Category: Death
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Trains • Perelandra • Complex
[Fragments from several days, several locations. A certain connectedness – but be ready for jumps in continuity: like a student film.] A lot of train trips the past few months: my analyst lives (fortunately very near the train station) in Leicester, about three and a half hours away… my 'local' supervisor in York (i.e. closer…
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Miseries
Yesterday I went to Leicester for psychoanalysis… unfortunately started to feel a bit off while getting to the train; suggesting IBS, or something very like it. By the time I arrived, three hours later… My analyst is fortunately a psychiatrist, so can write prescriptions; he kindly wrote a prescription and drove me around until we…
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Insight
How unexpected – some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the…
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Death in…
I, Aschenbach… Perhaps, partially, because it is November: Scorpio, darkness… the weather has been suddenly, sharply colder the past two weeks; a couple of nights of miserably torrential rain, though more days are sunny than is usual for us here on the North Sea. But Scorpio is always the darkest part of the year for…
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Brodkey
In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht… last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a…
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In-the-midst-of
A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between. Liminal, perhaps. With students, cheerful or as though…
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If we really…
At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or… – those clouds have moved into something unexpected… If, when we die, there is some…
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… double vision…
It is years since I've seen this… A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir… and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you…
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Types
Today was Steve's wake: of the 'eldest set' (and no, we don't have a term for ourselves – we are simply the members of the local HIV patient group who have lived the longest – generally from fifteen to twenty-odd years since diagnosis), he is actually the first, or perhaps the second, to die in…
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Airports (II)
I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them…
Paul Attinello 