in the hall of mirrors

Bernstein

The prospect of the new Bernstein film is dislocating me a bit, back to the late 60s and 70s....

 

recordings of the Rite, Sinfonia, El Salón Mexico; Stravinsky, Beethoven, Copland, Foss, many others... my record player in the room shared with my brother, between the dressers; concerts, then later playing on stage at Wolf Trap Farm Park. The electric strangeness of Mass, at the Kennedy Center in 1971, when I was 14....

 

This stuff is all deeply embedded in me: my dad liked his records too. When people later talked about Bernstein bringing Mahler back to everyone's attention, it always confused me a bit, because these things seemed to have always been famous.

 

Even the pictures they're showing before the film premieres: they've got the photographic tones of the time, it all has that slightly heightened glow, a bit too much of each primary hue....

 

In the middle of the night (during a summer that already feels temporally and existentially blurry), it feels like a chunk of history fell out of the sky onto my head, and I wake with uncertainty as to what decade it is.

Crossing

Crossing from one year to the next....

This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one place to another, I'm experiencing this is very different: to plan, to choose, step by step, feels like... well, a calmer, more conscious kind of life than I have lived, for most of sixty-six years.

Retiring from Newcastle University became entangled with an internal, then increasingly external, change in my relationship to organizations, schools, committees – community groups, support networks....

I realized I just wasn't interested in those things any more, that they had become mostly burdens. Which is unexpected as, for a number of decades (since the early 70s, really), I have alternated between trying to make things happen and, sometimes unhappily, giving up on making things happen. It's been a fairly basic pattern for me, entangled with wanting to be seen and heard (all that youngest-child stuff, amplified by the quieter social spaces of the last twenty years), plus wanting certain things to be understood differently, wanting to transform or expand or be a part of certain conversations – and then, as an analyst, getting entangled in professional conversations about taking care of people, of groups, of the world.

I do still tend to be project-focused, rather than any freer kind of being, which I realize has its limitations, even its hungry-ghost aspect. But there are vastly fewer projects now, and each is connected with far fewer people and practically no time anxieties. So, to go to an image from the first pages of Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, I spend far less time among those people panicking and fleeing the moon, as it looms above them....

I left a lot of committees and projects – including practically all the things I've joined in the past five years that were tied to my new persona, my third life and second career, as a Jungian analyst. I found myself habitually doing things like those I did as an academic – I was on the research committee of the Zürich institute, and the alumni board; helped Barbara with the internship project, wrote forewords and afterwords, taught a number of online classes (Zürich, Los Angeles, even far-away San Francisco!) – and of course helped manage the past three years of our online lecture series and videos; and the gay book group, plus showing them films under lockdown, and the online men's group, then meeting about the local men's group that never happened...

Leaving all those things, even when they were things or people I liked, ended up being a relief. A sense of quiet – even of great quiet, like the music at the beginning of act 3 of Britten's Midsummer: the forest is always there, mysterious and quiet, and if only the lovers would shut up they might be able to hear it....

•••

So, it's the change of the year: and a clear sense that all those things are done, and done.

It leaves a slightly strange vacuum: one I wish I'd experienced more often in my life – so many projects, so many things I wanted to do....

In this vacuum, it feels as though doing things has been one of my life's problems: why things were not finished, why the sadness or guilt of unfinished projects ended up coloring too many weeks, months, years, out of my life. Which now seems frankly silly: nobody insisted that I do these things – I can now hear, again, something as simple, as lucid, as Susan McClary telling me in the 90s: you are doing too many conferences and committees, stop, focus on real work.

That now seems obvious.

And – you may be pleased to hear – it also now seems easy, even for me.

No longer fleeing that menacing full moon, as it rolls across the sky...

•••

Listening to big choral works by Schütz: which links to the me of 1974 – nearly fifty years! – dazzled by the university's music library, those glorious collected works... and so joy in books, and music and history, and German-ness and serious dignity; but also in the sensual explosions that happened in the recordings of those works. As well as playing seventeenth- and twentieth-century pieces in the practice rooms, late at night.

•••

So, after getting rid of so many things – what is left?

The first book, then the second. (Maybe a third, we'll see.)

Analysands. I see about twenty people at the moment, but only ten or twelve in a given week (some of these relationships are rather itinerant, which is okay). I enjoy this work: the balance of the right numbers and timing is hard to hold on to, but I manage.

Some teaching. Not much, but some – mostly Jungian stuff, mostly online.

Aside from those, I still have a couple of Newcastle postgraduates; though I don't mind taking on more, I suspect the department will conserve and focus, both in relation to money and to keeping current staff working. (Our crazed, greedy Tory government has torn up a lot of pre-university music exams and teaching; that will all come back some day, but the next decade may leave music teachers and institutions struggling across the country).

•••

As the Hollywood joke goes: "But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"....

•••

Things are quieter. I'm a bit more like good old Montaigne (well, I wish), or like the old magician collecting herbs in the woods that I envisioned at the beginning of this pandemic.

Speaking of which – I've still never had COVID, that I know of, and would love to keep it that way...

In the larger frame of 2022, COVID, and the way everyone else seems to think of it – including Saturday Night Live – I have to confess, I don't see 2022 as such a disaster. Sure, COVID (but that was already familiar, and hasn't really gotten worse, it just hasn't gotten much better – so that feels kind of like the years 1984 to 1995 under AIDS). The Ukraine war is dangerous but not new – I'm still surprised by people who say, why don't you care about Yemen! – rather obviously, Russia has nuclear weapons that most of the world doesn't. And that is scary. But that cliff edge is something we've stood near several times in past decades. I didn't experience this year as seriously disorienting or fearful – perhaps that is just me. I always seem to come back to: it's not as though we haven't seem times that were just as bad.

Perhaps a big part of my reaction is based on my emotional shift towards being, well, less concerned – about everything – which follows processes that have been happening for maybe thirteen years now, since the 2009 stroke, since visiting the Zürich institute, since – well, since a kind of, perhaps implicit, decision that Things Needed To Change.

But this hasn't been the Bay of Pigs, or 9/11, or Prague 1968. Or the 2008 crash, or the election of Trump, or any of a mass of other dark things from past decades. Admittedly, events have happened in a more open cultural space, so we see more of them. And you can think of hyperobjects, and the sense that disasters these days seem further beyond us than earlier perceived disasters.

But I continue to feel calm....

•••

So, okay. Let's be traditional and think of 2023 – not with resolutions, exactly, but with things I want to do.

Continue writing, finish the larger stuff – while the (vastly fewer) small projects (one overview chapter, and the sprawling and disjointed blog entry about Barcelona that has meandered across the last three years, which should really get done) can be just polished off.

Visit Barcelona, and focus: should I, can I, move there? What do I do with my physical life, my books, how do I find a new place to live – with how many changes, accepted losses or benefits?... but that project can unfold over time.

Make, finally, a web page, with a new home for this blog, and a place to put it all together – work, writings, past. Something that looks decent enough... with a designer? I'll keep looking.

Clear out much of what I own, and get accustomed to walking away from things and projects without looking back.

Stay open to unexpected discussions that cross my mind, about time and experience and memory and death... and write them out, return to them. Which should be helped by the quieter spaces around me.

Manage the few project/event things on the 2023 calendar (the conference panel, the co-taught seminar, the handful of people asking for professional advice) without letting them get overgrown or entangled with similar things.

Relax a bit, walk more, listen to some of the music, read some of the books, that cover the walls of my life. Cook a bit...

Doesn't sound impossible. Not even improbable. Wouldn't be too shabby....

•••

(There are nights when I see the rooms and hallways of my life in Barcelona. They are pleasant and quiet – not bright but comfortable, book-lined. And, even if I never get there – those are good times....)

