in the hall of mirrors

Game On

My only excuse – at least the only one I can think of at the moment – is that, after a month out of town, I've had a cold for five days. Therefore: dislocated habits, grogginess, slow response time... well it's an excuse.

After a shower, vacuuming living room and laundry and feeling a bit more coherent, went to the corner grocery to buy some food. Knocking off items from list, mostly successful, a few pleasant surprises. Reach counter where the brothers, the one who runs the place and his rebellious younger sibling with the wavy hair, start to bag my items while asking, wasn't I away for a month, how was it, am I enjoying the weather?

And I realize I don't have my wallet. I say so, the younger says he'll put the bags behind the counter, and I up the stakes as I head for the door, saying: and I don't have my keys either. Damn.

As though one's choices start to fan out into implicit structures – solve puzzles, remember what tools you have, where are other copies of your keys? Can you call someone for help? You have your phone, that's good – plus ten points to start, then. I walk the three or four blocks home; I reach the door, no it is indeed locked, the keys and wallet are inside. Your mission, should you choose to accept it.

I knock on the downstairs neighbor's door while phoning my landlord: no answer from my landlord, that's no surprise, he should be at dinner with his family right about now. A second knock and the guy downstairs opens the door – I can't remember, did we exchange keys? – no, we didn't. He doesn't know what else to suggest – would you like to wait in here? No thanks, I'll...

Well I'm not quite sure what I'll do. I can sort of visualize my landlord's house, but the address isn't in my phone. Ian used to have a copy of my keys – no answer there either – let's try the landlord again. Aha – win thirty points – for eight years I have kept a copy of my home keys in my desk. In my locked office. At the university – fortunately just ten yards past the security office.

Phone out again: taxi ordered. It's getting chilly; how long will he take, do you think? Minus twenty points. After about fifteen minutes a pleasant young subcontinental arrives; I get into the taxi and start explaining, and fortunately he is kind/pleasant/in a good mood. Especially as it's Friday evening, getting on toward when people go out. I explain and explain, we reach the university – and glory be, someone has taken the block off one side of the entrance to my building, he can sit in the parking lot with no trouble.

Security office – a new guy, not one I know – drat; lose five points. I start explaining again: my office, right over there, unfortunately not on the building standard but instead on an 'A' key from when posh administrators used to have these three offices in a row (I kept the two chairs, and it took them two years to take the security cameras out), and for a long time Sue and Graham couldn't get a copy of the 'A' keys but supposedly security, and cleaning and maybe the porters, all have the key –

Try the landlord again. No answer.

He's pleasant but a bit helpless; he takes out a lot of unfamiliar keys and tries them one by one. No joy: minus twenty points. How about – Graham has a key in his office, at the other end of the building – no, the school office, the one behind two doors with number locks, I know the numbers –

While walking, try landlord. And Ian. And the taxi is still waiting

We go down there; the number locks are fine, but then the key locks – no, we don't have keys for those. How about the porters, they're in the next building? And the cleaners – no they leave their keys in the evening off in the Ivy Building (where the heck is that?) so that's impossible. Unless – Let's ask the porter, he's in the next building. An old friend, but he's tired and bored tonight, and responding very, very slowly to everything – the newer guy escapes an insoluble puzzle back to his office as the porter starts to dig through keys. A box of unsorted keys – what do you think? No, not really. Let's try some of these then...

While walking back, pass the taxi, shrug and say this might be a while, he doesn't look very worried yet. Try landlord twice: nul points.

Back to the security office. Extended discussion with bigger, more assertive guy, still one I don't know well, who runs through the normal British explanation of why everything is impossible. I, mostly patiently, wait it out, then use that stricken look to get him to unbend a bit and try to consider alternatives: we run again through Graham, cleaners, Sue, porters, missing keys, 'A' keys, who should have a copy and who shouldn't, and the entire history of ways that people have irresponsibily prevented Security from doing their job.

