in the hall of mirrors

Deliberate crises

Lately there is a strange sense of a kind of semi-ordered chaos: as I am by turns angry and disoriented, or surprisingly pleased, or overwhelmed, or insulting, or reasonable, it seems as though I have been pushed (or: as though I have pushed myself?) into this psychological place.

The physical/real-world explanations are obvious: months of anxious preparation and attempted rigid control related to the medications I'll start on November 5, exacerbated by new, unexpected appointments and ultimatums delivered by the hospital and my acupuncturist over the past two weeks; plus the start of the school year, with the usual huge increase in questions, responsibilities, spreadsheets, meetings, and swarms of alternately sensible and nonsensical phone calls and e-mails. (And why am I waking/sleeping erratically, missing meals and not caring – even missing my pills?... no no I promise not much, just, well, twice in the last week. Which is a lot for me.)

After a quiet summer, with some too-rational part of me having pathetically planned to maintain total control over the medical situation, it all feels like an onslaught of demands: and the fact that I can handle many of its individual parts makes everything worse, because I cannot simply collapse and say, I can't deal with anything at all.

And then there are the more distant worries – that the trip to Berlin in two weeks will be chaotic and exhausting, that the school year will be difficult to get through, that winter will be uncommonly depressing... and, behind all these smaller things, like those low noises in the film Inception that signal the multileveled darkness of dream time, the sight over Skype, most weekends, of my mother in the hospital, with my sister talking to her kindly, taking such loving care of her: but Mom looks very, in fact painfully, near the end of her long disintegration... so, yes, you can figure it all out yourself: funeral, sorrow, loss, guilt, and that sense of disorientation and collapse that can't be sidestepped, no matter how long one has prepared for it.

There is one distant, nearly abstract idea that suggests that this is not all hopeless – that, in fact, I have deliberately driven myself (I have deliberately been driven?) into this space of what feels like crisis, chaos, disaster. (Rather than, for instance, depression: because becoming increasingly unable to feel is of course a strategy against stress and fear.)

It's connected to something reasonable but surprising that came up in a lecture at the Jung-Institut this summer, when a skilled analyst listed the personal traits that were required in a patient for (Jungian or Freudian, or Adlerian or Gestalt for that matter) analysis to be a good treatment choice.

One of them was a high tolerance level for anxiety: in other words, analysis is not at all like simple therapy – it's not to make you feel better, not in the short term anyway. It is designed to push you into the things you find most difficult to handle, into the parts of your mind that are the most primitive, or shallow, or confused, or even (slightly) damaged, so that you can learn to deal with them rather than avoid them.

Which might mean that my lack of control lately is a good thing... not much fun, admittedly; but a step forward, rather than one back.

Blinds

For the most part, I have been sharply productive and energetic about preparing for my next bout with HCV medications, combined with the new school year. Robust, definite, in charge.

But an argument tonight about adding yet more things to do to my week has somehow flung me into memories from the first time I took these medications, in 2000. I was teaching, a visiting professor, at UCLA; I was doing a course on music and AIDS, and part way through the semester became suddenly very orange... I thought at the time it was my new HIV medications, which were themselves about the same shade of orange (the original formulation of Kaletra – a funny idea now of course), but no, it was HCV. And I was given needles to inject the new medications... as I've mentioned lately, I remember sitting at one of the sunny outdoor tables of California Pizza Kitchen in Westwood, far from the other patrons, uninterested in the lunch in front me, looking at the bag of hypodermics, and starting to cry, thinking: so it's come to this, this is what's left of my life.

I feel surrounded by those memories tonight. Susan said, later, that I looked as though I might just blow away... it must have shocked the students a bit; I actually became so weak that it was difficult to get all the way from my apartment to the music building on the other side of campus. A bus took me part of the way, but I started to calculate the shortest level distances to go the two or three blocks to my office... an eerie time.

Worst of all, night after night for several weeks, in that quietly barren rented apartment in Westwood, I kept having the strange feeling that lights, or eyes, were flickering behind the blinds. Venetian blinds the length of the apartment, with buzzing, glaring fluorescent lights behind them... I was so tired and ill, and frankly delusional, but I was sure some nights that someone was watching through the windows when I wasn't looking... it was very hard to sleep.

Toward the end of my four months I was feeling stronger and much saner, and went outside once, probably twice, privately reassuring myself that there was no one outside, that other apartments couldn't see in at all. That I had been... well, frankly, losing it.

