in the hall of mirrors

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.

Unexpected...

[8 July 2016]

I am in Zürich for a week, at the end of the normal Jung-Institut training sessions…

I went to the graduation ceremony; there was an unusually large number of graduates, including a lot of friends (some of whom started after I did, but oh well). Hope to be up there in a year – it is still possible; we’ll see.

I talk to the new director of studies at the Jung-Institut, who is a big, tanned, muscled, pleasant-looking German man. He’s friendly but very serious, and slightly preoccupied – you get the feeling that he’s still nervous about all his responsibilities; he stumbled a bit on his introductory speech for the ceremony, but with an earnest commitment to get things right.

So, yes, basically: hot.

And, possibly more importantly, since he takes things seriously but is trying to be supportive, it’s not difficult to discuss strategies with him for completing the various requirements to be completed this year.

•••

It’s true, though: I am doing a bit more on this trip than is easy to manage, as I still feel ill fairly frequently – but also fairly regularly, mostly after taking my medications; otherwise the body seems calm, three weeks after I’ve finished the HCV regimen. I would even say that I am gradually feeling better, but there is still such a lot of veering up and down from hour to hour on any graph of well-being that I hesitate to commit myself to any predictions….

•••

A couple of days ago, I left the HIV patient group – not in a huff, but definitely. I feel surprisingly calm about it: I was increasingly argumentative in meetings over the past year – as were others – and I didn’t really like where things were going – not because they were awful, but because they just didn’t fit my idea of the group’s purpose.

It actually felt like the splits that have been going on in political parties such as the Democrats and Labor – with me as the cranky old, inflexible, marginalized contender from the socialist left… But enough of all that; it’s not a government, it’s a patient group, and as I’ve been involved and/or running things for thirteen years now, it’s fine if I go and do other stuff.

In fact, since this change, there is an enormous reduction in the noise of anxiety and aggression in my life… which is very welcome: paying attention to one’s shadow in analysis is one thing, but staying in a constantly reactivating situation doesn’t seem worth it. And, of course, with everything else going on in my life (and in the world), I’m glad to have less to do.

•••

[12 July 2016]

I am on a train between Zürich and Einsiedeln, heading to a session of supervision, aware that my ensuing ticket to another supervision session in St. Gallen leaves from the wrong station and needs to be changed, and that I need to get some cash, and…

Looking at Facebook on my phone, I see that a friend in San Francisco has posted an article: ‘No Linked HIV Transmissions in Long-Term Partner Study After Couples Had Sex Without Condoms’.

I glance through the article, and – I start crying: and can’t stop.

No one is near me on this quiet countryside train – I have a napkin from my packed lunch…

By the time I arrive in Bob’s office in Einsiedeln about fifteen minutes later, I have partly put myself back together – he asks what’s wrong; as I try to tell him about the headline, I start crying again.

It’s amazing, really. As I’ve casually told friends, the main question that I cannot really answer that comes up in my own personal analysis, and even in supervision, is: so, have you given up on ever being in a relationship again? – on ever being happy?...

I generally answer, with varying degrees of terse irritation: I know that I’m doing this, I don’t know how to fix it, I’ve been asked that before, look it is what it is. Let’s get on to other things.

There is some link… There is some disjunction in my memory and conscious patterns: when I look at ‘myself’, at my attitudes and responses to this, they go back perhaps ten years or so. Which however implies, as I realize on the train: I tend to forget my direct experience of the rage, despair, loss, of the previous twenty years – of knowing that everyone is dying, and in any case I’m infectious and so are they, and…

I mean, it’s all very familiar, I write and talk about it all the time. But I don’t ‘go’ there anymore – it’s not really available.

Basically, I don’t have an immanent experience of who I was before about 2006-8 anymore…

There is a link here between a mindset that became so familiar it was no longer visible, and later conclusions that were reached on that basis, as their forgotten foundation: this article heading, which reasonably (but, to me, almost mockingly) points to huge numbers of couples, men who have lived together for a long time –

and also to the emptiness, to the brutally trivial inaccuracy, of my assumption that unsafe sex was dangerous, especially in a relationship… that the commitment itself would cause you to infect, and thus kill another person: so the commitment inevitably would lead to its own violent end…

You don’t get into a commitment, because if you do you’ll kill somebody. Eventually.

Or, well: something like that. Something never exactly reasoned out, something that didn’t quite operate as a line of thinking, but – a cloud of implicit experiences and anxieties that long ago congealed into a pattern, which has been suddenly, appallingly, triggered by a nice newspaper headline that certainly looks happy-making, doesn’t it.