So, we can't get into the school office, where I know Graham has keys – hold on, the school office? Maybe we can do something – and he uses his walkie-talkie to call someone across campus. Call landlord again; I know he probably won't answer, but it's this or sit on the front steps in the chilly night air. And the man comes, someone I've never met, from another building: he, and the porter walk to the other end of the building with me, and we have another shot. But aha! he has a key that works, it works! So we're into the school office –

that should be worth thirty points at least; try landlord again –

Graham's desk: a bowl of keys. I go through them one by one, expectant – on the last pair I've found nothing and am getting worried, but the new guy says, hey what about these keys? Ah yes the bank of keys kept by the door, and THERE is one that says Bennett's Office, Will's Office, Paul's & Bennett's Offices –

Aha. One hundred points. No, leave the light on, I'll bring the key back in a minute –

race down two halls, there's my door and YES it opens. Lefthand drawer, hmm there were keys in here oh no what if they aren't there, HERE they are, an old set of most of the department keys including some that no longer have doors to them, including my own house keys –

back to the school office, drop off master key. Security office, he drones a bit in a self-congratulatory manner. My phone rings – it's my landlord, who's on vacation in Cumbria, and was wondering why there were fifteen calls from me – I say no it's okay now, I'll make a point of giving a key to the people downstairs, see you Monday. I thank everyone, the guy from another building chuckles and comments, the porter goes back to his office –

Out to the taxi: how long was that, forty-five minutes? Yes, it was about that long – Huge blessings on your head for waiting, yes just back home. As we weave through suburban roads, it's still chilly, but the end of the game is in sight.

We reach my apartment, I say wait just one more minute, run up the stairs – wallet, keys, plus a jacket because it's cold – back down: it can't be fifteen pounds, you were there for ages, are you sure it's not more? I give him twenty because he's been an angel, thank him, wave as he drives away.

GAME OVER – YOU HAVE WON – GO FOR EXTRA POINTS?

Yes, I'll go get the groceries, to win the extra points. Walk to corner shop (again), passing the younger rebellious brother (who's walking the other way), and say, did you really keep all my stuff for that long? Yes, we put some in the refrigerator, you could have just taken it and paid us later –

In the shop, the older brother puts together three bags, getting stuff out of the refrigerator. Pay him (yes my wallet's here), thank him again, take bags. Start walking home.

EXTRA POINTS WON!

***

PLAY AGAIN?....

A Dozen Roses for John

In the spring of 2001, I was planning to move from Hong Kong to Australia. At some point in the previous months – John will remember more exactly, he knows my memories are never very clearly date-stamped – John and I had met at an Australian musicology conference. This astoundingly beautiful, very shy and earnest, and very well-dressed (he wears a suit far better than I ever will) man told me that he thought my writing and editing were wonderful – it was a bit dizzying to hear that from someone who looked like that.

In any case, in May 2001, a few weeks after his birthday, I made him a CD with the above title. The song choices were all favorites of mine that I wanted to share – some of them still show up in some of my classes – and they covered a peculiar range of affection, satire, love, sensuality and sadness (plus a piece I'd written about, and was of course proud to include). I've just come on my own copy of the disc, with a shimmering rose-colored label and charmingly archaic fonts:

1 – Kate Bush, 'Under the Ivy' (1990)

2 – Lumin, 'Wild Orchid' (1998)

3 – Elliott Carter, 'The Rose Family' (1942/80)

4 – Ben Johnston, 'Amazing Grace' (1973)

5 – Pussy Tourette, 'I Think He's Gay' (1993)

6 – Sylvano Bussotti, 'Siciliano' (1962)

7 – Björk, 'Joga' (1997)

8 – Senleches/Xasax, 'En attendent esperance' (14th c./1998)

9 – Sting, 'I Burn for You' (1986)

10 – Dieter Schnebel, 'Schubert-Phantaisie' (1978/89)

11 – Bette Midler, 'In These Shoes' (2000)

12 – Stephen Sondheim, 'Good-Bye for Now' (1981)

They tell a remarkable story, at least to me... I lived with John for a year; when my visa and job blew up in Sydney, he told me to come live with him in Adelaide, which I did for a year.

He's still very beautiful, by the way....

