in the hall of mirrors

In a hotel room, after midnight

London. “City, city!”, as cries Tom Rakewell.

It’s been a pleasant if tentative weekend: having achieved a successful research seminar on Thursday, with the grand old man of musicological modernism Arnold W. in attendance (astonishing that he would be there – it couldn’t have been my topic, so I myself must have been the attraction), I went shopping (mostly for books), wandered around, got tired, thought of going to gay bars but didn’t feel quite up to it. The attractions of London: with which I couldn’t quite bring myself to grapple. (It might have been an easier way of having fun to meet Patrick in Manchester, where he says he’s ‘bashing bears’ at the Bear Bash.)

Actually, the great pleasure was three hours, yesterday, with Sophie. Although today I had a similar lunch with Adam, noted London writer/networker and charming, kindly gossip, there were elements of that second meeting that were a bit too narcissistic and grasping on both sides. With Sophie, on the other hand, although I can’t help wondering how many annoying tics I exhibited (talking about myself, talking while eating, etc.) the experience was more honest, alive. When I found the restaurant I was in a bad mood, tired from not sleeping, embarrassed over feeling rather ill the night before, sort of wanting to flee London; but with Sophie all was intelligent and affectionate amusement, even to wandering through a record store and sharing giggly comments on the apparent and real achievements of the artists represented there.

I continue to claim, though it may rank people in an unfair hierarchy, that there are people in one’s life who are simply wiser, more supportive, more deeply honest (emotionally, intellectually, etc.) than others. I think here of dear Trisha in Phoenix, of Susan H. in LA, and of Mitchell, of Terry, of David in that same city; and of people I haven’t seen in a long time, such as Bill in San Francisco, Laura now in New York, Jay who died last year, and of course V. who has made such an impact on this blog, and David O.-S. so recently gone. These are all people who have, I think, never lied to me, in any fashion; and more importantly people with whom I have practically never had a spare hour, over dinner or a drink or the phone, from which I didn’t come away refreshed, happier, ready to go on.

Why do such people seem to have a different status in one’s life than others? It’s not a measure of how much one loves a person, or of how big they loom in one’s life – there are others we care about who don’t quite have this status – it’s something a bit more abstruse, something suggested by Californian reincarnation fantasies of ‘old souls’, or nineteenth-century fantasies of ‘soulmates’. I often feel that I’m not getting enough of that kind of person: but I feel it in a greedy, rather childlike way – I want more attention, more support, from people who – one instinctively feels – can only spare me so much contact before they must go and do, well, their angels’ work on earth.

But perhaps this is a fantasy, even a mutual one in some cases: Trisha and I have long shared the joky promise that if, in another lifetime, we ever get this gender/sex thing sorted out correctly (i.e. that we come back not as a lesbian and a gay man, but as a pair of people with sexual orientations that actually point towards each other), that we’ll be lovers.

•••

Probably, when that happens, she’ll be the guy, as she is definitely the more take-charge and studly of us two. But think of the confusing combinations that could happen instead! – must make a matrix of possibilities….

(I've never used ConceptDraw before – this program is obviously designed for engineers, there are no human figures anywhere in it.)

Okay: the theory of this is slightly exasperating. If both gender and orientation are random, we have a one in four (four in sixteen) chance of getting it right. (Oddly, until I made the chart, I hadn’t been clear that each of the four possibilities is only successfully mated with one of the others… hmm. Strange that such an obvious thing would give me pause – I must be confused by all that queer theory.) And only one of the four is unsuccessful, without frustrating one of the partners unfairly – i.e. the combination we have now – and there’s a one in two chance of one of us being cruelly disappointed (i.e. if, say, I’m me and she’s a handsome, athletic, redheaded straight guy – all of which adjectives pretty much apply to her present life, except of course the last one).

… Should I have included bisexuality? – or transgender surgery? – oh that’s too many variables, Judith Butler will have to do the diagrams.

