in the hall of mirrors

Alternatives

An unusual analysis session today... I had five or six dreams for us to discuss, three fairly substantial and complete, three or four more fragmentary and partially remembered.

All the dreams had familiar elements and settings strewn through them – a southern California parking lot and a suburban office building, a southeast Asian grocery with dried fruits and a mysterious dinner, a bedroom with a small boy and his older sister reading books, a long bus trip through the desert hills east of San Francisco, and so on – even, in fact, a strangely supernatural thriller centered on a footballer and his friends in northern England. But I couldn't quite make sense of them: I couldn't really intuit myself or the people I knew, or my past, in any of the fragments... we had a bit of a discussion about various mechanisms of dream transformations (which aren't unfamiliar to me, but for some reason in this set of dreams I continued to feel bewildered, disoriented).

And John suddenly tied it all up, not five minutes before we needed to finish: he said, well, clearly, these are fragments of your turning points from the past – confusions, problems, changes – and you're going back to reconstruct them, but while changing the endings. Sort of like alternative history fictions, or parallel universe science fictions... and, by the way, you've been dreaming them approximately in the order they actually happened, haven't you?....

Of course I love such things: I'm always interested in stories and films that have alternative-history aspects, especially when characters go back and try to alter their pasts – even when those alterations end badly, as they often do. (Think: The Man in the High Castle, The Butterfly Effect, a host of television episodes, etc. etc.).

So interesting, and so peculiar – and perhaps not as desperate as it might all seem at first: that I would try to heal my relation to my past by starting to tell all the tales, again, and in order: but through telling them differently....

Globes

Working tonight on a program note for an old piece of mine – as it happens the final composition I ever wrote, in 1986 – Seven Last Haiku, which will have its premiere by the students in late March this year. One or two pianists are looking at it, and we have a cellist (Bennett is going to help me score a brief, light cello part within the original piano notes), and we'll get one of the young women with a clear, calm speaking voice.

Looking through the book of haiku translations, with their clarity and summary moments and lives, and remembering  what I was doing in the 1980s, among so much death and change and so many attempts to become one thing or another, all feels unexpectedly contained – as though the fears and losses and passions and striving of an earlier self are of course not gone, but have somehow shrunk, contained inside a glass globe, on a shelf among others.

This is, then, what it is like to look back on earlier selves – one takes a small globe from a shelf, holds it to the light, shakes it a bit to watch bits of glitter and snow swirl around... and then puts it back in its accustomed place, and walks away.

History

Over the past few days, Mubarak's reign in Egypt has finally collapsed; a remarkable video of a song that appeared just before he gave up and left the country. I don't know a translation, but it hardly matters – you see the faces, some of which look tired (it has been a long vigil) and all triumphant, the vivid feeling of change. Tunisia, Yemen, my own students' demonstrations in London – which haven't changed things here yet; but they will –

 

For more than a decade, I've tended to end my course on music and cultural theory of the past hundred years with at least symbolic optimism, using Björk's Unison for the past few years, which works well; I calmly summarize things they've already heard me say about musical and cultural change and how they are intertwined, and about the possibility that Adorno may have been wrong about what music needs to do to effect change, about how wider communications and a connected world may have already created a different era in music and the world since about 1997 – something that's no longer merely postmodern, but is much more than that. In a theatrically calculated move, I let the song gradually drown me out until she's all they can hear, for the end of the final lecture – and thank them for coming as we hit the hour mark on the clock.

Maybe this year I wouldn't be so oriented towards a possible or imagined world of change: maybe I should use something like this – and remind them of real change, right now.

Of course: maybe they don't need me to remind them....

Biochem

Interesting to observe the mild chaos of my body's reactions, chemical and behavioral, as those pills start to drain from my system. I'd forgotten that there are also (brief) side effects to stopping the medications – my biochemistry that has rebalanced  to handle the toxic garbage being ingested and injected for the past few months is now thrown off balance by its absence, in the other direction, as it were.

This is especially bizarre across two days of big classes, meetings, and tutorials – two of my busier days for the past two months. But I hacked my way through, as if with a machete; and it was made easier by the increasing sensation of being lighter, being more awake. I even came home from today's stretch of activities expecting to simply go to sleep for six hours or so, and then... woke after an hour and a half, feeling almost – normal.

