in the hall of mirrors

Stages

The cloud of minor changes this month, anxiety over illness – three weeks of pains starting each night that turned out merely to be neuropathy, which, as I've explained to friends, is as though a dashboard light glows; but it doesn't indicate engine trouble, it just indicates that there's something wrong with the dashboard light – worry over the upcoming Jung-Institut semester (my analyst pointed out that it doesn't make sense for me to study there if I'm going to turn it into a burden); working on two articles, one on images of death –  and the general sullenness of winter...

changes no greater than those of shifting winter lights, glinting and sometimes stellating, but always limited to a palette of pale whites and blacks and grays.

I am surprised, and pleased, that my sabbatical starts a bit earlier than I had expected; and that it seems possible to put some things aside and get some clear air, space, time.

Somewhere among all of this are many flashes of memory, some of them coming to me in rather large chunks – memory tied to musician friends because I will be writing about them, memory tied to AIDS because of the death article,  and a frequent rapid turnover of, well, various experiential processes... and the added background confusion of dreams: at the end of last week's analysis session, two and a half pages of dreams ended with this rather abrupt fragment:

"Banquet/restaurant (?). Various tables, a reservation list, I’m making sure that I’m on it – I tell them that I’ve discovered that I’m dying, therefore I want to get a table now because I only have so long to live…"

Strange perhaps because despite the intermittent appearance of many travel dreams over the past few years – airports, train stations, waiting rooms – that I have become accustomed to recognize as death dreams, with their crowds of people known or unknown, changing schedules, delays and deferrals, uneasiness or serenity, I've never handed my analyst anything quite so... well, blunt.

I had written it down because that was what I remembered; but after reading it aloud to him, I couldn't quite meet his eyes for a few minutes – embarrassment of a kind, a sort of irritation at the naked demand of the dream?

I think he was a bit startled too; he did urge me to enjoy going to Küsnacht again – which could be interpreted in several ways....

But I wasn't going to write so much about that; that is perhaps merely background to what I was thinking tonight, when I got out of bed and opened the computer.

Somewhere among the books on memory, time, death, and dreams, I started to get sort of gestalt flashes of the Los Angeles apartment in the late 1980s or early 1990s – a big party that we had there, when Paul P. was my roommate, and we'd invited all sorts of different people. An amazing party, because we did the rather daring thing of asking highly contrasting groups of people – people who worked with me, friends from a leather bar, a real hodgepodge of the many people who were around us in those days.

It is strange to look back that far, a bit over twenty years ago: the crowded surroundings of my life, at least part of the time, especially as compared with the much quieter, emptier life spaces I occupy now.

Such contrast: again, like summer and winter – and suddenly the different parts of my life are represented as spaces filled with, or emptied of, figures – and with such different colors: greens and blues and reds, or grays and whites....

Sherlocks

Two Sherlocks in one week: the first episode of the second season of the brilliant BBC television series, and the second Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie film. Interesting as narrative that the film jumps to such a late place in the SH canon (Moriarty over the falls! that was originally the ending of everything), while the television version seems to be setting up a longer, more tangled line of work. Both have very different ways of making Sherlock Holmes post-[hyper]-modern, both direct the skill and energy in different directions –

but they do have something distinctive in common: much more than any previous version, or for that matter than most spy or speculative fictions, rather than emphasizing the complexity of the solution to the problem (which is present of course, but happens rapidly as though taken for granted, at least by SH himself) they emphasize the speed required to solve the problem, and the complex anticipatory and multiply directed actions required to survive the tangle of events.

This is sort of like the impressions that cyberpunk created; and of course it is the post-[hyper?]-modern world. I used to think that increasing transparency of government and corporate actions enforced by rapid information retrieval would lead to less public evil or repression becoming possible; instead we have a weirder world where we know perfectly well that extraordinarily illegal or immoral things are being done by people in charge, because we can see the tail ends of their actions, but we can't quite stop them. Except, of course, occasionally.

As though the attraction of these hyper-Sherlocks is not that they can resolve everything acceptably, but that they can create for us a fighting chance with evils – that they can catch some things, that they can raise the tension, that they can make life at least very difficult for the sociopath, for the greedy, for the selfishly controlling.