A bit vague, not lost

Anniversary of this blog... sixteen years. A few days ago, really, on Saturday, but this is close enough.

No, the blog doesn't feel dead to me, I'm still here for it, and it for me.

I retired from the university in February; moved the books of my office to storage; and now keep talking about moving to Barcelona. I'm not getting there quickly, but am not terribly worried... of course it might fall to become a thing that doesn't happen, but I think it probably will happen.

Life is quieter after retirement. I'm pleased they'll keep me as a retired 'guest' – so some minor perks, software, connections. A few postgraduates to work with for a while; if other links arise I don't mind – as long as they don't involve meetings, or list emails, or (horrors) marking.

Of course I continue as a psychoanalyst. I worried a bit in the past few months when appointments decreased... and then they increased. None of these things are major concerns – the income is fine, and I've hardly ever had more than 12-14 patients in a given week – and that can feel like a lot, bit it's manageable. 8-10 is more usual, I mostly enjoy doing that. My landlord rebuilt the trellis behind the deck in back of my flat, so I can see people there, on folding deck chairs that N. found for me – I'm still being COVID-cautious (I never have tested positive, which is fine with me), but I may start letting the vaccinated into my home next month....

And, though this is another project that has drifted through the years – I want to put this blog on a website of my own. (I'm not terribly interested in whether blogs are still current... I'm fine referring my thoughts and patterns to a now-aging form. It's still more modern than Montaigne's tower, and anyway I have heating and running water, which he didn't.)

As for travel... I won't go to Buenos Aires for the August conference, it seems like a terrible plan to get into a plane that goes that far for that long, with people crossing through several continents... a shame to not get to my sixth continent, but that's a goal I can let slide.

I will risk teaching in Zürich in July, though, and just wear masks throughout the flight. Teaching... these days it's seminars for adults, with no marking (yay!) – the Zürich seminars will be among the first where I'm doing 4-6 hours on a topic, so there will be time to dig deeper; and I think next year I'll ask for even more hours. What do you think of, say, eight hours over two or three days on archetypes and opera, focusing on productions at the fabulous Zürich opera house?

Another online seminar for San Francisco in December, and maybe Los Angeles (also online – seeing cities I once loved would be wonderful, but given the triple whammy of COVID, long flights, and costly travel for a pensioner, I think I'll wait before doing any more long trips).

•••

There's a department farewell in three days: I already know what to say – it's been in the back of my head for years. It won't have the same impact for them (it hasn't been in the backs of their heads for years), but I think they'll get that I know I was lucky to land here. Though, yes, I also love being done with the job... it's interesting how colleagues from around the world have identified with what I'm doing: but I feel as though I'm doing something a bit different from a lot of retirees. After all, in some ways, I actually expect more now rather than less – working, and living, feel even more interesting than they have for a long time (perhaps than they ever have?) – though they are defined in ways I wouldn't have foreseen a decade ago.

And the book! – or books! – I am indeed proud of what I've written so far, and annoyed that I haven't done more. (About 21,000 words of a book that's supposed to be under 50,000 – but the draft feels forged, intense – I find my own writing about AIDS both good and also a little scary, which is okay with me.) T. and D. and A. and others nag me to keep going... I hope I'll get there. And the other book. And who knows, maybe the third.

Other writing... that Barcelona (and Sitges and Vienna) blog post, which is about five pages in draft... I really do want to post it some day. It may end up a bit fragmented, but... I'll do what I can to keep it as coherent as its original intentions.

•••

Last night, dinner with D. in a beautiful small restaurant, one I'd never seen. Long conversations: a sense of moving forward, of getting somewhere... cross-linked experiences of talking to another psychologist about things that intensely matter, of making exciting plans for a different future, of moving somewhere in a way that feels important. And similar conversations online with A....

But even these relationships, the power of talking to someone who can push you to go further, are powerful largely because of the general space of who I am at the moment (and this is the important part, the part that made me want to write this post, though I suspect I can't make it clear):

because even fragments of aging and fragility, of not-doing and pleasure or sadness, of world difficulties and personal victories, are framed by a continuing, even accelerating, sense of changes in my own awareness, in dreams and thoughts: of time, self, memory... for months, even more than previous times in my life, I keep having a wider sense of all the things I've been, all the things I've seen and people I've known, as well as all the things that could have been: as though they are all available, as though awareness and imagination have, for me these days, so many interesting facets, that...

well, at one trivial level: that complaining about almost anything would be merely silly. It would be beside the point of existing, actually.

Even a wasted morning doesn't feel wasted these days....

Happy blogiversary.

Sermonette

A friend who is a priest, as well as a skilled teacher of theology, was talking to me about his mood… he said that he is bringing a message of joy to people, but lockdown is difficult, he finds his mood is... inconsistent.

I said: face it – this is the dark of the year.

There was a reason they put Christmas here: this is when you need it.

There is often a burst of weird pop-psychology screeds around this time for and about people who are “strangely” depressed and anxious…

Oh, come on: the shortest days, the darkest nights? Where I live, when the solstice arrives, the day is seven hours and eleven minutes long.

And, this evening, sunset is just about twelve minutes before that solstice.

All piled on top of COVID, Omicron, governments, confusion, anxiety – although all of that is quite familiar by now: I hope no one is feeling shocked by it all, it should be something for which everyone can prepare…

So. It is dark. This is darkness, this is the thing that is hardest to face: as the world moves through its nadir, can we really expect ourselves to be innately cheerful?

So, for me at least: everyone can relax. The darkness is real, the sadness is real; the dangers in the world are real. You don’t need to act as though they are not; and you also don’t need to dramatize the darkness, or dramatize your positive or negative relation to it.

You can just hunker down, protect all that there is to protect, and wait in anticipation of… something else: whatever it is. Whatever will be brought to us…

[Essaying] Bloggisization

Brian Dillon, Essayism. He writes beautifully, and has become famous by doing it.

Actually I'd never heard of him until I started noticing those Fitzcarraldo Editions – are they named for somebody involved, or for Herzog's strange movie, and the man the movie is about, played by the mad Kinski? – it's probably about the movie, since Fitzcarraldo is apparently a bizarre Spanishization (españolisación?) of the locally unpronounceable Fitzgerald – but in any case Fitzcarraldo Editions are terrifically subtle, well-crafted, densely literary books with simple covers, blue or white with spare lettering, they're the kind of thing one buys while being very aware that one is buying A Book (shades of Mallarmé, he would have liked to be published by these people, unless of course he were overwhelmed with the dismayed feeling that they are creating things that are almost, but hopelessly never quite, what he wanted), and I do indeed like buying books, and with some slight distinction buying A Book, which I also regard as a non-shameful (to me anyway, I live alone and don't need to justify my purchases to any vaguely disapproving partner) indulgence.

So Dillon (may I call you Brian?... no?... well all right then) Dillon is writing about the nature of the essay, and so tearing into / breaking apart the usual statements (which aren't quite clichés but are close, and Dillon being famous as a Current Voice, he's struggling with the possible clichéistic nature of them).

And as he moves rapidly and deftly, but also slightly irritably and desperately, around the topic, I am reflected back on (as so often) myself. (For some years I also have an oblique self-justifying set of thoughts around the idea that my constant self-reference, in this blog and in writing and in conversation, isn't narcissism – we've recently had a grandiosely fucked-up example of real narcissism in political history, which has fortunately made it much easier to clarify to analysands the distinctions between narcissism and being a bit, possibly too, focused on oneself – and if mine is egotism it's kind of an unavoidable egotism, because if you end up living alone in a quiet suburb of a small city, there isn't much else other than oneself to think about.)

