in the hall of mirrors

Dislocation

I have had about a day and a half of being really enraged – by an e-mail that felt like a dismissive insult, and from someone that matters to me... and at the same time still getting work done: finishing off that paper on figures of death and transcendence.

Today we met for our usual HIV+ patient presentation for medical students (some very good-looking ones this time, and they were all charmingly engaged and wide-eyed).

Beforehand, M. was in an irritable mood himself; it turns out he is suing the local HIV charity for treating him badly – of course he is a hothead, and accustomed to fights (and I mean real fights, prison fights and knife fights and gang fights, not just being annoyed with someone). After listening to him for a few minutes I stopped him, said I didn't want to hear it – not the ideal response, perhaps, for someone studying to be an analyst....

but no, my own analyst has said that choosing to be an analyst, or any kind of therapist, does not mean you are expected to listen to everything that anyone wants to say to you. In fact I like my analyst's brusque story about telling people, "I'm not paid for this."

Well, M. did stop telling me about his lawsuit; fortunately he likes me, so he puts up with me being direct. (I don't know what I'd do if he were ever really angry at me – I'm not actually made for violence. As is pretty obvious.)

And then we went in to the students, and talked through our stories, our pasts – I did my 'set piece' (I've done it so often it's like a baroque aria, except probably the form is more modern) about Christmas in 1991, and telling my family about being HIV+.

Came out, walked with M. a bit, excused myself to buy some food, went home... discovered I was still angry; handled trivial paperwork at the desk. Then fell asleep watching a new (new! that alone is a surprise) episode of The Big Bang Theory (which, I don't mind saying, I like a great deal).

And somehow it got mixed up in my head: California, Pasadena, and science and scientists; here and now, my life, their lives; and perhaps all this anger....

When I woke I had a sense of dislocation: am I a young scientist in Pasadena, am I an aging musicologist in northern England? Is it warm or cold outside? What are my concerns... what part of my life am I living – and which track did I follow?

As you may have noticed in the blog, these kinds of dislocations aren't that unusual for me these days – being on sabbatical (and thus out of contact with daily demands), paying attention to dreams and memories, and responding differently to frustrations, to imagination... the present and the past seem oddly flexible: not necessarily in their reality, but in how they are perceived, how they are remembered.

All that combined with a slight sense of exhaustion from being so angry... (and even that felt like remembered anger: as though this was not the first time I have been angry at this person in this way. Hey, it's called a complex).

But these strange portals of time and perception and feeling do seem to be open, lately: as though I could move through them and experience it all differently....

Perhaps my urge to go to sleep tonight is merely a wish to return to, to explore, some alternate space, some earlier or nonexistent time.

Well, I may as well indulge myself in that....

Six years; and recent weeks

Blog Anniversary: since 14 May 2006. It is now six years....

How different life is now than it was then: yes, still in Newcastle, same job, same apartment, still living alone. But the inner world, and my memories, expectations, hopes, feel so different...

I suppose I feel more... I don't know. More aware of the past, of places, of various people – without being quite so attached to them. Anger and fear at daily trivia fade into mere irritation; I recall and connect differently to the past (55 years! Four continents, working and living on each! A number of cities, a number of homes – the places I loved most I remember; at some point it would be interesting to make a list of every home I've had). And somehow people seem both more transparent and more whole, in a way... obviously a shift in my perception of them.

There is of course the reserved coolness of being on sabbatical: at times a bit like one of those ancient Chinese or Roman exiles, to a country villa – everything is slower and calmer, the cities are far away.

•••

Admittedly there have been points of contact: last week our students performed David Lang's Are You Experienced?, a post-minimalist work for electronic tuba, narrator and ensemble. Our tuba player, the wonderful Alex Dawson, organized the performance at my suggestion (after all, how often do you discover that there is a virtuoso tuba player among your students). His solo, a burst of amplified, melismatic madness, was quite wonderful.

