in the hall of mirrors

Vision • understanding • evanescence • eternity

The last three days of being in Zürich...

•••

Wednesday, 9:30 am: Dunbar gives his first lecture of the week at the Jung-Institut; he has visited here before, and he led a session of Nancy's online seminar this spring. His approach seems at first a bit strange, then fascinating – he points out we generally focus on darkness and problems in the psychotherapies, but that 'the good' can also be so highly charged, so demanding or so beyond our normally acceptable range of experience, that it also can be terrifying.

In my mind I seem to circle around his concept of 'the good' – I often feel, especially in the last year, as though good things happen to other people; though I am far easier with that than I used to be. Dunbar himself is one of those gentle, kindly psychoanalysts who seem to operate at a different level than most – one with a lot more light around in it. But he doesn't seem naïve... and it is a powerful idea, and I think I can go somewhere with it, in practice and maybe, occasionally, in life.

•••

In late afternoon, I sit with the intensely direct, grounded Rachel and the gentle English woman with dark hair, in the Festsaal, which is empty; the sun streams in, we talk about everything – the student association meeting, their analysands and training, their lives, what they did twenty years ago. They are both remarkably aware, very present to things – we talk about people, frustrations, pleasures, lectures. Though I am tired, this is where I want to be.

•••

Wednesday, 7:30 pm: dinner with Barbara, Johann, and others at the Sonne – Barbara is visiting to see us all, but can't stay for graduation on Friday. She has golden skin and a beautiful dress, she looks alive, energetic, healthy – unfortunately my energy has thoroughly crashed after too long a day, and I am shaky and diffuse (something I'm accustomed to, but not a state in which to be a social success). They all look at me and visually check my pulse; the conversations are alternately fun and alive, or (from me, I'm afraid) a bit disconnected and unavoidably darker. But we are all there... and the sun, and the lake, and the people cheerful at their tables, and the food is good. There is much light...

•••

Thursday, 8 am: I have a coffee – well, for me, a chilled matcha tea – with Robert, an American countertenor who lives in Austria. We met at a conference where I gave a rather blurry keynote; he has finished his doctorate and is trying to figure out what's next. After he gives me a copy of his newest CD of Handel arias, he tells me he's aware that he's teetering between worlds: old enough that his life in the concert hall and recording studio may start to fade, new enough to academe that getting a job is not certain. On the other hand, he's smart, meticulous, interesting – it's a relief to hear he's not in a financial panic about jobs, but I can't give him solutions, only encouragement. Fortunately, he is also an adult, so that is enough.

A sense of looking back at myself, and across at others, at various stages of processes of becoming, and losing, and changing – and as well at various stages of battling with the world, and with our images of it....

••• 

9:30 am: Dunbar speaks again, but today I cannot focus: I look at several paragraphs of notes I've taken in the past hour but I don't know where they go – I am unusually disconnected from the second part of the talk. Is it me, or him, or what? There is a sense that the dissociation is strong enough that I can't just find my way back to some clarity, so I continue taking notes – notes which may not later make a lot of sense – and just tie myself to the situation until its scheduled end. Not quite like the original metaphor here, of Odysseus tied to the mast – he insists on hearing the amazingly beautiful and deadly song, though that is not an entirely sane choice – but my mind floats around the metaphor...

•••

Of those graduating, or near graduation, from the Jung-Institut this July, several are like me – some of us have become suddenly older, more fragile, over the five or six years. Such things happen: but there are also brighter eyes in these cases – a sense of calm.

•••

Thursday, 1 pm: I talk to Julia, our beautiful Hungarian librarian at the Jung-Institut (honestly, she looks like a famous actress casually enjoying talking with 'regular' people) for help in chasing down the rest of the materials on AIDS and death in the small library. She goes beyond being helpful: here is a copying card, you can pay me later, I'll find all these journals for you while you copy that, you might find more materials at... I respond to this kindly, motherly care with an internal relaxation, a loosening of the anxiety that so often drives me from one appointment to another – I am being helped, taken care of, it will all be fine.

•••

I was such a wreck yesterday evening, and I don't want to do that again – so I leave the Institut and go back to my apartment in midafternoon – but first I must pick up something: there is a bead shop in Zürich and, unlike the otherwise apparently normal bead shop in Newcastle, they consider themselves capable of restringing beads. So three of my small strings of stones, carvings and rudraksha seeds are being restrung, and today I can pick them up – a good thing, as I've been trying to get these redone for several years, and the elastic is falling to pieces.

(I could send them back to the ashram in Florida of course... which is unfortunately a lot of postage, takes forever, and keeps resulting in them getting a bit smaller – women don't remember that men's wrists are a bit bigger, do they?... So much for that then.)

Ma Jaya said rudraksha beads were the tears of Shiva – as she said: he weeps for you, so you don't need to.

The shop has used some new rudraksha beads, because some of the old ones had such narrow, irregular holes through them that they couldn't get a cord through; that's okay with me. The bill is a bit higher than expected, in the Swiss manner, but I pay it happily – it is so good to get these back: especially the one I think of as the 'classy' one, as it has black onyx, hematite, rudraksha beads and a small wooden carving of a skull.

Which makes it the perfect thing for Nachiketas to wear to a formal occasion...

•••

Thursday evening: two online sessions with analysands. Both are frankly a bit startling: they both have been traveling, have thought about and experienced various people and events, and have leaped forward over unexpectedly long distances – one has seen something knotty in himself that he doesn't like, but he can look at it straight without flinching, and it changes quality even during the session, because he's patient and tough with it; the other is startled to realise she can enjoy many things more than she had realised....

The kinds of sessions that leave you aware of how huge people's inner lives are: and how vastly they can shift and grow.

•••

Do you happen to know John Adams' Harmonielehre? A beautiful orchestral work – the first movement so charged and astounding in its harmonic shifts... I don't always notice the third movement as much, which is subtitled 'Meister Eckhardt and Quackie'; it ends with a sort of answer to the aggressive darkness of the first movement in high, bright trumpet notes shifting unexpectedly between V and IV.

Quackie was the nickname for Adams' daughter when she was little – it doesn't take long to see the line of thought, or perhaps more accurately the line of expanding awareness, that connects Adams marvelling at his baby daughter and thinking first of Eckhardt, then of impermanence and ecstatic compassion, and of eternity...

•••

Friday, 1:30 pm: I meet Nancy in the lakeside café at the Sonne. She is in a dress buoyed up with taffeta – a beautifully elaborate, old-fashioned rose and black confection of the kind she so enjoys. When we talk about my thesis, AIDS and death and disintegration and its archetypes, she yanks me up to a higher, more disorienting level. For the first time in a long time, I'm a bit lost – and admit it: taking notes, but with a sense that there is something huge and crucial that I'm not getting at all.

I'll try to figure out what my questions are, but she can clearly see some large shape that is beyond me at the moment: at the end of the hour she says, plan on five rewrites. Five... and don't fight it: just assume it will take that many... She is a bit hilarious, a bit mocking: but also pushing me, for which I can only be grateful.

I am exasperated and/or excited: this might be wonderful, or chaos, or both.

•••

During these three weeks in Zürich, whenever I talk with other students or teachers about the thesis, I always see the new computer screen, like a freshly plowed field stretching before me in spring. I keep telling people about finally discovering the simple software that allows me to create multiple desktops, and move them back and forth: in the back of my mind that offers such a sense of freedom and clarity – the knowledge that, wherever else you wander, the important project is always undisturbed, in its own place: and as you return to that screen, your mind returns to the point where you left it, with an inaudible, pleasantly clear and energetic *click*...

•••

Friday, 4 pm: Slowly moving, with many pauses and greetings, from the garden, then the entryway, and up the stairs to the Festsaal at the Jung-Institut. Graduation.

