in the hall of mirrors

Men in autumn • fragments • a flash

I haven’t written here for a while…

somewhat preoccupied, fairly busy. Walking through what feels like several lives at once: the university (with various changes in upper-level policy – an annoying time for British universities, as upper-level business savages try to extend control over non-business systems), my analysands (and another new one, and new chairs for them, so professional!), the HIV patient group’s expanding activities (and I finally seem to be letting go of control), questions over HCV treatment (deferred until April, perhaps; but I am not worried, as I was), a cluster of impending conferences and collections (including some surprising gestures of respect, as though I am considered a known figure), a film series to introduce…

And, in October, there was a long burst of passionate feeling: for some weeks I was fascinated with some men, and (more than usually acutely) imagined living with someone again. At that time when people notice that winter is coming, and instinctively, or rationally, decide that they might want to settle down with someone.

Which didn’t happen for me, but which didn’t feel utterly impossible either.

One day in that period, I stood and spoke to a handsome Irish bear working at the Apple store. Everyone else was with customers, but relaxed, and things were quieting down toward late evening; and it seemed as though he wanted to talk specifically to me, to hear what I was like, what I wanted to say. I thought – and I know, I may have been imagining things – does this mean he likes me?... who knows.

•••

Another day in that period, I wrote:

Pleasant/melancholy: at the corner store a hand taps me on the back, someone says how are you? A charmingly good- and intelligent-looking man with glasses and a shaved head, it takes me a minute to remember that he's my former doctor, who moved to another practice. He looks even more like someone you would want to live with for the rest of your life now, standing casually and smiling, than he did sitting behind his desk then. We talk about the book I suggested to him at our last appointment, Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man, which he has bought but not gotten to read yet, which is about a remarkable doctor who, like him, pays attention to the details of his patient's lives and behavior in interpreting their symptoms. It is pleasant to talk to him, despite being somewhat distracted by thinking how very much I like this man. We say good to see you, take care, I walk home... feeling a bit lonelier than usual, wondering if his obvious pleasure at seeing me means anything, wishing....

••• 

One day a train to Sheffield, the next a train to York. No rain, quiet journeys.

It’s a (bit of a) shame I haven’t written about it all. There are indeed some interesting fragments among my dreams and notes from analysis, as well as some journal entries and (possibly overly personal) Facebook posts. But it would be hard to put together a coherent story out of the past two months… which implies it’s not a particularly coherent time (which is reflected in analysis, where we have spent a lot of time wandering around the fragmentary, the incoherent, the multi-linked – and around memories I’d forgotten that I’d forgotten).

One thing that does seem true: although I have bursts of anxiety about not finishing things, about projects, about sleeping too long, about some intermittent disjunctions/disconnections between sleeping and waking over the past few weeks…

nevertheless, these all seem – well – not particularly important. I was thinking today: there are indeed the familiar anxieties and problems, but somehow they feel shallower – the pool of worries has an odd quality, as though the bottom is only two or three inches deep.

As though my anxieties and losses, my bursts of concern about HCV treatment, my embarrassment last month when I was too irritable in the HIV group meetings (how could they forgive me? though I know that these things are rarely as bad in the real world as they are in the projected one) – as though all of these things are just... a couple of inches of water.

And I walk through the water, my shoes getting slightly wet, mildly annoyed by that – but feeling something so far from any experience of deep worry, of shattering anxiety…

•••

During last week's discussion in analysis, that same image kept coming to mind: of a circular pool, a few feet in width, dark water that shines with reflective light; occasionally drops of water falling onto it, or ripples… but clearly shallow, only a few inches deep…

An unexpected online clash with the gentle R. one Saturday that left me incredibly unhappy – and which was my fault; we shared various back and forth comments over perhaps five or six hours, ending in a healed relationship. My analyst points out the implicitly relative shallowness of my anger in this – only a tenuous connection to the young boy I once was, walking around and round the damaged pine with its bleeding, wounded bark, arguing and gesticulating in a theater of rage and frustration.…

•••

A dream, from 2 November:

I live in an apartment, small and dilapidated, in a large low apartment building that is old and worn – old paint, peeling in places; not in disastrous shape, but it looks as though poverty has left walls dull, bluish, slightly dirty.

Early in the dream I meet a handsome young man, intense, with pale skin, dark hair and eyes, spare muscles and tattoos, who has just moved in towards the east side of the building with his girlfriend; we are immediately comfortable with each other and become friends. He looks like someone who may have grown up poor, because of the wiriness of his frame, but seems healthy and strong, attractive to look at.

I work in the same large building, which has many apartments, and which looks back toward another large old building across the street. It all has a New York or Chicago feel, or some place that has always been industrial or poor.

I come back to my apartment during a break or lunch, and the door of the single-room apartment next door is open – and he is there. Alone, he has moved his things in, with no explanation. We talk, not referring to his girlfriend – perhaps they are no longer together. I say I’m happy he is there, and he says he is happy to be there.

Beyond his one-room apartment, toward the north beyond a window, is another apartment that seems to have been closed off, and is unused – a single room with a high ceiling, abandoned, and some high structure in the middle. We both wonder why it is unused, and wonder whether we can get into it, whether it can be added to his apartment. I see his tattooed arm next to mine; I stand and say I have to get back to work, and go, happy that he is here, happy that he is around.