On the other hand, what if gender in reincarnation is random, but sexual orientation is not? (Hey, it’s my theory, I get to make the rules. And besides I have lots o’ trouble seeing myself as a lesbian, in any universe.) Then, we’re limited to p = f/s, m/g; t = m/s, f/g. (Yes, I’m slightly unamused at p = f/s, but hey it’s more possible than the deleted others.) And we’re then still one in four – only one, rather boringly normal, combination is successful; and two still lead to unrequited sorrow.

Perhaps we should be happy as we are.

Perhaps I should have gone out to a gay bar!...

Victories

My sister is far better, sounded remarkably cheerful on the telephone yesterday.

Friday I started calculating exactly what I had to get done before leaving for Los Angeles this coming Thursday; and panicked – nerves, anxiety, woke at 6 am to wander restlessly about, wondering how it could all possibly get done. (Especially as most of it is about students – responsibility for them is sometimes a bit much...) Did some of the CBT (cognitive behavior etc., not that other thing) work, and felt far better, quite level-headed.

Today, with Patrick's and Catherine's help, put together a number of IKEA shelves for the front room, moved all the boxes around, many things on the shelves etc. Which means the front room, for the first time since I moved here five years ago, is sort of manageable: still way too full of junk, but it's easier to get in there, things are more organized, and therefore in a few weeks I can start doing some determined taking stuff to the trash or to thrift shops, and reduce it all a bit.

As the front room is partly full of about twenty boxes of papers that represent my entire life, this is really a major move – dealing with the past and dealing with the present at the same time, making it possible to move through both memories and current needs, and feeling quite comfortable getting rid of a lot of the past that doesn't matter any more, and getting rid of things that I'm not using, because I can confidently feel as though if I should ever need them I will simply buy them again. If it were a dream, it would be a fantastic chain of symbols.

As it's reality instead, I'm quite pleased with myself....

Relative

Fragments of good things and difficult ones; much administration, many students (most of whom seem rather smart, charming, alert this year; as D. said, sometimes it seems as though changes in students are like the weather – who knows why they happen – which means, I guess, we should be grateful for good weather).

A seminar in Darmstadt, high modernism, and my favorite Difficult Musics of the 1950s and 1960s: and the students seem interested and as though they're absorbing everything. It might be actually fun to teach it.

Meanwhile: I remain internally mildly volatile, chaotic, in the process of unstable change, of unpredictable thinking....

M. said this blog was sounding "a bit bipolar" – I objected immediately: if I were bipolar, wouldn't I at least sometimes have the energy and euphoria of the manic phase?... as opposed to this fragmented but mostly low-to-middle-mood existence. But I suppose what he means is the energy of depression versus anxiety... which would be – a sort of poor man's bipolar disorder?...

•••

But all of this, activity and work, thoughts and responsibilities, fades into a rather pallid, two-dimensional unimportance in contrast to what my eldest sister is going through. Several years of diagonoses and tests, good and semi-bad prognoses, have accelerated into a bout of chemotherapy – and several attendant crises: liquid in the lungs, great difficulty breathing, a sudden hospital stay, etc.

The situation is serious, but perhaps not disastrous: I get the sense – from thousands of miles away, through the hearsay of her husband, passed on to my younger sister, and my brother and sister-in-law – that doctors are expecting her to pull through the panicky, painful experiences of this week, and hopefully to respond well to treatment – over time. My sister herself, always calm and articulate in the way of the take-charge eldest child, and her husband, whose ex-Navy toughness prevents him from even thinking of panicking, both tend to sidestep any expectation of catastrophe – but fortunately they don't sugarcoat anything either.

One thing that is obvious: that even if she will be all right, her physical experience over these weeks can't be anything but deeply frightening – even when your mind knows that things are being handled, when you have an experience like difficulty breathing, or (as in my first 'body shock' experiences around a failed surgery, back in the early 1980s) you have rapid internal bleeding and your blood pressure suddenly drops over a matter of minutes, your immediate physical experience is one of panic and an acute need to act, to prevent what feels like dying.

So, of course, I worry, fret, wonder if there's anything I could do.

