in the hall of mirrors

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....

A bit dulled

Last night: sitting around with D., V.'s husband and H., V.'s best friend. They were relaxing after a day of doing lists – lists of people not to forget to invite to the service, lists of music, lists of this and that. They are both in rather better shape than they were.

And, fortunately, we were all too savvy to ask the question, How are you doing? – that being the exact invasive demand that has been driving me nuts (and undoubtedly them too).

But it was easy to segue from everyday things – the dumb movie on television with the sound off, the drinks on hand – to carefully constructed discussions of big things: what will D. do now, where will he go?

I drank a hefty slug of the chocolate liqueur that I'd given V. for Christmas. (D. offered me the other chocolate liqueur that V. had given me at the same time – great minds and all that – which I'd had to give back to her as it included cream, and I couldn't drink it.) Which is probably why I'm a big groggy today – not really hung over, well a little bit I guess....

Too many demanding e-mails from too many silly people. I'm finding the Flaky Student thing particularly exasperating these days. Perhaps it's just the hangover.

Exasperate

This is actually the hard part: people stopping me in the hall, being sympathetic, saying how awful it is that V. has died. I always have lots of trouble with this part – actual disasters don't faze me that much, but talking about them afterward in any but the simplest terms makes me a bit nuts.

It's sort of like something I've repeatedly mentioned at the AIDS presentations we make through the year – when you get through something, wherever you are with it emotionally, every time you bump into a new person and have to explain it to them, you have to go back all the way to the emotional beginning. With people who have AIDS, you have to deal with Oh, how awful for you.... And I tend to flee from all that, I'm afraid – today, after teaching and doing various administrative things, I sneaked out to have lunch (with a glass of wine) and then home.

You don't need to tell me that this is a kind of avoidance: I'm sure I must seem cold and quite ungracious – but I just can't revisit all the attendant emotions, let alone appear to generate them when I'm already past certain points. Acting shocked a week later than the truly shocking part is frankly kind of hard, and I get resentful that people seem to want me to do that – it feels a bit like professional mourners weeping and throwing themselves across caskets. I mean, if you're paid to do that it's fine, but....

It's easier when it's in an e-mail; I'm just not very good at the face-to-face evocation of emotional drama. Besides, I can't help feeling that V. herself would have been irritated by the same stuff – she also preferred a rather dry, almost clinical approach to disasters.

Another angle on all of this is the brilliant thing my friend Laura K. said to me once. Laura is very intelligent, forthright, efficient – a lot like V. in fact – but also the sharp one in a family of chaotic and self-indulgent people. When her youngest brother died in his late teens in an entirely pointless and dreadful swimming accident, she ended up managing the whole crew as they flung themselves about in throes of agonized grief; she was mostly pretty patient – but at one point she said to me, "It's already so awful in itself – why do they have to make it awful?"

My sentiments exactly.

After V.

Change, time, sudden breaks, new landscapes. Familiar to me; but this now is after a long time of relative stasis.

V.'s death coincided with finishing several things I've been working on for several months, and of course my increasing well-being over the past three months from the new medications; and considering, with increasing definiteness, moving on from northern England. (No, of course, that may not happen soon, because in my work it is hard to change locations quickly: but I have an increasingly sharp eye out for possibilities.)

Having V. missing from my life means: less kindly nagging, less support for getting things done; less pleasure and fun, and less refined education in the arts of self-indulgence. And, above all, less comfortable trust and safety: over the past year, especially, I had become more comfortable with her than most of my friends and acquaintances; she had the great advantage for me in being, in a way, sort of American in her social/emotional outlook – direct, not skittish or difficult, neither too easily wounded nor xenophobically judgmental. But perhaps I can try again to do what I thought I should do after Philip Brett's death: internalize some of what I got from her – push myself forward in work and life, rather than depending on her to do so.

(Not perhaps so hard to construct, psychologically; I was looking vaguely upwards and commenting to her on various things all day yesterday. I don't claim any particular rationality, nor any formal religiosity, in my attitude towards the dead – I'm just happy chatting with them when it occurs to me to do so.)