I always forget how amazing it is as so many people, analysts and students and graduates and spouses and friends and children, show up – walking down the streets and through the garden and exclaiming hello and wonderfully dressed and looking beautiful and handsome and happy, gathering like the beginning of the big garden party in a film....

Melissa suggests photographs, so I move to stand at the side where I can frame pictures – not very good pictures, I don't have the family talent for it, but I'll do what I can. Unexpectedly Virginia appears next to me in a beautiful blouse and scarf – especially unexpectedly, as she graduated last year, and is visiting to see us all and see the graduates. We smile and click away on our phone cameras...

In the midst of all the activities, I think: there is something peaceful, stable, about this graduation. Now more than a decade after the Institut split in two with much rancor, there is a sense that the organization itself is finally settled, sure of itself again. There is a stability here...

By five we are in the garden: Wolf makes a semi-inaudible announcement, others speak; we wander and talk and eat and stand in the afternoon sun by the lake, with champagne, the tables of food inside. Many brief hellos, longer conversations, people who haven't seen each other in a year or more and people who have been talking to each other all week....

•••

Friday, 7 pm: as the party winds down I find myself in the boathouse, at the end of a long table with the people who work at the Institut. Not analysts, many have never done analysis – Wolf, Julia, Diego, Ronja, Petra – the brashly cheerful caretaker wanders in and out, as always in transit (I wonder if he ever settles anywhere?), but the shy older country man who carries equipment around has probably gone home. They are cheerful and laughing, on somewhat different grounds than the others outside the boathouse – the sheer relief of finishing the long work of the residency weeks, some are going on vacation, and apparently Diego is leaving for the next phase of his life. They are mostly fairly young – I'm reminded that they are not embedded in the Institut, that they pass through on their way elsewhere: even institutions are just way stations.

As the party breaks up, which takes more than an hour, there are brief or extended encounters with so many people: the lady who cleans, whose name I don't think I ever learned, but we always speak with each other... she had dark hair when I first came, she has white hair now. Camilla and I bump into each other, we connect as we haven't yet; and Thomas and I keep starting conversations, then splitting off to talk to various groups.

Everyone gradually drifts along the lake toward the outside restaurant at the Sonne; we encounter a cluster of the Italians, with Sara and Francesco and their friends, and Luigi and Eva; Thomas speaks to everyone, but he and I are already planning an escape – I am wilting a bit, Thomas wants to talk, and we are comfortable together.

•••

Friday, 9 pm: Thomas drives me from Küsnacht into Zürich: he has an idea. If I don't think I can move to Barcelona or Bologna, it is possible to buy a house in the north of Italy – it is a good time, not expensive – we could go in together. I am always financially uncertain, but I listen with some pleasure. How do you want to end up, in your life? I ask him. He says, of course married!, some kids... Italy perhaps? A psychoanalysis practice, with a family life. And I would be installed as the old uncle.

Later we talk about how many months go by without contact between us, but we immediately pick up the conversation without explanations or pauses. As with Trisha, as with Laura, and a few others: people with whom you're so in tune you just walk right back into the relationship, whatever years and miles stand between.

•••

Going back to my apartment to pack, I wonder: can we do this... I'm not bothered if it's a fantasy; I know people make major decisions based on fantasies, and sometimes that's not a bad thing. And the truth is, my usual chain of anxieties, disappointments, static situations and possible decisions, looks rather – well, flexible: I feel no need for any imagined future to be perfect, and surprises are all right, I think. Current politics have singed a lot of bridges, but I don't mind trying out new ones; but I also don't mind if there isn't time to make any more.

•••

Saturday, 4:30 pm. The taxi driver from the airport is pleasantly talkative: he mentions the flat he owns near my neighbourhood and problems with the cat lady downstairs – he's tried to be nice to her but keeps trying to line the floors with various sealants so that his upstairs flat can be let to tenants who actually have a sense of smell. We laugh about this mess and I say that a friend of mine wants us to go in together to get a place in northern Italy, but I don't know –

He says, do it! It's a good time, and you'll obviously regret it if you don't.

And I think: how many times in my life have I told people: don't wait, go ahead! And I know I'm often right, as is he – in the long run, the best way to go...

•••

As I pull all the luggage and mail up the stairs, I am aware that I don't travel so well these days – I'm relieved the flight wasn't so miserable; and perhaps it was that way because I made a point of eating very little today, just enough to take pills. I wonder if I can dare to travel to Cape Town in three weeks: it feels like a long way...

And the landlord has put in the new windows! The three large windows have had water drops in them, gradually getting worse over the fifteen years I've lived here – but now they are absolutely clear: the outside streams in, sun and green.

The weather is cool, which is a relief – and there is nothing so comfortable in the world as my own bed....

•••

Sub specie aeternitatis: from the perspective of eternity – all these people, the dresses and sunshine and restaurant tables: but, much more than seems guaranteed on the surface, so many of these people are so awake, so present – we know that we are traveling in time, with the limitations and awareness that brings...

I feel very aware of lives, of change, of time: and without sadness.

•••

Sunday morning, time not recorded, not long before the full moon. Odd fragments of dreams, each large and intense: a couple I remember enough to write down, but most are lost – I am left with a sense of unexpected chunks of unknown experiences. I am struck, in a way that I'm not often struck in relation to my own dreams, by the challenging, infrequent reminders in the most intense workshops and lectures, by the most ruthless analysts: that we really have no idea what is going on in the unconscious at all – that all the dreams and messages and chunks of past and nonexistent presents are merely fragments from the borderlands; and that the deep unconscious cannot entirely speak to us, ever.

To write what I know, to aim for what I don't.

To settle here, with this, and have it be enough; or to set out on a new adventure – but not alone, with a friend for steadiness –

To fall far into dreams, to wander across imagination and vision, and memory.

Anniversary, again

The eleven-year anniversary of this blog....

Well, hey, it matters to me. A bit.

•••

After a brief but unpleasant virus – probably caught on that hasty train south and back – everything has a slightly disconnected feel to it: still coughing occasionally, but so what?... work to do, but really, who needs it?...

Shower, laundry, get myself dressed enough to go buy cough drops... then home and a Skype workshop, prefaced by a 'recovering, so everyone go away' message, and watch without participating.

The overlap in the past few years of analysis, the resultant digging in deep cellars, a vast increase in meaning, followed by a recurrence of that life pattern where fantasies of things I thought I wanted are taken away at a level beyond my control – perhaps this is the pattern I struggle with: a pattern about which I'm happy to make stories (like that last blog post), but uncomfortable accepting as truly mine.

And maybe that dislocated, dissociated, quasi-schizoid space between waking and sleeping, between sick and full of medications and awake and recovering, is always and innately the best place to see all of this...

Yet, disconnected. Not quite like a Kafka, or PKD, story – this is calmer, but it highlights the slight unreality of things....

•••

Spring, with clouds and some rain.

Awareness, with some darkness.

Return to health, with some coughing.

•••

Eleven years of occasionally writing, here – 753 posts, so that makes... 1.3 posts per week.

Time, space... a nearly Buddhist sense of the contingency of decisions and actions.

I may cancel some plans... that seems reasonable enough. Like reducing noise levels.

•••

You'd like the sun: that North Sea slanting, pale light, but brighter than usual – it would be beautiful to paint it....

Shift

A dream fragment:

One of two simultaneous dream narratives, partly remembered – don't remember the other one.

A friend and I are at the front door of a house, a porch light over the door; an old woman is inside. We come to talk to her, twice – I know she won’t remember or understand what I’m asking – something about finding someone, or knowing my own story – but I think if I come and ask a second time I might get a clue about where things have gotten lost, what happened, where to find things.

