in the hall of mirrors

Correction / Amplification

An addendum to my previous post – because I don't want to be unfair to the theater company Propeller:

• I assumed it was obvious in any case that my mood/attitude in that post affected by my judgment of their Comedy of Errors. (Plus my judgment of the play itself, which I still think is... well not up to S.'s best. 'Could do better'...)

• Tonight we went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream – much more a favorite play of mine anyway – and it was much, much, much better. (Still spoken very fast, but I think a lot of troupes do that to Shakespeare these days – the inevitable cost of linguistic/cultural change.) In fact, at a number of subtle points, it was really wonderful – so my thanks to them.

• Many excellent players, but note – great Titania, wonderful mechanicals, great Helena... and:

• the actor who seemed intensely sexy to me in briefer roles in The Comedy of Errors was even more so as an open-shirted, barefoot Oberon in the Dream. Some people are just, essentially and remarkably, hot.... a shame he didn't come to the bar afterwards. Ah well.

We did, afterwards, go to a trendy bar – then to the gay bars, where I haven't been in, oh let's see... several years I guess. At first we went to places that were too loud and too young and too straight – then finally we all managed to agree to go to the (sort of) leather bar, which was  considerably more relaxed and pleasant.

Of course the entire concept of meeting someone I like did cross my mind....

But that's all right; I'm home now, and will quietly go to bed.

Shell games

The odd mood of the past few days – not a unique mood for me, but one that seems to be holding steady more than usual – is perhaps emphasized by the combination of having enough space to stay in that mood (it is our Easter holiday, I have a lot of work to do at home or in the library, but relatively few necessary contacts) and recurrent impulses to stay with it, even when it is reflected in accidental meetings with strangers.

The sense of sadness – but with a certain calm, and clarity.

A day of procrastinating, after a week of procrastinating, after years of – well, you get the drift: which finally fell into about three hours of intense and semi-productive editing. With constant background noise from my own mind about how miserable this all is, how useless I am, etc. – a familiar litany, especially around this project, out of all of them. And again that illusory quality – the project itself slightly unreal and contingent to the world, and my anxieties very unreal, but they shadow everything.

A play that wasn't really very good – Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare's cheesier from my point of view; Propeller, an all-male troupe, made it as energetic as they could, but it still seemed flimsy, a faintly empty event. (As there's space for a brief flash of a review – the Adriana was extremely good, putting on a barrage of successful coups de theâtre, and a handsome Doctor Pinch did one short but impressive turn; the others were also good, but not good enough to make me care about the traditionally silly separated-at-birth stuff – which is in any case the outer shell of theatre at best, like baroque opera, or Edwardian melodrama.)

And so: actors, physical energy and sound, the overlap of the tawdry and the funny and the not-quite-real – and the slight failure of skilled professionals who can't quite manage to bring an illusion into presence; perhaps emphasized too much by a set and production that projected the tawdry, the shallow, the dispiritingly unsuccessful imitation of reality. (Brits, and comic pseudo-Mexican accents... some of them simply shouldn't try.)

A late dinner at one of our small city's new overpriced, overhyped celebrity restaurants – a lovely young waitress, warm and friendly, and me feeling oddly dramatic myself, like a mystery man alone at a corner table; with a sense of reality (the food, the woman's smile) mixed with unreality (the slightly false, commercially amplification of the food and restaurant, the slightly disjunct though sincere expression of her hopes for a life in politically conscious theatre).

Later, in bed, reading a Chinese fairy tale on an electronic screen... a fragment of history in it, but the details are wrong: but it's a fairy tale, so who cares? And the comfort of the story fades quicky, as the story disintegrates into fragments and footnotes after two pages... the many other electronic texts around it in the program, really too many to see: novels, stories, plays. Philosophy. Psychology....

Scraps of news that are threatening and oppressive – plus fragments that go in the other direction: is this the illusion of the internet, where people grasp at a fragment of a thing and trumpet it as the whole – or merely the illusion typical of those past middle age, that the world is perpetually getting worse? Which I don't believe in any case; but it has been an ugly couple of weeks. The large structures and historical/political waves back and forth – never entirely real in themselves, interpretations and partial stories (not to mention all the falsehoods and altered stories). I don't normally like investing too much energy in them – but they are distracting lately, and create anxiety – or the shadows of anxiety.