As for me, I did the narration. In rehearsal, I had discovered that, even after spending time on it, the text doesn't come into clear dramatic focus. It's not really a character so much as it is a collection of composed feelings – compare dreams, hallucinations, where identities flash into and out of being.

(I suspect, in fact, that the entire work tends to be composed in terms of moods, of feelings – rather than the closely focused development of a them (Reich), shifting key signatures and harmonies (Adams), or the subtly elided expectations of the best Glass. It would explain the success of Lang's more focused tour de force, Cheating, Lying, Stealing, a remarkably uncomfortable work based on painfully irregular rhythms; when I teach it in class, I talk about  some of the disturbing darkness of the late 1980s and 1990s, of a world Adorno would have recognized.)

Which meant I could focus on performing feelings: the visceral, the highly charged, the not entirely conscious. Overlapping scenes and lines and musical moods shift from panic to anger to a creepy sort of reassurance – but the kind of reassurance a serial killer gives his victims. (I didn't say they were nice feelings, mark you.) My miking – excellent tech by our department technician (who incidentally just won a well-deserved University award for being fabulous) – was very responsive to closeness and breath; I realized I could really chew on the mike for the last movement, which becomes slow and dark and dreadful. Most remarkable was the sense of abandon in letting the final growling whispers grind through the speakers. As I told a friend, I was channeling Vince D'Onofrio – a far, far better actor than I'd ever hope to be; but a powerful model of a big, dangerous man with enormous energy and focus, all of it held in reserve.

Quite an experience: and I probably did a better job than I usually do of letting the visceral out – all of this Jungian work has reoriented some of my sense of where parts of myself are living.

 •••

This week there was also a memorial puja for Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, the guru who made such a difference in my life when she visited Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She died thirty days before this ceremony, in mid-April of this year; she was the kind of person it is hard to imagine dying – that boundless, generous, almost preterhuman energy. There is an odd resonance with my mother's death last fall, as with my eldest sister's several years ago; I suppose, finishing this at the end of Mother's Day before I post it on the day after, it is indeed true that everyone has several mothers, and several fathers.

Ma had some of the elements of that tradition of 'mad' Buddhist teachers – unlike the usual Hindu or Buddhist or other Eastern religious, who tended to act calm, quiet, reasonable – cool – Ma was one of those who exploded with a chaotic, sensual, often hilarious energy. She tended to toss insight, strength and advice at people so fast and so hard that they would lose their footing almost immediately, and have to listen.

Not polite, not reasonable: but utterly real... hmm, maybe I could learn that from her. Yet again.

... double vision...

It is years since I've seen this...

A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir... and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you by the end. As do manyof the other characters – even ones whose names you don't learn; even some who pass by on the screen without any lines at all.

I hadn't seen it in years. And then never straight through, as tonight...

But hey: I'm trying to finish a paper for the Jung Institute on the personification of Nachiketas and Yama, that is to say Death, in the Katha Upanishad. And preparing an exam for the Institute where we have somehow ended up with me being quizzed on healing and Buddhism (why did I not choose a more material, or more everyday question for that topic?). And then of course I always wonder if I'm sufficiently in touch with (insufficiently in touch with, overly concerned with, confused by, obsessed with) death and illness – in the now nearly twenty-nine years since Reid's death. Or perhaps in the twenty-five years since Mitch told me my HIV diagnosis over the clinic desk. Or in the twenty-four years since I met Ma Jaya Satai Bhagavati – I use her full name with respect, as she herself died last month.

And most of all of course in the months since my mother's death, the several years since my eldest sister's, my father's... My aunt's, my uncle's. Memory, change and loss resonating out like rings on the water, then bouncing back, breaking and overlapping rings on the water.

In the film, at the beginning when he has survived a plane crash, the noise of the plane, the roar of engines, or perhaps it is just the sound a seashell makes – the roar of eternity – is behind everything. There is a sense of strange and utter clarity, of ruthless reality, with everything slightly slowed, slightly strange: Bridges is afraid of nothing, nothing at all. Walking through death, through life, as though not quite sure where the feet are landing. Allergies, appointments, family, plans... going home... all entirely unimportant.

