in the hall of mirrors

Ideal

The truth is, for all my complaining, I have an ideal situation here.

The big middle room, all the walls covered with useful and intelligent books (the 'attractive nuisances' are in the front room, with the television of course). Comfortable, warm; big chair, good lighting. It's raining outside, which makes it all cozier – pleasant, that the rain is beating on a window two feet from me. The kitchen a few feet away....

Well, although I knocked out a few forms and recommendations today – about an hour and a half's work maybe – I didn't do the important things I was supposed to.

And that, despite the ideal situation... hmm... it seems that the only thing that needs replacing is me....

Stumbling [and] Rhetorician [and] Aftermath [and] Ready

Writing this paper: pleased at a sentence, frustrated at a page; gratified when a point comes clear, dismayed when it blows up into something aggressive and nonsensical.

Read what I had for V–, and was surprised at how mad and rambling and repetitive and polemical and... well, you get the idea – how overdone, how Adornoesque, it all sounded.

Fixing it now, to the best of my ability. But this is the mania of the writer – I know, for my audience in Liverpool tomorrow, it's just this thing, and it's either amusing or not. (As in Hitchhiker's Guide, the recurrent joke about Zaphod Beeblebrox: "He's just this guy, you know...".)

But for me it's identity, it's universe, it's either a disaster or a vast success: which means the world of the narcissist and the world of the writer are perhaps the same thing....

***

Having turned a mess of notes into about ten pages of text (pages 8 and 9 still messy, but I'll rewrite on the train, then print at the other end), I'm pleased. Maybe it's not perfect, maybe it's in process, but: when I have my first paragraph, and my last, and they create a sort of symmetrical hat-trick of rhetoric, I'm happy.

Because, after all, I'm kind of a performer at these presentations – somewhat like the magician in a traveling carnival, a bit cheap perhaps, a little greasy, but suave and confident in his effects. If I can make magic happen, if I can manage, perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps even against their will, to ensorcel my audience: then, I'm satisfied....

***

A couple of days later: back home, tired, had fun, wore myself out a bit. Presentation was good. Still doubtful as to the validity of certain kinds of research writing; as I put myself together in the next day or two might comment on it.

Nice to just lie about for a bit, though... oh oops I have to buy my brother's gift on the Internet... later today, tomorrow, soon....

***

And the next day, after being out at celebratory dinner, which, for me, is partly celebrating an end  – since I'm no longer the head of the HIV patient group (I've handed it on), this was the last of their Xmas dinners I'll be invited to. A sense of being done, a sense of moving on.

So: okay, I did it this week, the paper, it wasn't hard. And another separate article was due today, but they said they'd "keep the door open as long as they could" – I need to crank it out in the next few weeks.

And I can do it. I have to do it, after all: it would be the height of absurdity for me to not be in this book – they're waiting for me.

And after that, I can actually do the whole book, the one I'm so identified with: whatever thousands of words a week, I know where to go. Hearing The Fray's 'How to Save a Life' ringing in my ears. Past broken promises to myself, past inability to fathom large works, I can walk right past my past bullshit – this is no big deal: and I can do it.

And I will.

Workshopping

Today I co-presented a workshop on writing about AIDS for the local gay and lesbian writer's festival. During the months of arranging for this workshop, I'd worried that the overlap between the HIV and writing communities here was small or nonexistent – which is probably true; but we managed to guilt some of our friends and fellow writers into showing up anyway, and so we had enough people (eight in all, including both of us presenting, which was a comfortable number).

I did my usual schtick – overview of art about AIDS; I was, somewhat unusually for these presentations, the only positive person in the room. Which ended up identifying me as The Representative Sample, as it were; among the usual discussions, I said something I've said several times in the past few months – that I've ultimately identified too much with AIDS, that increasingly I've made my life revolve around it, and I'm aware that that is rather silly of me. (Which, not entirely incidentally, probably indicates that I'm at a point where I can start to live out beyond it – although both my research and my volunteer work tend to drag me back in.)