It is always difficult to clarify, even to my own conscious, alert mind, just what 'losing it' might really mean: but it is indeed possible to become uncertain about apparent reality, to start to experience the waking world as a confusing, shimmering nightmare.

My control, my schedules and spreadsheets and firm requests lately, seem  designed to be a sheath over these memories, this fear: alone again, confused again, that possible sense of panic, confusion, chaos... injections and illness through all the winter months...

Yes, I know. I am considerably healthier than that now. But the windows are still here.

Air

Something remarkable about today's air: cool, damp, sharp – an almost Scandinavian feel to it.

Although northern England is close to the latitudes of Denmark and southern Sweden, we don't often get quite that kind of air – it reminds me of that sense of clarity one gets in Copenhagen some days, where everything seems reasonable and one wants to get out to do and see things.

A bit like a quick shot of akvavit?...

Formal analysis of current status of complex

(As musicians, we are accustomed to formal analyses that don't emphasize the contents/material of what is analyzed. Herein a therefore relatively abstract reiteration of some of my understanding of the past 24 hours.)

Recently understood aspects of complex formation suggest modification of my own emotional self-analysis:

(1) von Franz clarifies the basic structure of complexes is agglomerative; emotional/cognitive/interpretive elements are added to a given experiential node over the years of one's life, combining with unconscious elements to give the appearance of a vast interconnectedness (this may be obvious to many, but I'd never really understood it until a few months ago – thanks to a convenient drawing)

(2) the real process of analysis and individuation is one of taking those agglomerates apart – you cannot remove your experiences or judgements, but you can disentangle/disconnect them in such a way that all of the parts become more malleable, can develop or fade over time on their own – one becomes, simply, 'saner'

(3) my own long self-examination has tended not to take advantage of this – I've tended to allow events and emotions to continually refer to each other, which is artistically interesting (sort of, anyway) but emotionally tends to become crippling – i.e. as the complex grows to include masses of various things in the unconscious and conscious it becomes impossible to do almost anything, because every aspect of one's entire history/memory seems to refer only to other problems embedded in it

(4) all of this resembles an (oversimplified) Star Wars image of destroying the Death Star – except that you don't get to blow the thing up (as it consists of many parts of you), but you do get to take it apart, and some of the pieces that had seemed more depressing/menacing can then drift away into space, as it were

So, last night's viewing of The History Boys, which has many threads that are both fascinating and disturbing, ended up focusing for me on the whole problem of Getting Into The Great University. Short-term conclusions related to my own case:

(a) Not getting into my ideal college, and the rapid emotional disintegration that followed it, was a watershed event. At that point I combined various existing anxieties and losses (panic at thinking I was getting left behind when we moved at age 3, fears of school bullies, anxieties over growing up gay, new confidence and new embarrassments over the two years previous to this event) to attach them to each other in a massive conglomeration of hopeless resentment that enforced a certain permanent dejection. (N.B.: No need to explain to me that this was not 'really' important – I know that perfectly well – but in my emotional history it was important. These things are not, need I explain, rationally constructed.)

(b) Later ego developments (stage experience, sexual experience, emotional development, increased awareness of dangers and possibilities related to event (a)) tended to get attached to event (a); even the apparently grander and more serious journey related to AIDS, death, loss, and health issues, which then combined with experiences on four continents, interpretations of living environments and internal emotional contexts, retold stories and interpretations, etc., was actually overlaid across event (a) such that everything seemed to establish the basic status of my life.

(c) Thus, interestingly, beginning to separate sorrows and joys over people and relationships, loss and guilt and personal growth/insight related to AIDS and health, and disappointments with myself in a variety of contexts into separate elements, makes it hugely easier to move through, and develop more productive relationships with, all these elements.

On the other hand:

(a') Caveat: is it really possible for a central establishing element to appear so late as age 17? Freudian theory aside, of course. But unfortunately I don't have much understanding of, or awareness in, early developmental psychology; but certainly, though many Jungians spend time on childhood issues, others happily focus on adult events, rather than assuming that everything must have roots in early childhood.

(b') Certainly, childhood experiences loom very large in the unconscious and in the emotional world: but it's also possible (unless I've misunderstood) that some childhood elements may fade into unimportance over time, unless they are revivified or made important by later events. And that, of course, a 'Deathstar' complex can greatly expand after childhood – it may be based on earlier elements, but what makes it powerful may be delayed (I think).

(c') Not to mention: I've always been uncomfortable with the transformation of my expression in many photographs after the age of four or so, when I turn from cheerful into owlishly solemn, rather cautious... but I suspect that searching for a distinctive event to explain that transformation is not possible. Probably just the caution of the nerdy youngest dealing with siblings and peers.