This second time, my friend is partly in the way of the door, I know we’ll look official or threatening or like government men or something, and she won’t want to talk to us, I try to get him to move – I know she won’t remember that she used to know us, I try to make him move but it’s too late.

She closes the door on us, I know it’s my last chance: later we are in a car or train, leaving, giving up – on everything; my friend is asleep, he doesn’t understand what we’ve lost; I know it’s all over, and we won’t find out what happened, or get anything back. Like the end of life, or of a hope; sadness, not intense or surprising, but final.

***

Yesterday, I was suddenly on national television – no, reel it back a bit –

Wednesday evening, Skype with M. and his husband R.; they are jolly, talkative. I am cheerful but tired – it's been a long day, I'm looking forward to a bath or some such.

A phone call interrupts – a woman from the BBC's local station: there's some AIDS research on the news (as it turns out, a minor update/confirmation on something we've known for years, but okay). They want to hear from a long-term survivor – can I come and talk?

And then it gets a bit more complicated: this is television, not radio (which is always intimidating – it is astonishing how precise and tailored television studios are; they're not like radio, which can be cheerfully funky, as no one can see you). I have already noticed, today, that I am literally heavier than I've ever been in my life – too much bread this weekend, and still so little exercise. Sigh. (The old Hollywood joke rings in my head – "But you know the camera adds ten pounds!" "Well, how many cameras are on her?".)

And it's at the big new BBC studios in Salford, and it's national, and can I catch a train in an hour? The hotel will serve breakfast, a taxi will pick me up at 6:30 am –

This is not how I wanted to spend my evening, and I'm disconnectedly saying I'm not sure – finally I turn to M., who is still there, on the screen: he says, yes, do it.

Pack, train, taxi, hotel, unpack, midnight or so: sleep, wake, no breakfast unfortunately (a crossed wire in communications), taxi, station, makeup, studio. It's a national chat/news show; I get five minutes, interspersed with other speakers – I say generic things about my experience of AIDS, but wave my hands and look cheerful, so they are happy.

Taxi, train (a table seat, fortunately), home. And figure out how to do things scheduled for afternoon... see two students, do the usual HIV-patients-talk-to-medical-students thing, go home. Skype again with M., catch up on the day: so, how did it go?...

and am coughing, a bit more than my usual side effects: dammit, this is what happens when you go out into the world... the crowded world as Petri dish: biologists must be intensely aware of how complicated the contemporary world is becoming – our closeness and international connections are ideal for smaller organisms: but their glorious dawn may have an impact on us....

***

Recognition is great: as I've said before, my life addiction has always been fame and attention – more than money or sex, or the other usual suspects.

And I'm not cynical about the interview: it was a good thing, well handled...

Friday I'm coughing, I really have a cold. I have one patient – should I have canceled so that she wouldn't catch anything? Ah well, I've taken a pill, I get through with only minor coughing (and she's used to me coughing these days).

I make a point of mentioning the new computer screen in the room, say: when we talk about our relationship, some analysts are careful not to show their lives to their analysands – but when we meet in the analyst's home, of course.... She is unworried, says it's fine, talks about her own concerns; it's good that I mentioned it, but it is more about dispelling my worries, not hers.

I answer a few emails, cough, cover some work demands, take more cold medicine – other queries look too complicated, and it feels as though everyone wants me to be alert, awake for them – they want me to be available. Which is not always easy these days.

I finally give up and lie on the couch, fall into a drugged sleep... and dream....

***

I've said several times lately, in different contexts, that I have, without really planning to do so, changed direction in the past months: the collapsing world of Brexit and Trump, my shaky though not disastrous health, a quiet sense of spring slowly though erratically coming –

Buying the computer was a decision, actually: chances are that I won't move on, and looking for experiences away from here, or beyond the current range of my life, is no longer something I can really expect. (It hasn't been for several years, truth to tell; but now I'm admitting it, to myself.)

So: less anger, exasperation – calmer. But...

Close in spaces, expectations; let shutters drift half-closed over the windows. I enjoy being with my analysands – I thought today: the amazing worlds within each of these people, the joys and sadness, it's like the science fiction and fantasy I have always loved: this is traveling to other worlds.

And I would like to write; when I do move beyond my fuzzy, mildly disconnected world of procrastination, it is truly a pleasure, a source of pride.

Being here must be enough, and therefore it is enough: I can continue to look out at other places and prospects, less wistfully perhaps, more calmly, as lovely fragments of the past.

So: the same life, a (slightly) different meaning. No big events, no big accomplishments: no big answers. What I appear to be is what I am – there aren't secrets that will make it all important. It's a life, and it's what a life is.

***

... sadness, not intense or surprising, but final.

Easter week

Maundy Thursday. In the night I wake coughing – side effects I think, but perhaps I also caught a minor cold on the train back on Wednesday. Paracodeine (given to me by Antonio, a couple of years ago – I had the flu in Zürich, missed most of the classes that month; on the last day Antonio, who is also a cardiologist, wanted to meet at a café before he went home to Milan – I kept coughing, he finally threw up his hands and said, Enough!, got up and walked into the pharmacy next door, wrote a prescription for this codeine...) – it helps, the cough gradually winds to a stop, and I sleep...

***

Good Friday. I wake, only a bit groggy, coughing intermittently; wonder should I cancel my one analysand today... The news mentions a largest bomb, non-nuclear; I make tea. A few minutes before she arrives I am dressed and presentable, the middle room vacuumed. We return to a dream from the previous week, her church and its stresses, old emotions and managing strategies, and I say: it's Good Friday, an interesting day to look deeply into this – getting in touch with the fear seems terrible, like death, descending to hell, but  then....

When she leaves, I am steadier but still a bit tired, and so sleep on the sofa for an hour. I wake remembering – something, some dream fragment now evaporated – and I realise – thirty years ago this month, April 1987: I was thirty years old. Diagnosed HIV+ at the Gay and Lesbian Community Centre in Los Angeles. The psych student volunteer who gave me my results was in training to be a Jungian analyst, and I agreed to start analysis with him, which would continue for five years. I gave up on composing forever, after finishing a set of small songs based on Japanese death haiku. And I won a travel grant from UCLA to spend three months in New York, finally meeting some famous composers I'd always wanted to work with... a visit where, walking home from the bars late at night, I saw the black-painted storefront of the Theatre for the Ridiculous covered with flowers and candles and cards, mourning Charles Ludlam after he died of AIDS.

How could I have forgotten all that?...

***

Back to the Saturday before Easter week. In the middle of the day I am angry, astoundingly grim with M. and D. as we sit having lunch on a lovely sunny day. They put up with me somehow, eyebrows raising as they look at me.

That evening I go to a bar where R. and F. are celebrating R.'s birthday – everyone is there, and glad: glad to see each other, glad to be here. At one point I am euphorically happy, sitting on a bench at the small dyke bar that we pass through later... I go home a bit earlier than the others, and sleep deeply.

Such changing emotions. What charged energies have been appearing, what dominoes falling, in these weeks?...

***

Palm Sunday. The previous week's analysis session was so charged, so emotional: not because of any story or memory, but because it reached into something... too hard to explain, I'll leave it aside. I'm not surprised when I start to remember intense fragments of dreams, after months of remembering almost nothing – although I am surprised at their elemental incoherence: not stories, but a more basic level, from unexplored distant islands of the unconscious. I record:

At one point I’m looking at myself – that me is facing or looking at something else; from my viewpoint I see myself sideways. Later there is some kind of electronic gate between us; he/I tries to come through it towards me, somehow in a threatening or dangerous way, and is horribly burned: it is an electric fence of some kind – he will be very deformed when he recovers…

I have a sense of seeing myself split off in some way (which seems connected to last week, and to Legion, with its schizoid subpersonalities and possessions.) I’m not upset when he’s burned, I’m relieved that he can’t get at me.