At 3 a.m., or now 4 a.m.: it has been so cold this week, but with flashes of spring – and now you can hear the birds outside: sounds that seem late and slightly out of kilter this year. Birds are morning sounds, but it is still absolutely dark out – the processes that hold the world together keep moving forward, but again, not quite in sync with themselves, or with us.

A Buddhist, or a Sufi or any of a number of others, would of course say: perceptions seem disconnected from feelings because they are, things do not seem real because they are not. The sensory seems off because it is in the mind, the imagination fails because it always will. Of course, of course, but –

Perhaps the birds know.

Well: back to bed....

Insight

How unexpected –

some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the indoor, snow-filled spaces of a number of dark, scattered winter buildings, into a sort of big, open, airy space that I don't entirely comprehend:

perhaps because of two rather odd and unclear dreams that became startlingly revelatory in yesterday's (Skype) psychoanalysis session – thank you, B.! – and our attempts to connect up what they showed, to outline an entire line of change and development –

tonight a shockingly bright moment occurred when I could suddenly feel sheer joy at wanting to learn to be a psychoanalyst: the (perhaps strange-seeming, but real) sense of calm and value that is embedded in my whole connection to death, but through it to life – and at deeper levels than I normally can go –

•••

Or, to put it more coherently – perhaps. Though I can't guarantee that going back to the beginning will entirely help, as this is one of those paradoxical ones.

Two dreams, one that invoked an avant-garde theater performance (like the books I liked so much when I was younger, that are still behind me on shelves in this office – the experimental plays, the Grove Press editions! the ideas, the surprises, the sheer wildness of it all) – and opposed them to a dull, miserable sensate side, personified by a slatternly woman at the door –

and then a second dream in a children's library: extraordarily pleasant and warm, people sitting in chairs, parts of the room transformed so that chidlren could play there (a bit like the fairy tale exhibition that E. and I saw in February, in Zürich at the Landesmuseum – but this dream version was much brighter, with more California colors) – but which is then interrupted by me making a joke about AIDS, which offends a man sitting nearby, at which I coolly explain that I didn't mean to be offensive but just to make a point, and am in any case myself... well you can see where that exchange goes, approximately as it would in the waking world.

And somehow these two dreams – the first colder one, the second warmer, both with their oblique, interrupting fragments, which were really perhaps their important points – were somehow extraordinarily sad. That I was, in fact, extraordinarily sad when I worked through them at length, despite the fact that neither dream seemed sad in itself.

And that sadness is perhaps my own experience of something that people have told me, in the past few years – that my toughness in relation to death, to AIDS, was only achieved by cutting away parts of myself: as if on a cold, snowy hill, with a rusty knife – for the sake of sheer survival....

•••

So: after the discussion of those two dreams yesterday, and its resultant sadness, but ultimate dazzling clarity – in the last minute Brian said, so, explain it all to me again: and I spewed out one long, multi-connected sentence that reached from my failed hopes in the late seventies, from so much death in the eighties and nineties, through many events and interpretations up to the present moment in this present place, and facing what I have to do right now – or not facing it –

it is strange that today I would suddenly experience that exact same chain of things, that long series of knots, as leading to this amazing joy: as though caring about all of these things could really create a joyous life:

as though that ol' Katha Upanishad is actually right, when it says that we go through death, into life....

•••

My conscious, coherent mind is still a bit confused, as is this post: but it all seems to hang together, in some way that is perhaps inexplicable: yet real.

Temporal anomalies

(... you know... as in Star Trek, I suppose.)

So, several weeks of the stress but not really misery, chaos but not really feeling frantic, the Stäbler book – working on it but not fast enough – and many smaller demands, extra classes coming out of nowhere, paperwork, and so on and so on. With echoes of Zürich and Rome, summer and winter, and other places all mixed up in between.

Today has been rather like the past few days – getting some things done but not the crucial ones – except, well, sometimes.

And tonight there were not one but two parties – one where I was to go with Rumana, one where I was to go with Michael and Andrew – I finally sent negations to both, settled down to... well, mostly to waste time, then had dinner, then actually started the Powerpoint slides for Monday's class. Which aren't hard, and which do indeed need to be finished.