It feels as though the best thing I could do with my time would be to throw aside all this teaching, this administration; a trip to Los Angeles next week, fussing about the projects this year – to simply drop it all, and go sit by her bed at the hospital. Not to be tragic or overwhelmingly sympathetic about it, but just to be there: maybe read some books aloud, listen, talk. Or just sit.

Frankly, that seems to be the only thing that would really make sense, these days....

Fortress Persona

Distance, limits, boundaries: I seem especially concerned, even tense and anxious, these days around the connections between myself and other people. This, of course, after ages of lamenting that I am too alone – but perhaps partly as a result of that, I'm struggling not to experience other people as painful chores, as demanding and hopeless, Sisyphean, tasks. As though everyone wants things, and yet they are never satisfied: and the echoes that I get back seem especially unfulfilling for me at the moment.

Perhaps this is simply the larger resonance of such things as being an introvert, being too long alone, living in a place whose colors are naturally across the dark grays (because of the weather here). Not to mention a simple response to the pressures of new classes, new students: despite the admitted masses of time that we academics get to ourselves, the times when we must engage do tend to be high-pressure ones: all those young people, all their emotional demands, all the need to get everything right.

It's such a cliché, to quote lyrics that resonate with one's own mood, but – Porcupine Tree again: 'Buying New Soul' –

I still wave at the dots on the shore
And I still beat my head against the door
I still rage and wage my little war
I'm a shade and easy to ignore

White wall, I had to paint a door
I always find that I've been through it before
Close it up and throw away the key
Break the code, how happy I could be

I suppose I do wave at the dots on the shore; but with the half-felt hope that they won't notice me....

Panic

I am startled – and discomfited, and somewhat embarrassed, but I suppose also intrigued – by discovering, while doing this cognitive behavior therapy for depression, that underneath the depression is a wide pool of anxiety, nerves, fear. Anger and hostility, insecurity and defensiveness. Hysteria. Panic.

It's a bit weird, really. One of the things about depression is it's sort of, well, cool – it's not embarrassing or ridiculous; pitiable perhaps, but fairly dignified. Anxiety is not at all dignified, and panic is certainly not.

The past two weeks: acid reflux, acid stomach; a throbbing pulse in my ears at night; occasionally a twitching muscle in my left eyelid; odd aches and unpredictable drops/surges in energy. Not a lot of those things, not constantly, but enough of them to startle me, and make me feel their barely concealed importance. The presence of all this – what is I suppose best termed anxiety – does make perfect sense, of course, as it explains the very existence of the depression as a covering strategy, not to mention its stability; but the anxiety remains a surprise. And, unlike balloons and birthday cake, it is not my favorite kind of surprise.

Therefore tonight, when a suddenly homeless, divorce-threatened friend – no, let's be accurate: acquaintance – wants to sleep on my couch, I have refused to allow him to stay for more than one night, and I have been entirely inhospitable: I just don't want this guy around, I don't want to hear his story, I don't want to help him talk through it. And therefore I feel embarrassed and angry at myself, and angry at him, that I can't be nice about this, that I am a Bad Host. At one point he came in where I was working to say: I just got the most abusive text message (implicitly, of course, from his soon-to-be-divorced wife), and it says... but I barked at him: This is exactly what I can't deal with right now: just stop.

Heartless, of course – what kind of human being am I not to help this guy out? – well: I'm a human being under stress. And although I know that there are human beings under a great deal more stress than I, I am, more precisely, a human being who is determined to handle some of his reactions to stress – to end up with different patterns over the next couple of months, different levels of self-management. So I simply can't accept his problems, talk about the miseries he's going through – a bit of overbalancing of my emotional life, and any prospect of really changing myself will go out the window.

It is embarrassing. Not impressive. Not dignified. But somehow necessary – so necessary I have thrown all politeness and hedging out of the window, even with this guy, who is frankly perfectly nice in his own way. But I find myself unable, or more accurately absolutely unwilling, to be, even for a moment, normally kind, pleasant, helpful.

Appalling behavior, in everyday terms. But, I think: entirely appropriate....