Not that he is against those things, but... they are all behind the haze of a slight roar....

I have been a bit dizzy myself the past couple of days.

There is this strange double vision: fussing over doing things, putting things in order, the anxiety of demands and wants and needs... and having all of that vanish with a faint roar of engines, a muffled feeling...

This thing: the thing of having some awareness of life and death, of time and no-time. Of dreaming as much as waking, where one's dreams may be more important than anything going on out in the world. The double vision occurs when one doesn't quite lose this contact with (forgive me if this seems arrogant, you may put it into the subjunctive if you like) eternity, with death, with nothing – and yet also walks through life, talking to people, doing things. Putting medications into bags, as I am doing tonight (although admittedly the film has slowed me so much that the pills I started putting out at about 7 pm are still not quite put away, nearly at 1 am).

Another aspect of the film that gave me a shock of recognition: the people who were on the plane telling their tales to each other, to various people, the frictions and resonances of them. Reminds me of the HIV patient group, which is a bit exasperating these days: many of our group members have gone beyond wanting to explain their experiences to medical students – indeed the ones that remain are mostly people who are teachers or therapists in waking life, and therefore are more accustomed to reiterating lessons. Even lessons that are attached to the deeply emotional.

Even when they want to move on, at some level, to talking about... something else.

I wonder if I ever understood before tonight, or partially understood, what really happens, when Perez reexperiences the crash and realizes she couldn't have saved her baby; and then at the end when Bridges makes his final, wild, personal... experiment: and then when they both cross back out of the limbo of standing and chatting with Death, so easily and comfortably – when they walk back into living: actual, real living. A shock of course, to come back: but the shock of being alive....

I never had such a dramatic event, of course. But it is true that the past few years have been a slowed-down version of this process for me: coming back from perpetual limbo, from a familiar wasteland of death – or, at least, partially back – to these studies at the Jung Institute, which are inevitably and unavoidably predicated on working towards something. I know I've felt, in body and mind, returned to living: not particularly amazing living, but real and concrete living, nevertheless.

I also know the reason I haven't come all the way back: I remain alone in this, even with my lovely friends, and the various good and real people scattered about the world. Living alone, it is hard to come completely to earth – especially for someone who hasn't spent a lot of his life completely on earth: it was perhaps all too easy for me to emotionally vacate after 1983, after 1987, after 1992, 1996....

Well: I do know, this is what I have to work with. We will see what I can do with it.

Redewendung

On Skype this evening, I was waiting for a prospective student to come online and tell me about a proposed project... he forgot or got the time wrong (this student keeps having trouble remembering which way the time zones run – I suggested he get a computer program to explain it to him...).

Hans-Rainer was online, as he often is, so I talked to him for a while. We traded war stories of past and current HIV treatments – he's had some really rough spots in the past couple of years, as have I; but we're both doing well at the moment. At one point he was waving his new medications, one after another, at the screen, a bit too fast for me to decipher the labels (Skype is not, alas, perfect).

As it happens, I really, really like Hans-Rainer – and I have ever since meeting him in 1994 in Berlin, when he was an ehemalige Ossi, boyishly excited that he could wear a leather jacket, and driving one of those East German cars he had had for years (if you could call it driving – it was like a tiny cardboard box of a car, and he would have to lean forward and keep it going almost by sheer tough willpower). During the year and a half I was an exchange student there, he would visit from time to time – and there would be entire weekends when, whatever we had planned to do – some fair or trip or something – we just wouldn't ever really get out of bed until he had to drive back home, an hour out in the country.

So, well, you see how it is.

And yes, I do keep wishing we could end up in the same place. I've even hinted... but that was at points when he had an on-again-off-again relationship with some boring guy who lived near him. (Admittedly I've never met this person – I just happen to know that this other guy is boring. Call it intuition.)

The picture is a bit old – we're both much grayer now – but you get the idea.

