in the hall of mirrors

On the way to living

The past few days have seen some work, and a great deal of not working: in the midst of some lovely weather, much quiet, much space.

Today I followed several patterns familiar from this summer: up at 6, surfing the web unimportantly; then slept another hour or two; then...

but here the patterns broke a bit: I inadvertently diverted myself right into the mainstream of thinking about living by watching one of the two videos left by Randy Pausch, the computer science professor who just died, famously, of pancreatic cancer. He reminds me a lot of my brother-in-law (the one still recovering from my sister's death last December – I should call him, and will today, and will call my mother too); thin, smart, energetic, pragmatic, very American, a regular sort of guy.

One reason for me to watch Pausch's work is that I think I know at least as much, if not more, about illness, dying, mortality, and what it means, than he did (he wasn't ill for all that long). However, obviously, he's a guy with a family, with an energetic approach to things, someone who was very busy and engaged – none of which really applies to me, at least not much of the time. So: what does the optimist do when faced with these awful, anti-optimistic things?

And it was useful to see him talk: a bit fast and pragmatic, but good at rousing me from my overly introspective lethargy.

Indeed, one of the first things I did at the end of his 'Time Management' talk was to throw one of those beautiful Indian shawls that I leave over the doors in my apartment over the television set. Not that it's impossible to watch the hulking beast, of course, but now there's a brief barrier that might help me ignore it more often. I took notes on his talk, too; downloaded some (more) time management software, and moved it all to one folder.

(Slightly eerily: he gave that talk at the University of Virginia, where I was an undergraduate more than thirty years ago; and, at the very end, as the camera panned back to show the room and its architecture, I realized that it was in Old Cabell Hall – smack in the middle of the music building, a hall where some of my more thrilling and more embarrassing performance moments happened in the 1970s. A source of intense and sometimes very unhappy memories... one of the places where, in fact, I first gave up on myself, washed my hands of myself as a hopeless case, a lazy fraud, a dreamer not a doer.)

Speaking of giving up on myself – it becomes clear that one of the big differences between Pausch and myself in attitudes towards death/loss is that he really had a short time to deal with it, where I've had more than twenty years (twenty-five years, if you go back to Reid's death). And in fact the entire color of my life has been determined by decisions made at the end of the 1980s: realizing that I wouldn't live long, I understood many things about life – but also because I was sure that I wouldn't live long, I didn't work to implement any of those things, to change my own life to something that would make more sense. And still, that is how I operate, at some deep and all-encompassing level: waiting for my life to end so that I don't have to do the work to live it... and now it is twenty years later. Amazing stasis (that should, perhaps, be a hymn: amazing stasis, how sweet the sound, that destroyed a wretch like me).

At least I know all of that is absurd.

While finishing those notes, organizing, I played some music – since I'm writing about the classical works, I put on some of Ned Rorem's choral works. I don't care that much about Rorem, but his two settings of Paul Monette's AIDS poems need to be written about early in this book, as they are rooted in much the same aesthetic world as the AIDS Quilt Songbook and Corigliano's Symphony no. 1. And, in the midst of writing/thinking about all of this, and how the main barrier to writing/living for me is a range of foolish decisions to give up on myself that I made between 1973 and 1987, the Rorem/Monette came on – a vast, dark waltz, intensely sung, with a certain savage power and beautiful falling melodies, unmistakably more powerful and attention-grabbing than the pieces around it, so that I recognized the sense of it without even knowing the piece. Ending with the phrase, howled passionately and repeatedly over the crescendoing waltz of time, the one that defies any possibility of giving up: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here...

Hildes Reise

It is rather wearing to see all of these films about AIDS. (Have I perhaps mentioned that already?...)

This one was well-made; coolly done – a lovely, simple ending. But the most disturbing part was the rich Swiss family, homophobic and controlling: ick – we may all be glad we're not rich Swiss people.

Of course, the mother got hers in the end: the scenes split, and as Martin/Hilde's friends take him to the sea burial he wanted, his mother is left putting kitty litter into a fake urn so that there's something for her mausoleum. Just what was coming to her, too....