Uncharted landscape

My blogging has sort of slowed to a halt since mid-August – apologies (especially to those of you using neither RSS nor Bloglines, who have to actually bring up this page to see if there's anything new engraved on it – that must be a bit like switching channels and seeing only reruns). Have felt both complicated and dull, with flashes of change – none of which seemed terribly interesting from outside (i.e. from your side), nor terribly comfortable for me to write about (nothing really weird is going on, it's just, well, personal).

Being two weeks into the cognitive behavior therapy for depression/anxiety, I am struck with two things: one is how vast and how unknown my internal world of thoughts, feelings, and reactions is – whole huge stretches of a strange landscape that it seems as though I've never seen; which seems very peculiar, given how self-oriented (or, if you prefer, self-centered) I am, and how much therapy I've gone through, and how much of my professional work has engaged with my own reactions and emotions.

But no matter how much work I ever do to explore this internal landscape, the reality is so much vaster, its boundaries invisible beyond the horizon: it feels as though the choices I've made, the identity I've chosen, is just a few small fields scattered across this land.... no wonder we hold on to our identities so strongly: the vertigo of possibility is daunting.

The second is how flexible, how fragile, how unreal – ultimately, how contingent – my own thoughts, reactions, habits, are: how easily changed, how lacking in any essential or concrete nature. This is good of course; it means that perhaps I can change, from the rather hopeless and dull and too quickly aging person I've become, into – who knows what.

But, for the same identity reasons, it is disorienting: I'm certainly not wedded to my self as I am, but it's simply hard to get from moment to moment without the illusion that one's identity is 'real' – how do you make decisions, how do you think anything at all?...

Perhaps it is a blessing to experience myself as this uncharted landscape. I've always been interested in such landscapes – my work on the more elusive and bizarre aspects of high modernist music, poetry, literature; my fascination with the more outré tangents of psychology, language, and so on....

Perhaps I can even get interested in my self, again.

Sullen

Sorry I haven't written...

Continuing irritable, depressed, at a bit of a loss; plus intermittent unexpected headaches, and a chaotic gastrointestinal tension that seems, capriciously, to react badly to whatever I eat.

Summer is now technically over, we're on the verge of masses of work for oncoming students; three days ago a student, after apologizing for bothering me, proceeded to run through his own manic concerns, leaving me exhausted and actually angry at him.

Which somehow transformed into real rage in my dreams, remembered anger, the rage of the youngest of the family, who can't fight back....

On the other hand: tomorrow is my first appointment for cognitive behavior therapy for depression. Probably a good thing, and not a minute too soon: although I'm experiencing all kinds of resistance – not wanting to feel the way I do and yet not wanting any change, any disturbance in the hypnotic round of television and sleep and oblique misery.

Dysfunctional, I know. Aren't you grateful that I haven't been writing about it?...

Nothing

What are our friends doing, when we don't see them?

What are our favorite short story writers doing in the long periods when they aren't polishing the paragraphs we finally love so much? Or novelists when they aren't hewing away at the massive structure of their newest Bildungsroman?

Or actors when they aren't getting deep into the role on stage, on film? Even commercial actors, when they aren't doing one of the hundred or two takes it needs to get the spoon into the cereal exactly right. The politician, the...

well, you get the point.

What have I been doing when I'm not blogging?

Nothing.

Really, virtually nothing. Even less than usual: sleeping very long, being depressed but not very, having some long, tangled dreams of living in the room next to John, of traveling with Mitchell, both clearly dreams about some sort of trusted human contact; and being... well, nothing much.

Last Wednesday, in the midst of this fog of nothing (a familiar fog, unfortunately – I spent much of the mid-90s, and much of the last five years, in this fog; in addition to various other times, it's something I've done off and on) I met with Melinda, my therapist. She had the results back from several tests that measure depression and dysfunction; I was getting fairly high (i.e. low) marks, which didn't surprise either of us, though I'm still clearly in control of myself, etc.

She, and I, were however surprised at how many different things seemed to be quite wrong on one of the tests – as she said, "rather a lot of spikes" – spikes in, in fact, the areas named: depression, anxiety, dysthymia; lesser spikes in narcissism, negativism; and then lesser spikes than that in areas named dependent, aggressive, schizoid, avoidant, etc. Rather a depressing list in fact (though you'll be glad to know I scored very low in areas named compulsive and histrionic; but I scored high on 'disclosure' – i.e. the kind of thing that made Anne Sexton a 'confessional' poet).