Now, Hans-Rainer is definitely aus dem Land. He's learned a good bit of English, and always makes a point of showing it off; but he is more comfortable in German – and it is definitely a country German; he'll often throw off some phrase or saying, and I'll have to stop him and get him to repeat it and, bit by bit, explain it. (Sometimes it's simply impossible to figure out – proverbs in foreign languages can be fairly incomprehensible; Lafferty made fun of that in his science fiction stories of the Camiroi, having an alien translation machine attempt to explain incomprehensible translations such as "It's that or pluck chickens", and finally giving up.) A fairly long process...

But this time, after a few explanations that involved getting up, walking around, and gesturing, I got it. The Rede itself was something like – excuse me if I've gotten this wrong, this is from memory, and I've probably got the cases wrong – "Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen."

Pause, rewind, wait, did you say Hemd?... okay... and I actually started to laugh as he was still gesturing about the Taschen. "The last shirt (that you wear) has no pocket (to keep money in)."

It's a more visceral, immediate country-German version of our own: 'You can't take it with you'.

...

I really shouldn't wait for Hans-Rainer, should I?...

Sturgeon's Law

Various versions of this law appear in different places, including different final words... Ted Sturgeon's version was something like, "nine-tenths of everything is crap". Or crud, or inessential, or... well you pick.

Having lately bought some books online, without seeing them first, I am feeling the sting of this tragically universal law.

And if you have never seen my apartment – or office – I'm one of those people with rows and rows, and rows, of massed, ordered, organized books, CDs, LPs, magazines, DVDs... other media... papers on the floor...

So I do rather take this law to heart. Given my acquisitive habits, I don't know whether that makes me the biggest fool in sight (watch out for the Fool-Killer – this one's too big for me!) or just a bit self-aware....

And, of course, given my terrible habit of not getting things written quickly, I think: does this mean I'm agonizing over just adding to piles of crud?...

Ah well: bring it on.

Feeling

Last night I watched Weekend, the 2011 film of an encounter between two guys who clearly need each other. Fairly heartbreaking, and very, very well done indeed – writing, acting, all of it. They go through the usual chaotic mistakes of a hasty encounter between strangers, then as they realize they want to spend more time together try to connect more honestly – but with a time limit. The best things in the script are the amazing moments where they hit something very deep – glancingly, exposing themselves almost by accident, as things they mull over in the private back stages of their minds come out into the unexpected intimacy of meeting somebody you like (and have sex with).

I was thinking of a poem by Mark Doty that I first read just a few weeks ago – it startled me, conjuring up some of the more heartbreaking encounters of the 1980s and 1990s (well, for me, mostly between 1977 and 1997):

 

Theory of Beauty (Tony)

 

Somebody who worked in the jail house kitchen

cooked up some grease, burnt it black, scraped

the carbon from the griddle. Somebody made a needle

from the shaft of a filched Bic, ballpoint replaced

 

with a staple beaten flat; then the men received,

one at a time, faces of Christ looking up through

streams of blood from a thorny crown,

or death’s heads looming over x’s of bones.

 

But Tony chose, for his left shoulder, a sign language

glyph, a simple shape, though hard to read;

he had to tell me what it meant. He flicked

his lighter and spilled flecks of dope on the towel

 

across his lap, brushed his bare stomach as though

he might have set himself aflame. He said,

It stands for Love. Then what seemed indifferently

drawn, hardly a sketch, became a blazon

 

that both lifted and exposed the man who wore it,

as he fumbled with the lighter, too stoned to fire

the pipe he held, using it to point to the character

on his arm, making plain the art of what was written there.

Balance

Almost too faint, too evanescent, to write about –

You know how it is, when you go through a day, or more, on what seems a different pattern:

today was busy, one thing after another. Up early for the delivery man to pick up my passport renewal, rapidly reworking lists of compositions for an article I will write this summer, organizing our usual Thursday presentation to the medical students, looking through new books in my office, rehearsal for concert in two weeks; and two quick Skype calls, to Chicago and Zürich, to structure plans for things I need to do this summer. While incidentally managing to reach people I'd despaired of ever reaching.