Spring

And finally, here it is, what we've been waiting for. Nearly a week after Easter (and apparently this year Roman Easter and Greek Easter were the same day, which is in itself a fairly weird result of changing calendars and seasons).

A young father, slightly anxious-looking but in a light t-shirt, walks with a child on a plastic tricycle behind my house; the child falls and he stops, helps, wipes off a hand. In front of the house a car stops to pick up someone, radio blaring – oh well, not all the flashes of outdoor behavior are pleasant; I wonder if there is a generation coming, perhaps in fifty years, that isn't as fascinated with loud musics as are most people who grew up since the mid-60s. The radio is turned down after a few minutes, there is laughter, a car door slamming. I'm getting ready to go out, to meet Michael and Andrew in town, and meanwhile bringing the computer, to sit in a café and continue working.

There have been flashes of good weather, increasing during the week – Bennett and I went to the large garden store up in Northumberland the other day, and it seemed almost warm and sunny at the beginning of the trip, then chill and gray by its end. Then yesterday when I planted my bought herbs, it was pleasant in the morning, miserable in the evening.

But today the sun seems pretty solid, fairly well established in its presence... there is rain predicted later, but the look of things seems serenely springlike. Perhaps it's time to do just one more planter – there are now four planters of baby herbs, but I haven't done the seeds; although I clearly need more compost/dirt, and unfortunately my tiny strip of garden doesn't really have any extra soil I can use. (A shame that my otherwise very helpful/pleasant landlord decided to turn the whole thing into a deck eight years ago.)

And I did some work on the book on Gerhard yesterday; there will be more done today... this is really so easy, it's ridiculous that I didn't finish it a decade or more ago. And that would be a great burden shifted: it would mean that practically all research, all projects, that involved someone else's career would be gone – and I wouldn't take up any more: I am too flaky in my writing to have other people depend on me, and don't want it to happen again.

Possibilities seem generally easier, futures seem lighter and more casually bright. As noted in the Jungian literature, breaking through old problems, old complexes, isn't often about grand fights with horrible creatures, although one always anticipates and dreams that they will be. It is more often about things that used to seem impossible, or awful, or miserable, fading into relative unimportance over time and through change; they become either manageable or they simply stop mattering. Even better, it is about chunks of complexes that seemed knotted all in one great, terrible 'deathstar' of unhappiness or tension disintegrating into little pieces of things, each of which are easily handled. It is a bit like legends of dangerous beasts that come apart into smaller, more easily squashed creatures; and you wonder why you wasted years, decades, worrying about mere gnats, small pests that can be ignored or overcome without difficulty.

And sometimes the changes in seasons help, too....

Short List

So: exactly one long month after my last substantive (from my point of view) post, interrupted by only one jeu d'esprit about coffee... I keep thinking of the blog, of all the many large and subtle shifts that have taken place in that month, and keep feeling rather guilty for not writing about them... but then they were happening and I was too involved in them, or I was busy otherwise, or... I didn't quite know what to say about them.

So, just to bring us up to date: a list of points.

1 – Michael read the 'Smart guys' post, much of which was about him. This was neither embarrassing nor problematic, because we've both certainly been around the block – actually around and around and around the block – and aren't overly concerned about such things; and of course as he's a dancer he's accustomed to people having Passionate Attachments for him.

2 – And he was evidently pleased. He took the train down from Edinburgh the following weekend, put his suitcase down, sat on the couch, pointed out he'd read my blog, and said: So I think we should do something about this. And kissed me.

3 – We proceeded to spend the following three weekends together, two here, then one in Edinburgh; then he went to Paris to start his doctoral studies, where he is now. Wonderful, heartening, many good things. I've had only occasional flashes of wondering where this could lead and whether I am really all that interesting for him, but that's just knee-jerk negative narcissism speaking.

4 – I will visit him in Paris, perhaps in a few weeks or so when he has his own place.

5 – Good lectures – even, if I may say so, very good lectures, with excellent responses, smart students who are interested in the materials. Much of my nervousness about being allowed to teach this course in cultural theory and music, which I haven't been able to teach for five years, has evaporated, as I've remembered that I know what I'm doing and I enjoy it.