Now Melinda takes this seriously, but not too seriously, as she knows me well and knows how well I function (she did after all put me in charge of the HIV patient group for the past three years). She knows things aren't terribly different for me right now than they have been for a long time (though she thinks Vanessa's and David's deaths were triggers of a kind, indicating the shrinking and fragmentation of a social world already too small to support me) – my unhappiness may be more fully experienced, because the newly reformulated HIV medications don't seem to be damping my feelings as much as they may have been for some years – but on the other hand she also knows I've really wanted help this summer: not so much because I'm exceptionally a mess, but just because I'm truly sick of being a mess, feeling energetic about doing something to make me feel energetic, if you follow my rather circular meaning. Besides, these spikes can be taken as evidence of the artistic personality indulging itself in orgies of interesting emotion (admittedly fairly true) and/or as evidence of exaggerated claims reflecting a cry for help, or for attention (also admittedly true, and not atypical of me). So, as I said: seriously, but not too seriously; or, to paraphrase an old joke, critical but not dangerous. Or something like that.

In fact, I haven't written about all of this here – although I thought I should write about it, given my tendency towards 'disclosure' – because it seemed structurally too hard to explain, too easy to misunderstand. Something Mitch told me during my analysis, in the late 1980s, was that I had a rather unusual personality structure – that my actual personality was indeed rather diffuse, fragmented, confused; but that my persona (i.e. the mask offered to others) had become unusually focused and strong, well-articulated and decisive, as though the persona were taking charge of things and telling the rest of me what to do. Which made an odd sort of sense: this is apparently not unique, but it's not very common either, which is why a lot of therapy and social interaction don't cope with it very well. It's not a disastrous personality structure, but it doesn't work terribly well of course, since various forces are sort of turned on their heads – and, ultimately, too much pressure is brought to bear on a part of the self that is not really made to grow and become stronger.

Although that is now nearly twenty years ago, and I've developed a lot since, I think my internal structure hasn't radically (or sufficiently) changed. Although many parts of my personality are stronger and more confident than they once were, when I'm depressed/uncertain/unhappy the persona is still the one in charge – which, of course, gives everyone (including the therapist) the impression that I'm in better shape than I experience myself as being in (pardon my grammar).

All of my blurrier, unhappier internal bits are made worse by what is called by depression specialists 'rumination' (which has nothing to do with cows, so skip the 'sad cow' jokes) – just as depression patients who seem to have benefited from treatment, if left to their own devices, keep thinking in the same old circles and get worse again, so someone who is too isolated from other people (i.e. me – and note that I am also very 'dependent' as mentioned above, which is no surprise) will simply think themselves into a more and more depressed, fragmented, helpless state (thus creating lots of slightly alarming peaks on certain psychological tests). Which is pretty much the story of my life, especially in recent years.

Ah well. So, all these messinesses: what to do?... and I insist on doing something, I'm frankly sick of myself as I am. (I never said that the hall of mirrors was a nice place: but it's where I live.)

She's going to have me doing some CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy – it's a dicey acronym; aside from computer-based teaching, it also stands for something rather kinky – they should have come up with another term) on a computer in her department, especially anti-depression CBT. I'm going to do some equally pragmatic work on my own with several books I have to hand, and see if I can get somewhere.

I don't mind the rather simplistic, rather mechanistic work that CBT involves: especially as I'm experiencing myself as almost self-hypnotized into depression – repetitive patterns (television, computer solitaire, web surfing) and isolation – I've pretty much been driving myself into a ditch, psychologically speaking, for years, but especially since moving here. And no, it's not enough to simply dig into office work, etc. – I need to develop an internal world that functions well, since my important work is done alone at home; getting focused and energetic about other people's needs will do nothing to change the important parts of my life and career. I need to turn the structure of all of this energy on its head....

I guess it's that, or write poetry.