Somehow, I simply seemed to be present for things: after several days of dull work avoidance, abruptly just walking right through work, projects, ideas, plans –

and aside from such a day, such fluid processes, such a sense of easy achievements simply happening, there is also a peculiar, faint dislocation: as though the universe has shifted half an inch to the left on its foundations, as though the laws of physics have been slightly, but permanently, altered. E now equals M times C, to the 2.03rd power.

This is something that happens to all of us from time to time – a sense of simply walking through things, as though one has somehow, without fanfare, been awarded mastery of the Tao (or perhaps, more accurately, one is suddently walking in line with the Tao). Like the point where someone learns a martial art, and it becomes so fluid they can do it without work, in a graceful dance that does not pause.

I suspect it has something to do with analysis, with complexes shifting or disintegrating, with some of the things my mind flings up against various tasks suddenly disintegrating, as a result of some unexpected change just behind consciousness –

It is this that makes Buddhists. It is this that makes Taoists.

It may be, also, that it is this, that makes one think: one's analysis is working....

Issuing a retraction

I find myself uneasy with one of my previous blog posts.

A few weeks ago, I was in New York. Frank Oteri wrote a blog entry on our conversation; he was upset that I had given up on composing. I defended myself...

but the truth is, although I thought I was clear on my stance and the reasons for it before I sat down to write that post, by the time I finished writing it, I didn't quite believe it any more. Justifications kept going clunk (rather than ding... reverb), reasoning seemed to circle, there were holes in the argument....

So, with my analyst in the background, repeatedly hammering away at the need for me to be creative (at times almost mockingly – we have had a few rather sharp exchanges in the past three months; which of course suggests that there is shadow stuff floating around in the analysis, perhaps on both sides), and in a spirit of cautious investigation, and partial retraction, I'd like to revisit Why I Don't Compose, And That Isn't A Problem.

At least, insofar as I can do so....

***

1. Music, and composition, are good things.

2. However, they are not innately better than other activities – creative, artistic, whatever you prefer. (Admittedly I've pushed the opposite of this argument in some of my published papers; but I was younger, and/or trying to make a particular kind of point. The aesthetic traditions of either dismissing or enshrining music, or any particular art form or intellectual or social endeavor, are familiar (think of Kant, Schopenhauer, even Nancy)... but they are all fairly self-serving; and all of them are founded on reasons that are as easy to disprove as – well, as my argument in that earlier post.)

3. Composition is no longer plausible for me. (My skills were never very good, and what there was has faded a great deal; any musical creation, at this point, might not be as bad as are my attempts at drawing, but once you've said that you've said all you can.)

4. It's fine for Frank to defend, valorize, glorify music: he does so with passion (rather than logic), which is an entirely good reason to do things in life – but which can only make it important for him (and for those who already agree with him), not necessarily for anyone else.

***

All right, so: that's really all I've got. Any more extensive reasoning about why I don't compose starts to clamber out across soggy, swampy logical holes and self-justifications.

Ultimately, I suppose my above reasons for not composing reduce to: realistic pragmatism; and the relativism of action.

After all, people do different things – plant gardens, correct accounting ledgers, teach children, build skyscrapers, fix cars... paint, write, compose. Make love. Hem dresses. Go for long walks. Bungee jump.

And while those things can be done in various positive or negative ways (are they generous, does someone develop understanding, is something made better, are they simply fun?), they cannot be lined up on a list of best to worst. Call me a relativist – and I am (hey, what do you expect – I'm gay, have worked in the arts, grew up in the seventies, and lived in California for two decades!) – but that's my stance.

***

Admittedly: the question of what I should be doing, in life... well, if it can't be composition... yes, it still should be creative; and it will be connected to the life of the mind.

But other than that...

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen – there will be no questions at this time.

Biochem IIa

[PREREQUISITE: BIOCHEM I; or permission of instructor]

I am noticing some other aspects of changing body chemistry, after the new HIV medications....