And maybe they can even make the whole game so difficult that some of the 'enemy' simply gives up in frustration...

Well: one can hope.

Retrospect

I continue to be slightly... what? – unclear, disoriented, mildly frustrated? – about my previous post, about my feelings on Christmas night.

There was a lucid sense of time and the year, of eternity and life and death, of change as perfect and inevitable.

And, quite honestly – and this is rare for me – I had a sense of my own life, death, successes and failures, as simply not terribly important: not in any negative or cruel way, but I think in the way sought by Buddhists, Taoists, and the more arcane branches of most religions.

I realized as I finished writing it that it was quite real, and I went to bed treasuring it, though I was already fatally certain that morning would bring me back to normal anxieties and desires, and the constant greed for life to be more important, more successful, more pleasurable. More, always.

I know that some people (mostly those in such religions already mentioned) think such understanding is crucial, though rare – and that many others would treat it as anathema, as nonsense, as some sort of disguised depression or delusion. But I think the second of those groups is simply too attached to the external world – they have mistaken the biological demands of the living body, or the social/affectionate demands of other people, for necessary forces; where they are merely very common – good things, but not thereby the only or ultimate good. Then of course you have another side – as a depressive who reads too much I might be more susceptible to the tired, and poorly named, 'existentialist' pose, that would claim that nothing means anything anyway. I certainly don't mean that – perhaps I'm lucky to have seen plenty of Grove Press and French thought when I was young, because such a negative 'existentialism' looks as silly to me as, say, the current world of American politics, just to pick one example of many.

But you can already see I'm overworking it. Two days that included a train down to Yorkshire for analysis, a session that was productive but tangled, murky; discussion of two dreams with oddly violent characters in them, and an argument over experiencing feelings related to recent deaths; a sleepy, cold ride home, and much of today sleeping on the couch. A time of blurry retreat, of wondering, of wandering rather aimlessly through inner territories – of not particularly wanting to get back on the wheel of social/working time (a not uncommon feeling for me), and trying to justify all this by being alone with my – well, not my thoughts: my feelings? My dreams?

Looking at a closed door: but not completely closed, light still leaks around the edges.

And what would be the point of having it open?

And what would be the point of going through it?...

This Christmas night

A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing this for long, and I know he will create more complex things later – but already it is a bowl that has its own definite nature.

And today a Christmas day, slow and quiet during the day, then pleasant talk and stuffing myself with ham at Michael and Andrew's, with the other Andrew. (It's like those passages in the New Testament where the text says: with the other Mary... passages that give a startling sense of the concrete, of seeing vastly important things as they happen.)

And here at home, sleepy, the tree small but glowing with colored lights, and delicately ruthless neomedieval carols by Richard Rodney Bennett playing. A sense, after a glass or two or so of champagne and wine, after a quiet but satisfying day, of the deeply serious strength of this time of year: as existence shows its bare but still living branches, and the dark earth and moonless night show their natural power – a power that is always there, but is inevitably obscured by the confusion of surfaces and flashes that interrupt during the brighter and more social parts of the calendar.

These notes, these lights, seem to weave small patterns against the vast sky – but the patterns themselves are ancient, are echoes of the sky itself: they reflect something that reaches down through the core of winter, that touches the life that grows out of this coldest time, and starts again to take root....

Solstice

Last night, exceptionally strange dreams: psychotic, then sociopathic, figures – strange flashes of ruthless danger, violence. Not frightening exactly, not a feeling of nightmares, but certainly alarming – perhaps more alarming on waking: to write about them brings one to a stop, to a point of shock.

Of course, in Jungian terms, some kind of serious shadow stuff... the unabsorbed and inchoate materials of the unconscious. Above all, strange.

During the day, a surprise: the usual triennial doctor's appointment, and he wanted to talk about new medications – new HCV medications to be started at the end of March, and as a result new HIV medications. I insisted on lots of detail, but strangely enough it all sounds good – and yes, I know, especially from events of the past year, these things often have side effects that are less amusing then you're ever warned. (The perpetual annoying thought process: we didn't want to tell you about the side effects because then you might imagine that you had them... hmm.)

But this actually sounds good: a possibly bumpy month-long transition, or possibly not bumpy at all as a celebration of Spring, to move to easier HIV medications (no Ritonavir, oh joy unbounded!) and generally more successful HCV medications.

