"I'm not myself at the moment."
Variations on this expression are common currency in the languages I speak or more or less follow, but there are times I think we feel what it is to say that without being able to understand, let alone express, what it means.
Occasionally too, I can identify so closely with people in the novels I read (and then distance myself from to review) that the border between my sense of self and the one a really good writer gives characters and the ambience of their world becomes porous.
The latest on the list -- so long and so rich that a critical write-up will be a while in the coming -- is Kim Stanley Robinson's already very well-received 'The Years of Rice and Salt' (Bantam, 2002). Already, 100 or so pages in, the author has caught me up in a spell with the wealth of his ideas and some of the protagonists.
Not being myself, yet seeing long-abandoned former selves awakened and imperiously demanding recognition in whatever it is I'm becoming (for I can only perceive that we are all multiple entities, an impression confirmed with the passage of the years), has had strange effects.
I love the Wildcat dearly, for instance, would like to see her -- and help make her -- much happier than she can be in her arduous daily existence, compelled to make the best she can of circumstances and some people I certainly could not have tolerated for month after month after month.
Yet I have been every bit as irrationally mean to her this week on the 'phone as I have gifted her with flowers in this journal -- ever more the "experiment" of its sub-title than it was even when I launched it.
The Wildcat has become, I know, one of the "characters" in a multi-threaded tale I seem to be unfolding here nowadays in a way that has a couple of the Loyal 4 ¾ asking for more! It's a challenge to write about her -- and me -- in a fashion which is honest and as upfront as I dare without a single concession to those who want her identity blown.
So I scarcely felt myself when a rather odd tale she told me -- about how a "gorgeous man" did something strikingly unusual in the cold, unfriendly town where she's currently compelled to be -- made me suddenly angry and, I knew soon enough, quite alarmingly jealous.
Where the Wildcat is, most people are these days stodgy, uncommunicative and inclined to cliques and, no doubt, élites. A city renowned for its culture and artistic achievements, its bourgeoisie prices most of that fare for the mind and the soul far beyond the reach of the average wallet, certainly hers.
In Paris, the Wildcat would and does turn appreciative heads when she busies her way along the avenues and through the older quartiers dear to her heart. But where the Wildcat is, the dull citizens ignore good looks and feline grace. Foreigners and immigrants as vital to its economy as they are in many sizeable western towns find themselves perpetual outsiders, objects of a racism which will sometimes even dare to speak its name in some of the politics of the place.
B., who is a vivacious, affectionate semi-academic and writer from Cameroon, survived several years of being black and being different in this place of the Wildcat's only because she has a more remarkable ability than most of us to shut out reality's brutalities and make thinly but richly populated worlds of her own. At least, this is how the venerable Tony and I think she managed.
I should have been happy to hear of the elegant fellow -- no native of the place -- who exchanged eye-language with the Wildcat on a journey home, very politely accosted her when they got off at the same stop, and asked, for some reason in English, whether she was "lost".
Such attention is rare in that town, a town in a country which did not leave a favourable impression on me when I made swift passage across it many years ago. A place where even the most convivial of people have a tough time making any friends at all.
The "odd" ships-in-the-night encounter, the Wildcat said, left her regretting that she hadn't found the presence of mind to reply: "Yes, I am lost. Take me for a drink somewhere warm."
Instead of being happy for her about a few moments of pleasure, sad about one of life's little lost chances as she saw it, I felt the anger of a jealous adolescent broil up, was nasty to her then and remained so for a day, enough to say a few more unmerited things.
This mean-mindedness made me feel bizarre as well as unpleasant. Not myself. Remote from the self that enjoys writing about her, among others, and hopes little gifts strewn on her path, should ever she read them, lift the Wildcat for a while out of that place where she is, take her mind to places where she'd be happier.
Well, there is a part of me which has reached far forward across the years to remind me that my teenage rebellion went quite unfinished, partly suppressed, partly socialized and sublimated.
Some 'bloggers call their journals things like "identity crisis" and other, often funny, terms to express insecurities and instabilities. One I enjoy, for instance, is All Out of Angst, whose considerably younger writer sometimes echoes my own sense of the absurd, irreverent and ridiculous.
With the music and other things resuming their rightful priorities in my life, come an armada of long-buried memories, sailing up from somewhere in my unconscious I scarcely knew existed. The strangest things! And with them, feelings and whole moods, even, I've not known for a very long time.
Adolescent jealousy is just one of them.
All this, in someone who thought he'd been psychologically analysed and shrunk to fit society, in ways which had wrenched about every skeleton and the other bone fragments out of the dusty wardrobe to be inspected, discarded or re-clothed.
Somebody who'd learned, more or less, no longer to project on to others.
Not so, it would seem.
I have, albeit initially grudgingly, apologised to the Wildcat for being cruel, but find it somewhat easier to write about, even publicly, than to discuss on the 'phone one of the subjects which interests her: me.
"The simultaneous shutting down of all your electrical/electronic stuff is interesting. Some will say this is nonsense, but there is a theory that moods can affect machinery, and some people have a stronger magnetic field than others. A friend of mine could make TVs flicker and light bulbs go out by just walking past. And a psychologist friend who was going through deep depression had constant mechanical problems with his car, which he felt were connected to his state of mind. Don't know what I'm trying to say with this!"
This part of Natalie's further comment under my Verdi item doesn't strike me as "nonsense", any more than Karl's remarks elsewhere about acupuncture and the parasympathetic nervous system. You are simply trying to say, Natalie, that I'm weird, which I knew...
I've known many people pass through such phases, occasionally prolonged, where they find that what's happening in their heads triggers improbable events in their "material" environment, but I've never had anybody tell me that these episodes have lasted much more than a few months.
Though unexplained, one or two friends prefer to acknowledge that these things happened, shrugging shoulders, rather than worry that they went "slightly crazy".
In a perceptive letter, my father reminds me that he's long thought of me as "a poet, rather than a journalist."
Hmmm. I'm not torturing myself with any notion, Wildcat, that my career took the wrong turn in 1976. But behind that paternal conclusion lies very much more.
As I prepare to return to the Factory sometime next month, I know that life there can and will never be the same again.
While there's a purely physical aspect to my Condition -- the curious way in which my digestive system works -- I can't help starting to believe that it all began in May at least partly because my body launched an open rebellion against what I then was, did and thought I could tolerate.
Since then, I've been through a mind-shift.
The journalist in me must make room for the other bits that refuse to be stuck in a cupboard any more.
My introduction to Robinson was his near-future 'Antarctica' (Bantam, 1998). I went on to devour the Mars trilogy.
Never one to shy away from issues of identity and the sense of self among the many themes of an immense body of work (the latter, in the Mars books, tied in with some very probing thoughts on the nature of memory), Robinson confronts them directly in 'The Years of Rice and Salt'.
This weighty alternative history looks back, for once, to recount some seven centuries of a world in which Europe, let alone the United States, are nowhere significant on the map. The predominant cultures are eastern and those of the Islamic world.
As they very likely would have been had European civilisation been totally extinguished by the Black Death in the 14th century.
Reincarnation is the literary device Robinson adopts to lead us and his characters on from one great chapter in this alternative world to the next. In so doing, he astutely questions our received notions of identity as oriental philosophers have done for centuries.
It's just the ticket, right now, for this midlife reshuffling of my-selves.
3:54:27 PM link 
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