For several years, I have tended to get frequent bleeding, and clotting, in my sinuses. This has been worse since my 2009 stroke, and a subsequent three months of the dreadful medication Warfarin (avoid that one if you can); it's gotten so that it is perfectly normal for me to spit blood clots mornings, during showers, etc.

That recalls periods of frequent nosebleeds in the 1980s and 1990s... I occasionally tell my students the story of being the Emcee in a suburban Marin County production of Cabaret; one night, as I was nervously preparing my Solo Entrance (you know the one, on a darkened stage with one pinpoint spot, the scene that climaxes with 'Even the orchestra is beautiful!'), my nose suddenly, and definitely, started bleeding. Two tall chorus girls holding me up, another one rushing to get the stage manager to hold the lights and the orchestra to vamp... and the bleeding stopped: I waved them all away and went out to give what, at least from my light-headed point of view, seemed a properly, exceptionally macabre version of the opening scene.

As for that Warfarin – it is really a rat poison: it kills rats by thinning their blood so much that they die of internal bleeding. And now they give it to older people who have had any kind of stroke or heart problem... because it's very cheap, and keeps it all from clotting. I always have the feeling that the medication only gets used because older people feel ill anyway, and don't get to win arguments with younger doctors who might prescribe something else if they had to take the damned toxic stuff themselves.

In any case, just lately, my sinuses aren't bleeding: so, perhaps, my new medications don't have that side effect...

And then there's the psoriasis. I've had psoriasis since I was 18; it was far worse in the late 1980s and intermittently in the 1990s, in a way that doctors linked to a damaged immune system, low t-cell count, and possibly simply the presence of the virus. It hasn't been terrible for the past decade, but it doesn't go away either – at all.

Except, lately, it is noticeably thinner, lighter, fading – we'll see how it goes

And I suspect that my mood, and mental focus and processing, are much more positive/stronger also. Admittedly I am having headaches, fairly frequently; but as I've only been taking the new medications for just over two weeks, perhaps those will decrease or vanish. All of these changes might be happening partly because it's spring (well, sort of – we've gone back to temperatures in the high 40s/low 50s here); but it seems to be more than that –

perhaps the new medications give me a few minor reprieves: in addition to the major ones, of course.

The Manticore

So... during a time of relative quiet – home a lot, mulling around various work, making lists, and doing bits of it – last night a novel caught me: Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie; and caught me so definitely that I read it from about midnight to ten a.m. And then was of course groggy and headachey all day, but all right; it is good – lots of 'untrustworthy narrator' stuff, plus the immediate experience of wartime, which does give me pause (I've written at points about what some modernist composers did during the Second World War, and been quite judgmental about it – the Kristof reminds me that a generalized madness infects everything, and everyone does things that seem unforgiveable under such chaotic circumstances).

But that wasn't what I was going to, briefly, write about tonight... having been groggy/tired, got some things done, the sofa moved/replaced, etc., I found myself picking up Robertson Davies The Manticore as I went to bed tonight.

As the middle of his most famous trilogy (he's got about five or six), the Deptford Trilogy, this may be one of his most famous works. It is the record of a Jungian analysis undergone by a character in a tangled web of relationships – it is thus a way of working through the crises and changes of the entire trilogy, at least from the point of view of one part of it.

And it is wonderful: dense, rich, tough to the point of being painful, but heartening – I'm a bit curious as to whether I had read this before I did my Jungian analysis 1987-92; I think (though I'm always pretty bad at remembering sequences of events) that I tripped over it while I was actually in analysis.

In any case: although there are passages that literally make me think: oh, I really have to remember that for my fundamentals exam this summer (and no, I promise I won't use the book as a study aid...), it reminds me of why I want to become an analyst – the complex battle with the self, the density of memory and understanding between analyst and analysand, the richness of technique, and the importance and difficulty of feeling.

As well as the fact that, every time Dr Joh. Haller points out that her patient is primitive in relating to his feelings about what has happened to him, it reminds me: that's exactly what my analyst John keeps pointing out about me in the last few months...

... sigh. It's always easier to see this when somebody else is doing it.