Ach. Deutsche (oder Schweizerische) Krankenhäuser, kälte Familie. Geld und Tod.

Macht mich müde....

Oh, and like an idiot I forgot to take notes on the music in the last half hour. So I'll have to at least skim through it again.

I do wish somebody were here to give me a hug. Ah well.

Things that are easy

After months of moving from anger to exasperation, through guilt and a sense that I was holding out on him too long (and thereby being petty, etc.), I finally texted Patrick tonight, and we Moved On, which took a total of four text messages.

So utterly easy, as it always is in these things once you actually do them.

I phoned Mary Jo in New York to ask her about the tableaux at the end of Elizabeth tragedies, thinking they were a standard staging trope that would probably explain the tableau of gay activists at the end of Jarman's Edward II. It was instantly fun to talk – but we discussed another friend I've been ignoring for several years, not because I'm angry at him but because I simply can't relate to him any more. He has plenty of money, hasn't worked since 1983, works out at the gym and goes to big gay parties... she sympathized, as she feels sort of the same way (as she said, she and I have always lived "purpose-driven lives" – there are things we really want to do – so it's harder and harder to talk to people who don't, especially as we all get older and less flexible about these things).

But, having talked to Patrick, I'm thinking that a simple, friendly note – on the order of a Christmas card, as anyone would write to someone who was a friend long ago, even if they don't seem to matter much now – would be easy enough; and would still my milld guilt....

***

I am still (a) getting work done on the book, but (b) wasting far more time than I'm actually using. Of course (a) is far better than everything has been, for years, but (b) is still fairly ludicrous.

And all this making of sentences! They are so awful! – at least at first – at least often – at least in my doubts. Every sentence, often each phrase, is a battle with the obvious, the hackneyed, the unclear, the cumbersome... the nonsensical. A world of snaking subordinate clauses, overlong chains of adjectives, the whole oscillating between the shabby grays of scholarly prose and the shrill, clashing oranges and greens of journalistic crap.

No: I know it's not really that bad. It just feels that way, at moments.

Yesterday, I gave my current notes and drafts - about thirty pages, single-spaced and with shrunken margins to save paper – to Melinda, my therapist. She was pleased, saying – rightly – that there is more of a sense that this book actually is coming into existence, that it is becoming real. (Or Real, like the velveteen rabbit.)

I feel the book and its ideas rising around me, like dream buildings... which reminds me of this unrhymed sonnet.

But watching and hearing these things is in itself a difficult kind of work. It's like being possessed, by the spirits of these songs, books, films – by the spirits of their makers...

Bathing at Delphi

I continue to like Jarman more and more, overturning my earlier irritable disdain.

I have been reading his Chroma, a sort of journal/book of quotes/poetry cycle/death diary, the last book he wrote before he died: it's full of memories and the frightening and painful bits of dying of AIDS, but also full of the joy in colors, the wisdom of a (shortish) lifetime of painting and thinking about colors. I so wish I could have given a copy to my sister Sandy, as she had made a special study of the technology of color – if she hadn't died last December; my other sister would perhaps like it, as she is an artist, but it might not strike the heart of her joys as well.

It is full of wonderful passages; but one that brought me up short is in the chapter on green. It is a short memory of backpacking in Greece with a friend in 1960 or 1961, when Jarman was eighteen; they were on the island of Delphi, lost, late at night, and settled their backpacks and slept by the side of the road. When they woke they were "in a cleft in the mountain. A chasm in which fig trees grew, watered by a crystal spring that sprang from the rock."

They bathed and shaved in the water, washed their clothes – and then were interrupted by some Greeks, who were very angry, then the police came, then they were dragged away and told not to return...

because this was the spring at Delphi, the sacred well of Apollo, where the oracle drank and spoke. Without knowing it.

Although it was sacrilege, although they got in trouble, I was so incredibly envious of him in reading that, I cannot tell you – Jarman himself thinks that is where he got the gift of poetry, of knowing. I think so too.