Then of course there's illness, and sharing its experiences: but that seems to transform into the idea that I need to take better care of myself. Odd, that every time I am tired or have digestive problems I'll want to talk to V. about it – well, I'll probably talk to her about it anyway – for a long time.

And there is the feeling that I need to allow things to change, a lot: and be more assertive in those changes – to move on, not just to anywhere, not just where the wind blows me, but to some place that works better, for me –

to, in fact, create such a place....

Fin

End of a year. Another year, I suppose I should say – but the phrase "end of another year" has a tired, endless quality to it that I don't like.

Given as I am to worrying over the past and over what I haven't done, or have lost, this of course would typically bring up fairly irrational worries – but I'm older and calmer, and can merely observe such ideas and not get overwhelmed by them. So, without any particularly Protestant guilt or progress-oriented foolishness, I think I can come up with some resolutions:

(a) to continue finishing all those old projects that people have wanted from me, so that my writing/research can be less attached to other people, to the guilt of not keeping up, and to have almost nothing that is 'for' someone else on my list of projects by the end of the year. I believe I can keep the South African project in line with this, by just making sure that anything I agree to do is about my own work, not contributing to someone else's.

(b) to stay calm and not let work, of any kind, get the better of me.

(c) to move again towards habitual behavior of the kind that I need: some regular exercise, even trivial exercise like walking; some regular writing; perhaps, even, meditation (something I have been running around but avoiding for more than twenty years now).

(d) to, as frequently as possible, gently and casually move my attention away from the garbage floating around – bad television, exasperating or foolish people, impossible situations – back to what seems worthwhile: books that go somewhere, battles I can win. To, in fact, choose my battles.

That all makes sense, I think. It's a strange night, dark, stormy, windy, rainy – I have made a possibly foolish plan to walk over to V. & D.'s with A. in all this weather; hopefully it won't be too much of a mess. Or if it is, perhaps we can easily and mutually cancel. But then I wouldn't get to have a piece of that outrageous Xmas cake, the one that apparently has 52% icing, by weight.

Happy New Year....

***

Later, after coming home.

A. and I did indeed brave the elements (okay, one element really, since it wasn't raining by the time I left – and there was no falling fire or dirt blowing around, so merely a lot of cold air is the truth of it) to go eat and drink some of the vast amounts of holiday food left at V. & D.'s (never got to the Christmas cake though, ate too much to form that kind of commitment to a cake knife).

On the way home we were discussing – why are New Year's entertainments, live or on television, so – desperate, so fake? Among the cheesy shows D. kept flipping past we caught some really talented and funny bits from the 2006 version of Secret Policeman's Ball; but then we'd flip back to some dreadful live show where celebrities of various talents would be engaged in cheapening their skills, performing a variety of songs and acts that were aimed at anyone who would watch or listen, and yet somehow not entertaining at all, but only embarrassing. An awful mystery, an unattractive curse – A. thought it might be because these performances were masquerading as parties, which seems plausible. If I were still a performer, perhaps I would avoid appearing on New Year's Eve – like the plague!...

A slice of orange

A slice of orange floating in the bath oils....

There is peace in my heart these days: or, to be less religious-sounding, there is a certain peacefulness in my heart lately. I almost hesitate to mention in it; not because I think that saying it will make it go away, but because I have claimed at other times, to myself and others, that I am happier, calmer, these days; and it hasn't really been true, yet, or the feeling has faded again.

The short-term version is: I have finally gotten over the overwhelming, frustrated rage at being sent out of Australia four years ago; that, although I had embedded so many older and newer dreams in the image of that one job, that one new life (that sunny, happy life, warmer and more entertaining and sexier; a fulfilling job working with people who more closely share my ideas and interests; head of department, and I heard last week that the woman who took it in my place is soon to be Director of the Conservatory; and, of course, the little house in Woolloomoolloo, with the boyfriend working in the garden – all of which assemble many of my experiences and hopes from San Francisco and Los Angeles in one package, and gave them an antipodean spin I found irresistible), I have finally gotten over losing all those dreams for a different life, a different scale of expectations. Something that only time could have done.