Anyway: the structure of the writing part was for each of us to write a sentence about our experience with AIDS, and pass it to someone else to continue. Claire, a handsome young woman who is also a dramatic and accomplished performance poet, gave me the following sentence:

All through my teenage years, me and my peers were bombarded with four words: 'Don't die of ignorance'.

The shock of those times: no wonder the slogans were so merciless – don't die of ignorance, safe sex is good sex, silence equals death. No room for argument, no space to wiggle through: you can read between the lines of all those huge posters – actually, between the individual letters, those great big seventy-two-point Helvetica letters, booming down at you like a speaker coming out with Big Brother's voice.

I mean, I sympathize of course – all those doctors, social workers, government policy makers, faced with the exotic, chaotic scariness of Sex. With a capital S, naturally. The secrecy of sex, the difficulty of legislating it, because it's so hard to talk about – well it is for me anyway, whenever guys would ask, what do you like to do?, I'd turn all dumb and blushing.

But that's where the problem is, isn't it? The shapes of all our thoughts, our days, the ways we walk through the streets, all are overlaid on top of our passions – they take their shapes from what's hidden, from what's hot. And, for me, just as I was figuring out what was underneath, to have so much change all at once –

I wish it had all, always, been different: as though our lives were lived under palm trees, near white beaches, in circles of huts, our needs immediate, our friends affectionate, and funny, and difficult, and demanding.

And alive.

The way it spozed to be

Well, today I actually completed the editing on two articles of mine for publication – in addition to handling a number of e-mail requests with dispatch, and making a healthy breakfast (oatmeal with chopped apple and dried cranberries). And all without wearing myself out or staying up until four a.m.

Doesn't sound like much, does it? But the editing, although I resisted it strenuously (as usual) for several hours, wasn't that difficult; and the resultant papers are, I think, far better for the extra work – and, in fact, they're now quite good. That makes me more pleased with them than I am with my two most recent publications, both of which were interesting but not very carefully finished, nor were their arguments worked out as far as they should have been.

All of which makes me feel as though: aha, I can actually do this – I'm not an academic fake: all I need to do is keep it up. If only!...

I always think in this context of Saki's story The Oversight, where Lady Prowche is desperately trying to match her guest list for a large house party so that there can be no major arguments (over suffrage, politics, Greeks and Bulgars, etc.). She doesn't succeed, of course, which is where the comedy lies. But lurking as it were behind the story is Sir Richard, who "has his literary work to think of; you can't expect a man to concentrate on the tribal disputes of Central Asian clansman when he's got social feuds blazing under his own roof." She tells her friend about another year when the guest list went wrong and there was a huge argument, and says, "That was the year that Sir Richard was writing his volume on Domestic Life in Tartary. The critics all blamed it for a lack of concentration."

I'd love to think of my own work this way: if only one could have a tasteful Edwardian house, with someone anxiously trying to keep things calm and pleasant; and, much more importantly, if only I were the kind of person who – if things were quiet – would always concentrate, be disciplined, work hard, and produce good work....

Well, I can dream. As long as I don't have to write about domestic life in Tartary.

Dementia Poets

From 1987 to 1992, I was part of an HIV+ writing workshop in Los Angeles run by the wonderful Terry Wolverton. My main partners in crime were Gil Cuadros (the most successful of the lot, who published his powerful poetry collection City of God with City Lights before he died in 1996), Kevin Martin, and Mark Lane; the four of us, plus a couple of members of the workshop whose names I've mislaid over time, wrote the following one silly evening, at a time where AIDS dementia was a very real prospect for us all.

It is really a chain of giddy in-jokes – those who know me will see my dirty thumbprints on 6, 7, and 11; Gil agreed with me on 7 (this is from when a time when the tiresome Dennis Cooper was considered The Thing), and he was clearly reacting to me in 10; Kevin's lemon poem (quite a fine one too) gave us no. 1, and I can see that Mark was guilty of 3 and 4 – but, beneath the black humor around losing one's mind, it still reflects the affectionate warmth of a group of friends huddling together and ignoring the storm raging outside.