6 – Various films, artworks, performances. Perhaps most interesting at the moment is Jacques Roubaud's Great Fire of London (which should really be called Destruction – because The Great Fire of London is properly the title for the entire series of six books of which only five are published and two translated into English). The first volume: such a calm, eerie, grieving, thinking voice, pulling you into such a hyper-aware space, filled with subtle literary moves and even clouds of mathematics – it is what he is writing instead of the great project he had planned; it is what he is writing out of the tragic death of his wife; it is his attempt to shore up existence.... I'm just starting to get into it but might say more as it goes along.

7 – I love Great Monumental Series in modern literature – Proust, Joyce, Musil, even people like Thirkwell... this might be just what I want to read.

8 – My recuperative body chemistry after the stroke seems to be settling down to something more normal. About two weeks ago, at the end of Michael's second visit, was the last time I can remember getting upset and worried over nothing. Sent long detailed message explaining medical status to family, which involved good news, though it was couched in somewhat technical terms.

9 – Much good fortune and good work among my students. A sense of the universe supporting people and their work, which would certainly be a nice change. Annie even got a fabulous scholarship for the next three years....

10 – It's late now. After excellent dinner at Liza and Daryl's – brilliant composer and brilliant conductor, with their houseguest student and son – followed by long, rather chilly train ride home – it is a blessing to lie on the couch in the warm flat. Bed soon.

11 – But before bed, answered an e-mail from Michael....

G'night all.

Twenty-five miserable things about me

Having lost the chance to study in Zürich this year – yes, it will happen; but next February at best, more plausibly next June – I'm still going to start analysis in the next few weeks, and am meeting two prospective analysts this week. I keep thinking that what is really the central 'presenting' problem for me these days is a cluster of anima issues, that is, my ability to relate to others and the world: and these have popped up here... in this miserable list, this list of dark things. Which is somewhat edited from the version that appeared in my own journal last week.

1. I have an increasing contempt for the lists of ‘twenty-five things about me’ that are going around on Facebook; they exhibit such a shallow, boring egotism – such little pieces of such unimportant puzzles, puzzles not even worth putting together.

2. Walking to work, to teach, to an appointment: I inevitably stalk along, aggressively facing into the direction I’m going, impatient with everyone in the way, abruptly angry at anyone who drifts along in front of me. It is not as though there are furies behind me, but rather as though a miserable but utterly necessary duty is before me – and one that is a matter of life and death.

3. Grissom’s farewell to CSI was on television last week. The actual farewell was well done, in retrospect – having the nerdy guy no one likes make a dramatic outburst; having Grissom walk along looking at people in their offices, and none of them look up but Catherine, who crinkles her eyes in the briefest but deepest of farewell looks; but I didn’t respond much to all of that. What caught me was the last thirty seconds in Costa Rica, when he is hiking to find Sarah – that was amazingly satisfying, and oddly unexpected. It made me happy, comforted, and of course jealous.

4. I am impatient with young people and their needs – except, sometimes, one on one, as in a tutorial with a student who suddenly makes sense to me: and then I am helpless to change the difficulties of their lives, in the face of the usual tiresome strictures that run the university and its judgment systems. Which is merely one of several problems that makes me wonder if I would make an acceptable therapist, as I am obviously impatient, judgmental and heartless.

5. I have been given the name Nachiketas, the boy from the Katha Upanishad who made friends with death; and that matters to me more than most things that have happened in my life.

6. I was so shattered by Reid’s death on December 2, 1983 – and/or I used it to justify the way I felt, the way I was constructed – that the following six or seven years were entirely emotionally organized around it; and everything since has been aftermath.

7. In fact I was so ready to be dead at a number of points after 1983, after 1987, after 1991, that when Philip died, when Vanessa died, and then when my sister Sandy died, I was filled with an enraged sense of inappropriateness – here are people who are still doing real work, living real lives with people who actually care about them, and they end up dying rather than me. Absurd. Terrible planning, bad choices.