Jarman's Garden

I've been watching Derek Jarman's The Garden (1990) in order to write about it for the book.

I wasn't looking forward to this, because I've conceived such an annoyed dislike for such films as Sebastiane and War Requiem – the glacial pace, the stiff acting, the cheesy tech. But I was immediately enchanted by this one – maybe I was brought in partly by the music, which is gorgeous, and by the textures and quality, which are considerably more polished than I'm used to in Jarman's work.

Maybe I need to see more of him.

Among watching are several phone calls, most of which suggest that I need to answer the phone less often: someone wants to chat, then someone else tells about some dreadful behavior by my least favorite UK academic (a nasty, small-minded, constantly hostile young man who teaches in the far South, and who has collided with me several times because we write some things on the same topics). Distracting; and stupid – I wanted for a while to call someone, perhaps Mitchell, to discuss being angry about it, then thought it would be better to simply let it go.

And, in fact, I'd like to let go of a lot of things: I keep thinking and dreaming of things that require some privacy, some quiet, and I'm not best pleased when the outside world invades. (Unless I go out to it, as I keep doing when I go out to cafés to work, or yesterday when I went to the first ever gay pride parade and fair here in Newcastle – which was fun.)

Isolation, a sense that people are irritating, difficult: anger is exhausting, people's needs are exhausting. A sense that I can concentrate on artistic and writerly things, on really thinking, on making and being aware – but I need more space, more time away from people and their needs (and television) than I have tended to have.

Risky, of course: since I complain so much of being alone too much, at this rate I'll become really, seriously, alone – ah well. Perhaps I'll have a clearer head.

***

Later: reading Chroma – one of Jarman's last diaries, which includes the text of Blue – I realize I am enjoying myself hugely. I really love Blue, also, though I've never seen it in (been trapped with other people in) a theater; I suspect I am coming to really like Jarman, and to like at least some of his work, having long disliked the few that I'd seen. This is really wonderful....

... But I still think Syberberg's Parsifal is a chore and a joke. And no, I don't feel like sitting down to watch my two DVDs of it to see if I'm right.

Don't confuse me with facts.

The larger sense of time

Late last night, after a day of getting some things done and some falling aside, looking for a book to take to bed: and I picked up the big collected poetry by Czeslaw Milosz.

A beautiful book – well, a book full of beautiful stuff – but really too large for a poetry book, even more ungainly than my collected Auden; I'm glad of everything that's in it, but it's hard to carry around.

(And so typical of me: I got rid of any books of his work that were duplicated in it, so now I can't carry around anything more portable. Like when I was complaining to Bennett in a bookstore the other day that I probably need to re-purchase all of Jane Austen, because the Penguin complete works I replaced them all with is in such tiny print as to be unreadable.)

Looking through the Milosz, almost anywhere in it, reading his vast wisdom and sensitivity to time and meaning – it was comforting, and brought me a certain clarity. Sleeping, I had a sense of myself between yesterday and today, between sleeping and waking; between my past stories about myself, and some possibility of a future. I even dreamt of possibilities of love – not really erotic, but more the intimate awareness of another person.

Today I got to work, a bit; had to handle things needed by other people, watched a student DVD (of a country-western musical, of all things) and agreed on a mark for it. Later at night, I was making lists of different books and CDs needed to write different chapters on the book about music and AIDS – and thinking, it feels endless: there are so many bits of things here, so many downloaded web pages, so many pieces I only know a little bit about, so many possible links and bits of information I haven't found yet, or at all. And so very many pieces I'm planning on writing about – have I set an impossible task for myself? Or at least a task that it isn't possible to do well?

Talked to Mitchell, cheered up, calmed down: that Miloszian sense of being suspended across time led, metaphorically, to a feeling of being suspended among all of these works – and a sense of being untroubled, of having plenty to say, without troubling to worry about saying the perfect thing, the final thing, the only thing (which is, in any case, impossible).

Like a brief vision of what it is like – might be like – will be like? – to be 'in the zone' with writing this book: to be aware of all the possible things to remember, and float among them, easily....