Well, we'll see – holding the whole thing at a slight distance from myself, considering – but at the moment let's count it as...

good news.

Types

Today was Steve's wake: of the 'eldest set' (and no, we don't have a term for ourselves – we are simply the members of the local HIV patient group who have lived the longest – generally from fifteen to twenty-odd years since diagnosis), he is actually the first, or perhaps the second, to die in nine years. (I'm not quite sure whether our 'original' straight man is alive or not – he left the group some years ago, and we've lost touch since then).

So, it was a bit strange from that point of view. The oldest soldiers, those most acquainted with illness and death – but we haven't been called to it, not yet. It is merely that thing we have lived with for a remarkably long time, that has changed the shapes of our personal universes.

It was not, however, an especially dark or sad day – Steve wanted a celebration, no dark clothes, etc., and that is basically what he got. Those struck by sadness were generally younger, or further from the orbit of the AIDS community; and the music and conversation managed to pull those who had been sad during the ceremony into something happier and more social during the wake. Which is how it is supposed to go, I think.

But that's not quite what I was going to talk about... I remember, as a common occurrence years ago, waking from a nap, or simply thinking back, after a social event, to suddenly realize something about the particular people I'd encountered that escaped me at the time. Of course this is often a sudden flush of embarrassment, or perhaps a startled sense of having missed the deeper point of someone's conversation; but it was always, for me at least, imbued with a sudden astonishment – look, it says, the world is run by many different patterns, and there are some that you never seem to notice the first time around.

Of course this relates to Jungian personality types, or at least my view them; they've always been a favorite aspect of Jungian theory for me – as I tend to be a fairly well-defined type myself (according to Myers-Briggs' simplified system, an INTJ), it both reminds me that the universe is not based on my values, and helps me to relax and accept behaviors and feelings that I don't instinctively understand. It's way of keeping my balance in a complex world of people, as it were.

So when I had a sudden sense, after a long nap this evening, that several encounters today involved crossed wires between different types – a hug that lasted strangely long, someone telling me the extended and Rabelaisian story of his life, a woman expressing cheerful resignation with her marriage as she drove a car through the snowy streets – abruptly made sense: that I had received signals and tales that were like messages out of other people's internal universes – I suddenly realized that, years ago, especially in San Francisco, such belated recollections and perceptions happened more often for me.

I suppose it's natural: we tend to self-select the people around us, and, depending on our professions, end up being grouped with people who have comparable values and perceptual worlds. Especially academics, of course: there is no question that there are various personality types among academics, but certain types are commoner than others – and, for instance, the passionately sensate and feeling types I encountered today would be rarer in a university department than in other businesses. And though there are more dramatic differences with some students, they are of course so young and malleable – it is difficult to remember just how different they might grow to be, while trying to teach them my own perceptions.

But I suppose I was also recalling something that lies beneath many of my memories. I miss San Francisco a lot, of course, as I say all too often: there is a sense of lost joys, and I have been deeply angry this year that I couldn't get accepted to a major conference that took place there – losing the chance to have such a trip paid for felt like losing one last bite of the lotus, one last look at Paradise.

But it's also true that San Francisco was full of people, including my dearest friends and lovers, who were very different from me: it tended to draw the sensual, the kindly, those who took more joy and understanding from everyday physical and emotional pleasures. I knew at the time that I was unusual there, but that that dramatic difference was extremely good for me: as though, to put it into fairy-tale imagery, the cold, skilled magician, with all his sorceries but with little happiness in his heart, were exiled to an island of gardeners, hunters, fisherman – and lovers, dancers, painters: people operating at a very different angle from him, but who could teach him to relax, to tan in the sun, to tend the nets and the fields, to dance around bonfires when the moon rose.

And today's wake was a bit like that: stumbling over those very different worlds, again – and realizing that perhaps this explains my increasing coldness and sadness over the past decade: because, exiled from that livelier world that is so unlike me, I become too much like myself – and my self, on my own, tends to live in a small room, engaging in complex but repeated patterns; in a space of rote and abstract diagrams, of hazy memories, and a smell of dust.

Maintenance

I tend to be disturbed by the times when practically everything there is to do in a given day, in this city, in the world seems to be a kind of maintenance – keeping things going, repetition – except for the things that are timewasters.