And Michael texts me again, and his party is very near by – so I throw some clothes on and go over... bar, crowd, drinks, noisy music. I order a glass of wine (ah, I am the wild one) and sit down and talk to everyone.

The band gets up to play, the recorded music is shut off – a trio I've heard before, two older guys with one of my former students: basically folk, really. And they're really very good, but –

the problem with folk ballads, especially ones that refer to Ireland and Australia and working and distance and when-she-went-away stuff, is that you start to get into that mood. You know the one – Sad, Alone And Far from Home.

By the third tune I can see it getting to me – well, it is a good band – and drat, by the time I've got my coat and made good-byes and escaped, it's sort of set, and –

That sense of time, and distance, that is simultaneously both abstract and utterly concrete – all of those songs combine some broad concept of place (the outback) with a person who said something (I can still see her face when she...). This is all even more painful when you cross-reference any of this with San Francisco or Australia (because I don't much care about Connemara, do you?) – there is a very exasperating way that concepts of places simultaneously suggest worlds where things went badly, or could have gone wonderfully, and are in any case out of reach. Forever, naturally – not only in the song but also in reality.

Damn. So now I can't do any work at all. Good thing it's midnight, may as well give up on my slides – and we'll see if I can dream the folky sadness away....

The party

And so... a birthday party for Andrew, thrown mostly by his partner Michael and a number of helpful friends, in their large house. With many people from different places, who have different styles... lots of fun, the usual rambunctious cheer in some rooms, quieter and more relaxed in others, and a lot of talking and laughter along the cornered hallway; dancing in the room where the stereo is, sitting where the couch is, eating where the dining room table is, and of course there is that group that will never, ever, leave the kitchen, that hands back and forth an endless range of empty and the full bottles of champagne, and washes glasses....

Talking to J. (with a surprise), talking to R. (things seemed to be going well), talking to D. Talked to P. at some length, surprisingly intimate about life and experience and anxiety. B. told us he wants us all to go on holiday to Barcelona and Benidorm – we said we need dates before we can decide anything – but it's not a bad idea (at least not the Barcelona part). Andrew's mother in a light dress, standing comfortably with my arm steadying her across her back as she talks to everyone in the hallway – she always enjoys being with her son's friends...

One of the best things I have ever read was the collection of eight stories, Mrs. Dalloway's Party, by Virginia Woolf. The stories were preliminary sketches, warmups, and afterthoughts for the novel – usually when they appear in larger collections, they seem scattered and unfocused among other stories about quite different places and people; but someone was once brilliant enough to collect and publish them as a powerfully integrated set.

Such amazing stories... each about the inner world of one person, or actually more often about two or three; the young girl in a new party dress, who is proud of the mark on the essay returned to her that day but then shattered by the casual dismissal of a more fashionable schoolmate; the fiery young man who can barely express his intense thoughts trying to relate to other people or figure out why it is so eternally difficult to do so....

Not all of these people are helpless, at a loss, at a painful angle to the party: but many of them are, and I have too often felt that way myself, even at the best of parties: the introvert's chaotic and unreasonable response, the inability to synchronize one's feelings with the conversation, with the celebratory touches, with the other people at the party, well-meaning as they may be.

But tonight was calm, and full: though I have had so many exasperations lately – the extra classes I have to teach, the long train trips to Leicester for my new psychoanalyst – tonight I felt complete, without unmet needs from the party: granted, I probably ate more than I needed to; but connecting to people was easy and comfortable, talking about things that mattered was constantly recurring without pressure, and it all seemed meaningful, unfolding like the flowers she loved....

It does, I suppose, get better – Clarissa....

Downs... and ups

Zürich. Küsnacht. Jung-Institut. Two and a bit out of three weeks.

I do seem to be emotionally volatile while I'm here... anxiety over my ability to become an analyst, excitement over new ideas – or, as you'll see, anger over new ideas – plumbing unexpected depths...

Well, the past week was a rough one.

Both the diagnosis of the loss of meaning and the idea of the dire need of meaning (which come nicely together in Jung's statement, we “cannot even get it into our heads that no myth will come to our aid although we have such urgent need of one”) are nothing new.