•••

Since that dream, I have only remember fragments of other dreams – it is three weeks now: I sleep long and deep, I know that I am dreaming, but I don't remember, except in incoherent bits. My analyst and I aren't worried about this... there is an easy rapid flow to our sessions....

•••

Today, I had only one thing to bring to analysis – not a dream, but a flash, a vision:

Just before bed, in a combination of figuring out how to do some things and worrying about them and being elated that they were going well, and that the psychic pressure of tasks seems so much lower since the book crisis – a fragmentary vision while emailing M.: of visiting him somewhere warm, taking a nap – I am clearly older, more wrinkled, but happy – and dying in my sleep in the afternoon sun. M. comes to call me to dinner, and finds my body…

When I tell my analyst this, he is silent for a few moments. We talk for a while about its simplicity, its calm quality. I point out that in the past two days I've done two public presentation/discussions on AIDS – the one on Monday for the clinical psychology students at the RVI, and then today in my class on musicals, to talk about Rent and other musicals related to the crisis. And about how easy they were... a sense of lightness...

He says: is there really not any more to say about it? I say: I'm not avoiding things – it just seems that it is in itself light, clear. Any more interpretation seems... heavy.

•••

There is in the past weeks a quality of release from weight I've held on to since I was three years old – and in fact (I have a flash of articulate, highly complex insight, and try to explain it to him in a rush) there are only a few times in my life when the weight lifted: in high school, from the time I suddenly felt handsome to the collapse of not getting into the university I wanted; in the garden San Francisco apartment, during the time when Adam would visit, and I was happy; in darker Berlin, during the days when Hans-Rainer would appear at my door, and we would be in bed for days; and that first year in Hong Kong – I can remember that first night of torrential summer rain, when I left my bed naked, walked onto the twentieth-story balcony overlooking the sea, and exulted in the rain, amazed and drenched....

But those were different states than this feeling is, now: they were releases through anticipation, through excitement, through passion. Now, things are calm and not unusual, and I am merely released back into my own everyday life, which is not terribly exciting or passionate, at least at the moment – but which is nevertheless not weighed down, either –

I think of an older dream and try to explain it; can't remember how it ends, and so open my computer and look for it – the one in the jungle, sitting and talking to a woman in ruined huts underneath trees dripping with rain: it is from January 2010, several years ago now. A dream early in analysis, a dream like a promise, a dream like a vision of something I could perhaps someday reach. But I remember it, and its intensity: in that dream small animals, not cute but gaunt, scruffy, who have been living in the wild, gradually, slowly come to trust me. A kitten curls up under my arm, a small green snake rests next to it....

My analyst is smiling. What else is there to say, then. I think we're done for today.

Amidst

Three psychoanalysis clients!... uh, patients? Analysands?

And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'.

Analysand... an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most people don't recognize, so...

(Incidentally: did you know that the old fuss over whether 'psychoanalysis' was restricted to Freudians or not is now considered unnecessary? I'm allowed to call myself a psychoanalyst... I still prefer 'analyst', though of course that also tangles me up with my musicology colleagues, who then think: Ah, he knows all the different ninth chords!... and no, I don't know them.)

Oh well. Anyway it's going well.

•••

Many things to do, a sense of a sudden expansion in responsbilities – it did occur to me that suddenly I do have rather a lot going on: analysis, plus continued training, my own personal analysis, my first control case colloquia and supervision sessions, both in the UK and later in Zürich;

some teaching (fortunately less than last semester), exams to mark, postgraduates, planning courses for next year; year abroad students, their plans and auditions and paperwork...

the HIV patient group, teaching medical students, peer counseling... oops I do have to catch up on the peer counseling appointments.

New chairs for the middle room (because chairs for analyst and analysand are supposed to be both comfortable and similar). New business cards, for all of these things – made on my computer, as long as I can figure out how to add small pictures. Endless e-mails all over the place of course, the curse of our time.

And of course – RESEARCH!... the slowest of all areas in my life, the one where I really must get a lot more done. And soon. Editing the book, two articles....

•••

Today was remarkably but effectively busy: e-mails, brief meetings that finished off tasks, the bank and new shoes, jumping from one appointment to another with alacrity and success – the way successful people are supposed to be, of course, according to all of those Business Advice books.

Naturally this is a bit surprising for me, as I can often be fairly helpless when faced with many tasks – but it is as though I am reaching a stage where many things (even most things, aside from writing of course, which is still my weakest point) can simply be glided through: done lightly and quickly. With the Tao, as it were.

And the truth is – I think that, even more than my personal analysis and training, the biggest source of this lightness is being an analyst for others: that caring for, hearing, the histories and disasters and strengths and anxieties of other people pulls me out of my own locked gears –

as though the larger view given me by these analytic relationships rebounds into my own life: and my own concerns suddenly have space around them, alternatives – even: life....

Mid–

Solstice night, nadir of the year. In the middle of the long night: the point where our day goes down to seven hours, then the direction reverses and the day rapidly lengthens...

This winter I seem to be waking in the middle of the night – not a new thing: since my 2009 stroke I generally need to go pee around 3-4 a.m. on any given night. (A small Science Fact for you: when older people need to get up to urinate at night, it is not because of, say, any weakness in their waterworks – it is actually the deterioration of a minor brain function: we are designed such that when we sleep, kidney function slows way down so we can sleep through the night. But it's not a strong evolutionary need, so that particular mini-module out of the various brain functions breaks fairly easily when we get older; for me it happened quite abruptly in the stroke.)