Observing these experiences is fine with me, too. I have gradually, without thinking about it very much, developed an assumption over the years that the Western wish to be drugged into a zombie-like daze when one is anywhere in the ambit of illness, madness, misery, toxic treatment or death is one of the stupider innovations of our modern science – it's a bit like those science fiction stories where people who are ill or old are quietly whisked out of the view of the pretty, doll-like populace of the futuristic city. And it's probably one of the things that screws us up the most of all our cultural errors: we are taught to treat a whole range of physical/mental states as so infinitely unbearable that we can't even experience them at their nearest and mildest edges.

In any case, now that I've written about it, I'll remember this flash of counter-toxicity. And in fact, though at points over the past eight months I've been embarrassed by my own rather theatrical reaction to this not particularly dangerous treatment, I'll allow that it's really valuable – because in a way I've been experiencing some of the illnesses and despairs of the past twenty-five years, some of the sense of panic, some of the sense of imminent death and disintegration – both retrospectively and also prospectively.

Because, of course, this means that when I am here again, or even considerably deeper into the territory of bodily panic and misery and collapse, it will be that much more familiar: and I will keep my wits about me... like an old soldier, unfazed by anything you can shoot at him.

The wind rises

An absolute favorite line by Valéry, which I think Prévert quoted with small changes after the war: "the wind rises, let us try to live."

A phone call from the nurse just before she left at the end of the day: the medications have failed (not unexpected news), so I have just spent a finicky but pleasurable half-hour locating all of my newer pills in bags, bottles of medications, needles, disposal bins et al. and putting them in the back room to return to the clinic.

So: a couple, or more, years of coasting, then we see what the next treatments are.

And I don't plan on being stampeded into taking toxic meds, sooner than is really necessary, next time...

But, as for right now: I may start feeling ridiculously hale and hearty within a few days or weeks, if previous experience indicates anything.

And that will be fun....

...

Much sleep the past week, hard to wake for more than a few hours at a time.

I have spoken before about the memoir of Lady Sarashina – one of those ninth-century Japanese Heian women writers, but very unlike Murasaki or Shonagon, all we have of her is a late, not long attempt to put her life to paper. It has no actual title, and the name 'Sarashina' is simply the way Japanese historians chose to identify someone whose name is unknown, from her memoir's quotation of another work I think. The truth is, this sheaf of papers with her dreams, with memories of her family and travel, and of her hesitant and rather unfocused life, is really a faint trace, no more.

I know, of course, that there are many, many people in the world, and that there have been many, many people in the world in its history: some of them active, some quiet, some silent, some productive. Most, the greatest most, vanish without a trace of course (it has been slightly eerie to read Peter Levi's history of Greek literature, and realize that what we call the 'great Greek poets and dramatists' – not to mention the philosophers – cover a remarkably small geographical area of Greece, and a very brief time span out of the local activity, with enormous gaps between the few figures we can name; the fact is, much of the Greek culture that we claim to remember is the faintest trace of a vast stretch of time and space and people that are all almost incredibly, totally, forgotten).

And I know that, in our very loud and very present world especially, most voices vanish or are lost in a cross-fire of bandwidths of noise. Notwithstanding our rather unfortunate training and values that aim towards promoting ourselves.

So it becomes a bit strange, a bit pointless I think, to take one's dreams and bring them to consciousness – or to write words that probably won't be remembered, to speak out when only the vaguest fragments are remembered even the next day.

On the other hand, I'm not all that enamored of silence either... ah well.

Keeping life systems going just enough – the apartment coherent, food ordered – to have the illusion of continuity. Though I suppose I would matter just as much, to myself as to anyone else, if I were not pretending to act, or even to Do or Make Things – but if I just slept, coasted... like a coma; like a dream.

A dream figure

A disturbing dream image from last week, that I discussed with my analyst today: in a chain of three dreams that conjured buildings, city streets, and figures of cryptic support, encouragement and change, an eerie version of Buffy the vampire slayer crashes into an otherwise benevolent continuity – where she seems so dangerous, so easily angered, that everyone is afraid of her.

And there is a violent fight, and I accidentally destroy a light projector of some kind – and the figure of Buffy vanishes, and I see that it is the projected mask for something much worse: a crippled, enraged Buffy wearing a stained yellow dress, stuck in a wheelchair, with a grotesquely damaged face, one ruined eye staring off to the side. Who, though she may not be as powerful or as fast as her projected image had seemed, is far more dangerous, because she has become feral, consumed with fury and resentment, and psychotically lost to any glimmer of empathy or reason....

And we manage, somehow, desperately, to kill her – in the dream.

Such an arresting way to show me my own long covered-over reactions to pain and powerlessness, and remind me of something that has made me increasingly uncomfortable over the past six months – that rage drives me at unguarded moments: and that pretending my shadow aspects are made up only of despair and envy is to underestimate their malevolence....