The Dementia Poets School of Writing:
The Ten Rules of Style

1. Always start with lemons.
2. Never use proper names.
3. You don’t have to be on antihistamines to talk to your furniture.
4. Always disagree with everything so that everyone gets totally confused.
5. (I forget what no. 5 is.)
6. That is not funny.
7. All parodies of Dennis Cooper should be introduced as such, to avoid the embarassment and confusion of others thinking you actually want to write like that.
8. There are no ideas but in things.
9. Blame it on the virus.
10. If you know what an objective correlative is, just keep it to yourself.
11. It’s not a matter of opinion, you’re just wrong.

Interspersed

Overlapping experiences:

• have had a cold for three days, groggy and sniffling (sniveling? – that always seemed to be a different sound of course); every once in a while my face crinkles up, I mumble 'damn', and sneeze to one side or the other.
• the weather is gray and increasingly wintry, but
• it also has that windy liveliness that one associates with Halloween, which makes autumn so fascinating. (Is that merely the fractal shapes of masses of leaves blowing by? If beauty is merely fractal, how hard it will be to wax lyrical about it....)
• and a lot of work has gone well, things in my area are actually way ahead of where they were at this time last year, and even in some ways ahead of where they've ever been, but
• there are still clusters of things to do, logistics mostly, and because I've been so fast and aggressive about settling things with students and colleagues they expect those things to be rapidly settled also; then
• scheduling a meeting has been chaotic and unsuccessful, which has me distinctly exasperated; and on the other hand
• one of the anthologies is due in less than a week – I have some time to do it, but of course masses of anxiety, combined with
• the odd complacency that comes with knowing that whatever I do it will be finished soon, and
• longer-term discussions of projects floating through all of this, combined with having to make a list of my work over the past seven years – there is quite a lot of it – which is really rather satisfying.

Not to mention the complex resonances each of these bullet points invokes – even the sneezing reminds me of the HIV patient presentation on Thursday, where a student noted that I was already sniffling and asked whether I was paranoid about getting ill, or getting other people ill.

Of course this is the truth of living, much of the time – the pleasant and annoying, the good and the bad (last night reading Beerbohm and watching adult swim – a sharp contrast of high and low cultures, of the leisurely and the rebellious, the exquisite and the raunchy; plus experiences of good food and bad, interesting downloads and boring ones, etc. etc.).

That is what makes diaries so enjoyable, often more so than any novel or even essay – Woolf writing about her annoyance in meeting someone tedious for lunch, but overlapping it with her pleasure at the spring air, and her concerns about the printing press, all in one paragraph. Each thread tempers the others, without leveling the experiences of any of them.

Even realistic novels tend to cluster experiences in a falsely symbolic way – I get most annoyed with those dark satires where every experience, every detail, proves what a miserable schmuck the antihero is, and proves what a mess life is at every turn.

It's just not, of course, usually, really like that....

Dim / reflections

Positions... different ways of viewing life – my life, my life as it is now, my life in my imagination, or if you prefer, life generally....

(a) Resistance to writing is a neurotic symptom, related to being a rigid and immature judgmental personality, constellated with various feelings/strategies of fear/laziness/self-justification, etc. My anxious reactions to the impending restart of the school year are more neurotic symptoms, from someone who is both rather self-indulgent and also somewhat oversensitive to the emotional eruptions and conflicts that all humans engage in as entirely normal social practice.

Or: (b) Health concerns (minor symptoms relating to a major condition which are not in themselves, however, major) and side effects of medications (notably Ritonavir and Efavirenz) together form a general and long-term physiologically depressive state that makes it difficult to be energetic, to approach problems proactively, to engage smoothly with others, etc. This is exacerbated by personal isolation (lack of supportive personal relationships at home), a weak social life out of the home, and poor adjustment to an alien climate with less sunshine, warmth, etc.

[Addendum: (b1) generalized toxicity related to medications mentioned in (b) exacerbated by current liver problems; liver reacting to subject taking numerous commercial food supplements that are overburdening it and causing rises in liver enzymes, etc., creating a general context of a body out of balance.]