And I'm accustomed to that... but this is a bit different: I am awake a bit longer, happy to read or open a window, walk around the apartment a bit. (Unlike many northern Brits, I don't turn the heating off at night – yes yes don't nag me, I know that's more expensive and less green... but I can't stand the cold.)

And since I read – somewhere, recently – that, in the eighteenth century and before in Europe, it was perfectly normal for a night's sleep to be broken in two – that the northern nights tended to be 3-4 hours, wake, light a candle and read or sit, then back to sleep again until morning – I now feel pleasantly justified.

Of course, as you will no doubt remind me, I should be able to do what I like without reference to history, science, fact. But I am so made that I am always fairly beholden to concepts...

I think that, in this case, my body is somewhat relieved that my mind now has a reasonable justification for this habit; and that I can comfortably enjoy being up for an hour or so, without feeling as though I've ruined my sleep or the next day or anything similar. A pleasant way of making the winter less onerous.

The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories: among all the Xmas stuff, an interesting reminder that a proper Victorian Christmas always had its ghost stories, as important or more important than carols and trees. A wonderful story by Gaskell – so well written that now I want to read more of her.

Deep night, the cold, the dark: and a good ghost story....

Joins

I sleep a lot in the past weeks... not in some sort of avoidance, just a quiet dream of winter...

I keep being aware of the joins, the cracks, between the great blocks of things that can be seen: if when I was younger a great deal of my thinking, and ultimately my research, tended to push past the self-satisfaction of intellectual complexity toward points where the iron vanity of made things seems to disperse into new forms, possibilities and freedoms; or where the world of created (artistic) objects either glowed with the awareness and ethical generosity of a given maker – or didn't –

now it seems as though my current concerns with the mind, with time, with quasi-existential awarenesses, are not so much about a particular goal (how can there be a real goal, with time and life and death in the shapes that they actually take on, the large rises and falls where I, and most of the people I know, are firmly on the downward slopes of later life?), as they are about –

the fragments of understanding: the sense that some of what I am looking for seems to appear between great chunks of apparent awareness, of structured understanding; that it is not the heavy articulations of logic and reason, not knowledge, nor direct attention, that get me anywhere that matters; but the subtle, almost uncertain glimpses out of the corners of the eye –

•••

In the waves of sadness, irritation, and a sense of strength that have come and gone over the past month, I have thought again, often, of Hans-Rainer. A month ago he sent me a link to a news program where he was interviewed – I suppose, although I normally abbreviate friend's names and avoid giving out too much information, there is no harm including the link here?...

And you will see a rather serious, graying man with a sharply handsome face talking about some storks found near Parlow. A good context for him – it is his nature to be talking with such passionate seriousness about birds in open land, about living things and how they are being cared for, brought back... living things and forests spring to life for him, more real and more sharply outlined than the shadowy repetitions of cities; it is a very different world than mine of pages and shimmering screens, of concepts and judgments and memories....

Last night I sent him an e-mail that just said: Ich vermiße dich. And he sent back a few hours later: How are you? I hope yust fine... Ich hoffe, das wir uns im nächsten jahr mal sehen.

•••

Lunch with Michael and Andrew. Shopping with Derek; wandering off by myself to buy expensive but good Italian foods at the new posh restaurant. The sensual world: I keep thinking lately – that Italian tendency to make, and of course to sell, very fine foods, and charge a lot for them, actually seems perfect for me in the growing storm of Christmas planning and shopping. Electronics we choose ourselves, clothes are hard to buy for others, furniture?...

but food, including really good food, is a gift that evaporates in a puff of pleasure: there is no need to own any more stuff, here is something wonderful that you eat, or drink, and then it's gone. The affectionate giving, the delight of unpacking, the experience, the fading memory – what else do you need for the perfect gift? Nothing.

The sensate world....

•••

Some of this comes from reading a lot of Ralf König lately: I ordered four more of his comics, or graphic novels, that I hadn't already got (yes, I have quite a lot of them). A resonance from first discovering, well really devouring, his work twenty years ago in Berlin, the language, the discussions, the guys, gay life... and Hans-Rainer.

Have I ever mentioned the days in Berlin when Rainer would show up unheralded on my doorstep, and we both had various plans but would just keep cancelling them, staying in bed for two or three days because there seemed no good reason to go anywhere else... then sometimes wandering around the city, always with a magnetic connection between us: and endless deferrals until we finally went back to the things we were supposed to be doing....

•••

Many people are shopping in Newcastle. I have work to do, but it is not as onerous as it has been, and not so much about death and loss. Meetings with students, then home sitting on the couch, then back again.

Day, then night: sleeping a lot, but not in any numbed or darkened way, just... floating through the North Sea winter, somehow.

The comics (graphic novels?): reading about men arguing with each other in Köln and other German cities, until my memories of places and experiences and language come alive. As does my memory of Rainer. I change the bed and think, but we won't really end up together, he lives where he lives, in his apartment near his aging mother in a village outside of Berlin, with not much money... and I live where I live, and couldn't afford to just drop everything and go where there is no job. We can visit, of course, but...

Late at night, from next door suddenly music: a graceful, actually beautiful bit of pop music. I put down the König, pick up the iPad, turn on Spotify... but the volume is too low, I keep trying with no success. The beautiful music fades and ends, I can't capture it.