8. When Sandy died, in fact, I struggled with my responses – they all seemed inappropriate, as they still do today: a ghostly sense of unreality, as I had seen her so rarely over the years; and an anger at everyone else, that they were all so shattered, as though this were the first death in the world. I wanted to shout so what, do you think this is the first person to die who shouldn’t have died? I’ve been living with this for twenty-five years, who the hell do you think you are, to take this so hard?

9. When I see trash blowing through the street, I think: the goddamn Brits really don’t give a damn, do they?

10. In fact, though I have lived in many places, and aggressively spent energy and money on travel, too many of the places where I have landed for any length of time have ended up being misery for me: the gray flatness of the Washington suburbs, the malevolent darkness of Berlin, the foreign emptiness of Hong Kong, the dull crudity of Newcastle. I do not know whether this is a matter of comparison – I can’t help wanting to get back to the lively and constantly changing beauty of San Francisco, the fun of Sydney, the beauties of southern Europe – or if it reflects a coldness in me, an inability to find joy in things. I suspect it is both.

11. My psoriasis has been remarkably damaging to my confidence and happiness ever since I was nineteen – strange, given that some people barely know it’s there. The sheer depth of my response to it is remarkable – and now that Sandy, who also had psoriasis, is dead, I feel weirdly unprotected, exposed to it.

12. In fact, Sandy’s death, and Vanessa’s and Philip’s, left me feeling peculiarly exposed in a larger way: as though casual gunshots were going through a crowd, but then others were mowed down, and there is a lot of space around me: I am no longer protected by the bodies of others.

13. I discovered about a year ago that HIV caused depression biochemically. As, to some extent, does HCV, as well as the medications of course. It actually helped detach myself from some of my depression to see that: although right now it doesn’t seem to matter much.

14. I was disturbed and fascinated by posters for the play Beirut in 1987; they were plastered up around the Village in New York, something like ’59 minutes to…’ something grim, I can’t remember what. Having read the play, it’s a crude but admittedly powerful picture of disaster, sex and death; but seeing it all around me in the dark streets had me feeling as though real crises were coming; as though they really were going to herd people up, and hang the HIV+ from lampposts.

15. I seem to respond rather strongly to changes in light, especially at this time of year. It may or may not cheer me up, as the case may be, but it certainly changes my sense of time and continuity – sometimes confusingly so.

16. After being deported from Australia, for the first time in my life I no longer knew where I wanted to live, no longer had aims and desires to be somewhere. To a large extent, I still don’t: a bad joke a few years ago was that I wanted to go back to San Francisco in 1979 – but that I couldn’t get the tickets. That joke seems flat now; and the world divides into pleasant places where I can’t get a job and don’t know anybody anyway, or miserable backwaters where I would live as I do now but it wouldn’t be worth the change.

17. I appear to have devolved into a cliché: the aging gay bachelor academic who lives alone. All I need are piles of old newspapers and too many cats, and the identification will be complete. I wonder what I seem like to my younger students – although I know of course that they are probably barely aware of my existence, except as a droning voice telling them the history of unimportant musics.

18. I doubt there is much love left in me, in any case. I feel, night after night, that the capacity for falling in love is simply burned out of me: for thirty years I had flung love at people who hadn’t returned it, or who had died or vanished, flung away so much that there simply isn’t anything left. The well is dry.

19. And, embarrassingly, the well of sexuality is even drier: I seem to be post-sexual, post-desire, post-physical. Astounding, given my behavior from the mid-70s to about the second millennium – but I’ve gradually turned into a dull bag of potatoes, a dry broken twig. Not surprising, perhaps, given my medications.

20. It is still painful to remember my encounter with Ron in 1980: an amazingly handsome man, a graphic designer with a green Jaguar and a beautiful house in a hilly part of San Francisco. After two weeks of him trying to make love to me in his huge waterbed, I simply couldn’t do it any more – I was literally too embarrassed: I couldn’t put together knowing someone, talking to him, and having sex too. He said, kindly and full of regret: Well, it’s clear that you aren’t interested… I followed him around the house that day, trying to say, no I want to be interested, I just don’t know how to… and then the horror of a big Sunday party with all his friends, that last afternoon. Now I think: why on earth did I stay for the party? But I was too confused, too shattered, too unwilling to leave the scene of our embarrassing lack of connection; and far too young and stupid to do the intelligent thing and simply leave him alone.