Maintenance: I do tend to keep the apartment neat, I make dinner, I wash the dishes. I put books in order, I organize the next lecture – which is similar to previous lectures in previous years (the university tends to force us to work this way, demanding extensive paperwork for any change to the curriculum, which is insane of course but oh well, if we're a bit crazy it helps us fit into their system better). I answer e-mails, but frankly they are astoundingly boring – taking the trash out is actually, faintly, more interesting.

And I also spend far too much time on timewasters: television, solitaire, books that I've read before. And the things that don't look like timewasters – the articles I'm supposed to be writing, reading something new, actually doing anything – don't seem particularly interesting at the moment, and are ultimately extensions of other large-scale patterns of maintenance or timewasting (i.e. cranking out more academic papers that can be collected into another set that someone tries desperately to sell, multiplying ideas upon ideas, etc.).

Even things that I don't happen to engage in – raising children, etc. – are of course large-scale maintenance functions: keep the race going, create more beings, then keep all of them going. I've been excited, intermittently, over the past two or three years at studying at the Jung Institute, because I'd like to work especially with older people, helping them (and me) continue to grow, which would hopefully lead into spaces of understanding that would actually be new, at least to them (and me) – but of course that can happen at best seldom, and most of that work is also merely maintenance, continuity. Same old same old.

I realize this starts to seem, well, slightly schizoid... I wouldn't characterize myself as schizoid, but I suppose we all tend to drift in one direction or another. And of course I could go read some Deleuze about repetition – but that sounds like a terrible idea; after all, disturbingly enough, he committed suicide, after a long and successful career.

Creativity? Yeah sure well. Sometimes faintly interesting. Better for people who can actually do something that seems to go somewhere, but still kind of a hamster wheel activity.

Sensate pleasures – food, clothes? Tainted at the moment by atrociously early Christmas advertisements that are already being shoved down our throats. Adorno was right.

I'm not really trying to be terribly, well, negative-existentialist – I did read a lot of existentialist literature as a teenager (Grove Press published a lot), but it has always seemed rather silly to me, to create a philosophy that leans towards nihilism. It's really just self-aggrandizement... Sartre wouldn't have made his own nausea such a big deal if he couldn't have put his name on it, like a designer label.

It's winter I suppose....

Bored now....

Is something happening? No?...

No....

Spinning

After Mom's death, recovering from what is apparently irritable bowel syndrome (sigh) and someone breaking into my office...

At the analyst's. My dreams have no particular focus; I can discern an echo, like an invisible superstructure, of response to Mom's death around the edges, but otherwise there is not much to work with.

He finally says he thinks I am avoiding having any feelings about Mom's death.

I explain that it is entirely reasonable to not have any strong feelings about her death; that she died on another continent, and it was not an experience that was very real to me.

And that she has been barely 'there' for about three years in any case, and we all said good-bye some time ago.

If we said good-bye at all, anyway.

And besides death and dying have been so familiar to me for years, what do you expect anyway.

And on top of all that I haven't been feeling very well, and besides in any case I explain.

After I've been justifying myself for about half an hour, his eyes are glazing over slightly....

At least I got the point, if on a cognitive, and slightly embarrassed, basis.

Came home and pulled out Verena Kast's book on death and mourning, I've been meaning to read it anyway, she teaches seminars I've attended in Zürich.

I've now been reading it for two days; it is quite articulate, very intelligent.

Not entirely surprising material, but it clarifies a lot of things I reread, trying to remember them, somewhat like people learning Kübler-Ross' five stages (which are an oversimplification but oh well, I should simply memorize them anyway, at some point).

I carry the book with me a lot and read it, but admittedly don't read it for terribly long.

It seems only two or three pages at most before I mostly feel as though it's time for a nap.

And yes I know this is a different kind of cognitive, processed response.

Well, what do you expect.

It's a kind of spinning....

Airports (II)

I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them for the whole flight. They look like something you could travel on, they look like... well, a sort of heaven of course, certainly a complex landscape of hills and valleys. Since we grew up near Dulles Airport, perhaps Saarinen's famous building helped out a bit (we were between Dulles and National Airport, now disgustingly renamed after a dreadful president – one of the symbols of the greedy decline of America, for me at least).