As it's four in the morning, but with the glory that is a North Sea summer light, which almost (for years I would say this resentfully: almost, though this summer is a bit different because warming has created several weeks that actually feel like a very mild, almost-warm summer) makes up for the damned winters, the sky is already light, beautifully so; and so although yesterday, Tuesday, I was tired and mildly ill, to the point of worrying about the small amount of student marking still to be done – the plan was to be entirely done with it last week, then last weekend, then Monday, then yesterday, but sadly it's not done yet and I hope I'm not about to get yelled at – and this morning I fortunately feel much better, to the point of getting up at this bright four a.m.; and so my mind is working, and it reflects the Dillon essay in a way not atypical of my imaginative flights....

and that's a bit like responding with my own thoughts to Dillon's worrying, growling pulling-around and chewing on the nature of the essay.

Because the book I'm supposed to be writing, the first of two or three AIDS books, has pulled me into the orbit of Becker on death, and his junior colleagues' extension and concretization of his ideas (if you look at the link I'm really sorry about the cover – someone seriously incompetent chose it, clearly panicking over the content of the book to cover it over with something twee and disconnected), which points towards the general human need, which is exaggerated as one gets older, to build, make, establish, remake, parent, control, foster, and all sort of other verbal things in order to create somethings that will get us beyond our own deaths...

And so a kind of Discussion Panel comes to mind, where I (because I haven't published much and am not very notable) am included at one end of the table for numerical reasons, probably, and so can appropriately be humble, but am still allowed, even expected, to say something.

So, after everyone sails into Why There Are Essays, I respond with my version: that essays, with their abstract and writerly pleasures, are a bit like drawings in the books of John Berger: art that is sketched, real, present, because it is existential in nature. That whatever other reasons there may be for generating essays – a newspaper gig, a desire to explain – essays are like sketches, and that's why they exist, and maybe that's one explanation for the weird etymology of the word.

We write essays, or make sketches (or blog of course) as a way of being: writing that emphasizes writing, but also writing that emphasizes what we're seeing, what we're understanding at this moment. And that's a major triumph over death, despite its slight and casual nature, because it's an unquestionable statement that I was here –

and I suppose it would help to point out that, if one reflects off to the side: if most writing is arranged around story-telling, in a way that pleases Jungians – stories are natural, when we write stories we fall into those stories, as in the one I read by Gene Wolfe in the middle of the night; and Wolfe is a good example of this kind of thing because he's always writerly, aware of the history of writing and of the many directions it can go, but also very aware of mortality and time and loss; and so when he writes a pastiche of Jack Vance he's very aware of time and the fact that Vance is dead, and the fact that Wolfe himself won't live forever, as is now especially true because he actually died a few years ago, but Wolfe is able to look all that in the face – and so our constant focus on stories does indeed contain many of the most important driving forces of why people write, and paint, and make art and talk to each other, and enter that world of creating worlds –

but in the case of the essay, as in the case of Berger's sketches, I want to emphasize the purity, the pure existential impact, of it: no longer tied to story-telling (I'm hyphenating that to make a point, I know it could be one word), when someone is writing an essay they are making sentences, and enjoying them, enjoying the process: as when Berger draws something rapidly, casually, and redraws it to try again to capture an element, it's not so much about making a substantial artwork that will impress everyone with its image-ness and reference to archetypal whatever and artistic visionaryness and so on, but it's just about the making itself, about the pleasure of creating something that didn't exist before –

which can quite fairly, but without any dreadful Beckettian tragedy or childish Dylan Thomas-esque brandishing of toy swords, create a space that isn't touched by death:

when we write these sentences or draw these lines, with the emphasis on the sentences and the lines themselves, they are merely, but definitely, assertions of being present: they are life because they reiterate that basic human statement that I am here, which is also always, especially for those who are older, I was here.

And that is what I like about essays, whether by Lamb or Sebald or Sontag or MFK Fisher or, frankly, me:

that even if I never finish any of the books, I, now, like these sentences: and I like that I made these sentences exist: so I like essays because they prove that Lamb and Sebald and Sontag and Fisher and I are alive, or were alive, as that distinction isn't terribly important.

Just like a sketch by John Berger. Just like an unfinished painting of a lot of water lilies. Just like that earthquake-y point where Annie Dillon asks potential writers, Do you like sentences?

Because we have all been alive and we proved it and that can't ever really be erased, even if civilization vanishes into eons of dust.

And when I finish my improvised statement, my time on the panel is done, and we throw it open to questions from the audience....

Stats

June 5 is HIV Long-Term Survivors Day – it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon, with varied definitions. It's 5 June because that's when an article talking about five cases first appeared in the press, so – as in the work I'm writing (or supposed to be writing) now, it's not about the existence of the virus (they've found it in remains from the early 20th century) but about the date it was recognized in the world, so, culture. And cultural psychology.

And this year is the fortieth year since that article came out. So.

***

It's completely normal in PWA groups to compete, somewhat indirectly, over length of time and doctors and when and how bad, and famous people you've hung around with at benefits, etc. In the Newcastle groups I often win, quite unfairly of course – it's about the timing of when it appears in some cities rather than others; if I lived in London I'd probably have more arguments. It's kind of like "so you were at Okinawa, well I was at D-Day" arguments. I'm sure people will be doing this in nursing homes for the next fifty years, at least.

The loooooong stretch of our Patient Participation Team (PPT) in Newcastle, talking to medical students about our life experiences since early 2004, means that I've told all my stories many, many times. The people who've spoken a lot in the group look at each other when certain questions come from the wide-eyed young students, and say, oh, Robert has a story about that, or let's tell you how Claire was told her status. Or, that one's for Paul, you have to tell that story now.

Of course there is a tendency for such retelling to fix things in place, restructure them, and sometimes alter them... which is unavoidable really. Sometimes it's like remembering being at D-Day for someone who really showed up the next day. Or Woodstock for someone who didn't get there in time to see Hendrix.

I actually wrote about this in one of my favorite published things, the one about Reid Beitrusten, which I re-posted recently – Writing a Story for You – and now, as you're no doubt aware, you are in the position of sitting in a dressing room with an aging actress who is looking at a picture and saying, oh, the Barrymores were lovely to me, absolutely lovely.

It's the nature of memory – especially when it's altered/amplified by the fear of death (see the books by Becker and his followers – the fear of death is a basic psychological force, it causes people to raise monuments and publish books and found corporations and hold anniversary dinners – everyone wants to be remembered, somehow). We need to tell our stories, in the hope that they will be remembered....

***

But okay this garrulous actress should pause her musings and go back to the first point here, which was to outline My Stats: the basic facts of when I got into the HIV game.

I started getting laid around 1975; in the summer of 1979, just a few weeks following the Harvey Milk riots (about which I knew nothing at the time), I flew from Washington, DC (with two oversized bags, and my mother crying a lot at the airport) to San Francisco. I did that because I'd screwed up my degree at U.Va. (a four-year course finished in three years, but with terrible grades – because I hadn't gotten in to Princeton my life was clearly already over, a waste of time for everybody; and a couple of years in Washington merely proved I wasn't getting anywhere; and I'd read Tales of the City with a group of friends at that wonderful café/bookstore, and I believed Armistead when he told me that San Francisco was Different).

Wow okay this is definitely garrulous, and it's all prequel, so. Let's speed up and select.

In the winters of 1981 and 1982, I'll have obscure flu-like illnesses that suggest seroconversion. I remember bumping into Reid on a streetcar while going up to Parnassus to UCSF, both of us feeling confusingly ill, including STDs, and talking about feeling very... uneasy. He looks haunted... I think I do, too.

