After midnight, difficult to sleep, hearing David Lang’s shimmering, wispily endless Orpheus Over and Under pieces.
There is something bothering me about Neville’s illness and impending death (aside from the obvious), plus its effect on his partner Chris, plus our mutual friend Dennis’ moving away up the coast, and the possible knock-on effects of these changes on Susan and Rob coming here to Sitges every summer, and thereby on me – all suggesting the death also of a knot of relationships that had seemed firmly tied to a geographical location. Is Neville terrified of his own death partly because it will turn out that he, as a former beauty and fine dancer, but ultimately as an appendage, as a small speaking role, in the life of a known scholar – that he will wink out like a candle, and after a year or three only a few people will even remember his existence, and that too faintly?...
Then there is my brief fling-ette with Nick, as I cross through his tangle of friends – Sarah and her new girlfriend, Hilary and Paola and their dramatically, publicly disintegrating relationship, even obnoxious Ray and his sexy little baseball guy: my relationship to these people is obviously transitional and unimportant, whatever impulses appear or seem to be required. And of course there’s the whole hallucinatory quality of a town that becomes alive in a particular way at a particular time of year with people who fly here for particular reasons, some always present, some frequent and known visitors, some impulsive day-trippers... the knowledge that perhaps, if I am awake, I should go out and see the bars or clubs. Where I would be anonymous, another guy in the corner... would I care, would anyone?...
All these things suggest something exasperating about time: and how they all seem, in the dead of night, to be splintered across time, the advent, beginnings, peaks, fadings, deaths of relations all simultaneously visible, immanent in a way that threatens the shallow apparent reality of this shimmering, deeply unreal beach town. The evanescence of minor artists, of the rootless, even of those who take their place in a family: our fading existence.... Something about how anticipation and disappointment drive so much of time’s apparent forward motion, about how things that seem so real, so concrete, fall apart or were never really there to begin with – and how this has become especially true for me, living too quietly and too dimly in my head, at the edge of other people’s relationships: because I have allowed myself to be cast as a disposable character, a walk-on with a few lines – because I have made choices that have increasingly made my life a pale appendage to my supposed but also practically nonexistent writing, and since I am thereby only at the edge of things that are happening to and among other people, my status inevitably fades, evaporates, whenever the situation changes....
Perhaps it’s a reaction to my impulse to come here this summer: I missed Susan, wanted to see her, knew she and her husband would be here. It’s like family, or almost like family, and my impulse to come felt almost necessary, as though I would be missed and things wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t show up: but what if the family changed, what if the pattern of summer visits changed, would I actually be missed?
And, if it all disintegrated and no one that I knew came here, where would I go?... would I be left looking for the next European vacation spot that interests me, making friends (really: making acquaintances) in some other summer spot, getting used to a different pattern of store openings and closings – all in the rootless manner of someone who is perhaps too old to have never really had his own story?...