I suppose, for a long time, I’ve been able to handle the death part; but losing the possibility of relationship – no, less abstractly: of love and comfort, of a reason to go to bed at night and get up in the morning – is truly painful…

•••

I do know that this emotional crash occurs partly because it is available to me: much analysis, and especially the internal fusions and transformations of the past year, have left me… open to seeing such things.

Which is, frankly – and unquestionably – a good thing.

However it might feel at any given moment.

•••

Back on the train, Einsiedeln to St. Gallen. The clunky little I Ching app on my phone gives me:

24, Turning Back. Turning back or returning. Reaching the point of no return, and returning.

Changing to:

2, The Receptive. Receptivity, acceptance, facilitating.

•••

[13 July 2016]

Supervision is good: because I’ve stayed a week after everyone else has left, my supervisors are calmer and more relaxed – surprising insights and corrections, and a general sense of respect and being respected.

Evenings are hot, the café outside this small, stylish urban apartment is noisy – I take the computer to a trendy, student-y Italian restaurant to work on the paper I need to finish for Greg and William. It is going quickly, I feel fluent, this should get finished soon –

•••

[14-16 July 2016]

4 am, I wake, in pain. A lot of pain: I take stomach pills, they do nothing.

My plane leaves around 11 am.

I lie in bed, roll around –

I get up and walk a bit –

lie back on the bed –

lie on my other side –

•••

After three and a half hours of this, I decide the plane is moot, I must get a taxi to the hospital. I dress, a bit sloppily, with shaking hands, throw things into my backpack (it will turn out that in choosing what to take I make some very smart choices, yet completely forget other necessities) and go down three floors into the streets.

It is sunny; it will be a lovely day. Zürich is quiet at 7:30 am in this neighborhood; a few people are walking around.

I approach a couple – I am of course looking rather messy, dissolute, which is rare in Zürich – and ask in German where there is a taxi stand, to get to a hospital; they look at me in confusion. They are British, I translate back into English, they don’t know. They look sorry and slightly guarded… I walk onward, three or four, or five or six, blocks… and finally a taxi…

•••

I shouldn’t do the whole story; memory gets chaotic for some hours after this anyway.

The Universitätsspital, early morning; a kind nurse, a lot of pain, a lot of waiting. Emergency room, curtained bays around a central block of offices, pleasant, alert, and remarkably good-looking young doctors of both sexes come in and out.

(See, CSI isn’t so unrealistic after all: there are indeed public service systems where everyone looks as though they are taking a break from their modeling career.)

I have a tube in my arm, it turns out that I am being put to sleep by something in the tube; I am fairly groggy all day. Young, smart people come in and go out, they shake my hand when they enter, I explain health, HIV medications, HCV medications, pain on a scale of 1 to 10, we talk about my UK health care (and Brexit, and whether that makes a difference), I find my health insurance number in my phone, my University travel insurance is on an email from a month or so ago, my diagnosis, procedures, things they might do, medications for pain.

By early afternoon, I am awake and in no pain. Somewhat groggy.

Around 7 pm, they are satisfied that they know what to do – at this point things are quiet, and the shy, friendly young man who keeps checking on me has obviously gotten a bit tired of waiting for return calls from Urology and from my insurance. They finally take me to a ward, an exceptionally gay nurse with a wicked sense of satire finds me a dinner, I ask about showering but they say, firmly: tomorrow. I fall into deep sleep…

•••

Friday. A different nurse, also male and gay (though not quite as gay as the first one, but hey it’s not really a contest). A big, serious German – good, controlling advice about everything, a definite approach that involves ordering me around…

Enough. Let’s turn the next pages in quick succession.

Shower, the nurse sneaks me a pair of nice rubberized socks, food. Young doctors come in and out: you can’t fly today, in fact you can’t fly unless…

The brashly handsome one, like Brad Pitt with Top Gun glasses, asks if he can examine my genitals before the procedure – he says, you wouldn’t believe what we find: rings, tattoos, all kinds of… I say, oh yes I would, I would absolutely believe it.

He finds no rings or other paraphernalia.

Trolley, elevator, anesthetic unit…

(the film reel runs out…

•••

and after an unmeasured time it is replaced)

I wake, relaxed: I have a ‘pigtail catheter’ invisibly inside me, near the right kidney – without it they won’t let me fly, as the pain of another kidney stone would mean the plane would have to land. (Really? It’s just pain, isn’t it?)

Another twenty-four hours: bed, boredom, walking, chatting to nurses, reading on the iPad.