Of course: I could be wrong....

I feel as though there should be a statistical chart for this presentation. Oh well: you can't have everything.

    •••

Was pretty satisfied with above insight; went for long walk on sunny day, and started to think: hmm, dubious that it's that simple. However, I do think the age-17 emotional event was central, not just built on earlier experiences.

Therefore: maybe it makes sense to think of this as a sort of 'molecular', as opposed to 'atomic', understanding of my inner workings... still useful though.

And no, I'm still not doing a cool chart...

The Evil Internet

Normally, although the Internet is a mess of advertising and manipulation, much of my daily experience of it is relatively personal, or at least to my taste.

But in the last few days the trashy, controlling, greedy, incompetent, screaming corporate world has been moving in heavily on some of my familiar standards... the Mac shareware site is taken over by a corporation that has ruined it in just a few days, Bloglines is being discontinued by its growing corporation because it doesn't pay enough, and of course Pirate Bay flickers on and off.

The stupidest part of this is the sheer heavy-handed ineptitude of the bloated corporate management once they take over these sites – they broaden it, mess it up, make it unreadable, then when it stops paying off (because they ruined it so quickly and so utterly) they close it down after a few years. I know also that this is the invasion of my haughtily superior Mac sites by the cheap trash of the Windows world – because Apple is no longer considered to have such a small client base as to be useless for corporate drones.

Ridiculous. I know that my students, and other savvy youngsters, stay a hundred steps ahead of these changes, and that for them many of these sites were hopelessly vieux jeu long before they were taken over. But I'm not as good at keeping up with the new versions of things... oh well, another bit of proof that tiresome old Adorno was right.

It reminds me a bit of this lovely/hideous/comic/grotesque video, on io9 (which seems a nerdy enough site, though with energetically frequent daily updates, that no corporation would bother with it – I hope). They are cheerful despite all those little advertisements, aren't they?...

First Books

Another thing I picked up today in Blackwell's... Susan Hill, Howard's End is On the Landing. One of those books about reading that seem to be going around the past few years; a nice, classy, personal, terse, realistic one by an experienced writer with a brain.

She speaks at one point of the first books she read, lots of Enid Blyton and a few others... but as she muses on them of course I'm dazzled by the memory of my own first books and stop paying attention completely even as my eyes reach the end of the paragraph.

Two of the earliest (as Tolkien says of, I think, Tom Bombadil? – "oldest and fatherless" – there are always books and other things that seem to have been made when the earth was created, as far as your mind can experience it) are still on my shelves. The earliest is Ruth Krauss' A Hole is to Dig, with pictures by Maurice Sendak – the sweeter pictures don't mean much to me now, but the tiny picture of the girl smirking as she spins impudent cartwheels is still pretty wonderful. My mother's handwriting says this is my book (mine, do you hear me, so hands off) and the date is November 1962, a month before my sixth birthday.

A couple of years later, there is a copy of Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line, with a lovely note written by my sister Sandy, who died two years ago (too early, of cancer); it recalls everything about my slavish admiration for my eldest sister, who was obviously the smartest person in the world. The book itself is a charming tour de force, not amazing now – but it is by Norton Juster, and functioned as a sort of warmup to his The Phantom Tollbooth, which is clearly one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world, especially when you include the illustrations by Jules Feiffer. (Apparently Juster didn't write more books in the same vein – which is a shame, because even as an adult you can pick up the bizarre, hilarious, hyperimaginative Phantom Tollbooth and be as dazzled as anyone ever was by Alice and Wonderland.)

Hmm, it's nice to have roots....

    •••

Oops, was back in bed before I thought of one that should be mentioned along with these: because it is another forgotten Great Book, and because someone has inscribed it to me. Mamie Spruill, librarian at Parklawn Elementary, gave me this as "Library Merit Award to Paul A--- for the most creative annotated list of books read during the school year 1967-68." Which tells you all you need to know about me, my life, and all that happened afterwards – it wasn't first prize or second of course, but a sort of tangential prize that reflects, if I'm not reading too much into it, a certain amount of puzzled encouragement from a sweet librarian tasked with handing out prizes.

It is in Joan Aiken's Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, which is funny, sarcastic, witty, sad, resonant, brilliant... Aiken wrote many children's books, but none of the others ever mattered to me as much as this, including Black Hearts in Battersea (couldn't see the point really – probably London children would identify more with that more famous book).

