would a fabulous-looking Eurasian girl with sultry eyes and the perfect low-cut dress be willing to hear? – yes, we can go the club, yes, you can have some more, yes, I'll pay for the champagne).

For a time, I was one of her coterie – one of the gay men she dragged around and ordered around, part of the background to her fabulousness. She was very smart, but the intelligence was all pointed in a direction quite different from those I would normally be conscious of – it wouldn't occur to her to write poetry or make paintings; she wanted to make a fortune because then she could buy paintings, and I'm sure she was going to do so (as long as she didn't make a more serious kind of mistake – and that would have been no surprise, either, as I got the distinct impression that some of the rapid, complex wheeling and dealing that sped by on her cel phone was on the shady side).

You couldn't help but be aware that here was the Real Thing: she had indeed turned a few very well-paid tricks at some point in the past (wild girls always enjoy hanging around with gay men – the combination of loose morals with relative safety makes them happy, I think), but by that time she was rapidly surfing the upper and more stable levels of Hong Kong money and society, aiming for the kind of financial and social position that I could hardly imagine, and barely understand as such when it was right in front of me. Actually, the character in a novel that best resembles her is Peaches in Rupert Everett's decadently hilarious The Hairdressers of St. Tropez – go read it if you never have, it's quite something.

What was most remarkable was that she was so good at it – even tone-deaf to such high social frequencies as I am, even I could tell that – she really was amazing to see in action at a party: where she knew everyone, and could perfectly and gaily connect to exactly the right ones at an amazing and rather flashy rate of speed....

I wonder what her name was. It will come to me, I'm sure.

The kids are being funny again

[The following rather peculiar typewritten document was evidently the response of my sisters, my brother and I to the eternal parental demand that we thank relatives for our Christmas presents. What it must have been like to preside over a household of four children... note especially the interesting salutations, which probably sounded almost normal in 1971. I would have been fourteen that year.]

_____________
(Date)

Dear __________,

Thank you very much for the __________. (It, They) (was, were) just what I wanted. I (use it, wear it, drink it) often. I hope you had a good (Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Thanksgiving, Birthday). I'm sorry this came late, and it would serve me right if you forgot my birthday next ______________________________.

(Sincerely, Peace, Love)
(name)

Form *** 1-71