Friday evening, a big, bluff Swiss guy – a nice guy, an athletic young dad, like a big, uncomplicatedly friendly dog – is wheeled in to the other bed; we intermittently joke and chat, he falls frequently into deep sleep.

•••

Saturday morning, more of the same: young doctors come in and out and explain things, we settle insurance.

The woman whose apartment I’ve been renting actually packs my luggage – including sweaty clothing from several hot days: well beyond the call of duty, but she is kind about it. Brinda, another Jung-Institut student, is even kinder, bringing me my suitcase and taking the apartment key back to the woman.

Five pain medications: the German nurse says, don’t bother with the last one, it’s got too many side effects – and walks me downstairs to the pharmacy to buy the first four, talking about his plan of visiting Berwick-on-Tweed, just north of me, in the next year. Yes, he has my card.

On Saturday afternoon, I step into the pleasant Zürich summer day to take a tram to the airport. People are walking around, enjoying themselves – I am suddenly in the outside world: I feel as though I have come to miss it –

even though over only three days –

•••

As I’ve written a brief, Bravely Bearing Up notice of hospitalization on Facebook, Norma messages me to say she’ll pick me up at the airport.

Home. Norma carries my suitcase upstairs over my objections, comes in to check that things are all right… we chat, I make her a cup of chamomile tea…

I tell her I don’t think I can travel any more – at least not much: is this the fourth or fifth time in a decade that I’ve done wheelchairs in airports, delayed flight plans from hospitals, emailing my doctor?... my health just isn’t so good that I can traipse around the world, or even around Europe.

And, frankly, I’m not sure I can finish the degree at the Jung-Institut – if I can’t really travel, can’t dependably go places, do things –

Norma is lucid, direct, corrective: giving up is pointless. You’re taken care of – you never know what’s next with health, or life –

She’s right, in one direction at least; I remain slightly uncertain, but mollified.

And later, sleep, in my own bed.

•••

[…]

Sunday. I cancel all travel – I won’t go to Spain to see Susan and Rob, I won’t go to the August conference in Japan. I won’t take a train to Sheffield for analysis.

It is sunny, warm. I am relaxed… pain medication, my usual pills after missing them for two days…

I walk to Gay Pride, but walking is not quite so easy: and I have misunderstood which end of the large park is the right one. Long walking, late afternoon, the health area is closed, things are winding down. I walk, looking for a taxi… home… sleep again…

•••

Monday. I finally, actually, start volunteering at the hospital dementia ward: I sit, walk with a lonely, anxious woman in her eighties – the nurse takes me straight to her when she hears I’m working in psychology: the woman is unexpectedly paranoid, and keeps talking about her husband, who is either in another ward or hospital – or, as she doesn’t seem located entirely in the present, perhaps he is dead.

A restless, lacerating grief floats through her running monologues: at times she wanders the ward, picking up other patients’ belongings, which I cajole away from her as I lead her away – the other ladies look at me in grateful relief: she is familiar to them by now.

But it is not unpleasant, or difficult, being with her: as I’ve only been back from my own hospital visit for two days, there is a direct and guiltless empathy – my body remembers what she feels, as she twists and mutters on her bed.

And I am, without trying, detached: not uncaring, not overwhelmed – there is a sense of ongoing time, of the inevitability of our last years and months, and a knowledge that she will not become miraculously happy and relieved –

but just sitting here, occasionally chatting, rearranging her clothes as she pulls them out of her locker and drapes them on the chair where I’m sitting, is in itself calming:

pain cannot be removed, but my own breathing calm makes time itself less acute, makes its passing hurt less – for her; and for me.

•••

Monday evening. The paper I was writing is no longer in my mind, but I know the chunk I’ve got, plus all of these notes, will be enough to get me restarted.

In the ensuing days, I catch up with things, rapidly, briskly. I ask my doctor when the catheter will come out, translate the reports from the Zürich hospital (except the arcane medical bits that aren’t on the web), see my own patients, meet friends in cafés…

Perhaps Norma is right; perhaps I don’t need to remove myself from my own life. Not yet, anyway.

•••

[27 July 2016]

Finally, the hospital, and Urology!

An astoundingly fast-talking, sharp-edged, decisive doctor, a woman in a restrained but classily dark dress, absorbs information instantly or a little bit faster than that, turns on a recorder and reads back, evidently from her meticulous memory, a five-minute history plus diagnosis plus procedure plus planned outcomes plus instructions to phlebotomy, nurse, and anesthetist.

(She does crack a smile at one point, as I explain the past two weeks...)

She walks briskly out; the gentler nurse and I get to work.

The catheter will come out in a week or two…

preparations are made…

•••

I walk out into a different sunshine and go home.