But there is a longer-term aspect, because frustrated rage has not been unusual for me, ever since I was seventeen – I have often felt cheated; I would like to say 'obscurely cheated', but I have tended to be obsessively specific about what went wrong with my life at various points. Wrong university, shabby jobs, AIDS, Reid dies, shabby jobs, failed composer, failed performer, yet more shabby jobs, and of course debts and forced moves. A long and tiresome whine....

But I simply don't feel much that way any more. It is interesting that my goals are increasingly inner ones – to write, to think; I have always been concerned with my inner world, but now perhaps I am trying to make my outer world match up with the inner one, rather than the other way around. Maybe it's just age, maybe it's just time – maybe it's even this opportunity to write freely and yet connect to reading eyes. I would want some specific event to have made this change, if it is one, happen, but probably there isn't one – as my analyst said when I went through Jungian analysis between 1987 and 1992, if it actually works, you won't know why or how.

I don't mind that I don't know. It is the holiday season; I have certainly had a fair number of holiday seasons alone, but this one doesn't bother me – I'm not steeling myself for anything; the small pleasures are just fine with me: dinner with friends, parties here and there, buying a few gifts. The small but living tree, decorated with ornaments many of which were made by my sisters (in some cases as much as twenty years ago). And especially all those things we use to bring strong tastes and smells into the dead winter landscape, the gifts of a stronger, waxing earth: the dates, the almonds in honey, the chocolates: the winter apples from a colleague's tree, the oranges.

The holiday – all the holidays, in a slice of orange....

Diagnosis

Was reading Storr's Dynamics of Creation, where he analyzes creativity (as viewed through biographies of 'great' artistic figures) in psychological/psychoanalytic terms. It's one of his earlier books, and a little clunkier than the later ones – Storr has made a career out of intelligent but popularly-oriented explorations of various experiences in psychological terms; one of the pleasantest things about the books is his willingness to be speculative and essayistic rather than dogmatic, which is rather rare in the world of psychology.

Anyway, he coasts over various artistic personalities, viewed through a diagnostic lens – schizoids, manic-depressives, etc., mostly interpreted in terms of Kleinian theory (I told you it was an older book – does anyone spend much time on Melanie Klein these days?). Naturally, I thought of myself throughout – and clearly my symptomatic problems are most associated with depressives (unfortunately not manic-depressives, which is probably why I don't get much work done). The Kleinian diagnosis was of course a bit insulting, including the identification of sexual fantasies, which was rather annoyingly plausible – I hate all the Freudian stuff about development, stages, and sexuality, especially because it claims that gay men are so 'arrested'. (And I also tend to dismiss most Lacanian theory, although some of my colleagues use it a lot – it seems to me merely a mass of pretentious and paradoxical obfuscation made to cover up the problems embedded in Freud's ideas.)

But it's interesting to think about aspects of a 'depressive' condition, and how it might dictate some of the problems I'm always trying to solve for myself. I know that psychological self-diagnosis is always pretty doubtful, but I can't help hoping that some analytical thinking would help lead me out of – the hall of mirrors....

Reality

My eldest sister is in the hospital for an operation... it unfortunately brings up some worry; she is always cool and offhand about serious things (she is, in fact, always the unflappably dependable one, the smart one, the one who raises no fuss – typical eldest child in that context).

But of course the rest of us are worried – in fact it's always remarkable how my siblings show at different times different facets of themselves that resemble either my calm, generous dad, who was always interested in practically everything, or my anxious mom, who worries about and guards against practically everything instead.

Thinking about my sister, and hoping she's well – and, somewhat more demandingly, that she will continue to be well....

On reflection

The formal articulation of so much mental garbage does tend to leave me thinking I'm being rather silly. I mean, you'd think that at my age I would remember that the best solution to being unproductive/unfulfilled/unexcited is just to get on with it.

