in the hall of mirrors

After Küsnacht

So: I am back from a week in Küsnacht, a posh southern suburb of Zürich right on the Zürichsee (where, as it happens, Tina Turner lives – and no, I didn't see her), where I studied at the Jung-Institut for a week...

It was good; some of it was great. And yes, I'd like to go back, and study for the full diploma – I figure it would take me about six years.

It's hard to sum it all up more precisely than that – probably because it also involved so much engagement with the other Intensive Study participants, and some more tangential encounters with the training students and faculty; we told all of our stories so often and in so many ways that it now feels difficult to rehearse them again. I also have twenty single-spaced pages of notes from lectures and seminars... hmm. Yes, I'm a bit of a grind.

So here are just some fragments....

(1) It is wonderful to connect again with Central European seriousness: it is associated with such a sense of purpose, and in a way much more optimism and pride than similar work in the UK. The library and bookstore, the big lecture room upstairs, the Aula and terrace room downstairs – they have the right smell, as it were, the right quality. (Except for the chairs – I'm bringing a cushion next time.)

(2) The range of lecturers and presenters: some highly intellectual, some impassioned – all fascinating, with one exception. That exception gave me a day's discomfort; I suddenly realized, to my horror, that I was about to be subject to the student's subordinate position for the first time in years. And though I know that in any institution there are teachers who are disliked by some students, and there are even frankly those who are semi-incompetent at their jobs (lecturing does after all set a bizarrely wide-ranging variety of demands), I hated the idea of having to pay attention to someone I couldn't stand.

However, after an earnest discussion, the head of the Institut assured me there was no need to attend lectures or seminars that didn't interest me, that the hours would be covered easily without me being trapped in boring miseries for hours on end... (except, perhaps, for those chairs. Actually, I think they could make money renting cushions).

(3) One workshop leader was especially remarkable, and in an unexpected way. Although I don't plan on doing child/teen/developmental therapy of any kind, I was impressed by a German children's therapist, a 'sandplay' expert. He had us discussing and painting scenes from Finnish myths, and then ended with slides (of sand pictures) and discussion of a young patient (12 years old) he'd treated a decade ago. You could see his enormous patience and clarity – throughout a seven-hour workshop with about ten people, he never seemed to lose attention or get tired of us, nor to judge anything we had to say. An amazing talent, very Zen in a way, of being constantly and completely with people: and probably necessary for a good child therapist....

(4) I definitely ate too much, and spent too much on food. Something about the social connections, the different contexts, at points even the sheer excitement, led me into making a true pig of myself... I'll have to curb that next time.

(5) Of course as soon as I came home I had reason to worry that I would have no ability to be any kind of therapist, let alone a Jungian analyst. I have a complicated student who has been sending me long e-mails complaining that I'm oppressing him by giving him assignments – and who uses a lot of weirdly twisty, slightly stalker-ish arguments and barely controlled, abusive hostility. Well, I answered bluntly and angrily – which made me feel as though I would never be sensible enough, clear-headed enough, to handle this kind of work.

But perhaps that's what the training is for. (And yes, David R., it would also help to do a bit of your meditation so that I could keep my cool in such situations.)

(See no. 2 for the other side of that kind of relationship.)

(6) Unexpectedly, a very kind and pleasant man, who lives about two kilometers away from me – Peter – is already starting his training. So there's somebody nearby who is engaged in this work, which should help a lot.

(7) As a group, we thought of a couple of ways to help pay for the tuition and expenses; Antonio and Cristina complained that pizzas cost 20 Swiss francs (= £12) while they would cost 4-6 euros (= £4-5, this week anyway) just an hour south in Milan; so they want to run a pizza place at bargain prices. This led to masses of jokes about symbolic pizzas – some examples: Unconscious Calzones (everything's hidden of course), the Borderline Pizza (no crust, just a mess of tomato sauce and melted cheese that drips all over the place), and the Undeveloped Function Pizza (a pizza crust with an underripe tomato, a jug of milk and a raw piece of pork sitting on it).

(8) Jung's house at Bollingen is fascinating (although I wouldn't be able to deal with the lack of heating and plumbing, myself); a beautiful lakeside situation, a house full of fascinating details. They need to publish a book of pictures before it starts to decay. And, although I don't want to become some kind of disciple (drink the Kool-Aid!), the place does give you a strong sense of an extraordinary man, someone whose thoughts are well worth following....

(If you are on Facebook, you can go look at my photographs of the house. I suspect it is impossible to take an unsuccessful picture in certain places...)

(9) I'm sorry to say I was a bit disappointed to return home. Nice to see my apartment again, and of course I sleep vastly better in my own bed... but I didn't want to come back, really.

And I still wonder: is this just a kind of idealization, of displacement? That studying in this way is merely a way of getting out of my life? Because I know well enough, at my age, that you never really get beyond your life – as they say: wherever you go, you're still there....

(10) My own fundraising idea is to publish a Guide to Zürich. I've written some notes:

Fun Facts about Zürich

1. Trains in Zürich are expensive.

2. It is not true that the trains in Switzerland run on time. I clocked one at fully one-and-a-half minutes late, and yet there was no apology forthcoming from the government.

3. The maximum legal size for any dog is nine point five inches in height. Any breed is allowed so long as it is classified as terminally cute.

4. Eating in Zürich is expensive.

5. The Zürichsee, despite its name, is a lake.

6. However neat and tidy you leave your hotel room, the Swiss person who cleans it will find a minimum of nineteen items to straighten within the space of a few minutes.