Or: (c) Writing in this context is just a way of being coerced into various cultural/institutional structures – commercialization/consumerism applied to academic writing, and to writing generally. The book is a product – and worst of all, the academic book is an unreadable product (a consumer object that is not consumable, something designed purely to maintain a financial/institutional structure of production, purchase, measurement, etc.). My worries around productivity are actually elaborated versions of a need to conform, and my battles with it are a bid for freedom, or at least a bid to show that I know what my bonds look like.

That would mean that my doubts are rooted in a wider awareness of the very real falsity [sic?] of my position – a realization that my world is indeed both trammeled and dependent on political/cultural structures that are only internally viable, and in fact are simply one rather minor kind of nonsense that is common in my time. Consider in this context Proust's fussing about what people think of him, or even more appositely Musil's tangled ideas about a Viennese culture that is rotting to pieces around him – one cannot help feeling from time to time when reading Musil, 'oh get over it', since all the things he is anguishing over will have vanished a few short years later in any case. Maybe in fifty years, climate change will be such that anyone reading about such worries as these would be similarly thinking, 'oh get over it', and wonder why I didn't give everything up and go live in the Orkneys.

(This is the kind of interpretation that could also encourage giving away all one's goods and becoming some kind of monk, or joining a commune, or moving to a South Sea Island, or even joining the Foreign Legion. Unfortunately, my postmodern, passive position dictates that it is more probable that I will simply buy a DVD of a film about the Foreign Legion – I'm thinking of Beau Travail, of course – and watch it to look at all the muscular soldiers and their engagements with life and death, instead of actually going anywhere, instead of actually doing anything.)

All this, and much more equally useless analysis and reflection, has occurred in a context of two days of dimness, of a shadowy sense of reality, of the past and the future held in a suspended world of temporal fractures and multiple possibilities... a sort of quantum-universe awareness of one's life....

***

As we are once again in the hall of mirrors, what are some of the reflections of these moods and ideas, lying around on my Parsons table? A book of Karl Kraus' aphorisms (distilled bitterness, like Unicum, that peculiarly named, unpleasant-tasting digestive liqueur Joe was so proud of having bought back from Hungary); South Park flickering by on television, with Kenny's parents telling him the story of Job, so he can get over his troubles (hemorrhoids, as it happens); and Stephen Micus playing through iTunes – a fine musician whose graceful, dignified mixtures of traditions perfectly fit my mood.

How can, in fact, these extended chants in Persian, in the strong 'belt' region of his baritone, have such power, as they repeatedly and fierily hit the note above the tonic and wail around it, holding yet longing, falling and returning, mourning yet resigned –

One flings one's hands open to the desert winds, and tries to give everything up to them: take it, take it all....

Failed

Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly, which was quite wonderful. On my way out, I bumped into Jonathan, the handsome and successful young doctor who has helped me on some of the HIV presentations, who was headed into another movie; I was in enough of a daze that it was actually rather difficult to fake casual conversation.

The book has always been one of my favorite Philip Dick novels (with Ubik, the first I ever read; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is a sort of parallel to Scanner; and, above all of course, the mysterious The Man in the High Castle, which has a climax that I always find far more disorienting than any of the basic concepts that run the novel). I couldn't help identifying fairly deeply with the film – the anomie, the sense of decline, the sense of confused waste and the constant return to the repetitive, meaningless, draining actions that create that waste.

I also spent an appreciable part of the afternoon arguing with a postgraduate applicant who seemed to be dooming himself to failure through doing everything backwards, and complaining about the results; and I had the mild shock two days ago of having my opinions dismissed by a colleague, a fairly frequent experience during the school year (I become unused to it in summer, but will have to deal with it again on the usual regular basis, starting in a couple of weeks); and of course the previous weekend in London, and the week in Spain, spent with colleagues and advisors who have great affection for me, but not much in the way of expectations, and two of whom have made some promises they will clearly not bother to fulfill – not out of any malice, just out of a combination of forgetfulness, plus the implied sense that effort spent on my career is effort that is kind of wasted. Good money after bad, I suppose.