After a few years I noticed I didn't have so strong a reaction, and they had become just clouds. But I kept watching, wondering why that ecstatic amazement had gone away, and trying to respond. There was certainly something resonant about the things I was imagining at the time – my poem Airports refers to something very important to me, though it probably just confuses other people.

More significantly, there have been many airports (and some docks and even bus stations, just for variety) in my dreams; it seems that they have come to mean, for me, death and some sort of transition – there are dreams where older friends such as Susan and Philip are solemnly leaving and I am full of anxiety, trying to stay behind; there are others that are more cheerful, with strange airport shops and crowds, but just as mysterious, where people old and young are lining up with me to board.

All of which means that tonight's airport dream comes as no surprise. I have no dreams that clearly show my mother as a distinct person, now just over a week since her death (although she has appeared in many dreams before her death, recently even in one where she is talking to her own mother); but there is a sense of her and/or her death in the background, as the context for the dream. And in this one I'm trying to stay on a plane home, though I don't have the right ticket, and odd things keep happening among the people who are gradually boarding....

...

Mom died on Sunday, very early in the morning. There have been papers to sign; my sister and brother have of course handled lion's shares of the complex work involved – contacting relatives, banks and newspapers, filling out forms, cleaning out her room, etc.

I'm apologetic to say that I mostly feel a certain dim relief. It feels as though she hasn't been 'there' for about three years – not comatose, but it seemed that her memory, personality, her self pretty much disintegrated some time ago. My brother and sister discussed the details of how she was acting – she seemed more awake and responsive when my sister was there, for a while, and that is when I got to see her through a shaky Skype connection, about every two weeks.

So it's not as though she wasn't there at all: not without reactions, small near-smiles, changes in the eyes and facial muscles. But they seemed the reactions of an extremely young child, from very, very far away – it became confusing to decide who you were communicating with, or whether you were communicating at all. (And, of course, especially the past three or four months, whether she was recognizing my face and waving hand on a computer screen as an actual person, or if it was just blobs of color moving.)

All three of us, plus spouses and my brother-in-law, have been watching the same things happen, and obviously trying to figure out what they mean for us. Impossible to know, I suppose. And, of course, I wonder if it is insensitive of me to be so sure that she wasn't 'there' enough to matter – that any loss to her, or to us, happened some time ago, and this is just the end of a mildly sad coda to her life. (Only mildly sad because, fortunately, she was not anxious for long during her mental decline – this is the crucial difference between Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia; because I do know that one of the worst experiences of my mother's life was taking care of her aunt when she had Alzheimer's, a really tortuous experience that went on for what seemed like a long time.)

It's hard to know. I suppose that having seen a lot of illness and death, and thought about it in a fairly introverted way, makes me assume I would understand what is going on with someone else – especially someone as important to me as my mother – when she's near the end, and also then when she's gone. But it does seem like the vast clouds of unknowing that surround mental disintegration and death are just as opaque as they ever were: not only are we unable to follow at the end, it's hard to feel that you are sharing any part of the experience.

Maybe what my sister did – sent out a collection of photographs of my mother at different points in her life, some of which I've seen, some of which were new to me – is the best way to connect: connecting of course to a younger woman in the midst of life, but someone one can at least intuitively understand.

In any case: I do have a sense of the parts of myself that come from my father and my mother – and there are surprisingly large parts of each. The combination of those parts darkens both of them a bit – I am sadder, more easily depressed than my father; and although I share my mother's passionately well-meaning anxiety that she was doing the right thing, taking care of her family in the best ways possible at all times, I do tend to lose forward impetus and a belief in action more easily than she did.

Perhaps the reality hasn't hit yet: after all, and this is unfortunately a familiar situation for me, living far away means that the verbal news of someone's death has a certain imagined or abstract quality.

But, given that my mother and I tended to be so close at some levels – sadly at levels full of anxiety: I felt that I was always one of her biggest worries – there is still the sense of the lighter-hearted, smiling Greek girl, the shy youngest of three who discovered she was beautiful in her late twenties, who had a passion for caring for people.

So perhaps my sister's collection of photographs is the best thing to do: to focus on that awareness of eighty-nine years of life....