***

Monday. I wake impatient with myself: email all three editors, apologising – briefly (a couple of weeks ago I got a bit hilarious with an analysand who was apologising, telling him: you can say sorry just once to me, you know, you don't need to take care of me; my impatience folding out across work and life). All three editors respond within an hour, not irritated – kind, but clear: you're still okay, but not for much longer. A sense of easy clarity: anxiety recedes.

***

Tuesday.

Another dream fragment, just as vivid, but from a very different direction.

A recurrent image; comes up twice, as I wake twice on the same morning – some television travelogue about something called a cughol or kughol, something that looks like archaic Korean. The narrator describes pots for fire or for food, or both – they are on pillars, about one and a half to two feet high with a covered bowl on top, all pottery or with wood or reeds beneath – they seem to have been floated on rivers or the sea, weighted to stay upright, with fires burning in them – they are seed, which is obviously both symbolic and physical here.

That morning, I launch into the third article, the one that is the least finished but soonest due: and then there are five pages of... well, stuff: it needs to be made coherent. But there is something being said.

***

Ash Wednesday. I awake and push myself through the morning, some combination of impatient efficiency and – well, frankly, weakness: my hands are shaking slightly, if I could I would just lie down. Though I am wondering, should I cancel the train to Sheffield for analysis, I keep getting ready – print two copies of the dreams, microwave frittata for the black bento box, shower, even some actual shaving (okay, trimming). I leave, exasperated that I have to get on the train at all –

Table seat, computer. After some reasonable work and email answering, the pad and ebooks. By the time I arrive I am no longer shaky, though I intend to talk about my circumstantial irritation....

In the room, I tell him that I had a doctor's appointment, and was frustrated by my doctor's disinterest in side effects. For nearly a year I'm talked of changing doctors in some oblique way that won't annoy anyone (okay, only one person might be annoyed); as I'm speaking, I think: to hell with it, I'll just do it.

My analyst, who retired from psychiatry in the NHS last year because of his own health, says: you have looked jaundiced at times lately; it would be good to have someone paying attention to that.

Other people keep trying to treat me either as ill, or as not ill: which doesn’t work – I’m partly both, and battling over doing things and not doing things, being energetic or not, is exhausting. B. laughs in recognition: his MS has given him the same experience – people have such an exaggerated capitalist sense of working all the time, or doing nothing, they can't simply... back off, be flexible. I remember first being in Darmstadt, in Berlin, in a villa outside Rome, and seeing that continentals don't feel they have to work all the time... they do far better work, too....

B. is very interested in the dreams. Technical discussions: dissociation, charged emotion. I think of Kime's lecture two years ago, his startling approach to shadow: that it is dissociated fragments of memory and self that have been lost to time and consciousness. Such fragments may not seem dark or dangerous, just... incoherent.

***

We talk through the first dream, my psychotic self, the electric fence. B.: This is the defense. P.: watching him isn’t connecting emotionally – we are really detached, there is no sense of twinning or anything like that. B.: You’re really frightened of him… You know, it must be terrifying to be a sub-personality: no one else even sees you. P.: It's like the image from Legion: a personality locked in a box, underground. B.: The defense system is so powerful that it burns him. P.: And in Legion, as he tries to marshal his strength, the enemy becomes exactly as strong, because....

B. asks me to feel my way into it.

I do what seems the only thing there is to do: this howling, scarred fragment of rage, that is just like me, that is me: I reach for him – imagined production values recall various television and film images: crackling with power, irregular explosions, amazingly chaotic noise – things exploding off shelves – pull him in to me. (The real and present me is tearing up). I hold him, it’s the only solution and the right thing to do. It’s like holding a horribly wounded animal or child – I don’t expect him to understand, I’m the one who must hold him, because I’m the conscious/human one: he/I is only a lost fragment that doesn't exist in time, or reason.

***

P.: The abbot’s story was also about dissociation: I am arrogant and careless, not paying attention – it’s not until everyone is dead and I’m sitting bleeding to death, and can’t do anything except remember and understand, that I am forced into awareness. B.: the electric fence – trying to keep out this part of yourself – in the same way the abbot dissociated when talking to the pirates; but there comes that moment where it turns around and you can’t avoid it any more. P.: This is the chunk of raw emotion that stands behind the abbot – raw because thoroughly unconscious, unprocessed.

I am extremely tired, sitting here, in this room. The room is saturated with a sense of recognition: I realise why I have been so impatient with everyone else, for weeks – this is so important that they mustn't distract me.

B.: that is the electric fence.

***

A sense that both dreams are from the same place – opposite in terms of light and dark, but at the same deep level: and one of them opens up the other. The second, almost Vedic – old rituals, life, fire: I wouldn't have dreamed of that, unless I had dreamed the electric fence, the burning body and raw screaming face....

Legion is a useful source of images: especially because so much of the processes suggest intense dissociation – it does of course add ideas of invasion, magic, superpowers, but the writers are rather casual about all that, and are clearly really going for complexes, dissociation, the schizoid....

After the session, going home on the train, I can still sense that raw pain that isn’t caused by anything – which is what makes it raw, and why reason doesn't touch it: it is a chunk of unaware darkness, unconnected to time or memory.

*** 

Good Friday. In the evening, after a relaxed Skype with M. and R. – who have become so comfortable together, and M. is always smiling when we speak these days... I make a mixed rice with smoked salmon and leftover vegetables; it feels like comfort. I sit and write in front of the television.

***

To bed. The same images arise, as they have for the past three nights:

Then what do you do?

I hold him.

And, as I have been doing, easily, as the most natural thing in the world, I roll onto my side in bed, holding him still... until we sleep....

Shafts of light

From the chilly, detached sadness of last week, unexpected changes – a day and a bit that were more entwined with the life, and lives, around me –

Friday, an official reception – you know the drill: speeches, food, suits, paintings for sale. But this one has much more life in it than most: an LGBT History project, in its second year – people enjoying themselves and talking to each other, all a bit astonished that this was an actual pleasure. A speech by a gay councilman, a Labour representative – given Labour's behaviour the past few days I am admittedly not too interested at first. But he is energetic, involved – he had been a musician, so Tippett's Child of Our Time was the focus of his discussion... and he also makes it clear, without exactly saying so, that he is absolutely against current Labour policy.

Good people: energetic, happy – and some beautiful younger men. It is hard to miss them, to be frank. But a sense of connection even across the lines of... hmm, what do we call them? Boundaries of contrasting attractiveness?

That won't suddenly become the new slang, but you get the idea.

•••

Somewhere in the midst of preparing my own presentation among these events, a message arrives from our department head: the previous day B. collapsed, theatrically, eyes skewing and vibrating, threw up everywhere – a stroke or what? Much anxiety and confusion, he's at the hospital now – eyebrows are electronically raised at me – others evidently remember my 2009 stroke, and defer to me slightly: what do you think could have...?

The reception isn't far from the hospital, so I text M., his wife, with the (only slightly fictional) news that I'm in the building. She says he is probably okay, he can't see anyone, but she'd like a break, so will meet me in the cafeteria.

And when I get there, weirdly enough, I joke – and then we joke together – for an hour. Yes, I know... but it seemed fairly certain that B. would recover, and M. and I were both increasingly caught up in a slightly giddy mood: hope, diminishing anxiety, a sense of relief with a slightly guilty look over the shoulder, in case things weren't entirely all right –

•••

Today (Saturday) – the LGBT group is having its all-day public talks; I am doing my 'AIDS Rage' talk, heavily cut, but with a lot of the music, and pictures and... well, all the flashy stuff I have been able to generate.

And it goes well. Hey, I'm actually pretty good at this, if I say so myself.