I suppose it started with the assignment to read a famous article by radical post-Jungian Wolfgang Giegerich. Terrifically intelligent, ruthlessly precise – an obvious background in German philosophers. (In fact, I kept thinking that some points would be more easily shown using my favorite French post-structuralists, but never mind.)

Unfortunately, Giegerich rips away a lot of hope and imagination – and his arguments aren't bulletproof; in fact they're a bit like Sartre, or like some modern atheistic arguments that say, Look, you can't see anything, so it's not there. Arguments that make me tired – I can't say that I believe in anything very definite, but I'm certainly not such a fool as to strenuously disbelieve in things.

Then Philip Kime, whom I like a lot, gave a controversial knife-edge precise seminar on redefining – no: more accurately defining – the Shadow. But I won't go into detail on that one, as he's still working on it for a summer presentation.

So: a lot of highly intellectual stuff, some of which made me frankly furious.

With a depressed person, the most dangerous point is when they feel a bit better – then they may have the energy to do violence... [my notes]

Then Kim Arndt, who graduated from the Institute last summer, gave a seminar on suicide. And it was very well done – we were all proud of her, in a frankly rather possessive way (One Of Us!). But the topic is of course dark – and the depths of the discussion and material went further than I really expected...

because, of course, although I style myself as familiar with death after years of the AIDS crisis, I'm fairly at a loss with suicide. Even the one last month in my own city, by one of the HIV patients who participates in my group. He hanged himself when his benefits were ended....

Psychotics become virtually inaccessible to psychic growth or transformation. Profound lack of humanity opposed to powerful, seductive forces... and very skilled at becoming manipulative and controlling/destructive of others. [my notes]

Then Ronnie Landau, a lively, energetic analyst from Philadelphia, spoke about psychotics. For eight hours. Brilliant, frankly – but, as you can imagine, I started to lose it a bit – internally at least.

Unexpectedly for me, although she mentioned films like Silence of the Lambs, etc., her actual choice of scenes to show toward the end of a long day were all from Tilda Swinton's We Have to Talk About Kevin – which I didn't know at all. Disturbing quality, messed-up mother-child relationship, yes, that much is clear... but the climactic act of violence is presented in fantastic/allusive form, so that you have to figure out what really happened. Hardly Silence of the Lambs. Or even a Saw advertisement on the side of a bus – let alone Hellraiser, which my first analyst thought was interesting back in the late 1980s – I saw approximately thirty seconds of it, and that was enough to regret ever having heard of the thing.

But, despite the obliqueness and lack of gore, Kevin is a film with an intensely disturbing impact, because of the acting and the writing – I know because unfortunately I came back to this apartment late at night and watched large parts of it... which was a Bad Idea.

Pictures of shipwrecks... a ship is a container, a vessel. Or an oven: container, heat – the motherly power to sustain, to bear, gets lost – failure means a container breaks, loses security. [my notes]

That day I'd also had a first supervision with Robert Hinshaw, which had a calming, reassuring effect. Then Renate Daniel gave a seminar on failure... failure in the patient, failure with the patient. You can see where I'm going with this. So, on Friday, when Kim gave another seminar on ceremonies, I was thinking of the dark legends of my own life, rather more than the topic I'm afraid.

That evening, the kindly secretary for the Institute passed me in the hallway and said: I'm very sorry to tell you this, but... and it turns out there is a major problem with one of the qualifiers for my promotion to the second half of the training, that extends back for a year.

Hmm. At first, surprise, exasperation – then I started to get distinctly angry, disoriented. Rather bad timing, on the evening of the student party... and the weight of the whole week seemed to be crashing down on my head.

Within 20 days of the decision in question an appeal must be submitted, in writing, with the Curatorium. This time frame is not negotiable. The written appeal is to state clearly why an appeal is sought and why a reversal of the Selection Committee‘s decision is requested.

Show up at the pizza parlor where the party is, some students there, others still in one last seminar. Interiorly twanging like a string, sort of planning on acting normally, well that's not really going to work is it. Two students approach and sit down to talk – I  can't deal with it, and grab my coat and stalk out to the parking lot.

I am, at this point, (projectively) worried that this is the beginning of another general failure in my life – this won't be the last disaster, it will all go wrong, I'll never graduate. I call Roberto, who I know is skipping the party (he'd had a long day), and is an experienced psychiatrist... yeah, okay, a child psychiatrist, but then I wasn't exactly at my most adult. I start the call saying I'll cancel Saturday's colloquium and he shouldn't pick me up in the morning; but about five minutes on the phone and he talks me down, so I go back inside to the party.