They all acknowledge my potential – but of course I've been playing the potential card since my early teens. Potential instead of action: a disastrous exchange. As I think backwards through time – the past few weeks, even months, and most certainly the years, the evidence simply continues to collect....

All this, with various other minor and fragmentary experiences, plus my normal obsessive concerns about writing and failure, came into focus as an acutely lucid morning dream and waking vision of my current position: that, although it is true that I am not a dramatic failure, it is no wonder I am powerless at work, not invited to preside at pretty much anything, simply not considered by a great many of my colleagues, locally and internationally. It is all simply a natural and accurate response to the figure I cut in the world, to use a rather eighteenth-century phrase – people do not think of me because I myself have not made enough happen; I am indeed perhaps in the middle of the scale of normal academic failures, not someone anyone would need to fire, but someone who will simply be in the back of various pictures, someone who is not really suitable for promotion, or attention, or being asked to speak in a professional context.

And this is not experienced with my usual inflated, narcissistic tragedy or self-pity: just an edge of horror at how clearly the picture develops, if I look at it straight on – that, whatever excuses I can drum up around health and history, I have firmly cast myself as an also-ran.

And even this blog, of course, is simply an ineffective attempt to bypass the work that would have a significant effect on my position, in favor of the casual, ephemeral – the failed....

Entangled in the blankets

I woke shortly before my 8:30 pills, turned off the alarm, went out to the couch to lie for a bit more: engaged in an interesting (to me) psychological game, which had a depth that only gradually became evident – imagining myself differently, as someone who was going to get some things done today (marking postgraduate papers from last month, and above all writing of course). Not as someone who is perfect and on top of everything: imagining myself that way is an old pattern, and a useless one – but also rebuilding an image of myself in my head that is different from the expected one, the one who is disastrously behind on everything. Felt very strange and new, and rather powerful... then drifted back to sleep, and woke at about lunch time, confused, aching in a couple of joints, with all the clarity gone.

I continue to be useless, passive, inert. Yes, I'm more healthy/energetic than previous summers, and I have definitely recovered to some extent from the rage/misery I was experiencing when I crash-landed here in northern England, after being summarily ejected from Australia, which apparently ended my Pacific life and dumped me back into the more crowded, old-fashioned, guilt-ridden, chilly Atlantic cultures. I'm (despite that sentence) cheerier and more resigned, and work not done doesn't seem so awful.

But it's still fairly awful: or not awful, but silly – I have such ingrained patterns of not doing anything important that I don't think I can get started on anything that matters. Yes to surfing and downloading, no to writing; drafting articles happens very clumsily and at the last minute; and so on. I remain fairly dismayed at myself....

Virginia Woolf on the influence of acquaintances on one's creativity/productivity:

"For some reason one can't settle to read, and yet writing seems the proper channel for the unsettled irritable condition one is generally in. Perhaps this condition is intensified by tea... particularly if one happens to meet Roger in the Charing Cross Road... with four or five yellow French books under his arm. He is the centre of the whirlwind to me. Under this influence I was blown straight into a book shop, persuaded to lay out three shillings and seven pence on a French novel, made to fix a day for coming to Durbins, invited to a play and fairly overwhelmed – made to bristle all over with ideas, questions, possibilities which couldn't develop in the Charing Cross Road. Of course he was in a hurry to keep an appointment, and to produce one or two plays somewhere – ill too, he said, but somewhat relieved in his mind by reading Fabre, who makes him see that after all our war, hideous though it is – but here we parted." [Diaries, 8 April 1918]

Wonderful sentences; and a wonderful encounter, if a bit overwhelming. One of the problems here is that there is no one who has that effect on me – smart friends (all in the university, unfortunately – the same problem that I had in Hong Kong), but most of them, when we talk about writing, have only either a depressing or an intimidating effect, or simply have an impact on me that is off-center, as it were... they don't seem as close to my concerns and needs as, say, my beloved Trisha (in the far-off Pacific Southwest), or even Jenny down in London. Or other friends, mostly associated with California, with Australia, with warmer and more cheerful places, where people are more involved with each other's emotional lives.