Passionately engaged speeches from various people: a cheerfully pleasant woman – a retired librarian – talks about her archival research into a local man who was a transvestite, and his endless tangles with the police until he vanished during World War One. The way she tells it: not exactly a sad story – yes, of course, much abuse and darkness, and the lostness of the end – but she constantly reminds us how assertive he was about doing and being who he was – strangely and not entirely sadly inspiring.

The wonderful woman running the logistics, very direct and smart and calm – what is it about her face that recalls an actress, someone who is also very good at walking into a room and putting every person where they need to be?

D., who ran the whole show – an open, cheerful young man, who seems to make things happen just by his presence... And the mostly young, energetic people who have done so much work to make everything happen: a distinct sense that these are people who want to do things that matter, and they were lucky this time because it all caught fire: suddenly they all found themselves doing things that they wanted to do, and staying up late and running around like mad to do them...

A remarkable kind of inspiration. As when there are stage directors, or conductors, with that remarkable talent for making things happen – apparently without anxiety, without effort....

A young man who introduces the speakers, who recently returned to this city from a few years away, and now he is thinner, more assertive, more present – still shy and gentle, but one who seems to have discovered his strength in the world.

And my favourite lesbian lawyer: smart and quick, and unexpectedly the twin of a woman at my university office, someone who is always bouncing off walls with enthusiasm – the two of them alike and yet different: tall and blond, but sweet and tart in very different measures.

One of the last who comes to the podium, a trans speaker, friendly, imaginative, assertive but gentle across a complex series of feelings and judgments.

•••

Saturday evening, after that long day, back to the hospital to see B. Who is feeling much, much better, though absolutely wiped out – it was not a stroke (that phrase has a faint resonance of Dickens: "and to Tiny Tim, who did not die..."). His eyes are closed, as the pupils vibrate when he has them open too much – it was neurological, viral, maddeningly weird but not a stroke, and not permanent.

And yes, he is a bit wrecked (when human beings undergo system crashes, they are not like computers – the body is exhausted for a time; he won't be working for some weeks). But his brain, his mind, his memory – his creativity, his existence – should be unmarred...

Though he is tired, his eyes closed, his face is relaxed and he smiles from time to time. He shares the relief M. and I feel (I needn't worry about the previous night's joking, fortunately).

M. sits on the far side of the bed, I am on his left; I hold his hand for a while, with a sense of reassurance shared among us all. When I leave after an hour, I give him a hug – and, in one of those peculiar split-seconds of confusion and missed aim, I accidentally kiss him in the middle of the chest, rather than the cheek.

But neither of us are thrown by it: in this atmosphere of returning to life, it all feels like – well, like life. Pure life.

•••

There will be a birthday celebration for the guy who ran today's events in two hours – after such a day, which has had a friendly glow like embers, I don't mind indulging myself until then. So: Carluccio's – the outrageously handsome Italian waiter is near the door: he lights up when he sees me.

As I am floating tonight, I don't question this, I just happily go to my table. He is not on the floor, however – my waiter is a warmly friendly Argentinian with a wonkier, very guy-like face. But not unsexy: I think that, if the outrageously handsome waiter is someone you are dazzled by, the Argentinian is the guy you end up living with, the one who looks up and smiles as you walk into the apartment....

Dinner is good. Couples all around, I realise it is the Saturday before Valentine's Day – I choose from the regular menu, as too much of the valentine menu is a bit sickly in one way or another. (It has a 'for tourists' quality to it... and several items are dyed pink. Ecch.) The Argentinian and I argue out my choices – I feel a certain relaxed triumph as my order clearly interests him more than those of the adjacent couples. Well, hey: it's not their faults, what do they know.

After finishing dinner, dessert, a small liqueur: a brief Facebook exchange encourages me to get pictures of these waiters (friends on four continents want to know what I'm looking at, and I wouldn't mind pictures for myself). So I set up the camera on the phone, put on my jacket, pick up my briefcase, walk toward the front of the bar...

but neither is around. Oh the timing of taking breaks.

I put the phone in my pocket with a sigh, realise I need to buy a birthday gift, so walk over to their small deli – the maitre d', a big, tall, athletic local, helps me choose a box that combines liqueur and chocolates. A voice behind me – so, how was your dinner?... I turn and the gorgeous waiter, with his jacket on to leave, smiles at me. At that point I'm too flustered, and not coordinated enough, to get my phone to do what I want it to; so I smile, we chat, and we walk out, and part.

•••

Walking down from the middle of town toward the area near the station, where the gay bars are, I detour through the small but crowded side street with the comedy club/restaurant where M. works – he is there as I walk through the door: he pushes back at the air in front of him, gesturing for me to keep back, as he has a cold (but is working anyway). We exchange a few sentences, laugh, wave, I turn to leave and walk further through the busy town.

•••

In the plaza, people are outside at tables – it is not freezing, but it still seems a bit cold for that... Fortunately everyone I've met today is inside:

the bar is wide and long, a plain space, but a number of people from the LGBT conference are there – dressed down, more animated, the ones who worked all day calmer, relaxed, happy.

There is a warm connection operating across genders, ages, appearances: this is community, which can indeed be created on schedule by those who have a talent for it. I talk to D. and to K. and my favourite lawyer and the woman who ran things, and various young men and older men and women and...

An intense young man with a big smile, A., who asked a question after my talk that pointed towards a huge set of ideas around Galás, performance art, madness, and experimentation, wants to talk. And we do talk – for at least an hour or more; there is a constant, unstressed density to the conversation – because we each almost immediately get nearly everything the other says, the artistic, the emotional, the bizarre, the psychological, the fragmentary. Personal stories, art works, philosophies of existence.

Others around come over and joke with us briefly – A. is known to them as someone with strange tastes and ideas, someone fascinated with the edges and dark transformations of imagination – but A. and I are moving so fast, in such an endless tangle of exchanged possibilities, that everyone soon backs away and leaves us to keep talking. As from a fire that is burning a bit too hot for it to be comfortable to be near it.

It is, throughout, remarkable, for speed, for ideas, for... even if at first there is a hint of mutual measuring, some can-you-handle-this on both sides, it rapidly becomes clear that neither of us has anything to fear in this conversation – least of all being misunderstood.

Dazzling....

•••

After an hour or so, I still haven't gone home – so much for that plan. I don't feel tired...

Some of the men move down the street to the leather bar, the Eagle – usually the place where I would feel most comfortable, in this neighbourhood where all the gay and lesbian bars are strung along a single, long, curved street.

I have not, however, been in here for at least a year, or two, or very possibly three. I really don't go out these days.

Which tells you how low my expectations have plummeted, and my connections to the everyday gay life that is here....

•••

Which is probably why the continuing life that fills this day and night, this time of connection, is so surprising.

I continue to talk to the men who were involved in the conference – we are gathered in a small raised area, up a small staircase, at the front of the bar: the quiet, alert man who ran the Twitter feed, which apparently was second-most-popular in the UK for the entire Saturday – second after football... which, if you think about it, is seriously impressive. He put a couple of my best lines onto Twitter – rather proud of that, made a small splash.

At points I am assertively lecturing K., and then D., about how well they did today, about their skills and talents, about the rather larger splashes that they each have made. It's an interesting tone – I'm being the Old Man, pushy and a bit aggressive, but in an entirely encouraging way: telling them, no, you don't quite get it – these are talents many people don't have, and you must realise that you have them, in spades.

It's a bit like when I've pushed some of my own students – such as the ones who have that peculiar talent for leading and encouraging that makes a good conductor; or talking to M., who now studies in New York, when he showed that he could join practically any musician or ensemble in the department and make the performance vastly better just by getting involved...

D. looks at me intently, surprised but attentive, as I tell him what he is capable of doing: I am the old man you bump into after you have gotten lost in the fairy-tale forest – weird cackling, gnomic words, the forecast of the castle won, the golden future.