•••

The divisions between past and present, between Berlin and Newcastle (and of course Adelaide, and San Francisco, and Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, and...).

In twenty-four hours, my fifty-seventh birthday: I am older, but healthy. I won't be healthy forever, of course, and I don't particularly want years of quietly fading away, alone. I want to live with Rainer, somewhere: making the bed with him in the next room, either showing him Newcastle or having him show me Berlin. Or – Bologna, or Barcelona.

I sleep a lot; I wake... halfway through a book, I put it down and close my eyes... I am in Newcastle; I get an e-mail from Berlin...

The edges, the corners, between the imagined and the real, between the remembered and the present: there is something I almost understand about time and memory, about love and breathing. There is some connection between remembering holding Rainer as he sleeps, warm beside me, and trying to plan a future that includes him: and also dreams forgotten or remembered, and memories, and comics.

Something that is more about a network of joy, calm desire, and lightly delineated hope, rather than the more focused blocks of grief: the borders and interstices between things I'm paying attention to seem as though, if I could only hold focus and peer through them, they would be seen to hold everything I've done in my life that matters at all....

Cities, days: back in August...

So... after my summer was partly derailed by Jung-Institut exams, then the flu and a month of its aftermath – I chose to travel to København (Copenhagen, to you in the back) for my first-ever conference of IAAP, the international Jungian organization; but Stockhom first, for fun, with Annick; and then Manchester, for Pride weekend.

I would have liked for the whole trip to be remarkable, but it wasn't, quite. It wasn't awful either; but a mixture of mild dislocations, slight disappointments, and more interesting things that I wasn't really in the mood to see. Ah well... I think the truth was, I simply didn't have the energy for these experiences – about two weeks, when I didn't really want to travel....

The first night in Stockholm was the only truly rotten one – a tiny, windowless room, construction right next to me, a heating system that left the temperature at 30°/80°... I staggered, wild-eyed, down to the breakfast room at 7 am, and told a silent, tall, blond Swede that he needed to find me another room. I'll bet they already knew that first room was impossible to rent, because they quickly put me in the room next door, which was much more normal (three cheers for openable windows! and normal temperatures). Then I slept until midday, after Annick sent me several texts asking where I was...

After that, Stockholm was pleasant, although I didn't see as much as I should have (mostly only Gamla Stan and Södermalm, and not enough of those), and wandered around a bit too aimlessly. At first it seemed filled with cool, utterly unsmiling people – but as I found my way into a less touristy, more working-class part of Södermalm (while looking for a particular bookstore), the faces became warmer, the people a bit more demonstrative in the pleasant summer air. And on our last night, when Annick's lovely friends Raziye and Björn came out on the town with us, the Swedes seemed to become almost lively – dancing in the street (Annick joined them), singing and wandering happily through the crowds on a summer night.

Best meal: Pelikan in Södermalm – while Annick was away at the island with Raziye, I walked several miles to a famous Swedish-classic restaurant. A long wait, but it was worth it – a platter of differently flavored herrings and akvavits, a solicitous waiter who decided I was worth taking care of. A real pleasure, even with the long walks.

The train from Stockhom to (oh, all right) Copenhagen was pleasant at first, then it got complicated, with a bus linking two trains that would normally have been one – but we got there in the end. The last stretch from Malmö to Copenhagen was elaborately polished, seemingly a matter of both countries showing off to each other... a young man in the seat in front of us spent the last three hours of the journey expounding on his own brilliance and creativity to the girl next to him, who seemed to waver between indulgence and a wish to escape. I thought: ah, narcissism, and the problem of existence in a big, crowded world that doesn't regard you as particularly important...

•••

Copenhagen. I was last there almost exactly twenty years ago... and I loved it then.

Partly because I was so impressed with the intensely handsome, brilliant artist Allen S. – at least at first. I came back from my scholarship year-and-a-half in Berlin to Copenhagen to visit him, and to see this wonderful city again, and Tivoli, which I loved.

Though it didn't seem to be working out between us... Allen was still very handsome, amazingly sexy, terrifically smart... but I wanted to see the city, to wander through the small streets in autumn, to look at things and people and places. Allen kept asking me: what do you want to do, exactly? Laundry – we can do that right here. Anything else – why? Why do you need to go somewhere?...

After three days of being penned inside, I blew up at him. Handsome yes, sexy yes, but possessive as all getout... think of those exasperating tales of famous artists and various whatstheirnames, the quasi-partners they keep pushing around. Clearly Allen saw me in this light: oh look, an American boyfriend, that will look good. My own interests were not supposed to matter, or in fact to exist.

So I packed and returned to Berlin, taking a train along the long, long line of lights that outlined the dismal post-Communist apartment houses of Rostock – wondering which of us had gotten it wrong, wondering if I'd ever meet anyone so – impressive again. Wondering if I even cared.

I can't locate Allen these days – admittedly his name is exasperatingly common (not quite like a Danish John Smith, but perhaps their version of, say, John Williams). And of course, between two HIV+ men in 1993 – chances are slim that he is still alive; a lottery I won (if surviving alone is really winning).

But I wanted to make this trip, to find out – was he still alive, was he still there – and I wanted to have coffee with him perhaps, and say, what did you think of our connection twenty years ago?...

But I could only locate the name of one of his friends – now an elderly art professor at the university – and there was no answer from her phone.

Perhaps I should try again, at some point. If it even makes sense, to try to go backwards in my own history....

