Category: Memory

  • A different three in the morning

    'Three in the morning' has shown up in several of my published papers around AIDS since the mid-1990s. It generally refers to the same nexus of memory, feeling, implications: a quality of being in a hospital room, an anonymous room that could be anywhere, in the middle of the night; lights are very low but…

  • Anniversary, again

    The eleven-year anniversary of this blog…. Well, hey, it matters to me. A bit. ••• After a brief but unpleasant virus – probably caught on that hasty train south and back – everything has a slightly disconnected feel to it: still coughing occasionally, but so what?… work to do, but really, who needs it?… Shower,…

  • Easter week

    Maundy Thursday. In the night I wake coughing – side effects I think, but perhaps I also caught a minor cold on the train back on Wednesday. Paracodeine (given to me by Antonio, a couple of years ago – I had the flu in Zürich, missed most of the classes that month; on the last day Antonio, who is…

  • Closing doors

    So: in a burst of extraordinarily blinkered and sociopolitically aggressive pettiness, the UK government pulls us out of the EU. I've been joking for months that I have two passports, but unfortunately they're the ones nobody wants… but just try to trade them for something more respectable, better. Slovenia? Great, flat trade, or shall I give…

  • Temporal

    Perhaps the problem is one of time… Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival. But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course. Time…

  • Summa

    A dramatic year… One that stank for the world, of course: major moves into aggressive idiocy. But it's not very interesting to talk about Brexit and the UK, Trump and America. Or about dead celebrities – some good people are gone, yes, but that happens always. And many of them were old enough that grieving doesn't seem…

  • Sketch of a conversation

    … You didn't really think you were having strokes, did you. Well, if memory – no, I suppose not; there would be other symptoms? Yes, there would. So: dissociation. But more dissociation than I should expect, yes? That sense over the last few months, from the last year – more connected, more of myself aware of…

  • At this point

    A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years… in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that…

  • Glory, glory

    Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced… Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones,…

  • Negative capability

    Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…