•••

Down on the floor of the bar I can see F. – a big, friendly, charming Irish bear, the one I always love talking to in the vitamin store. I haven't seen him for weeks, he's hanging around with people I know...

So I go down to mix with them, with increasing energy, for several hours. F. has quit the vitamin store, but we are glad to see each other – and now we have contact, we know names and Facebook feeds; and I'm seriously glad of that – he is not only intelligent, but – beneath the slightly Irish exaggeration and brief flashes of anxiety, he is very – how would I say it – grounded. Adult. Strong – if still a bit uncertain how to present that to the world. His boyfriend is an energetic, talkative (yes, that is me saying talkative, so the word really means something) American – charming, daring, constantly testing small boundaries in a non-threatening way. They are (in at least two senses) with a solemn but pleasant Spanish man, who occasionally smiles and joins the conversation (the limits are linguistic, but when he catches on he is lively, imaginative).

S. and his partner, and their gang of friends – always a fixture at the Eagle, but a friendly one. Various rounds of shots revolving – you can tell I haven't been to the bars in ages, because I am surprised that shots are now varied and mixed (which, I suppose, gives the bartenders something amusing to do as they dash around keeping up with things – and they are indeed having at least some fun, trading laughing backchat with patrons as they pass).

(But perhaps they are merely responding to this day, this night: and perhaps it isn't just me – the world seems to be alive tonight: Eros is present, and everyone has energy, hope, plans, life.)

At one point, a man in a wheelchair, small and very crumpled, comes through the crowd – we move aside to let him occupy the corner of the bar. He sits, head on his shoulder, for a while – finally a guy sitting at the bar and I catch each other's eyes with that look of: okay, somebody needs to do something, and it looks like it's up to us. As the guy at the bar calls over the bartender, I lean over – in full right angle, because he is sitting that low – and ask if he wants something to drink, if he needs anything... he says, clearly but shyly: I have to tell you something – I've never been to a gay bar. (A sudden sense of walking into deep waters, but with no threat of drowning: I know I can, and must, keep my head through these moments.)

We talk for a while, I wave away the bartender – the man in the wheelchair really doesn't want anything to drink – and we talk directly about being nervous and being comfortable, about how bars are and how men are, what it's like to be out in public – when he worries about being treated badly because of his wheelchair, I choose the realistic option: it's true, that might happen. But everyone in a gay bar is usually a bit self-conscious anyway, so if it does happen – ignore it. And he is fine with that....

There are increasing numbers of guys, familiar ones and new ones – everyone is a bit alive, an electricity running through them. The shots keep coming in strange colours, mixed reds and greens, peculiar and sweet flavours – which is good, I'm happy with sweet, as always.

Two guys who just got engaged – and they are absolutely in the world of sensation: they both radiate a combination of sexuality and innocence – a sense of some kind of perfect match... The taller one is energetic, happily loud, has lived in many, many places – he's way ahead of me, having lived in more than ninety countries, but at least I have my four continents, the fifth one coming this summer. He is friendly and funny and talkative, with an utterly masculine joy: he seems archetypally a man of repairs and tools, of the most immanently physical chunks of the physical world. A bit later, his boyfriend, the short, hot one, confides to me, his arm comfortably around my waist: his 41st birthday is Monday, and he knows his partner has surprises ready, but he doesn't know what they are. I turn to smile at him, and say, vividly oracular: it will be amazing.

The joy in his face...

And a very tall, handsome man, but with a closed, private face; who knows all the men in this circle, though he stands slightly alone, like a cautious animal – he is shy; and even during a few minutes of talking with him – but I don't quite know how to explain this: what is it about reassuring someone who obviously cannot realise how extraordinarily beautiful they are, that makes you feel as though you are doing exactly what is needed in this second?...

•••

The street, still fairly busy, but soon there is another taxi. The driver at first a bit irritable, a bit anxious – chaotic traffic, people wandering in and out, he is repeatedly waved down –

I tell him, look, this will take a bit more time than usual, and I don't mind.

He relaxes, and drives me home.

•••

Sunday: a floating lassitude, not up until early afternoon. Laying in bed reading. Enjoying recovery from something I rarely do these days...

•••

The early part of the week is pleasant, though working comes and goes.... I push myself a bit, some bits of administration vanish into a couple of quick spreadsheets... the list of to do's shortens, a bit, though the article at the top of the list is still there, and I keep walking around it, looking at it with a sort of friendly though guarded caution.

•••

Tonight I listen to some of the music I added into the computer last week – a collection of ars subtilior, some Jai Uttal...

Uttal's kirtan – this I haven't listened to so much since the early 90s. Wandering through Facebook, I see that L. is closing the house where he has lived for years, where I first met the guru Ma Jaya – and first heard such things as kirtan, the entire cloud of Hindu and Buddhist teachings that made me yearn for comfort, for enough warmth to get me through the death I spent those years expecting.

The music – more casually edited than I remember, but full of life and passion – returns me to a younger self: I find myself emotional, but as in memory – not grieving, but remembering grieving. And I want to tell him something, as my analysands do when they become aware of their memories as shades and echoes of earlier selves –

though I admit that, among the several things I consider telling him (you are going to live for a long time, you want to finish that degree soon) is an instruction that I wouldn't be able to fully explain to him: ambition yes, travel yes, but remember: love is better.

•••

Days full of light. Not a bright light, but light that keeps flashing through, and among, various people and exchanges and moments, that keeps showing up in sentences and eyes – as though there is really such a great deal of light, holding constant under all the surfaces of things: and it keeps appearing, glinting, through everything....

Summa

A dramatic year...

One that stank for the world, of course: major moves into aggressive idiocy. But it's not very interesting to talk about Brexit and the UK, Trump and America. Or about dead celebrities – some good people are gone, yes, but that happens always. And many of them were old enough that grieving doesn't seem all that necessary – just a sort of 'vale': that was a good life, thanks for what you did with it.

My year was unavoidably influenced by all that, but its essential nature was different: from sick and sleepy for ten months, to better, to much better. With, as I've said, a new ruthlessness: if illness and death have reminded me that they're always close by, life has sharper and more definite edges – the university, the Jung-Institut, at least two governments, and other large and semi-inept organisations will just have to accept as much energy and attention as I bother to give them, and not whine and ask for more.

Which is just fine: the greatly increased clarity that has clicked into place comes from my analysis with B. more than anything – a direct connection to dustier, more broken parts of myself across the winter of 2015-16 seems to have gradually given back a lot of energy; it has also clarified what I can hope for, what has fallen into time, and what can at least be remembered and enjoyed in memory.

But I do feel relatively healthy: even the weakness of my legs, which has been basically mechanical rather than caused by illness (surprise! if you sleep a lot for ten months your muscles fade) has itself been shifting – not because I'm disciplined enough to actually exercise, but just because I am walking around and doing things again.

Any plans for the next year don't seem quite like resolutions: they're just what I want – though they resemble standard resolutions: get some weight off, write a lot. Finish the Jung-Institut degree.

And ignore, or at least respond only minimally to, the restrictions and demands of the chaotic world....

But best of all of this is certainly that larger context where it all seems to happen, now: a broader awareness of how everything in me, and in past and present and in the world, shifts and balances across time, across levels of consciousness and being.

Because that makes all change, and any apparent stasis, interesting....

Sketch of a conversation

...

You didn't really think you were having strokes, did you.

Well, if memory – no, I suppose not; there would be other symptoms?

Yes, there would. So: dissociation.

But more dissociation than I should expect, yes? That sense over the last few months, from the last year – more connected, more of myself aware of myself –

Yes.