•••

To be honest, Allen's impressive qualities (you may interpret that as you like – and you'll probably be right) were not everything. It occurred to me that I was actually much happier, less self-conscious and vastly more comfortable, with my good and cheerful Hans-Friedrich, who visited me repeatedly in Berlin... and he is still alive, in a small town an hour into the east German countryside.

And we've Skyped, several times in the past two years.

Perhaps I need to – well, first, lose some weight, get a bit less un-trim, maybe – and then go visit him again; and see if there is anything we can recreate between us.

And, maybe, not take no for an answer: not too easily, at any rate.

•••

But I was traveling to go to my first Jungian conference. Yes, it was generally impressive... though the vanities of public rhetoric have lost some luster for me, after twenty years of musicology conferences. And the blunt truth is: Jungians are largely introverts – when they are together they are often a bit helpless or distracted, a bit out of focus, even a bit old, seeming far from the fast lanes (all descriptions that can be applied to me, of course).

Taken en masse, I couldn't help but wonder: how necessary is it really to follow this particular specialization, at this point in my own history? Can I do work in a new vein? Do I need to change life paths at all?...

Because a strong belief in a particular ideology – that is a game for the younger, the more foolish. Though it can also destroy them, of course... but I get tired, and a bit bored, about following any well-defined or narrow path, at this point.

But another truth is: the idea of not moving forwards toward the goal of becoming an analyst is also appalling to me. I tell my students, frequently, about the advantages of academic life – and I absolutely believe that: twenty years of forty-hour-a-week jobs, mostly associated with making money (with a few very underpaid exceptions), ground the exasperating misery of the regular workaday world into my mind forever. In comparison, academics may quarrel, departments may lurch along chaotically, governments may tinker with universities until it drives you mad – but the academic life is still a far more fulfilling, interesting, and flexible life than most forty-hour-a-week lives.

So, of course... as an analyst, I would have even more freedom, be even further from meetings and administrative structures. And focused on what interests me now: continued development, from mid-life onwards....

•••

So, right about here, there should be a clear description of what happened at the conference. But now that is nearly two months ago... I can recall only fragments.

Verena Kast, Luigi Zoja, and other famous Jungians talking about the history of the organization... The good-looking, charming guy from LA who was selling prints from the Red Book, and the friendship we struck up...  another wonderful restaurant in Copenhagen: an entirely raw cuisine, visited by a group of us at Annick's instigation – and it was wonderful... another pleasant dinner of herring by a canal, with tall Inge from Berlin... many pleasant people; and two very unpleasant ones – it's not true that all therapists know how to be social...

And a long walk through town with Andrés, to buy a gift for his girlfriend (he didn't take my advice – hopefully what he bought will fit her, I thought a scarf would be less risky).

And a visit to Malmö to see the conservatory, plus the conservatory in Copenhagen – as my department has exchange agreements with both. Both very impressive, massive places, and the people were lovely.

An afternoon in Tivoli with Brigitte – I dearly loved Tivoli in 1993; it was so mysteriously complicated, you could wander all over the place for hours – think of the wonderful garden in Tove Jansson's brilliant story 'The Hemulen who loved Silence'; it was like that. But this time I grabbed a map on the way in – a mistake: I could find my way around, and we didn't have much time... we should have gotten lost instead.

And the conference dinner on the last night, when Sara and I showed up late, and were escorted to a small table next to the rest of the conference – fortunately Sara was happy and charming as always, and her father and other famous Jungians condescended to come to our table and talk to us.

And the plane back to Manchester, and staying in Felicity and Richard's apartment while they were away, for Manchester Pride. Still wasn't much interested in travel, but wandered around a bit anyway.

And a train home... finally home, after two weeks and too much moving around.

•••

S0: I was able to travel, at least in space.

But, as for Allen – and Hans-Rainer – it is clear that I am having some difficulty with traveling in time...

[Panic / anger / calm: shifting grounds]

[a]

Friday. I am upset.

No, that's not quite true: I am not pleased, but... it is as though the negative emotions are at least partly in brackets. I can see myself panicking a bit, angry and disoriented – but, perhaps because this is how psychoanalysis can work, the emotions are understandable but don't quite drive my actions, and don't quite hit me at the core.

It's simple enough, really – trivial I suppose – I returned from Zürich, elated and a bit tired, went to a nice dinner with Michael, Andrew and the gang, and...

and caught a really nasty summer flu. Which lasted about five days. Which is still fading in bursts of misery, tiredness – illness – to the point where I've essentially lost nearly two weeks...

two weeks of beautiful weather, of piles of things to do, of what had felt like a more direct, more easy-going relation to doing things.

As though I was thinking: yes, I'll have to fight my way through all of this – editing Gerhard's book, clearing junk off the floor of the middle room, setting up to start having clients – sending out an abstract, finding exchange universities for students who had lost out, connecting with various HIV patient groups over our counselling service... but whatever difficulties come up, I'll just handle them.

But now it doesn't feel like that – or, more accurately, in brackets as it were, I remember it not feeling like that: compare the terrible summer feelings that I tried to focus in Augusts, which I don't want to re-experience...

[b]

Monday. Calm... a connected sense of season and space. There is still too much to do; but I am coughing less...

the day is quiet, outside; this neighborhood tends to be somnolent in summer, occasional sounds of working (hammering, moving things in vans).