So all right, I was going to tell you how hilarious, touching, and well-written Armitage is, but I have just discovered something miraculous online – I didn't know there was another book plus uncollected stories, a total of 24 in all! and here I've been living for the past forty-two years with just ten of the stories... so you'll excuse me as I must now rush headlong to buy the complete collection. You can let yourselves out I'm sure –

Volatility

After last night's cold-shower rush of awareness, I was given a pleasant gift as a reward, so to speak: a sunny, warm day, lovely and pleasant. Deserved, don't you think?.... well if you don't think so feel free not to chime in.

Met with Melinda, the psychologist at the clinic, about plans/prospects for taking interferon. We were pretty clear about risks and advantages; as I already knew, one of the things that raised my anxiety level about doing interferon (yet again) was not the memory of sitting outside California Pizza on a sunny sidewalk near UCLA in 2001, when I first had to do this medicine, feeling lonely and frightened and actually bursting into tears as I looked at the bag of hypodermic needles, nor was it the depressing time of wasting my first sabbatical in Newcastle on a second bout with this medication. It was the memory of B. taking interferon over the past two years – he was honestly a mess, a collection of disintegrating functions and added medications to handle his blood problems, digestive problems, breathing problems... we were all pretty appalled for him.

But of course he toughed it out, and is now doing quite well; he even came to the HIV patient group's meetings with medical students and talked about how he was doing (mostly as a way of getting out of the house).

As Melinda pointed out, entirely rationally, the fact that I've taken these medications without that many side effects suggests that it would be really strange if I had those symptoms, of course (but a bit of panic is natural). She agrees that she won't put me on antidepressants until we see how I'm doing – nice to have the flexibility, I hated the packed-in-cotton-wool feeling of taking them (besides, it would make my Jungian analysis a bit pointless for the duration).

One unexpected thing I did recognize in the discussion: I think my anxiety is also organized around something that has always bothered me, a source of some of the worries and depressions I exhibit in this blog: that I am actually emotionally quite volatile, changeable. Not socially: I don't fly off the handle – but emotionally, when good and bad things happen, I respond to them fairly heavily, and can change quite a bit in the course of a couple of days. Which is why I always complain about living alone, and try to fix solutions on external sources – friends, possible partners, even getting a cat – because although everyone who knows me sees me frequently seeming quite level-headed and cheerful, many of them don't realize that when I'm away from them my mood can plummet like a stone.

Good to recognize, anyway. Perhaps I can figure out some way of moving through that in the coming months... lucky I have Melinda, analysis, my acupuncturist – I must sound like a desperate child clinging to anyone who can help (hey, I was the youngest of a largish family); but I don't mind taking advantage of all those support systems.

Today, in the bookstore near the university, the counter near the sections of medical books had a charming new toy: a red ballpoint pen that looks exactly like a nastily realistic hypodermic, full of blood.

I bought one, of course....

Awakening Conscience

Sometimes, especially when watching TV or wasting time by various means, I have that feeling of exhaustion, surfeit, revulsion, retreat: somewhere among the parts of my rather dull life over the past decade as an aging academic living alone in a small northern city with lots of wet, cold weather, and despite seeking some sort of new fire for existence out of my Jungian studies, and while being bored with the round of teaching the same subjects and modifying the same spreadsheets and taking care of the same problems year after year, I'll remember that I wanted life to be more interesting, more alive, more amusing. My fault of course: the television can always be turned off, it's always possible to go outside; like so many I am too often mesmerized by glowing screens and computer games, that whole lower existence that has become so typical of many of us.

It's a bit like the moralistic painting by Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience. A well-meaning if didactic work; there is a most interesting take on it scattered through Brian Aldiss' fictional 'Zodiacal Planets', or Zeepees, a bunch of artificial planetoids scattered across the inner solar system that furnished the setting for a handful of wonderfully bizarre stories he wrote in the 1970s. The stories emphasize a mildly, chaotically decadent lifestyle of minor art forms and arcane indulgences – astrology and weird foretelling, casual chemical body and mind modification and drugs, recreational schizophrenia, art works that suggest a slightly rotting culture (perhaps he'd read Spengler on the indulgences of 'late' civilizations, or maybe he was just thinking of Gibbon on late Rome). Across the background of two or three of the stories, a famous video artist uses dense data streams to recreate the Holman Hunt painting as well as other Pre-Raphaelite 'story' paintings, and extend them into videos that tell what happened in the following ten or fifteen minutes... a blithely useless artistic endeavor that suggests the sillier and more expensive Saatchi-funded trivia you can see in major galleries.