In the summer of 1983 Reid falls very, horribly, ill, in the now-famous Ward 5A. I come visit him occasionally, not really knowing what to do – he tells me I'm wasting my time screwing around in San Francisco, I should go get a PhD somewhere. I try to apply to Berkeley and UCLA; a week or so after he dies, on 2 December 1983, I get an acceptance letter to UCLA. They know my undergraduate degree was crap, but I've been writing program notes and singing in groups, and they decide to gamble.

Yeah, too much detail, again.

In the rising excitement of going to UCLA, there is also the rapidly increasing darkness of AIDS; we know more by the month, and also less. It hits San Francisco like a ton of bricks – obviously David France's recent book focuses on New York's ACT-UP, and he's trying really hard to not offend anybody, but he is annoying flip about a 'few cases' in SF. There were a lot of cases, it was a smaller and more focused city – even though the Village had a certain social containment it always seemed as though AIDS in New York, or London or Paris, was a thing happening across people who were distributed among many networks, nodes, structures; in San Francisco, with an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ people among the city population of 600,000, it was absolutely... well.

It hit us like a ton of bricks.

Theater Rhinoceros allowed Leleand Moss, a very New York actor/director, to put together a workshop of writers and performers that became The AIDS Show, which ran for, I think, ten days in August 1984. I was one of the ten writers and actors – I wrote five 'Party' scenes as transitions, all of which were fragments of dialogue that got darker and more charged over the period of 1981-4, and a final death scene, the 'Hospital' scene – in fact I'm the only one in the production who dies on stage (don't snicker). The otherwise lovely David Roman, whose famous book on AIDS theater was a landmark, unfortunately misread the long list of segments and authors and ascribed my pieces to another guy, which deeply pissed me off, as it kind of wrote me out of history. But I'm clear that Roman was talking about a lot of things at once, and also that – here I shall pout a bit more – as in France's book, those East Coasters always find it difficult to get interested in the details of what was happening on the West Coast.

But I was very proud of what I wrote – Leland didn't really get it, he was very Method and realistic in his approach, where I'd written surrealist stuff that reflected all the Grove Press/experimental books I'd been reading for years. I still think it was good; unfortunately, some years later when The AIDS Show toured San Diego and other parts of California, I went with friends to see it – and my scenes were absolutely terrible, inattentive and hastily passed through between the monologues; like any long-running show, the things nobody was paying attention to had disintegrated...

Anyway. I was a co-writer and performer in what we think was the second play about AIDS (after Robert Chesley some months earlier). And it was good and I was very proud of it. I wish I'd written more stuff like that.

***

But at this point you're in the actress' dressing room and she's just gotten to her twenty-third birthday when she met the Barrymores, and you're longing to reach the door, so I'll speed up.

***

Los Angeles – far less AIDS, the light seemed brighter and people less worried, and I was back in academe and it was going fabulously. I seemed to know what I was doing, despite a supervisor who disapproved of the poststructuralists...

No, speed up. Yeah okay, sex clubs and bars and the Eagle; sun and cars, moving to the apartment on Spaulding Drive... in 1986 I wrote one last composition on Japanese death haiku (I'm still proud of that one), realized I wasn't a composer, and... yes this actually is part of the story because death was increasingly, endlessly present, and I knew, sort of, that I must also be...

Oh, and there were three months in New York on a scholarship to meet famous composers. I was a fool of course, starting out by telling them about myself, but among the various (Wuorinen was an asshole, Reich distant), Meredith Monk was amazingly kind, and we connected.

And I was walking down Christopher Street the night after Charles Ludlam (Theater of the Ridiculous) died, at three in the morning, and saw the huge array of candles and flowers covering the storefront on a silent street, with 'We Love You Charlie' big in the center.

I mean, every story had the same point to it.

***

So, back in LA, April 1987 – the gay and lesbian center in Los Angeles, the blood test, then a few weeks later my results from Mitch Walker, a Jungian analyst in training. I already knew I would be positive, he told me I was positive, yet that was a huge shock... which is how these things work.

Mitch takes me on as an analysand, I have my first, five-year Jungian analysis; of course it is rather circumscribed because we both know I'm going to die soon, and that's the whole point, dealing with death. Mitch is amazing, a mountain climber of an analyst, Nietzschean and more than a bit scary, as Kast will later be – I take them as models these days (though I'm friendlier – I'm more willing to apologize for throwing huge chunks of reality at my analysands, though I do it anyway).

And I join Terry Wolverton's HIV writing group, which is mostly three to six guys across those five years writing in a room, and I write poetry and stories, and feel creative and incredibly happy when I finish a short piece. And very, very taken care of by Terry, which is why I've gone back to her now, thirty years later, for coaching as I try to write these books.

And John (now Laxman Das) becomes my AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA) buddy, and he is a disciple of Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, a rather wild spiritual teacher from Florida, who visits LA and later SF periodically, and is full of life – she gives me the name Nachiketas, the boy who makes friends with death, and a kind of energetic mothering that changes me.

And all this time I'm still at UCLA, though from 1987 I stop actually working on the masters – yes, my degrees will take forever – but everything's overlapping with Susan McClary coming to UCLA, and a huge transition into the New Musicology, with Susan reflecting my work back at me in a way that will actually turn me into an academic. I know I've said it before, but if Susan hadn't become a mentor, then dear friend, there's no way I ever would have actually been successful, as academic or writer – I was digging existential pits for myself and being miserable in them, but Susan, and Philip Brett, pushed me to actually Do Stuff.

Which led to all of the musicological activities of the nineties, all of which nevertheless fell under the continuing shadow of Knowing I Was Going to Die Soon...

***

Okay I'm tired, you're tired, and this is really just my origin story, right? So, a few high points:

I tell my family I'm HIV+ a few days after Christmas, in I think 1990. It doesn't go well, but hey, it's done.

I finish the masters, a response to Adorno, in 1991. Vince Pecora, Adorno specialist, mentions to me after my viva that the thesis is very angry... I learn something from that...

1992, move back to San Francisco. Gorgeous apartment in the hills.

1993, Fulbright to Germany. A year and a half, Darmstadt then Berlin, and it's all, yet again, a Last Hurrah – I'll be dead soon but I am viable, cool! A respected intellectual who can give presentations at Humboldt and at the Darmstadt courses!

1995-6, back to San Francisco, but now in a dilapidated building as the city disintegrates around me. No real job, grimy carpets, working for the building manager who's trying to minimize the amount of crack and speed in the building. I'm messing with speed and crack myself, meeting people who are truly below the line of expecting to live their lives. I remember phoning my beloved Trisha after throwing all my drug paraphernalia in a trash can in the street, panicking that I've gotten in too deep, but...

Death is everywhere. Of course.

June 1996: that big fanfare over the New Medications. I have the Time magazine featuring Dr David Ho, our new hero.

Everything is changed.

There was a big conference scheduled in Florida later that year around famous writers and AIDS – they actually had to reorient the whole thing:

because if the plague no longer seems to walk the streets, the shape of time and emotion and existence are all so unbelievably changed...

***

1997-2001, first job in Hong Kong. Money, huge flat, respect, success. 2001-2, Australia – that great job in Sydney, but I haven't told them I'm HIV+, and the government rejects my right to stay and, after a year of living with John, deports me. Huge crash in money and career and hope: my tendency to assume my life is ending takes over my expectations, again.

2002: job in northern England. Too damned cold, and far from the urban things I love, but a smart department, kind people, a good-hearted city.... I gradually recover over the years.

2009. Visit to Zürich to reconnect with Jungian stuff. Then, that summer, a minor stroke... death appears again, in a different form. More personal this time.