Though the analyst did reassure me: it is not unimportant that the dream figure is so damaged – and dying.

Damaged house

The middle of the night. Jung on Nietzsche, speaking of the problem of creativity and how one falls into inflation – as soon as you look back at what you've done with pompous satisfaction – I am the one who did that! – and so the creative moment dies and you fall into a false self.

Especially so familiar as the entire balance between what I've been for decades, between creativity and being versus looking back on creativity or being, is so heavily tilted toward the latter: as I'm such a tiresome case of someone who has been briefly touched at moments by fire, then has spent years after thinking about it. No wonder I am so angry at others who seem to be doing things wrong, so despairing at the point of doing anything at all.

It is like living in the house of myself: but there have been so many storms, such wreckage – the place is so damaged, so ruined; it is ridiculous to spend time picking things up and wiping them off, as walls creak and corners rot, windows crack, wind and rain blow through the hallway. Like dusting a table in a hurricane, trying to ignore the impossibility of ever fixing the crumbling, rotting, rusting mess of it.

I would be so happy to simply open the door and walk out – in some sort of Zen abnegation: but I don't know what to walk out into, and I remain so tied to myself, so unwilling to have the sheer guts to walk into nothing. Even though I can see what is here, I'm not fooled: I can see that there's nothing at all here that I really need, or care about – the collected detritus of what I have been for more than fifty years is not even worth dragging down to a charity shop, it should just be left behind.

But I can't just walk out the door, I don't know how –

Mind / body / split

Body first, as I've been yammering about it so endlessly for several months: got up to wash the dishes and take a shower before bed; but was shaking with exhaustion after finishing the dishes (there weren't many of them either) so came back to couch; about fifteen minutes before I could sort of function, even lying down.

But, on the other hand, mind: very clear-headed the past few days – was earlier jogging through an abstract, rewriting it, assertively; reading a bit of Ashbery; and added a stanza of Bacharach parody to Merrie's on Facebook.

Okay, so: what's going on here? I don't get it...

oh well. More couch time I guess.

Abandon

The shot again tonight. And the doctor phoned to say the medication is having some effect – so now I don't know what will happen, what decisions will be made in February; but oh well.

The past two or three weeks remarkable for the sharpening, the intensification, of side effects: no, they're still not awful (as I've said, nothing like as bad as people with chemotherapy); but overwhelming, sufficient to keep me home.

Walking up and down the back staircase (one story only) twice, to take out the trash, leaves me so tired I have to lie down – strange; as walking around on the level doesn't seem that difficult. And the seemingly endless coughing.

Fortunate that January is always a lighter month for us, and this January an especially light one for me – although there are important administrative demands going the rounds. But I can't really focus on them – the past week or so I am so exhausted I just give up, abandon myself to the couch, like some febrile, tubercular nineteenth-century poet in a garret. This will be problematic, as some decisions must be made....

And remembering a few more dreams, long ones that seem to dredge up elements that cross over decades. I've had a number of dreams that include material opposing creativity and academic work – or, in my case, my younger self and its hopes, versus my older working world (where I encourage young people, rather pathetically, to do things I don't feel I can do myself any more).

Like the one in a large library the other night, a vast Denkmäler collection that includes a strange turn-of-the-century drafted opera on death and war – comments on my self-destructive focus on death, a fight with an anima figure, my long identification/obsession with books are all in there – but saddest for me are the aspects suggested by this prospectus for a stage work: because these were the kinds of things I wrote up with such excitement in my teens and early twenties, and they were even (embarrassingly) the kinds of things I brought to the Princeton interview, when they decided I wasn't worth accepting. (And they are not, of course, the kind of thing anyone bothers to publish in Denkmäler.)

Scenarios, ideas, fragments: the kinds of things film people still draw up (and those of us in the other arts look at them in amazement and say, is this all you wrote? Where's the craft, the Fortspinning, the working out?). When I'm baffled by my analyst's demands that I do something creative, this is what I'm fighting with – that I don't remember how to imagine things (the part of me that had ideas seems silent after many years); and that I can't believe that I, or anybody else, would care if I were to sketch out more such ideas, scenarios. Craftless fragments.

A strange conflict or limitation: but it is good to have such a strong light shown on it – perhaps a way through will become evident, a chink in the wall.

Meanwhile, I lose myself in almost drunken, sensual inability to move after the shot: once I let the side effects take over, and stop fighting with them, it is such relief....