21. I still miss my San Francisco apartment on Collingwood Street, with its little back garden; an apartment perfect for a young man, although it would have helped if I could have paid the rent more regularly. The person I was then: although I could not get anything right with other people, although the number of days of feeling torn up about something stupid I’d said or done or some rejection by some man was far too many, there was a living quality in me that later seemed to have died.

22. Perhaps, in fact, what Mitch said about me having an exceptionally strong persona is still true today: that the remains of that living feeling have continued as charm and friendliness in my persona – but that I have none of that kindness, that affection, that sturdy love, for myself; and that in fact most of what remains is the appearance of warmth, with the heart of it evaporated into the air.

23. I remain amazed by how deadly my emotions can be: envy for practically anyone and anything successful, rage at being thwarted, cold distaste for the clinging needs of others. I was disoriented enough that I had been so rude to N. – it was worse that I did the same thing a second time; fortunately N., being better at these things than I am, managed to give me the space to be pleasant to her so that all was forgiven. But my actions in this were pathetic, incompetent, the actions of someone whose emotional growth is truly stunted.

24. I am trying not to be jealous, or envious, of P. and his relationship; actually I don’t envy it – it doesn’t seem like something I need for myself – but I am jealous of the fact that his attention is now always elsewhere. I want to be acknowledged for my place in his life, I want to have his attention – but of course if I had it I would feel guilty, since he needs so much to move on, to have a real emotional connection.

25. I am amazed that the twisted skeins of darkness that run me: not at how dark they are – truth to tell, there isn’t much evil in me – but at how miserable, how gray they are: I am indeed a melancholic, a rather pathetic depressive. How, then, can I do the work I am set to do, am at least planning on doing? Isn’t it plausible that some Chirons are too wounded to heal?

The day after

On a sharply disappointing day, when some bitterly familiar bad things happened – yet again – and I left early, missing the department Christmas celebration – while at home, avoiding everything – the television has a rerun of a favorite musical/dramatic passage: the final episode of Sex and the City.

There are three exceptional passages in the show: the eerie, long passage of disintegration and disaster in the middle – to the hip-hop 'La Belle et le Bad Boy' – then the healing/moving on passage, with a repeated 'clinking' percussion figure that suggests an Olympian distance and a universal connection, both at the same time; and finally the ending, using 'You Got the Love'. All three tend to fuse the multiple stories wonderfully....

A favorite episode: and one that helped cheer me up...

and then Anne put a birthday present and card through the mail slot. Definitely cheered.

Out of thin air

An e-mail arrives, from persons unknown, from parts unknown – subject heading: "Hey sexy music prof."

No, it's not spam – or at least not mass-produced spam.

A viola player, from the US; his website shows him to be a cheerful bear type, with a beard (I'm a sucker for facial hair – can barely see men who don't have facial hair, but tend to be an easy mark for any who do) and startlingly blue eyes.

He tells me he thinks I'm cute –

I parry: it's an old photograph.

But I am polite: thank you though.

He ripostes: I'll be in London in November, are you near there –

a double parry: no, I'm nowhere near, it's as far as Detroit to New York – culturally anyway;

and I'll be in the US on those dates anyway.

He still wants my number, he wants to call some day, in a fit of amorous energy.

Very well, then....

Isn't it in Peter Beagle's masterwork The Last Unicorn, where the wizard Schmendrick is tied to a tree – and the tree somehow falls in love with him, by contact apparently – the wizard excuses himself with the fiction of an arranged marriage, to a mountain larch – and the tree swells with jealous rage, to kill him with his bonds – and so the lovely line: "... gave himself up for loved"?