Sometime in the 2013-2016 period, Verena Kast points out to me that I have no expectations for myself, and I realize I've been expecting to die for decades. Decades of knowing that, whatever I was engaged in doing, it wouldn't last long – and also, underneath that, and more dysfunctionally, knowing that never finishing a book or any major work would be something I could get away with, because... I was going to die too early, full of tragic promise.

You know, when you pull that sort of self-deluding game for decades, it sort of wears out. It becomes increasingly unbelievable, as such things do. And my secret, that I never seem to finish anything substantial or important, is exposed as a reality, not merely an accident of dying too soon...

But I also realize, after Verena faces me with it, that I'm not endlessly dying. My Jung-Institut thesis, The Passionate Body, is about AIDS: because the body with AIDS is not merely a body that's disintegrating and dying, it's one that passionately wants to live: anger, grief, activism, memorials, sex, drugs – our stories and our rabbiting on and on about being long-term survivors – all these things are evidence that living is the thing that we insist on doing.

***

So, now I want to write this shorter, commissioned book on the psychology of the politics of AIDS, and though I've already taken a year and a half longer than I expected to, it isn't impossible to finish – especially with the help of Terry, who has returned to my life, just when I need her.

Then an expanded, completely rewritten version of the Jung-Institut thesis: the cultural complexes and underlying archetypes of AIDS.

And even, maybe, that long-drafted overview of music about AIDS – not as detailed as work by other musicologists: I want to try to put it all together, to see what music has done for forty years... that third book already has eighty pages of single-spaced draft, but is full of holes, of course.

***

Last month, a minor event that suggested a stroke – then various minor symptoms and side effects: some weeks of panic around a stroke, but then I was told most of the problems suggested liver problems rather than neurological ones. A relief because liver problems are slower, and don't suddenly end things.

So, me, and AIDS, HIV, and death, and life, and continuing.

I hope I finish a lot of stuff. But, as I told Fred years ago – he was upset at this, but I meant it, and I still mean it – if things don't get written or published, that doesn't seem like a real disaster.

Because, and it's a cliché but it feels absolutely real, the only aspect of all this that still feels necessary, unavoidable, is the simple fact that I have been here....

***

Happy HIV Long Term Survivors Day, 2021.

Anniversary, and questions

A few days ago was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog – 14 May 2006.

I wanted to finish a blog entry from September 2019 – so a bit more than a year and a half ago – a fairly amazing late-summer experience of Vienna, Barcelona, Sitges, and life, and excitement, and death, and ending.

It's a draft, about 2,000 words, of something that probably should have been 5-6,000... if I'd gotten focused, written what I was thinking, the awareness – and the excitement, the passion. It was clearly a time of coming alive again – and it has echoed through the months since then: a sense of being full of energy and eros, of seeing how wonderful and exciting things were – or, are – and how big death is, but also how much it has become easy for me to face....

A shame I didn't really finish the draft; at some point I'll post the fragments, especially my eerie closing, which I'm very proud of. That ending may or may not resonate with friends or readers, but for me it is one of those pieces of writing, in stories or articles or blog entries over the last fifty years or so, where I think: yes, that is wonderful, and I am aware that I am done with desire or need or loneliness or disappointment, because I have written that.

•••

But today has a couple of things in it: one is that wish, and its disappointment; and this desire to mark the anniversary, even if some days late...

But now, after two patients this morning, four scheduled this afternoon, a sense of busyness and the usual concerns about writing the book (which should be more important than anything in my world, but is also something that just may never happen) – I drink a smoothie and some tea, I finish washing the dishes, I look at the dim weather, and...

am overwhelmed by a wave of weakness.

That's happened periodically over the past three or four years. And now it echoes a strange event from five weeks ago – a very, very minor event that recalled, that suggested, a stroke: I was standing in the front hallway in the evening after various activities, including showing a movie online to the gay book group, and my eyesight, abruptly and without fanfare, shifted sideways, angled down, split – for probably less than twenty seconds –

I thought, yes, I've seen this before. It was a part of what happened in 2009, when I had a stroke. This time it isn't the same, it's much smaller: feels like a warning –

I go and lie down, though I'm not as ill afterwards as I was in 2009. As I say, a minor event.

I didn't even go the doctor for several days, but after telling a friend or two about it, and seeing their faces and their irritation, I thought, yeah, I'd better tell someone. The GP, then referred to the stroke unit, an afternoon of tests and discussion – no MRI... they add blood thinners back in to my meds, treat it as real but not (yet) a problem.

It was odd... I talk about death and ending all the time, this shouldn't be much of a surprise, or a shock. And it's not – the possibilities around such a tiny experience are not unfamiliar, I can already see them, I just have to turn my head and look.

But it does, of course, leave me a little disoriented, a little off balance...

•••

Intermittent odd feelings and weaknesses since that day; a more enforced series of walks with M. and with M. (two different names, indistinguishable when you have only the first letter!), but they're hard to do, not only because of inertia and overweight-ness, but a real sense of that post-stroke weakness, fortunately in a very attenuated form.

•••

And so today, this wave of completely incapacitating weakness: I sit at the desk, feet up on its corner, typing away – it's a kind of work but I'm pushing myself to do it: if I keep being reminded of mortality, of the fact that, one of these times, everything will start to end for me – then at least I can write, I can talk about it...

•••

A bit of relief at the possibility of being done with the university, with marking and administration.

A bit of concern about all my analysands: there are too many, it's true, and can I be sure they'll all find their ways forward, if I vanish from the conversation? In most cases yes, but....

And the weakness washing through me, making almost everything impossible, but in a relaxed and sort of wonderful way: letting myself wash into the universe....

•••

Not being sure what this is: not being sure what anything is.

Fortunately, with my post-everything education, and openness to not knowing: that is, in itself, kind of a relief.

I should go lie down... do I cancel my two o'clock?... perhaps the only decision now is the one over the next minute, which is to lie down and not be concerned...

•••

There is something absolutely at the existential center of my life about illness, anxiety, and the resonance of this not-doing-ness. Fortunately I've gotten rather good at paying attention to it.

And to now.....

Mood [partly reconstituted]

[A post drafted in late November 2020; I have moved on from these things, a bit... and incidentally am now firmly of age, at 64. I apologize for the fragmentation: unfinished work, with later attempts to recapture some of the original content, and then some scraps of things I wanted to talk about – two and a half months ago....]

Mood is an interesting problem in psychology... mood disorders, CBT and medication to manage mood... if emotion or feeling is like the weather, then mood is more like climate.

In the time of strangeness brought on by COVID-19, I remain mostly pretty calm... but with occasional bursts of confrontative anger: I'm still intermittently a bit of an asshole, often right and sometimes wrong but always too direct, with various people. It's easier to recover than it once was, and fortunately it's easier to control myself and simply not respond....

I had a fairly major test of my still-and-probably-perpetually-clumsy ability to control my own emotional responses a couple of weeks ago: the online presentations of famous Jungians that we've been holding for six months, with marked public success, peaked in a book launch with Sonu Shamdasani, editor of the newly published Black Books by Jung. This collection is such a coup of research and background – I still find the Books almost unreadable, but Shamdasani's excellent introduction leads towards some possibility of understanding, and it keeps feeling as though real attention to this kind of creative work could have a real impact on me: a sense that change and growth remain possible, even two weeks before my sixty-fourth birthday....

Sixty-four: such a pleasingly solid number, one that always seemed to anchor the multiplication table among the weirder linkages that led to fifty-four, fifty-six, sixty-three, and the last familiar outpost before the chilly Plutonian distance of eighty-one. Now, of course, in an era of computer-driven binarism, the number remains solid and familiar, though it has a slightly archaic charm – back to the eighties and nineties, when we still cared about numbers as small as thirty-two, or sixty-four... a bit like telling them inattentive youngsters about diskettes. Which now feel nearly as far away as corsets.