•••

Postscript: 'House'

Though perhaps television is not always my enemy: an episode of House titled 'Meaning', where the bitter doctor, thrown off balance by change and improved health, is especially and pointlessly nasty to everyone, only to become increasingly bewildered by his own emotional fractures and reactions – I laughed out loud at the episode, although it had no jokes in it: Hugh Laurie did a brilliant job of projecting the discomfort of change, when it comes as a cure for despair....

Small broken things

The weather is beautiful, the past three days. Clear, sunny – not at all hot of course, it's barely 70 or so, but ideal. For the locals they think this is hot – one said to me yesterday that it was tropical: I just rolled my eyes and said, no, this is not tropical. It's like a pleasant April day in Virginia, or in San Francisco, or like a day in Los Angeles anywhere from March to May, September to November; life should therefore be ideal, as this is in fact the kind of weather I have missed for years, wanted to return to, in a prelapsarian Californication of the imagination.

Unfortunately, I'm not having quite the right response – or having only a pallid version of that response: hope, confidence, the aim to live, to grow, to move. Last night a key broke on my Powerbook; my reaction was surprisingly dark – the sense of things broken, of small things cracked and not working: the television program's digital freezes, my unhealing psoriasis despite the warmer weather, dust on the books, gnats in the houseplants, a headache for no apparent reason....

Becoming aware of that interpretation, of my life as a mess too damaged to be worth repairing, resulted in strange shifts and sea-changes, waves of interpretation and perception that seemed to shift as I slept or woke. I know that my life is cocooned, indulged, easy – but also relatively inert, directionless, dulled – interpreting one way or another is purely a matter of suspended virtual images, of the labels and names for things rather than the things themselves –

what glue, what small clamps and toothpicks, would repair these small, broken things?...

Seeing stars

Diamanda Galás is here for two days, performing and giving an interview. Last night's concert was amazing, with astounding piano licks and a ventriloquist's array of voices – but also almost parodic at points, with an edge of blackly camp satire I've rarely seen in her work before. I went backstage to talk to her afterwards, as I've done three or four times over the years; was gratified that she recognized me (she is, after all, a star). I told her I'd taught about her a lot this semester, and that five or six of my students were writing about her – she's always pleased with that.

Unfortunately, I also said several utterly stupid things – I always do this; I can remember managing to annoy such famous figures as Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Michael Frayn, Mauricio Kagel, Al Parker, and a host of others. I get too intimate too fast (some Americans can deal with this, few others of course), and say things that are frankly foolish. You have to be especially careful with Diamanda – although she is exceptionally intelligent and excruciatingly direct, and so doesn't need people baby-talking to her, she is also a great diva and a grand ego; it's no accident that her name closely resembles that of Callas (whom she quoted at me, possibly in order to suggest that I should be more careful in speaking to her).

Ah well. Some of these famous types ultimately forgive me, and even seem to come to like the clumsy honesty – at least they certainly remember me (just how they remember me is, in many cases, another question). There is, ultimately, no way I can ever be anything other than a bit of a jerk; I am long reconciled to that – it is partly why my career and life have drifted the way they have, downward and away from the successful and famous. And perhaps I'm not alone in this – I talked briefly to a bigwig from the concert hall, and he said something bitchy that would have gotten his head taken off if he'd said it within Diamanda's earshot.

Anyway, at the very least, I should be able to remember certain rules, so that I can prevent my relations with the great and powerful from getting any worse:

(a) never compare the star with anyone else or even mention anyone that the star may regard as a rival (this one is particularly hard for me).

(b) never agree in any way with any of the star's self-criticisms.

(c) never hand out your opinion of the star's work until you have a lead from them as to what they want you to think about it.

(d) never imply that the star has changed in any way over the years.

(e) never justify or defend anyone that the star has denigrated or disagreed with.

(f) never express hesitation about writing something adulatory about the star's work.

(g) never, ever, suggest that the star's age is perceptible – or not as perceptible as one might expect, given the facts – or that they look anything other than fabulous.

Maybe I should write these on the back of my hand – or, even more appropriately in this case, tattoo them on my knuckles for permanent reference....