But if I'm dissociating: if I pick up my watch and go to wipe it off, then come back to that little table near the stairs carrying a couple of bags, and don't pick up the wallet and keys –

Which isn't that strange.

No, okay. But if I'm more self-aware, more self-connected, why would I be dissociating? Unpredictably?

You mean you don't normally do that?

Well perhaps I do, but...

Everyone does, it's not such a problem.

I get that, but I'm not happy with it. I don't need the ego to be in charge all the time, but... at least there should be fairly consistent communication between levels?

Maybe, maybe not. This reminds me of the downstairs bedroom –

Alone, away from the rest of the family. Creativity but disconnection, those blank books with calligraphy and poems, my sisters' drawings, and also their encouragement.

And then the university interview –

Where it's clear that my notes and sketches are trivial, fantasies, they think it's all crap – I haven't drafted an opera, I've just messed about with pieces of paper.

So creativity splits away, falls into the unconscious.

I told you about the depression when I got the letter, that I wasn't accepted – going to bed for more than a day, something you just don't do in my family.

Well, dissociation... so, forgetting things.

And not keeping my attention on things: when I had friends over to dinner last Thursday, I forgot the onions – I was making a risotto – fortunately I asked R. for help, she fried them up in time and it was fine. And I didn't get as angry, as disoriented, as I used to when I screwed up with guests.

Dissociation?

At some point in talking to all these people, I just lost track – I wasn't going from one step to the next, I skipped one. Dissociated. I distract easily, and in the kitchen if I get distracted I can completely lose the –

This is part of your dissociative psyche; as you become more comfortable with parts of yourself it happens more – there is a kind of relaxation about it.

So, this is the price of being more involved with people and activities again – which I haven’t done very much for a decade, or more. Socializing at parties, and performing on stage: that wish to be seen.

But you hold back when you meet guys in a way that frustrates you…

When the Italian guy caught up to me in the mall, asked how the dinner had gone, I was a bit incoherent – cheerful, but babbling – probably he didn't notice. But that's twice in the last month: I think they see me and say, hmm, attractive, then look again and see old, out of shape. Positive. They're still interested, but... less so.

I'm going to disagree with you on that, again.

Well, nobody agrees with me about that, I still won't let go of it. So, when dissociation happens, it doesn't need to be a kind of blankness, it can be a presence in the world – the sensual, sensate world, or social or enjoyable – but one that doesn’t keep track of things. Doesn't need to keep track of things. Like Deleuze and Guattari – not paranoid, so a bit schizoid.

Oh, Giegerich’s take on dissociation in the neurosis book – denial, etc. –

But Giegerich gets trapped in consistency, which is very important for him. Not for me, I think he overdoes it.

Moments, or rhythms, of greater attention, then.

Connections between forgetfulness and control, social connections to attractive men, and getting up in the middle of the night to get some writing done… I was surprised last night, it was a good draft of an abstract.

You're still paying attention to nearby things, to important things: as opposed to drafting out a whole opera without focusing on the details, which seems to be the other extreme.

I have a lot of values and associations around the intuitive function – more than thinking or the other functions… many of my life stories of success or failure are tied to intuition, and its success or failure; I identify with intuition, which I suppose is linked to dissociation. I guess intuition is my secret love…

You share that with many Jungians!

It does have a magical quality… as though, is there even any such thing as intuition? See: I don’t check in with immigration in Australia – and my life is wrecked. Faustian, unreality, fantasy, dissociation… because I am depending on intuition: a sensate person would remember, as Faust does not, that there are steps to follow, debts to pay. A sensate person would keep track of things.

A bit harsh, but all right. So: what will you do when the Italian guy speaks to you again?...

...

Allegiance

Last night, a wonderfully pleasant evening for my sixtieth: eight people at table in a Persian restaurant, then back to mine for ice wine and sweets.

•••

(And, as I am thinking now of England, and my English friends, many of whom were around me at that table, I am also suddenly aware that the three grammatical/idiomatic elisions in that first sentence are deeply embedded in the utter Englishness of this language – the overlapping of two linguistic heritages, Romance and Germanic, with prestige and immediacy carefully distributed across particular groups of words and phrases – plus twenty-first-century remnants of firmly Victorian social structures...)

•••

A slightly odd moment: when N. gives me a beautiful print of those strange, high arches – the ones near the Tyne Bridge: stretches of eerily Pirandellian architecture that bloom high above the streets, that you can see from that intersection into Queen Street or this one, down at Sandhill – the card from her and from R. says:

'May you gaze upon this with beautiful memories in your heart from your amazing new home – wherever that may be.'

Kindness, love, support for all my back and forth talk of moving in a couple of years, of Barcelona, of a different future –

but I feel a pang of guilt: for my entire life, I've always talked about what I hoped for in my future(s) (cf. Zimbardo's book on time perception, and the very, very different ways people divide their pasts, presents, futures: I do tend to regard the past as a time of innocence followed by loss, the present as unstable transition, the future as hope of change – which, in Buddhist terms, means I have an unfortunate tendency not to be-here-now) – but I suddenly wonder: do I seem, to these kind and smart and funny people who are so dear to me, to be constantly saying good-bye?...

Probably I do, and probably it is my own fault. Allegiance: I always speak of Newcastle with a selective respect and affection – a good place, but not my place. But when does that become ungrateful, or cold?...

I suppose we all eventually learn that half a love isn't much love at all. Even for a city, for a community: and that suggests something unsatisfactory on my side of this relationship...

•••

Chris Wood, folk musician. I download his newest album; Chris often sings anger for the guilt of England, bitter reminders of the darknesses that shadowed its power and elegance. A song, 1887, is based on Housman's strange and graceful portrait of Victoria's Jubilee year – with dim but inescapable reminders of dead soldiers, their supposedly noble service undercut by the darkness into which they fell.

Subtle enough, partly because of the shifting, unstable nets of not-quite-traditional hymnal chords and wistfully backwards-looking chord progressions, that the throne and the glad peoples, the kings and bishops at the grand Jubilee dinner, all that noble pride and joy, was also built on many graves and the sheer cruelty of apparently dignified military control over the young, who don't even know what is being taken from them before it's all gone –

•••

At times, with television shows such as QI or Mock the Week, I become frankly angry: the contempt British comedians show towards Americans, towards other nations, always seems to ignore their own painful failings: they pretend to have intelligence, history, wisdom – ignoring the dreadful voices of the opium wars, of Raj and rebellion, of heartlessly dropping Hong Kong into its past as they packed their moneybags in 1997...

But of course the British, and the English especially, do know all this: and they don't really pretend that it didn't happen. I often feel resentment that they want to ignore their own guilt, the guilt of a smallish island that built an astounding if relatively temporary empire, and then gave it up, mostly voluntarily – but that's not quite fair: they do remember.

And admittedly they behaved a bit better than Spain, than Portugal. Than France.

•••

Perhaps my intermittently cold anger at, my dismissal of, England – which my friends sometimes perceive as a rejection of them – is unfair: I am not admitting to what is really here.

We are taught in psychoanalysis that, despite categorisations and diagnoses, each mind is a vast and unique place: the path to individuation is never the same, is always unexpected and disorienting. Structures that seem comparable are not so: balances and awareness and ambiguity are different, every time, and even across time.

That is all about individual people, of course; but perhaps it also applies to nations....

•••

This land, these people, these crowns: for a mixture of groups that somehow defined itself as English, that absorbed its Angles and Saxons and Normans and Danes. That placed itself in often ruthless command over Celts and Picts and others, but also eventually discovered some respect, even love, for them....

Who traveled and grabbed land, but also gave things back; who lorded it over others but with a certain supportive tolerance. Who were never quite as heavy-handed as other colonialist powers, while simultaneously being weirdly successful at extending their control over a third of the world.