Still acting, frankly, but more calmly... I tell the three people who sit with me, including my dear Annick, why I am keyed up. For a while, and in slightly excruciating detail... but they are with me, and the two glasses of wine help.

•••••

There isn't much point in a blow-by-blow of the remaining.

Saturday: all-day colloquium, where I am the only non-psychiatrist among four people – raclette for lunch, I take the dog for a walk while Dr Ribi naps, things go well. But I'm coughing a lot...

Sunday, Monday: The Flu. Is it possible that I was more susceptible because of my state of mind? Ah well, in any case I got it, as did some of the students. Nasty, but fortunately of short-ish duration.

And somewhere in two days of tossing and turning, getting up every other hour convinced that the night must be over by now, a lot of the above falls away...

An e-mail from the Institute: we can partly resolve the problem with your qualification, and won't put you back in the program, though I still have to make a major change in my personal analysis. Whew. So: bad, but not too bad.

I'm a bit fragile but no longer infectious – I think – and so shower, go out to buy cold medications, paracetamol, cough drops, tissues, any damned thing I can find really. Teetering slightly on my feet, not utterly clear-headed, so perhaps not completely past the fever...

and get on the train for an hour and a half to see the magnificent Verena Kast, for a first meeting with her as my supervisor.

No details here, as I'm tired, but it was – professional, heartening, supportive. She mentioned a lot of things I needed to do, but seemed to think the gist was all right, that I had it in me to do this work – and she was actually pleased to see me. Bringing one's mind to technical problems and solving them – and thus detaching from one's own anxieties....

•••••

So: late Tuesday night, my laundry's nearly done, then bed. Tomorrow more classes. And that sense of having been through the wringer is almost a pleasure, now....

Taut

It has felt as though I'm living about four lives – and am able to comfortably manage, say, about two... university marking and administration with the year abroad, HIV patient group and clarifying everything for other people to take charge of parts of it, training at the Jung-Institut and trying to get into colloquia, schedule supervision, and of course taking on new analysands....

It's all, or mostly, good: I am not upset, but I am certainly... taut. Overly attentive, constantly scanning, a bit tightly wound: haven't snapped at a lot of people, but I do tend to bypass discussion at the moment, in search of the punch line of every exchange.

Of course, certain times of year at the university, and every time I prepare to go to Zürich, has this same fairly manic quality. I always leave the house looking like Peter Finch's... but I do it in the style of Glenda Jackson. Unfortunately.

And tonight, in a yoga class I didn't entirely have time for but (fortunately) went to anyway, Conrad said: what do you want to solve tonight, handle tonight? And I thought: okay – I should be able to do these Zürich trips without winding myself as tight as a ball of wire.

Well, even an hour and a half of yoga didn't unwind all that; I was still breathing slightly unevenly, too fast, a bit shallowly (too much green tea today?).

But I can see, or at least I can sort of imagine, actually reaching some better, calmer,  point – hey, I've read my Zen and Tao and others, haven't I? even if I don't meditate all that often –

We shall see. Things are good, things are moving forward – supervision with Verena Kast, with Robert Hinshaw! – there are exciting things coming, it's true –

but it should be possible to move some of these things forward more easily: like the Taoist – with a casual flick of the wrist....

Amidst

Three psychoanalysis clients!... uh, patients? Analysands?

And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'.

Analysand... an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most people don't recognize, so...

(Incidentally: did you know that the old fuss over whether 'psychoanalysis' was restricted to Freudians or not is now considered unnecessary? I'm allowed to call myself a psychoanalyst... I still prefer 'analyst', though of course that also tangles me up with my musicology colleagues, who then think: Ah, he knows all the different ninth chords!... and no, I don't know them.)

Oh well. Anyway it's going well.

•••

Many things to do, a sense of a sudden expansion in responsbilities – it did occur to me that suddenly I do have rather a lot going on: analysis, plus continued training, my own personal analysis, my first control case colloquia and supervision sessions, both in the UK and later in Zürich;

some teaching (fortunately less than last semester), exams to mark, postgraduates, planning courses for next year; year abroad students, their plans and auditions and paperwork...

the HIV patient group, teaching medical students, peer counseling... oops I do have to catch up on the peer counseling appointments.