Sunny and hot some days, now cooler but still brightly lit – and bursts of rain that clear the air; the plants are, as you might think, ecstatic.

Trying to focus on big projects: to the detriment, of course, of scattered e-mails... but that can be borne.

An amazing glow of North Sea light, between the clouds... beautiful.

Beautiful men

After a couple of weeks with a lot of teaching and students; and after a lot of promises to continue editing the anthology, and studying for my Jung-Institut exams – about half of those promises broken, but I do try to keep going; and after somewhat warmer (though not actually warm) weather; and after a first meeting with Rumana, Norma, and Susan of something that may turn into an actual writing group –

today I did some e-mails and admin, plus a bit too much procrastination, as usual. Then yoga – which, over the past six weeks of trying to reconnect to something I haven't done for about fifteen years, keeps consistently transforming itself from a duty into a joy – and then a taxi to see a play about AIDS by a local writer (Steve Burbridge), performed in a pub, which I thought I should see...

The play was good – solid, a concrete experience of diagnosis. It reminded me that, for all my work with HIV training and counseling these days, I do tend to become – abstract about the experience, distant from my own stories, which gradually turn into memories that are dusty as old library books. And, of course, that so many of my later experiences are about isolation... and yes, I get by without the added pressures of other people. Or of relationship. How easy that all makes it. Or... not.

But at yoga the extraordinarily beautiful young man who worked in the health tent at last year's Pride – actually a beautiful puppy, but still very distracting – was for some reason in my class, though I know his abilities are years ahead of all of us.

Then after the play a very tall, handsome, almost exasperatingly charming bear of a man, with dark hair and a trimmed beard, stood at the door with a bucket to collect donations for local Pride festivities. (Yes, I spoke to him – and, as you might imagine, I was not entirely... coherent, throughout. But I suppose men like that are accustomed to people not completely making sense when they talk; they must assume that most people have some kind of mild neural damage. Probably located in their speech centers.)

Oh, and he runs the local Pride festival. So he's also intelligent, organized, take-charge... yeah yeah okay.

Then finally, since it was after 9 pm and I hadn't had dinner, I walked a block to a tapas restaurant I pass everyonce in a while. And yes, you guessed it: a disorientingly handsome, unexpectedly dark-blond, Spanish waiter – friendly, charming, personable... he told me his name (as did the handsome bear) but unfortunately I wasn't coherent enough to actually remember it. (Albañas? Something like that.) With that Spanish bearing – a clean, slightly soldierly intensity – a bit more sternly noble than my ancestral roots, with their more slapdash, self-indulgent Italian and Greek styles.

Are these men crossing my path just in order to confuse me?....

In spring, a (young?) man's thoughts turn to...........

Pieces

Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot....

*

A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience, difficult to describe because of its purity – this was not dark, or nonsensical. Could it be related to Jambo's work on my liver – if some of the body's long, depressed toxicity cracks and fades, is there an imaginative/psychological response?....

As for what I experienced: a sense of all the ones I've known who are dead (there are many), and it was as though they were standing around me – but charged with the extraordinary knowledge that I am alive, still alive, against any odds. And I could talk to them about it, tell them I missed them, though not with sadness; and they are happy – no, actually joyous – about this: not the envy of the ghosts one sees in a Japanese fairy tale, but a strange feeling that all of the dead are glad, even exultant, that I am alive. Blood flowing, the body with a vivid, concrete pulse: my body seemed so solid, so bright....

*

Nomi wants to chat on Skype: I realize that Mitchell, when he goes to Northampton for a year to teach at Amherst College, will live right near her. Two favorite people, and they would get on so incredibly well: and she is a Jungian analyst, and Mitchell will have left his analyst in Los Angeles – this might be quite wonderful. There is a feeling of family, of the connections that make the world hold together and grow.

*

Thursday I was angry: really angry, at at least one colleague, one I usually like. Possibly undeservedly: I felt as though I'd had enough from him, and couldn't even speak to him. Consumed by it: and that evening, when a parent of a student called to harangue me about something over which I had no control, I was not pleasant to him. Nothing I'll get in trouble for: but the whole problem of the irrational 'customer'...

I didn't want to talk to anyone later that evening, about anything.

Friday morning was still darkened by this; then it passed, when I went to...

*

It is Monday night at my favorite Italian restaurant: the usual Italian lesson, though Barbara looked tired – perhaps it's good that she's off to Italy for two weeks; I hope she enjoys herself, she is a good and pleasant teacher.

After the beginner's class, while the intermediate class continued behind a curtain, I relaxed over a risotto and a glass of wine – and talked to all my favorite people there: the dark-haired, smart girl who is working on her dissertation (of course I always say: so have you gotten some work done? and then we discuss everything she is doing), the wiry one who plays football (and needs to take care of that knee problem, but he shrugs and throws his hands in the air), and... the one I'm always kind of in love with: a good man, with a charming face only slightly thrown off by a long nose beneath his warm and kindly eyes; he stops and makes up jokes with me, and I would like to just spend time with him; but I know enough to leave, laughing.

*

Two weeks ago Saturday: Michael asks me over for dinner and a movie, while Andrew is out with friends. At first I think we're going to see an adventure movie I don't care about much, then he flips over a DVD of All About Eve. I pick it up, and say: Mitchell told me to watch this years ago – he even gave me a book about it for my birthday... Michael, incredulous: and you've never seen it? Are you sure you're gay?