It is, of course, a malevolent if fun setting for Aldiss' stories; but it does a good job of suggesting that awful feeling of energetic pointlessness, of people desperately looking for something to do... which always begs that question: if we didn't simply watch screens and phones, or only somewhat more healthily read books; and run races and go to gyms and tanning salons and public parks, and look for pseudo-religious meaning in local classes and study groups; and get massages and acupuncture; and go to gallery openings and museum exhibits, then... what would we do?

An acutely uncomfortable puzzle.

I don't want to turn the television back on; but... what else is there, that is really so different from it?... ah well. Time to get up from this piano bench, at least....

Wind

The last few days have been getting a sort of autumn wind – with the windows open, you can hear the gustiness; it is a beautiful underlay to the day. Somehow a fresher, more sensual, more natural sound through the windows than the usual (though I live in a quiet neighborhood, not quite close enough to a park, so the normal sounds aren't city noises).

Perhaps it's like waves, or white noise; in any case, like waves on the beach, it tends to be calming and natural, and reminds you (as waves do) how big the world is, how slow and complex time really is, how trivial and really uninteresting most human endeavors and anxieties are. I did always think I'd be happiest, calmest, living on a beach – well, maybe someday if I'm fantastically lucky.

It also reminds me of a particularly beautiful time and place – when Gerhard and Kunsu had their house on the south side of Crete, away from the towns and resorts, and I went to stay with them for a week or so. I was in poor health – thin, shaky, frankly having some difficulty getting through the day; but the flight wasn't bad, and Gerhard and Kunsu were angelic as always. The other constraint was the book about Gerhard, which I hadn't finished – and still haven't finished, but I hope to do so this fall; it is very, very late indeed, but although the book itself has become a real millstone around my neck, Gerhard has always been kind about the long years of no work done on it.

So the time there was characterized by that kindness: by the wind in the Cretan hills, the fig trees bursting with late summer figs (whenever we would pass one we would stop the car, get out immediately and collect a bag of them – they are at their best on the same day, so a fig tree by the side of a dusty mountain road suddenly becomes a treasure to be immediately plundered). The room where I slept, with the winds always blowing around it; Kunsu and Gerhard putting together meals in the kitchen, light, fast, beautiful food that was incredibly fresh and heartening; and the mountain paths, the village where I could buy dried herbs (a shame I didn't buy a lot more – when I got home I realized that the perfectly ordinary tourist fare was far better than anything you would get at home).

Even the miniature frog in the courtyard – it had somehow chosen a small hole in the wall as its home; it would croak occasionally, a tiny sound, but content.

Flashes

A long day, with flashes of light in it, crossing before and after the full moon.

Analysis, this time in Manchester, which means going to the train station early, realized I hadn't bought a ticket in advance, bought one fast at the machine, got going, arrived, we talked about dreams...

But the day did have a certain lightness, a sort of weightlessness about it that was pleasant. Sat and talked to Felicity afterwards in their new apartment – they've only partly unpacked, but it's on a top floor. I told her it seemed like a Scandinavian watercolor – lots of clean wood furniture, bright but pale sunlight through the windows as she worked at the table.

They were going to a new film by the people who made Les Triplettes de Bellevue – but it would have made me take an incredibly late train, I'll see it another time.

On the train, two subcontinental boys, who evidently didn't speak much English, sat quietly across from me with luggage; tried to help them get their connection – my phone couldn't get a signal, but at least they were reassured (I think? how many words did they understand?) that it would be easy to find their way to Bradford from the Leeds station.

Reading some poetry, sleepy, but the train had gotten quiet; dozing off and on...

And the train was delayed – half an hour or so; but soon before we were finally to get home, a young man walked by in a startlingly fashionable shirt – a sort of loose cowl-collar t-shirt that seemed really fairly avant-garde; and beautiful, blond with a fuzzy beard, and muscular – he must have chosen the shirt to show off his summer body.

When we finally got off the train shortly before eleven at night, I saw him with his buddies, all of whom were wearing similarly odd but stylish clothing (the low crotches on the pants don't work as far as I'm concerned, but okay that's what they're selling this year). And all of whom were in shape and tanned, with interestingly cut shirts that showed off muscles from various angles – but not I think gay, just, well, metrosexual I suppose. Nice to see: a bit of beauty, as self-consciously constructed as girls used to be...

Of course one doesn't watch for too long – so it is for the older gay man! – but it's nice to see anyway.