Who, as Marx explained, were the source of a that terrible scourge of modernity, capitalism... which is also, often, better than most other systems we've tried.

Whose own stories have such ambiguous relationships to power: all those children's tales, myths, legends – Arthur, who is so gloriously noble, and who fails to hold back the disintegration that starts in his own beds; or the children's books I read when I was young – Five Children and It, the Bastables and Armitages, Green Knowe, and all those fantasies where the world was saved only through a calm acceptance of enormous sacrifice –

•••

Would it be true to say that Stephen Fry, with his erratically parodic aristocracy, and Dara Ó Briain, as a sort of loyally Celtic opposition, as well as all their less subtle or less ambivalent guests and audiences, do indeed see England as both important and worthy of love, yet also full of grievous fault?

Brexit and the vilification of foreigners, class aggression and self-hatred, individualism and human rights and dignity. Brilliance and cosmopolitanism, smallness and all those damned shopkeepers.

I also feel some embarrassed guilt in relation to my sister – L. loves England, she studied here when she was younger, and I know she would rather be here than anywhere. Whereas I, who have been here for more than fourteen years, feel... what? I'm no longer sure what I feel.

Of course, there is be a lacerating self-disgust that can get on my nerves – when one criticises the English on historical or cultural grounds, they can cave in so quickly and agree that it's all been a terrible mess; but that doesn't seem quite true, either...

•••

But perhaps this land, which is always both so self-aware and so self-conscious, so much more sensitive to multiple interpretations of its past and its nature than many, but also exasperatingly neurotic about the winding paths of its self-understanding –

Perhaps there is a way that England, more than most lands, can hold pride and guilt in the same space without ever quite losing sight of either.

And perhaps I should respect that a bit more....

•••

"Haven't you noticed that we are two countries ? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain."

•••

"And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?"

•••

"Don't you feel it? The very quality of England. If we've got an ass's head it is by walking in a fairy wood. We've heard something better than we can do, but can't quite forget it..."

 •••

"And see you marks that show and fade,

Like shadows on the Downs?

O they are the lines the Flint Men made,

To guard their wondrous towns!

 

Trackway and Camp and City lost,

Salt Marsh where now is corn;

Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,

And so was England born!

 

She is not any common Earth,

Water or Wood or Air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare."

The Experience of Emotion in the Age of Digital Reproduction

So, Benjamin's late work!... well, not really.

Listening to Tippett string quartets on earphones (earbuds, headphones, headbutts, whatever).

Easy access to music of various times and moods, of high quality, doesn't really have such a long history: even in the 1970s LPs, and then cassettes and eventually CDs, represented only a small part of the musics that are now easily accessible.

So... if politics gets rougher...

Well, what I'm thinking is: rather obviously in, say, 1917, it might have been unusual to hear music that was blithely cheerful: recordings were rare, performers may not have chosen sunnier pieces that they would have sailed into five years before, and perhaps if they had played them there would be a bit more in the way of wistful slowing of tempi, etc.

And it wouldn't be so very different in, say, 1942, or perhaps in 1970.

•••

If things were to get rough for many people across a wide area, then... access to recordings of ecstatically searching music, like the Tippett 2nd quartet, might still be quite easy: would we hear music, watch digitally downloaded films, that were more cheerful than our surroundings?

And would that be a different experience – as though one could literally step out of one's own time into another, step out of dangers or troubles?...

Please note: I don't mean this as a Marxist or Adornoesque scolding, either – you can imagine Marx's scorn at the escapist bourgeois, or Adorno's scathing contempt for someone who is so weak that they step out away from engaging with cultural darkness.

Having not only our youth on CD, but also our feelings about it....

•••

But tomorrow I will be sixty. That's as in 'years old'. Quite astonishing really – bizarre to be one of the 'long-term dying' (that's a phrase I just coined, so consider it copyright).

And lately people are cheerful: my Friday class is smart and alert and engaged, friends are in lively moods....

We can ignore political problems and enjoy the now.

Which, it occurs to me, is what I shall demand for my birthday:

that my birthday present is: everyone must have a good Friday.

•••

Yes, I do mean all day........

Drawing-in

From crisp to cold...

The past couple of days when I've left the house, it is chilly; I think each time, I need a scarf.

A brief hospital visit, the doctor is late, I don't need the x-ray any time soon so I take the request for it with me and walk quickly out and grab the next bus.

I get back to the café next to my office just half an hour before my lecture, breakfast-less – I ask for speed but the cook forgets and lets my panini burn, and the contrite woman behind the counter throws together a tuna sandwich and most of what I had paid, and hands it to me as I rush to the lecture theatre.

(Why isn't it a panino, I always wonder. Is it perhaps because there are two pieces of bread.)

"Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear, and, as far as possible, for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flower beds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their levelling and rinsing."

As the students are filing in, I take a few bites of my portable brunch.

Barthes: the lecture seems okay, but the students are sleepy – are they still recovering from the time change? It's all right, it's good enough – at one point I lie on the floor to show them the end of Mark Morris' Mythologies, they wake up enough to laugh – at the end they roll groggily out, as though they are headed straight for bed.

I walk down through the university, buy some of the new line of sturdy soups at M&S, and get on the bus. I sit next to an elderly lady, we talk about travel and weather – she tells me she is 81, I say I'm nearly sixty, she says, predictably, oh that's nothing, with a laugh. I say good-bye to her as I get off the bus, come home –

but behind everything I'm doing is already a kind of cozy retreat-and-relaxation: even running around I'm already in a late fall / early winter mood, stocking the pantry and closing curtains.

"It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own."

I haven't brought in the rosemary and oregano and thyme from the back patio– but I must admit there's plenty in the freezer, both dry and in olive oil. I make some nettle tea, on R.'s orders.

I hear firecrackers outside – and check the calendar: yes, tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day. People tend to mess about with fireworks from a couple of days before Halloween. Seeing whether the matches really work, I suppose...

A casual mention of a short story on Facebook led to buying a cheap copy of an old paperback, which came today – exactly my kind of thing, though I don't remember ever reading it: Bradbury edited a collection of Timeless Stories in the early 1950s that was then reprinted for decades. After a brief encounter with television proves uninteresting, I turn it off and, in the dim light of the living room, read the first stories...

"He put away the nets. He stacked wood against the wall by the stove for next spring, and for anyone who might be shipwrecked on the island, and he tied down the woodshed with ropes because it stood so near the high-water mark."

There is a little bit of time travel in all of this: though most of these stories aren't familiar, the tone is – and so is the cover: this is a 1970 edition with artwork in a style that is familiar to me. That is also when Ballantine Books began to splurge on Lin Carter's idea of bringing back fantasy classics – so many of them are on my shelves, so many of them are so important to me.

In fact, there is a library-rescued Complete Storisende Edition of Cabell piled up, in order of course, next to my fireplace...

"The gales began to howl around our lonely island and the weather was cold. All of us now lived in my house where there was naturally a good porcelain stove and where we intended to sleep through the winter."

I wake up to the doorbell: a late night delivery of groceries, half an hour early because the driver wants to go home. When I open the door it is really cold, and I say so, though it is perhaps something he has already heard this evening: he is cheerfully energetic, a friendly Geordie lad who makes the usual jokes about it being 'fresh'. I tell him he wants to get home in this weather.

I have bought a bit too much food – solid and healthy, autumn fare for the most part. Except the mango, that's an indulgence. It's a bit of a fuss to put it all away, but I make room, packing away everything securely, preparing.

"It wasn’t raining at the moment but the forest was covered in mist and looked very beautiful, and it got thicker and thicker where the hills went down into Moominvalley, and little by little the pools became rivulets, more and more of them, and Toft walked between hundreds of streams and waterfalls, and all of them were going in the same direction as he was."

Seasons of mists...

I fall back into my book.