So, after heating M&S Asian dishes and arranging them on trays, we watch this famous film: and it really is remarkable. Cooler and more controlled than I'd expected – the sniping is less overt: I was expecting wig-snatching, but what we get instead is sharp looks and obscure anxieties as the creepy Eve extends her web. A startling cameo by Marilyn Monroe, who turns a few dumb-blonde lines into memorable gold. Then of course the end, when Eve lies on the sofa uncaring and exhausted: for the first time in the film she isn't poised and acting, and it is brilliant...

now that she has all she wanted, it's ashes.

*

I run another session of people living with HIV, speaking to medical students – we do this every two weeks, January to June, for the past nine years. But I'm colliding with one of the guys: he is intensely intelligent, but he likes to take over and run the show – and a third guy, new and shy and not very articulate, is bowled over. I am sharper and sharper with the talkative one – and yes, you don't need to point out that this is shadow stuff for me: he is like me at my most irritating. By the end, the talkative one is in a barely controlled rage, the shy one shut down: and afterwards the shy one suggests maybe this isn't for him, and the talkative one sends out an enraged e-mail.

And I answer calmly, professionally, that we're grateful for his contribution, that we need to give everyone some space to talk. He is still not happy, but slightly mollified. I know I was careless, and this is partly my fault: but I can understand all that without anxiety.

And I am privately amazed that I can construct such a cool statement of reason: only slightly affected by the storm of feelings, it is as though I have a way to walk through such things, without them tearing at me....

*

Thomas telephones from Zürich on Wednesday evening: he has passed the last of his exams, and is now a Jungian analyst! He wants to thank me for helping him – I feel like a proud father, full of praise and affection. I tell him to say hello to everyone who is there for the winter semester. His graduation will be this summer, in the week after I take the last four of my first-half exams – hopefully I will have good news then, too.... I look forward to that party.

*

Last week: a tricky and exasperating administrative task, sitting with Jo at the computer – but we gradually get more and more hilarious over the ineptly designed university software, over the piles of work she has to do, over everything, really. And it all turns into a great joke, a familial burst of joy: and, as the audio technician at the next desk watches us amazed, this silly administration turns into the most fun I'd had in days...

*

No dreams. This worries me: an analytic session in just three days, and I remember no dreams at all?... yes, I am dreaming, I know it: but the door clicks shut just as I wake, and I have no idea what happened, not a fragment or a figure or a street. What is going on, how can I get back in touch with... but of course I am always too heavy-handed with this relationship between the conscious and the unconscious: which is probably one reason that the door sometimes stays shut for weeks....

*

A student comes into my office – in his years here, he has always been especially smart, especially alert, hard-working – and darkly cynical about everything: life is hopeless, people are stupid, nothing ever gets better. He and I have argued about this a number of times, in lectures and seminars, and his attitudes have softened a bit... but we give each other a certain polite distance.

Today he is disappointed in his mark, which is high, but not as high as he would like. We talk, and increasingly something unexpected pours out: among the rapidly shifting opportunities and losses that he is crashing through in his last year, he is feeling despair, a strange grief: he is nearly in tears at the complexity of the impending successes and failures of life. And I pull us away from the discussion of the mark to tell him: go home and write down how you are feeling. Yes, write your dissertation, write your papers, work on your recital: but this is serious, you must face it, catch it, stay with it. And I'm here if you want anything, at all.

There is a clarity on his face, and a frightened but excited sense that there may be a way forward, as he leaves...

Left behind in my office, I realize that I couldn't have planned my response: it was intuition, not training, and I still don't know how I could do that as a professional analyst. But it was arrestingly right: and with no time wasted looking for the solution....

*

Laura Mvula, on Graham Norton's show: while two other stars were pleasant and professional, and Mark Wahlberg made a fool of himself, this exquisitely present young singer, with her passionately alive instrumentalists and singers, came in like a ray of real beauty in a tired chain of media commercials. Not so much a matter of virtuosity, though she and they were all hugely capable: but of a deep, full connection to the music – that sense that they could inhabit it completely, without doubt and confusion, while aware of everything that it could mean. And, of course, shift from one thing to another without professional concerns: watching the guitarists clap in counterpoint... beautiful: her song 'She' has this quality.

After she has sung, she comes out and sits with the guests – sitting straight upright, slim and fresh-looking, paying attention to everything: it is all new, she doesn't want to miss a beat. But she answers Graham's questions with confidence and grace: looking like the most real person in the room...

*

Another acupuncture session yesterday: again, an experience that was rich and strange, though not so ecstatic as the first. Lying there, I was looking back through my life, at particular scenes, in so many cities and towns, on four continents: and the results were...

well: it was as though I knew that what I needed to do was to take back parts of myself, from all these memories, from all these selves. It will come as no surprise if I admit to a great deal of living in the past, in memory: I am always tied to the dead, to places where I was happy or excited or sad, or had great expectations of what I would do with my life, what I would become.

And, of course, in this small northern city, I have tended to live for ten years as though everything is already over: as though my real life happened in San Francisco, in Los Angeles – in Berlin, in Hong Kong, in Adelaide. In Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen; in a field with a gamelan near Ubud; in streets at night and sunny avenues, in bed and on a bicycle and, more than thirty-five years ago, in a small, nearly vertical apartment in the Village in New York...