New chairs for the middle room (because chairs for analyst and analysand are supposed to be both comfortable and similar). New business cards, for all of these things – made on my computer, as long as I can figure out how to add small pictures. Endless e-mails all over the place of course, the curse of our time.

And of course – RESEARCH!... the slowest of all areas in my life, the one where I really must get a lot more done. And soon. Editing the book, two articles....

•••

Today was remarkably but effectively busy: e-mails, brief meetings that finished off tasks, the bank and new shoes, jumping from one appointment to another with alacrity and success – the way successful people are supposed to be, of course, according to all of those Business Advice books.

Naturally this is a bit surprising for me, as I can often be fairly helpless when faced with many tasks – but it is as though I am reaching a stage where many things (even most things, aside from writing of course, which is still my weakest point) can simply be glided through: done lightly and quickly. With the Tao, as it were.

And the truth is – I think that, even more than my personal analysis and training, the biggest source of this lightness is being an analyst for others: that caring for, hearing, the histories and disasters and strengths and anxieties of other people pulls me out of my own locked gears –

as though the larger view given me by these analytic relationships rebounds into my own life: and my own concerns suddenly have space around them, alternatives – even: life....

Mid–

Solstice night, nadir of the year. In the middle of the long night: the point where our day goes down to seven hours, then the direction reverses and the day rapidly lengthens...

This winter I seem to be waking in the middle of the night – not a new thing: since my 2009 stroke I generally need to go pee around 3-4 a.m. on any given night. (A small Science Fact for you: when older people need to get up to urinate at night, it is not because of, say, any weakness in their waterworks – it is actually the deterioration of a minor brain function: we are designed such that when we sleep, kidney function slows way down so we can sleep through the night. But it's not a strong evolutionary need, so that particular mini-module out of the various brain functions breaks fairly easily when we get older; for me it happened quite abruptly in the stroke.)

And I'm accustomed to that... but this is a bit different: I am awake a bit longer, happy to read or open a window, walk around the apartment a bit. (Unlike many northern Brits, I don't turn the heating off at night – yes yes don't nag me, I know that's more expensive and less green... but I can't stand the cold.)

And since I read – somewhere, recently – that, in the eighteenth century and before in Europe, it was perfectly normal for a night's sleep to be broken in two – that the northern nights tended to be 3-4 hours, wake, light a candle and read or sit, then back to sleep again until morning – I now feel pleasantly justified.

Of course, as you will no doubt remind me, I should be able to do what I like without reference to history, science, fact. But I am so made that I am always fairly beholden to concepts...

I think that, in this case, my body is somewhat relieved that my mind now has a reasonable justification for this habit; and that I can comfortably enjoy being up for an hour or so, without feeling as though I've ruined my sleep or the next day or anything similar. A pleasant way of making the winter less onerous.

The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories: among all the Xmas stuff, an interesting reminder that a proper Victorian Christmas always had its ghost stories, as important or more important than carols and trees. A wonderful story by Gaskell – so well written that now I want to read more of her.

Deep night, the cold, the dark: and a good ghost story....

Joins

I sleep a lot in the past weeks... not in some sort of avoidance, just a quiet dream of winter...

I keep being aware of the joins, the cracks, between the great blocks of things that can be seen: if when I was younger a great deal of my thinking, and ultimately my research, tended to push past the self-satisfaction of intellectual complexity toward points where the iron vanity of made things seems to disperse into new forms, possibilities and freedoms; or where the world of created (artistic) objects either glowed with the awareness and ethical generosity of a given maker – or didn't –

now it seems as though my current concerns with the mind, with time, with quasi-existential awarenesses, are not so much about a particular goal (how can there be a real goal, with time and life and death in the shapes that they actually take on, the large rises and falls where I, and most of the people I know, are firmly on the downward slopes of later life?), as they are about –

the fragments of understanding: the sense that some of what I am looking for seems to appear between great chunks of apparent awareness, of structured understanding; that it is not the heavy articulations of logic and reason, not knowledge, nor direct attention, that get me anywhere that matters; but the subtle, almost uncertain glimpses out of the corners of the eye –

•••

In the waves of sadness, irritation, and a sense of strength that have come and gone over the past month, I have thought again, often, of Hans-Rainer. A month ago he sent me a link to a news program where he was interviewed – I suppose, although I normally abbreviate friend's names and avoid giving out too much information, there is no harm including the link here?...