Relational

Not quite so sure I won't try to become a Jungian analyst; we'll see. Of course, in any major decision it is good to give up on it at one point, at least... but despite my concerns about age, health, time, cost, logistics, appropriateness, and what might be my underlying (possibly suspect, narcissistic, inflated or unrealistic) reasons for wanting this, the only concern that really stands in my way is wondering whether I'm only doing this in order to avoid writing The Book.

In any case: I am much concerned about anima/animus stuff, relations, the way I connect to others. I need to be concerned about those things – as school revs up again I'm finding myself amazingly hostile, angry, resentful about the tedious things that are thrown at us in e-mails, meetings, and tedious presentations by outside consultants. It is as though we start out the school year with the most nonsensical, oppressive and bureaucratically misguided parts of our jobs – and because this is the UK, where the government runs the universities, there are very, very many of those.

I did, after all, live at least partly in the business world during the eighties and early nineties, and left it behind because it was so airless and ridiculous – there is a way in which all bosses become pointy-haired after a time. The fact that British universities are increasingly run by, and in the favorite ways of, bureaucratic busybodies is a seriously unpleasant aspect of life here, even more than the weather.

So I'm cranky, and being difficult to my colleagues – at points, very difficult indeed. I am not nice when I don't want to be.

Somewhere among all this, and a crowd of half-forgotten dreams that seem to be trying to push me in various directions, and a beautifully thoughtful, extended series of long messages on Facebook with an admired gay poet of the 1980s, I'm thinking of many things. One of them is connected to the Jungian, to the psychological, to the relational – the way that some major stage works, operas and plays, don't mean much of anything to me; and my attempt to figure out why, on psychological rather than aesthetic grounds.

For instance, neither Mozart's Don Giovanni nor Shakespeare's Hamlet, though both are supposed to be the greatest works by the greatest artists, has ever really gotten through to me at all. Yes, I get all the ideas; but they both seem strange, flat and dead, and simply unimportant to my world.

With Mozart, it's certainly not the nature of opera itself: I love Nozze di Figaro more than many things in the world, and I enjoy the fluff of Cosí fan tutte, even if the plot degenerates into drivel. I'll admit I'm not as enamored as Zauberflöte as many are, but perhaps that is because the childlike doesn't mean much to me. But no – with Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni, there is a sense of being forced to care about something that is ultimately too heterosexual, too concerned with the endless, tiresome war between the men and the women...

but then isn't that just as true of Nozze and Cosí? What am I missing in these works? Or is it significant that Nozze and Cosí are more from the womens' viewpoint – that both seem to be taking place, much of the time, in women's bedrooms?

As for Shakespeare: given how much I love Lear, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest, and above all and more than anything A Midsummer Night's Dream, why does Hamlet leave me so entirely cold? And Macbeth is nearly as bad, after the witches leave the stage. (This can't entirely be a gay thing – Patrick loves the Scottish play, but maybe that's because he did it in school and knows it so much better.)

The problem with Hamlet, more than any of these, is that it is accurately described as intellectual, obsessed with death, tragical, rhetorical, complicated – doesn't that sound like something I would like? And I've tried repeatedly; but it just falls flat for me. I cannot see why it is greater than the other plays, and I can barely see why it is worth producing at all.

Of course I can't stand Gravity's Rainbow either, despite enjoying V and The Crying of Lot 49. Way too much war stuff, olive drab, yuck. Or Beethoven piano sonatas – though I love practically all the symphonies, even the wallfowers 4 and 8, the piano sonatas seem so heavy with male bombast – when Bennett plays them in the afternoon down the hall from my office, I can admire his passion for them, but I find the harmonies of that exaggeratedly male universe incredibly tiresome.

Is this, then, all something about anima relations – or animus relations – or the Double, or one of the other attempts that have been made to make sense of archetypes in the gay mind? (Which is one of the big places where Jung's often very heterosexual theories run into some trouble – and which is a place where there has been a great deal of discussion, as so many famous Jungians are gay men or lesbians.)

Is this – at the greatest depth and with the greatest resonance – a guy thing? Or a gay thing?....

Such a little difference a vowel makes.

Things that are easy

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sitges: People, and people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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