So: the book has a future. And I, maybe, have a future: Milosz has successfully reminded me of that....

Hi guys

Sorry to stop blogging for, what, about three weeks now.

A TypePad employee fixed my last Stuttgart blog post, then rather tartly e-mailed me to say that they didn't expect to give customers that kind of help. Which kind of soured me on the whole blog thing for a bit... didn't know how to fix things, and didn't want to wrangle with irritable customer support.

Recently, though, TypePad has told us all that they've fixed a lot of aspects of the new formatting setup (too bad they couldn't fix them before installing them, and too bad they couldn't be more apologetic when people were complaining; but I've heard quite enough from customer support people this month, after minor wrangles with the makers of FileMaker software, and even with Apple; it seems that people are trained to be polite, but not to be helpful, if it involves admitting that their pointy-haired bosses might have made a mistake).

(And I keep getting page errors when I save posts... sigh... but then the posts look okay, at least.)

So I'll stop being so standoffish and get back to this.

The short news? Doing okay; I work some days, not others – which is against the intended pattern of at least a little work each day, but maybe I'll get there. Feeling rather out of touch with family and several friends, but perhaps that's appropriate. Mildly annoyed with bits of the outside world, but that's life ain't it.

More when something, uh, happens....

TypePad mess

Apologies, I have several posts waiting in various formats, and others in my head unwritten; but TypePad's new setup messes with the formatting in invisible ways, and I can't seem to resolve it. Will post when I can either figure out what to do, or they fix the mess they've made.

(Although - admittedly - the day is beautiful, thoroughly summery, and full of well-being – almost as much as there was in Spain. A shame I can't write more about it.)

Sitges: People, and people

I remain confused about the position of other people in my life... my family, my friends, my colleagues.

Lately I've allowed two friendships to become somewhat damaged: one because a dear friend's husband is going through a rough time, and I have little respect for how he's handling it – thus, in an admittedly ruthless way, I'm tending to cut them both off by judging him as not worth listening to; and I've hardly communicated with another close friend who paid almost no attention to my illness over the past two months, thus winning my indignant anger and resentment. In both cases I am unquestionably judging, and mercilessly – I'm unwilling to forgive one for being amazingly foolish, the other for being careless of our friendship (admittedly over a long period of time; I have many justifications for my behavior, for my judgments).

Then, today, plans to go back to America to see relatives and friends at a yearly reunion are foundering in a morass of people too overwhelmed for me to visit them, plus a suddenly added requirement that I visit my mother – a requirement that I understand; but no one seems to realize that spending approximately $1,500 to travel for seven hours, stay alone in a hotel for a couple of days, and comfort my mother for a matter of four or five hours seems, frankly, a plan that is both stressful and expensive. But I should, of course, go....

It's not that I don't want to go see my mother. But it seems so bizarre, so inadequate, to make the long, expensive trip alone, to stay in a hotel in suburban Virginia, with no probable way to see anyone else in the family, or other friends. Perhaps I'm thrown by the inability of other family members, who have lived with their own families for years, to register the sheer bleakness of making dutiful intercontinentall trips alone, as opposed to sharing them with someone.

This afternoon Chris, Patrick, Simone and I sat around at a tapas bar while it rained, talking and eating and drinking and enjoying ourselves. It was fun at the time: but after coming home to get e-mails and phone calls from my family, I felt differently about it – or, perhaps, felt as though I should feel differently about it. Because, of course, these people are not mostly close friends; so they shouldn't be important, I shouldn't be spending time with them? I shouldn't value this, perhaps; and this whole trip is a ridiculous indulgence, and now I can manage to feel thoroughly guilty for spending money to come to this seaside resort instead of spending the money to take care of relatives, to make life easier for those who are under stress. And... well... or... but....

As it has stopped raining, across the street, a group of cheerful young Spaniards are sitting on a staircase, talking animatedly well past midnight. Are they friends? Are they family? Do they matter to each other, do they need each other?

Are they having fun? – are they really having fun? – and: is it a good thing, is it a good enough thing, if they are having fun?...