In any case, our management of Shamdasani's online talk was friendly and enthusiastic, but fairly clumsy and crude, especially through the technology. This is hardly new: my lifelong involvement with the split between a polished performance and a sloppy, that's-good-enough presentation has resulted in an article or two, as well as many of my greatest or most recurrent anxieties. (It's probably the largest obstacle facing me now, as I fight with myself to write a shortish book based on my own lucid outline... the writing of words that are good enough should not be difficult and yet, always, for me, it is.)

Over the months we've been doing these online and video presentations, I've forced myself to accept being publicly sloppy (not, of course, for the first time). Having one presenter wish to rip my guts out when I couldn't play the short video he'd wanted (a Zoom update wouldn't allow VLC to function, and it crashed... and I spent nearly ten minutes battling in front of ninety or so Zoom attendees to produce some kind of audiovisual entertainment, and failed utterly) was a dramatic recurrence of these anxieties. It was interesting to respond to that disaster with a certain distant coolness – I apologized profusely of course, but after that there seemed nothing else to do, and it felt like a mark of maturity that my internal response was summed up in the immortal words: oh, well.

***

[At this point I'd planned to tell the tale from November 2020: a clumsy video, with far too much noise in the emcee's wifi connection; and some irritatingly and, for me, pointlessly aggressive questions; so, when Shamdasani asked us not to post it... well that led to strife and argument. Some members of the radical (that is to say, even further left than me) wing of Jungians regards Shamdasani's closeness to the Jung family as proof that he is a kind of collaborator, someone too closely linked to the old Jungian association with the self-protective rich... though I must admit, if there's one area where I have sympathy with the one per cent, it's in the trampling judgment of private individuals by the world of media.

In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Shamdasani is a solid researcher – more than that, really: one of those researchers that make the great mass of academics, historians, writers, and scholars look carelessly sloppy. And his dislike of being poked at – some of the questioners were pointlessly aggressive; and his preference for a polished presentation – the video book launches that he did approve were considerably more elegant and planned than ours – suggest to me some perfectly reasonable values to be held by a rather shy and seriously brilliant man.

So, when he didn't agree for us to make our video public, one person blew up, and many of the attendees were disappointed... but as for me, I thought: okay. A reasonable enough decision, and not a great loss. But the tempest, though it stayed in the teapot and ran for less than a week, was tiresome...

Perhaps I experienced it, also, as a rebuke of my own vanity: the success of this series has been remarkable, and I like people telling me that they enjoy our work, paying attention to my opinions in the Jungian lists, considering me Of Significance in the Field. A bit as I've been intermittently in musicology, since my career high points in the nineties and early two-thousands; as I've said before, of the seven deadly sins, vanity follows close behind envy for me.

So, I suppose this was a kind of perfect storm, for me: and I'm pleased to say I could let it fade from sight with relative equanimity...]

***

Listening to music: I seem to have fallen into Sun Kil Moon and Kate Bush's Ariel, both of them styles that have a distant, thoughtful quality – moods that are generally calm: even the sad or the angry work is so tempered by time, or distance and (sometimes, with Mark Kozelek) a mildly alcoholic numbness. I am more comfortable with such moods today than anything else... or anything I've heard in some time...

Perhaps it's the quality of intense feeling held at a distance: not blocked, not refused, but not... indulged. Not exaggerated, not made into spectacle, let alone tragedy.

Which seems to give more space for really, well... feeling it.

***

Mood: a sunny northern day.

[And, two and a half months later, it is a similar kind of day, but this time with snow: and a clear sense that it will be the last snow – that the original and revisionary chunks of this entry bracket the enforcedly quiet winter of 2020-21.]

The background climate of my life is so different than it was even five years ago – certainly than it was ten years ago, let alone forty... I am so different now (though always of course still exactly the same).

Calm about things that used to seem impossibly difficult; and a bit testy about the insistence of so many who are safe and warm, so taken care of and free from the real, terrible worries of earlier centuries and real poverties, on creating worry, anxiety, even panic, out of such minor elements as having to wear a mask, or not being able to fly somewhere for vacation; or not seeing their grandchildren at this year's family meeting...

Riding the larger climate of anxiety, or relief around COVID, the American election, Brexit, and the Ragnarök of the massively incompetent governments of the English-speaking nations (except, of course, tiny, blessedly honest New Zealand).

[And now, in February, COVID continues, with people seeming a bit more rational, more sane in a realistically irritable and anxious kind of way - somewhat like way we were when we crossed that great line in 1996, when AIDS went from being the horrific end of the world, to an everyday, human, temporal kind of danger...

And of course the American election moved through a ludicrous and embarrassing crisis to a consummation devoutly to be wished, and Brexit actually took place, though without much visible impact in this weird half-life world; so the tangled overlay of what are to me hugely awful or mercifully recuperative have moved around, the strands twisting around each other in constantly refigured patterns.]

I seem to watch them all, slightly disengaged...

***

And now we are getting notices from the university that look towards a post-vaccine world: they might be a little premature, but I think I understand the mood.

And for the first time in months I imagine coming back to an everyday, though of course changed, world: admittedly with a little resistance (I'm comfortable here, don't drag me outside... it's a bit like not wanting to wake up when I was young, when my mother would play the radio loudly in the kitchen: the whole scene colored by her moods, which were cheerful and funny but anxious – she tended to worry endlessly, what would happen to us, would we wake up and work enough to survive – and I did end up as, of course, her greatest worry).

When I do get up it is so beautiful, this chilly sunny northern day. A consideration of where I am now: in a post-COVID I may get to revisit ideas of moving – in my own neighborhood, to a larger house – or, would it be possible to go back to those ideas of an apartment Barcelona, a shared country house in northern Italy?...

And a smaller range of issues: I would see analysands live again, and that would be a pleasure. A bit more reorganization and retooling: and I might finally get to meet some of my online patients live, for the first time.

I assume that the university would combine aspects of simplification and a return to normalcy (we would be back in classrooms, glory be, so much more alive and less attenuated than Zoom classes) with bursts of overblown institutional anxiety (I hope my more more anxious colleagues won't go into elaborate overreactions – we have at least one person who would feel a need to generate frantic questionnaires, instructions, policies, control systems to check whether students and academics feel overburdened... a problem that contains its own genesis, of course).

Life in town would return to – well: not the same, not recognizably normal, but –

And this disastrous government would continue to drag us down. I assume that my students, ex-students, friends, analysands, acquaintances – all the ones who are in more anxious situations under lockdown – would again be able to find employment and money. Depending, of course, on....

I assume we all know that, after we come “back,” people and systems and many things will be very altered. Some in good ways, I think; and others will not be able to continue.

A return to normal will not be, of course, a return to normal.

But at the moment, today at least, none of these things have any real sting or demand in them.

Moods, which are like climate, rather than weather....

Last day of....

It is, approximately, the last warm day (or, the "last," "warm" day).

Which means that today was in the low 70s – warm for the North Sea – and tomorrow is a fading version of the same, without sun. Then we drop to fall temperatures.

Sometimes we have a burst of late summer at the end of September – I remember an especially glorious example about ten years ago: a balmy evening, light shirts and late sun, we were at Bar Loco, where so many of my students like to perform and hang out; school wouldn't start for another couple of days, so it was like a vacation from...

well, everything, I suppose.

I actually met M. that day, in fact.

Such weather may reappear this year....

***

Yesterday I argued with M.: not for the first time, but perhaps the most dogged – I was angry. And, I suppose, a little frightened.