And you will see a rather serious, graying man with a sharply handsome face talking about some storks found near Parlow. A good context for him – it is his nature to be talking with such passionate seriousness about birds in open land, about living things and how they are being cared for, brought back... living things and forests spring to life for him, more real and more sharply outlined than the shadowy repetitions of cities; it is a very different world than mine of pages and shimmering screens, of concepts and judgments and memories....

Last night I sent him an e-mail that just said: Ich vermiße dich. And he sent back a few hours later: How are you? I hope yust fine... Ich hoffe, das wir uns im nächsten jahr mal sehen.

•••

Lunch with Michael and Andrew. Shopping with Derek; wandering off by myself to buy expensive but good Italian foods at the new posh restaurant. The sensual world: I keep thinking lately – that Italian tendency to make, and of course to sell, very fine foods, and charge a lot for them, actually seems perfect for me in the growing storm of Christmas planning and shopping. Electronics we choose ourselves, clothes are hard to buy for others, furniture?...

but food, including really good food, is a gift that evaporates in a puff of pleasure: there is no need to own any more stuff, here is something wonderful that you eat, or drink, and then it's gone. The affectionate giving, the delight of unpacking, the experience, the fading memory – what else do you need for the perfect gift? Nothing.

The sensate world....

•••

Some of this comes from reading a lot of Ralf König lately: I ordered four more of his comics, or graphic novels, that I hadn't already got (yes, I have quite a lot of them). A resonance from first discovering, well really devouring, his work twenty years ago in Berlin, the language, the discussions, the guys, gay life... and Hans-Rainer.

Have I ever mentioned the days in Berlin when Rainer would show up unheralded on my doorstep, and we both had various plans but would just keep cancelling them, staying in bed for two or three days because there seemed no good reason to go anywhere else... then sometimes wandering around the city, always with a magnetic connection between us: and endless deferrals until we finally went back to the things we were supposed to be doing....

•••

Many people are shopping in Newcastle. I have work to do, but it is not as onerous as it has been, and not so much about death and loss. Meetings with students, then home sitting on the couch, then back again.

Day, then night: sleeping a lot, but not in any numbed or darkened way, just... floating through the North Sea winter, somehow.

The comics (graphic novels?): reading about men arguing with each other in Köln and other German cities, until my memories of places and experiences and language come alive. As does my memory of Rainer. I change the bed and think, but we won't really end up together, he lives where he lives, in his apartment near his aging mother in a village outside of Berlin, with not much money... and I live where I live, and couldn't afford to just drop everything and go where there is no job. We can visit, of course, but...

Late at night, from next door suddenly music: a graceful, actually beautiful bit of pop music. I put down the König, pick up the iPad, turn on Spotify... but the volume is too low, I keep trying with no success. The beautiful music fades and ends, I can't capture it.

•••

The divisions between past and present, between Berlin and Newcastle (and of course Adelaide, and San Francisco, and Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, and...).

In twenty-four hours, my fifty-seventh birthday: I am older, but healthy. I won't be healthy forever, of course, and I don't particularly want years of quietly fading away, alone. I want to live with Rainer, somewhere: making the bed with him in the next room, either showing him Newcastle or having him show me Berlin. Or – Bologna, or Barcelona.

I sleep a lot; I wake... halfway through a book, I put it down and close my eyes... I am in Newcastle; I get an e-mail from Berlin...

The edges, the corners, between the imagined and the real, between the remembered and the present: there is something I almost understand about time and memory, about love and breathing. There is some connection between remembering holding Rainer as he sleeps, warm beside me, and trying to plan a future that includes him: and also dreams forgotten or remembered, and memories, and comics.

Something that is more about a network of joy, calm desire, and lightly delineated hope, rather than the more focused blocks of grief: the borders and interstices between things I'm paying attention to seem as though, if I could only hold focus and peer through them, they would be seen to hold everything I've done in my life that matters at all....