A dream this morning, clearly grown from my concerns of the past weeks: something about being disastrously late with homework... which is perhaps the truth about my life. And, as I bark at my postgraduate and senior students and get them to outdo themselves by simply insisting that they make it to the deadline and do the best they can, clearly I need to do some of that for myself....

Next (above) post: one of my favorites of my own poems. Hey, it won an award (from a gay newspaper in San Francisco, the Sentinel, some time in the early 1990s, when poetry about AIDS and mourning was especially common). Anyway: I like it.

Persona

Last Tuesday, I was in a pub with a colleague from another university, and was eventually joined by a circle of friends from my own university (most of whom have blogs, by the way). We had fun, I was rather giddy (saying some tacky things, but I have friends all over the world who are accustomed to my tendency to do that); I enjoyed myself, especially in contrast to my feelings of the previous three or four days (which had given rise to a few fairly depressing posts); but the difference between those emotional states bothered me a bit.

Last night, Barry and his partner Paul, and my dear friend P–, came over for dinner, and to discuss the workshop Barry and I are going to run in October about AIDS and writing. Great fun again; I cooked, rather chaotically (chicken, tomatoes, leeks, all with rather lot of chili oil, in pasta with lots of pepper), and we all got along famously. Then P– stayed over, and that is always satisfyingly and rather domestically comforting; it actually makes this feel like a home, which is wonderful of course. I felt odd about it again, though, and told P– so; he said it was just Catholic guilt, but I don't think I agree – aside from the fact that I'm not Catholic, it doesn't seem that I don't think I deserve to enjoy myself.

Instead, it just feels as though my life is oddly out of balance – oddly because I don't think I'm entirely dysfunctional: always, through the years, I have had many close friends, now scattered on several continents (even in the worst times, I knew there were always wonderful people I could call who cared what happened to me). And, in a social setting, I may be rather silly, but I get along well with lots of people; and I can enjoy things, respond to things, relate to people and places.

So: why is there such a painful gap, such a disturbing lacuna, around the area of editing, research, writing? These are things I enjoy, at least theoretically, and in fact they're the only things I do that really matter to me; and at more reactive tasks (answering the phone, responding to an emergency e-mail) I don't do badly. But generating my own universe on the page: even knowing that all writers and many academics have serious difficulties with that, my own problems seem rather bizarre and nonsensical. I just can't figure out why it's so hard.

And now the school year is going to start, and I can't regard it with anything but dismay (though blahfeme seems actually stoked about it – an apparently admirable emotion I can't even understand at this point, let alone identify with). It all seems so oppressive: needing to engage with a variety of people, to make the usual mistakes, to make real decisions and respond to real problems and personalities – I'm not excited about it, especially as this prefatory week has already included collisions, and as I keep feeling I've taken on more responsibility than I'm really interested in engaging with.

Back when I was doing Jungian analysis in the late 1980s, with my remarkable and rather bizarre mountain climber of an analyst (perfect for me, as I wanted to go far and deep to understand myself – so many therapists refuse to go further than what is necessary to make one content), we discussed my diagnosis. That was kind of a concession on his part, since he knew I would talk and read about it anyway. He said that my experience of myself as diffuse and unclear represented the fragmentation of my personality (in ways distantly related to narcissistic and borderline personality disorders – very distantly in the latter case, I might add, I've never been that screwed up – borderlines are of course pretty scary). He said that the way I managed to get by was through depending on my persona, that is, the external image of myself as presented to others.

This is, of course, backwards: a 'normal' person should have an integrated personality, and base their persona loosely on it. I was sort of doing it the other way around, since my persona was fairly solid and well-defined, while my 'self' wasn't quite so well put together. Which doesn't mean I was concealing myself – on the contrary – but perhaps what I was concealing (and not very well, as I've always complained about this to friends) was my own fragmentation, my own endless uncertainty about what I want.

I'm a long way from that time and from the person I was then; almost twenty years from when I started analysis, and fifteen from when I finished. But the problem, if it is one, is such a basic part of me – I just wish I knew how to move further past it....