As with most the younger people around me, including several of those who have recently started analysis, I am, probably reasonably, concerned about how they're going to manage – if COVID messes up economies and jobs, especially bar and restaurant jobs, I don't know what they're going to do.

It started when M. said: You're the only person I know who's doing well in the crisis – in lockdown and quasi-lockdown, in the COVID crisis, in the current hallucinatory shambles, which combines health panic with the worst Anglophone governments in a very long time....

Which is, basically, true: I haven't been frightened, or fazed, or disoriented. As I've said – rather a lot, and perhaps somewhat defensively – the people in my HIV groups haven't been scared either. The shattering discovery that we could all get sick and die? and that the situation might throw our jobs and lives and plans and relationships off-kilter?....

For many in the HIV communities – unless I'm being willfully blind, which is not all that improbable – these worries are so familiar as to be barely interesting.

For me, my university job is just fine – I am indeed going a bit part-time; but I also have more analysands every month... there's a slightly unpredictable planning dance about it all: I don't want to be swamped with patients, but I don't know quite many I can handle. At the moment, about ten to fifteen per week... I know, that's a lot. Some are more tiring than others, of course; but they've almost all agreed that I can change from 60 minutes to the old-fashioned 50 minutes, which I'll probably do this month. After all, online analysis – screens, Zoom, FaceTime, Skype – is unquestionably more tiring....

I'm delaying going to 50 minutes mostly because it feels a bit like the thing a utility company does when they raise their rates: you aren't going anywhere, you know it and they know it, and they send you a handsome multi-colored letter of apology with statistics and charts, but it's not really something you get to agree to.

***

If I were one of my analysands, I would have interrupted this rambling by now and said, so: you had an argument?...

Yes, we argued. Or, well, I argued. M. has several plans for creative things to do if he loses his job – and unfortunately his employer is easily panicked, they've discussed closing several times in the past few years. Loss of customers from COVID have induced several conversations about who's going to get laid off, and when. M. is in good shape, relatively, but if they simply close the place....

And so another friend of mine, N. (does this begin to sound like a Victorian memoir? Or a pornographic novel from the 1920s? well, there are more initials coming) offered to help him make some business plans. She is brilliant, and often happy to help friends for a home-cooked dinner... but M. has not contacted her; and he said he felt unsure, he hasn't talked to her for months, what does she think, is it too embarrassing to face.

Which is when I started to get, as they say, stroppy.

Not only pushing him – you can imagine the kind of parent I might have been – but getting fairly threatening.

I don't mean I threatened him, but – I said things I have not said for six months of lockdown: that many jobs and companies will slide towards oblivion, that bar and restaurant income might vanish, that a lot of people will probably be out of work by next year. That we live in one of the countries that is least likely to help the unemployed or desperate, and it's five years before an election. That he might have no way to support himself, and no rights as a foreigner, in what is now a ruthlessly xenophobic country.

That if he wanted to do anything, he should be getting help, especially freely offered help, and doing it now.

Because (as you can tell was implicit in my tone) this world is – probably – ending.

***

I have decades of reading science fiction, and TV and films, and then of course there's nearly four decades of AIDS, so laying it on a bit thick about dystopic prospects is the easiest thing in the world for me.

I may have overdone it....

***

M., like his Greek friends, enjoys argument, and likes to present strong opposition. I, of course, always do badly with this – my youngest-sibling stuff start to explode and, despite all my intellectually deconstructive training, I tend to hold a strong and ruthless line on the dark side of an argument. I said, I'm angry about this: there's no harm in you being uncertain, but you cannot afford to not call N. for advice.

After more of the 'enraged magus' stuff from me (I'm good at it, as friends know to their cost), M. said yes, he got it, and looked a bit exhausted... he doesn't like direct arguing. We walked home through the park, settling things in several directions at once – I admitted to the things driving me, as did he; and I could say: I know I sound like your father....

By the time we were at my home, things were okay.

***

There was an odd foreshadowing on the previous day, Saturday, in the midst of the half-deserted mall: I'd met M.-2 (there will unfortunately be three guys with the initial M. in this post; they are not ordered by age) for shopping and lunch. We sat and talked about everything, including vacation plans and the lack thereof, and eventually got to masks and public behavior. M.-2 (I can see I'm going to regret the format of that abbreviation – I mean really, a period and a hyphen?) found it easy to be clear: he takes COVID seriously, he can wear a mask, but he isn't scared and doesn't worry about it. A woman who is his best friend, who has weathered a cancer recovery in the past few years, feels the same – the two of them are known for being clear-headed and non-hysterical; they are really the rocks of emotional stability in a large group of friends and acquaintances.

And they're honestly not worried – and, theoretically, neither am I.

Or, let's say this more clearly: I'm not worried for myself. I don't expect to catch COVID, and am not terribly scared of it (there's an ironic overlay that people on HIV medications don't seem likely to get it, though that may or may not include the meds I'm currently taking). But I honestly don't worry about me....

But yes, I am, even passionately, worried about M.

And a lot of the youngsters.

I'm not sure I had realized just how much that was true.

***

So, back to Sunday, after parting with M. (that's M.-1 if you like).

The evening continued on to my usual Sunday Skype with M.-3 and R., or, if you prefer, the southern California contingent.

Despite the fires, and the dark orange skies above San Francisco, they are safe where they are. They were a bit tired, but relatively happy – they have just moved, to a place that is far pleasanter, with cooler weather and better air and friendlier people. M.-3 does have a ton of admin, and had to tragically let go of too many books in the move, but I know he's not really unhappy; so when he started to list his problems I was... detached. Kind of overtly uninterested.

And eventually I got around to the entire what-happened-today-with-M.-and-why-it-was-so-intense. Which kept unfolding: yes, things are good for me, and yet...

I found myself complaining about something I hadn't really noticed, with increasing energy and exasperation: I am on two email mailing lists for Jungians (I'm hardly bothering now with the musicology lists), and one of them has contained a daily barrage of anxious arguments, fussing, chaos.... I woke to 29 messages yesterday from one list....

A lot of the analysts and therapists I've gotten to know in the past decade are sensible and calm; many are frankly quite wise, have a sense of time and how to hold difficult things of all kinds. They don't overreact, and can handle problems without flinching.

But there are others who may be good with their clients... but who can be infuriatingly anxious, thin-skinned, panic-stricken, irritating. Fretful poor-you messages, trivial squabbles over terms, and what seems to me an absolutely deluded assumption that the entire world wants to hear about worries and projections in the worlds of politics, safety, crises, rights, and the palpitations some of them seem to be having over it all....

My last analyst, Brian, had a strange but brilliant theory: that people who care for others in the psychological professions often tend to be a bit borderline. That they are too thin-skinned, bursts of fear and anxiety frequently disorienting their experiences, more than other people.

Most of my new colleagues in this my third career are level-headed, many of them frankly quite wise. But there are the frantic ones, the frenetic ones – and they keep sending feverish emails, every day...

***

M.-3 and R., who had definitely shifted into carer mode in response to my intensity, came sensibly to the decision that I should leave the email lists.

Later I realized that I can't actually leave the lists – there are too many connections I need to maintain – but I can have all those emails dumped into a folder, to be ignored as long as possible, and then mostly erased.

I felt considerably calmer, clearer-headed, when we reached this simple strategy... it felt a bit like managing to move away from irritatingly noisy neighbors, who never do anything actually illegal, but who are exasperating in unpredictable ways, twenty times in a day....

***

We spoke about the fires, and the skies, and the analyst who had said on the email list: it's not 'like' the apocalypse, it is the apocalypse. Which I thought amazingly stupid: you're going to go through a tense time, constantly thinking, This is the end!... how idiotic is that?

And how can an analyst, who has been through analysis herself, not be able to see that?...