And here's a Proust quote, from The Guermantes Way, that is attached to some of my e-mail signatures; on reading it, my old adviser responded to it with mild irritation, as she knows how ridiculously true it is of me:

"If only I had been able to start writing! But, whatever the conditions in which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the undertakings not to take alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep fit), whether it was with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and keeping it in reserve as a reward for industry, taking advantage of an hour of good health, utilizing the inactivity forced on me by a day's illness, what always emerged in the end from all my efforts was a virgin page, undefiled by any writing, ineluctable as that forced card which in certain tricks one invariably is made to draw, however carefully one may first have shuffled the pack."

I always want to identify, not with artists who were busy or successful, but the ones who were, at least at first, confused: Berg, Proust... people who took a long time getting started, and whose works show the marks of insecurity and indecision. Alfred Corn was kind enough to tell me last year about Amy Lowell, who he said only started writing in her sixties (though my dictionary makes it more like her late 30s) – he said: there's always hope....

[Art by Padley Wood.]

The whole point

I'm enjoying this blog. It's not a big deal, I know – mostly just small, casual writing, with the address shared with a few friends – but it is succeeding in exactly what I wanted it to do, that is, helping me to get into the habits of writing, communicating, thinking, making sentences. Even at the lightest level – and this is basically a kind of journalism lite – it's already distinctly productive from my point of view: this gets easier, I feel better about it and about things in general, and the vast stretches of research and writing I should be doing (instead? along side?) look less impossible and guilt-ridden than they did a couple of months ago. In fact, it is kind of like doing journalism: and, as we all know, many writers spend long stretches of their career on journalism... it's a while since I wrote the many reviews and short pieces I wrote in the mid-80s and early 90s, so it's good to get back to something that has the same effect.

There are, though, two faintly tricky aspects: one is the difference between a traditional journal and this; the other is the changing context of the Blogsphere.

I already have journals: nice (sometimes very nice – I like Moleskines, very much) blank books, in which I've made occasional entries, especially while traveling and sitting in restaurants and cafes. Naturally, those journals function in a context that is considerably less tricky than blogging: one can write anything at all, one can be boring, one can babble incoherently, one can quote fragments of remembered poetry, one can draft and sketch and scribble down secrets. Those are all of the pleasures of a journal – as opposed to a blog.

Not that this is such a massively public forum: few people read these pages, and my name isn't on it. But it is still 'published', or made public, in the technical sense: and I know that other academics (and at least one New York nanny) have been concerned about the potential problems of talking about relatively private thoughts in a public forum.

Of course, I'm not known for being secretive – even in my academic writing, I tend to tell stories on or about myself, and some of my most successful articles have been grounded on examining my own (sometimes undignified or tacky) reactions. Some of that is merely my nature – as a thinking type, I'm not terribly sensible or completely in control when it comes to questions of emotions or social connection; I tend to regard those questions as areas of potential research (research to be followed in public, with myself and my friends as experimental subjects!), and anyway I'm not terribly good at instinctively knowing when to stop before I go too far. Besides, the years in San Francisco encouraged me to treat people as relatively 'safe' receivers of personal information (just think how different I would be if I'd gone to New York in the late 1970s, rather than the West Coast).

It's a bit like being a confessional poet: having read perhaps a bit too much Sexton or Plath – and it's a position that was exacerbated by my own circumstances. For instance, several of my most personal academic papers were written in the years when I still expected to die at any point – I thought they would be 'final' statements, so it didn't seem to matter that I would tell all.

The other tricky part is, as I mentioned, the Blogsphere. 75,000 new blogs a year (most tank pretty soon, of course); newspaper articles and television shows about the Phenomenon; commercial use, publicity, media connections. None of that interests me at all, but of course it makes this all a bit dubious: as if writing about one's own ideas isn't egotistical enough, the vast sectors of the Blogsphere that seem to want this to be a version of Pop Idol tar the whole idea of blogs with a slightly tacky brush. (Now there's a blurred metaphor – consider it my gift to you.)

Oh well. This blog is what it is, and I can use it however I like. And maybe I'll start doing some Real Writing – if I do, it will be partly because of this – this blog....