So it was strange to – so rapidly and assertively, though with kindness – go back to all of these selves, tap them on the shoulder, and tell them: it's time to leave this place, and come back to me. And somehow they all seemed to come into me: the lonely boy walking near the golf course in Virginia, and the laughing man wearing leather chaps while working the door in the Berlin bar at 6 am – even the intensely tired thirty-five-year-old looking at his face in the mirror in Joe's bathroom in San Francisco, up for a visit that showed me that my past was already getting lost.

Hardest of all was a version of me from the early 1980s, sleeping in that beautiful small apartment with its green garden through the glass doors: morning sun, and I am next to Adam – he is asleep, but I am happy...

But even that self gets a tap on the shoulder, and I say to him: you have to come back to me now; Adam is long dead, this place is gone. This is all memory, you can't live here any more.

When Jambo came back in, I told him about it... Of course I was crying. What did you think I was doing?

That was all about twenty-four hours ago: I am still strangely awake, relaxed, working fairly fast.

As though I have more blood, more air: more life....

*

Sun today, and the past few days. The light of the North Sea: and the sharp clarity of the promise of a northern spring...

Redewendung

On Skype this evening, I was waiting for a prospective student to come online and tell me about a proposed project... he forgot or got the time wrong (this student keeps having trouble remembering which way the time zones run – I suggested he get a computer program to explain it to him...).

Hans-Rainer was online, as he often is, so I talked to him for a while. We traded war stories of past and current HIV treatments – he's had some really rough spots in the past couple of years, as have I; but we're both doing well at the moment. At one point he was waving his new medications, one after another, at the screen, a bit too fast for me to decipher the labels (Skype is not, alas, perfect).

As it happens, I really, really like Hans-Rainer – and I have ever since meeting him in 1994 in Berlin, when he was an ehemalige Ossi, boyishly excited that he could wear a leather jacket, and driving one of those East German cars he had had for years (if you could call it driving – it was like a tiny cardboard box of a car, and he would have to lean forward and keep it going almost by sheer tough willpower). During the year and a half I was an exchange student there, he would visit from time to time – and there would be entire weekends when, whatever we had planned to do – some fair or trip or something – we just wouldn't ever really get out of bed until he had to drive back home, an hour out in the country.

So, well, you see how it is.

And yes, I do keep wishing we could end up in the same place. I've even hinted... but that was at points when he had an on-again-off-again relationship with some boring guy who lived near him. (Admittedly I've never met this person – I just happen to know that this other guy is boring. Call it intuition.)

The picture is a bit old – we're both much grayer now – but you get the idea.

Now, Hans-Rainer is definitely aus dem Land. He's learned a good bit of English, and always makes a point of showing it off; but he is more comfortable in German – and it is definitely a country German; he'll often throw off some phrase or saying, and I'll have to stop him and get him to repeat it and, bit by bit, explain it. (Sometimes it's simply impossible to figure out – proverbs in foreign languages can be fairly incomprehensible; Lafferty made fun of that in his science fiction stories of the Camiroi, having an alien translation machine attempt to explain incomprehensible translations such as "It's that or pluck chickens", and finally giving up.) A fairly long process...

But this time, after a few explanations that involved getting up, walking around, and gesturing, I got it. The Rede itself was something like – excuse me if I've gotten this wrong, this is from memory, and I've probably got the cases wrong – "Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen."

Pause, rewind, wait, did you say Hemd?... okay... and I actually started to laugh as he was still gesturing about the Taschen. "The last shirt (that you wear) has no pocket (to keep money in)."

It's a more visceral, immediate country-German version of our own: 'You can't take it with you'.

...

I really shouldn't wait for Hans-Rainer, should I?...

Database

Finally getting organized to go to New York and Washington next week, for my mother's memorial service at Arlington Cemetary; and staying with my sister in New York, plus catching up with a few old friends.

I went through my old addresses database – now increasingly supplanted by the data shared between my phone and computer; but at one time an elaborately structured Filemaker document, organized under major parts of the world (as they appeared in my life), people's names, addresses, how I know them... as so many connections have become virtual now, the locations aren't as important as they once were, but it's nice to be able to call up 'NYC' and get anyone in that general area. (Even New Jersey!...)

Yes, the database does have various kinds of weird resonance: relatives, people I love, people I've forgotten, people I barely remember – I do have a poor memory for realities, and I easily lose track of things. For some names, an entire emotional/physical history, a powerful presence, springs up as I read the name – including people I literally haven't thought about in fifteen or twenty years.

And there's the eerier, sadder problem of so many dead, from AIDS or, now, from aging: in the 1980s I can remember Bill (then best friend, accompanist, now a choral director at Berkeley – and we haven't spoken since what, the mid-1990s) talking about his list of those who had died of AIDS. I think he used a spreadsheet; at one point I started to think about transferring names to a separate Filemaker database, at least to prevent constantly coming across all those painfully lost names. The organization of that disintegrates soon enough; exasperatingly, there are many for whom I'm not sure whether or not they are still alive – and it is not the kind of search that seems very pleasant, so it gets indefinitely put off, of course.

Today, weirdly enough, a name from the WDC list – a Steve: and I suddenly, if fuzzily, recall being intensely in love with a man who seemed only mildly interested in me – perhaps thirty years ago. I can remember trying to contact him, trying to act cool, but wanting desperately to get any kind of attention from him at all...

But all I remember now is the story; I remember hardly another thing about him. That he was blond, not tall, and I was in love.

The rest is gone....