(M.-3 has an unusually detailed background in Christian theology, and corrected me: this isn't apocalyptic, it's eschatological. Apocalypse comes from the word for 'revealed', as in secret – end times are eschatological. He is right, but I'll never remember this in times of stress, so...)

I told them both about reading Pitchaya Sudbanthad's brilliant Bangkok Wakes to Rain: climate change moving back and forth over three centuries, in Bangkok, a city more low-lying than London... a place that knows its future is risky. But the author (whose name I still can't quite spell or pronounce, but okay) doesn't treat it as The End – but as an intense time of changes: his characters continue, but things are... different.

***

Between these things, an extended dream, with much concrete detail but not much intensity. I am wandering with a young woman and a young man (I am also younger, I think) through a series of small towns, a bit like movie sets along both sides of a large highway through an empty countryside; and the place we choose to explore turns out to be a school, underground; we can't seem to get past it to anywhere interesting, we go down and then come back up, and finally turn around to return through a clean, yellow-beige, slightly miniaturized version of a parking garage.

As I woke, I thought: a mildly boring but not upsetting story: it suggests the exasperation and slightly off-center quality of preparing for the university year, under awkward but non-threatening circumstances: I will probably be virtual, be online, for the entire first semester... or longer.

Being a virtual presence, doing a virtual kind of work: it was fun last month with the lecture on individuation for the South African group (they liked it, and will have me do two more in October on music and Jung, and then next year more, again).

But half of all my lectures at Newcastle need to be pre-recorded; and frankly that seems deeply boring...

And module handbooks, and fussing over procedures. There is a lot of rather fiddly control of minor actions at my university these days, always driven by that amplified institutional anxiety: box-ticking....

***

So, back to today, the last day of... okay, not summer, but perhaps of summery-ness.

The quality of the day was interesting: I showered, dressed, got a haircut – but moving slowly, lazily. Some sun, a long walk through my neighborhood, considering the new idea that's grown over the past couple of weeks: that I might move to somewhere around here – a house, a rental, more space than I have, enough to see analysands in a specific room. A bit more space and a new sofa, and a bigger bed...

so if moving to Barcelona or northern Italy is just too difficult, I can still upscale my life, a bit at least. As I've been in this flat for eighteen years – longer than anywhere in my life, by a too-long shot – it is time for a change; and if it's change for the sake of change, that's fine with me.

***

And today was also reading: I lay on the bed in the sun, and I read. An analysand is writing his second book, and he told me that he thinks one of the things that got him back to work was reading – Stephen King, or anything really – rather than television. So, when I am wasting time over the past week or so, I read –

as I used to do, for decades, on four continents, in so many bedrooms, living rooms, cafés and libraries: getting away from worlds of video, back to the worlds of print....

***

The last warm day floats along. Not many people are around, but the day is beautiful – really beautiful.

And, unexpectedly – I must have changed a great deal, as this was once something I found so difficult – the awareness of changing time is not painful. Going through yet another one-way portal in the year, going, always, in only one direction through time. You won't be back here again...

and that's okay.

Not grieving, not guilty – I'm not writing, it's true, but that doesn't mean I'm a failure, that I don't really exist. And I'm leaving summer behind, but that's okay too, there will be other days.

I do, still, wish that I could share this day with someone – but it's okay: this is not painful.

Which is amazing, really: that's my individuation at its core, isn't it?

Time, and life, as experience that is not painful....

Summer's day

I am a bit tired today – a mistake in minor medications, a mildly bad night... and, as so often, I only realized at about five or six a.m. what the obvious mistake must have been, and why my guts were churning as a result.

Not terrible. A bit exasperating.

And two different friends, eager to connect – one saying, can we Skype now (no, how about tomorrow night instead), the other calling twice... some people who don't take no for an answer, not easily. But I can easily ignore them, then later innocently saying, oh, did you call?

Because the era of needing to answer the phone immediately was over decades ago, with the advent of answering machines. We are far past that now.

It used to be such a useful dramatic device, in plays and movies: the phone rings, you have to answer it – it is a harbinger, or an eerie warning, or bad news. Not often good news, that wouldn't have been useful in getting the plots moving. I do think of those eras when interrupting time was a normal experience – those decades when people had gotten accustomed to the shrill ring...

It's far better that that is over. Phones may create their own problems these days, but at least they are not such disruptive, unlabeled incursions.

I suppose you can even tell, from some spatial apps, if the call is coming from inside the house....

•••

Coasting through summer, the day after the solstice.

It is still the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; I am still in quasi-lockdown, as are many here in the north of England.

And still not anxious, or particularly distracted about it all. Which at times leads to me being, perhaps, a little bit inappropriate – I've been visibly impatient and amused in several meetings including, probably most annoyingly, one with the Jung-Institut alumni.

I do, still, get bored and irritated by people who generate tragic anxiety while sitting in their comfortable homes... yes, I know, it's rather unsympathetic of me. But some Jungians do seem impelled to have Feeellliiings, perhaps in order to prove something about themselves (their kindness, their sensitivity? their professional abilities? their fragile Récamier-sofa delicacy?) by getting weepy about anything they can find...

Just as an opposing bunch of Jungians do the narcissistic-guy-who-needs-everyone-to-praise-his-newest-project thing (I've had at least three dramatic versions of that in the past few weeks).

Both patterns are also visible among the academics that make up another chunk of my professional world, but at least among the analysts one more easily sees the pattern – usually with a sense that the person dramatizing the pattern half-knows that they're doing it, and so there is at least some space to step past the heaviness, the messiness of the pattern.

Of course being rather bitchy about it, as I often am, is not quite so welcome. Ah well, this is in some ways a more developed version of me at 40 (and me at 27 and me at 18 and me at 13 and me at...).

Hey, I'm judgmental, it's what I do.

•••

But it is a pleasant day, and I am in a pleasant mood, generally. The two minor shadows above – they're trivia, things that pass frequently but unimportantly.

In fact, as so often in the past five or six years, I have a large-scale sense, like a kind of intuitive gestalt, of veils dissolving... of bonds falling away.

Which is, I suppose, individuation. Good thing, too.

I suppose I hadn't known that my life after my second analysis (and, perhaps, after my first one in 1987-92) would be so much about yet-another-veil-fading... that I would not leap into a new way of being, that I would instead fall, almost without noticing, every few months, a few millimeters – these days, perhaps, something more like a few feet – and realize that there is more space around me, more room to move. Without much concern or worry.

Life bigger, more fluid. And a sense that some people already live like this, and look at the rest of us and think: why do you cripple yourselves in that peculiar manner?....

I do wish I'd been this, known this, earlier... but then I would be a different person entirely, of course.

•••

If I reverse the point of view on these changes, they can move back into all those science-fictional visions of if-I-had-lived-otherwise... which, because, why the hell not, can be meshed with if-the-world-had-been-otherwise.

A common version of this for me is the one I've outlined before: a less damaged San Francisco in a less fragmented world, a less disoriented me who has found a way to be creative and happy, and with love and friends of course. No AIDS in this universe.

But today as I walk past that familiar vision, I think – if it had gone that way, if I were in a comfortable but not ostentatious house in Marin, someone I love and a pet or two in another part of the house; making breakfast as I am now making breakfast – perhaps even not such a different breakfast, granola, yogurt, some raspberries – would that other me look out the window and down the hill into the dazzling view, and think: I wonder if I've missed a lot, being happy and busy here, not having lived other lives, not going through different, darker experiences, in different countries? Has it all been too simple, too easy?....

•••

But I suppose discontent is always available, from one angle or another.

•••

I wash the dishes and fold the laundry; the windows are open because it is not too chilly, there is a gust of fresh rain... it is this kind of summer day....