7. Chocolate in Zürich is extremely good. It is also expensive.

8. It is not true that every Swiss person is better at speaking four languages than you are at speaking English. I have seen a waiter pause for as long as fifteen seconds before remembering the correct French word for something everyday such as ‘quince’.

9. Walking in Zürich is free. However, whatever you are walking towards will probably be expensive.

I may have some work left to do on this....

Einpacken

As I finish packing, many thoughts and images cross through my mind, past and future. And one from the present: dismayed horror at my clothes – do I really look that shabby, that dull?

But I suppose I haven't much liked the way I dress, or the way I look, for about six years – since, in fact, about the time of Australia. Ah well; to be expected I suppose.

And some amusement at my own choices: four books, two for the Jung seminars, plus Banks' Matter (mentioned before), and – this is the one that is a bit over the top – Steppenwolf. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know: clichés of German culture, personal development (isn't it a weird kind of Bildungsroman?), and Jung and mysticism and meaning and the Alps and....

But of the various questions that float up and disintegrate, one stands out: am I fleeing, or going towards?

...

Unanswerable. Because, right now, of course, the honest answer is: both. And only time, and luck, will tell which is uppermost....

Electric

In the midst of packing and printing maps to Zürich, and rather grandly ignoring St. Valentine's Day, and reading bits of Jung and von Franz – and, not least, despairing over a hideous eruption of lint all over my best black jeans, which I'm trying to fix late into the night – I had a note on my calendar that there was an important dance performance tonight. Looked it up online: Twelfth Floor, choreographed by the sadly late Tanja Liedtke, with members of Adelaide's fabulous Australian Dance Theater and DV8...

well, I thought, okay: I still have hours before I have to leave, I must go see this.

It was amazing (as was Australian Dance Theater's Age of Unbeauty and Birdbrain; and perhaps as are things by DV8, though I still haven't seen them, or their videos, yet). It's got brutal and dark stuff in it, and is in the unhappy context of an institution (suggestions of psychotic rage, schizophrenia, fragmentation, chaotic sexual/violent responses, oppression). But the range and intensity of movement is so incredible, the sense of space and complexity and wit and power....

I really love this kind of stuff. As I said to a friend – and, though it sounds overstated, I think it's pretty much true – the truly great dance experiences I've had in my life have been either Balanchine/Stravinsky or ADT. Styles extremely distant from each other, it's true: but both of them have that astounding expansion of visual/kinetic imagination; they both show me entire worlds I'd never even thought of. In fact, I tend to have an instinctive feeling in these contexts, as with theater or music pieces that are really amazing – that if only this complex, extended, fascinating awareness could go on forever, life would be worth so much more.

Oh, and there were some nice small connections: Anton and Kristina Chan, and probably others, were in some of those previous productions, and I'd spoken to them in those past years; and Anton even remembered who I was. And my friend Tim, the actor/dancer whom I pushed a bit last fall to get back into teaching, was there – he's now doing workshops locally, which is wonderful (and implies a swifter success for him than I'd expected even at best); and he loved it too, and left full of ideas.

BUT: now, of course, I must get back to packing, and go off to study a world of the psyche, of power, of beauty and fear.

But it seems clear that this wasn't an interruption on the way....

Sub specie aeternitatis

I am very, very lucky – despite hosts of administrative things happening this week, most have gone off well; most answers to e-mails today were yes, okay, done; and I don't leave for Zürich until Sunday.

Therefore there is some quiet time to finish reading some of the Jung I wanted to read before leaving; and there isn't a feeling of chaos, loss, uncertainty.

Somewhere among the waves of ideas and small events and actions, I can collect things into a sort of a pile: yesterday's snowbound meeting with students and friends to talk about life and AIDS; my colleagues waving cheerful good-byes today, asking for chocolate from Switzerland, but with everything else apparently fine and requiring nothing from me; a few chapters of Iain M. Bank's Matter, the latest Culture novel, wherein though stress and violence are in the forefront the background is filled with those strange people of the Culture, who can live casually and freely, without lack, for however long it takes until their lives make sense to them; and Groundhog Day plays on TV, its strange plot a reminder that taking advantage of one's time can lead to incredible things.

And among all those, and the snow outside, I hit a phrase in the middle of Jung's autobiography: sub specie aeternatis. By the standards of eternity, according to eternity, as though it is a piece of eternity, something like that. And Jung is speaking of making sense of his life, by those standards: and the phrase, the idea, seems to glow as it never has before – I want to remember to live as many days as I can, aware of where they, and I, stand in eternity....

Projective

A burst of anxieties and slight despondencies: after several days of talking to students about their futures, and in a few painful cases having to tell them that their marks were not high enough to allow them to go abroad as exchange students – which feels like telling them: no adventures for you, my boy – I'm having a small cluster of imagined futures, projected worries, about going to Zürich.

As though I will also be told: sorry, no dice... you're too old; you don't have a psychology degree. And, of course, feeling that someone will say: if you really wanted to study to be a professional Jungian, you would travel three times a week to Lower Bumsrush to meet with a supervisor... which, at this point, I simply won't. At my age, I don't respond well to peer pressure.

So: another day of students, most cheerful and engaged, a few flaky and unhappy... and a flotilla of e-mails from people who suddenly want me to do a huge variety of things for them, just before I'm leaving. Typical.

(There is also some anger involved: after all the things I've done over the past three or four weeks to get ahead of work, to prepare what people may want before they ask for it, now various people are forgetting to do things due to me... ach wohl.)

Or maybe this is just how the world feels sometimes, to an introvert....

Multitasking

Apologies for not posting. Many students, classes, administrative e-mails flying back and forth; and preparing to go to Zürich next week to study with the Jungians.

(As in the Gilbert and Sullivan tune: "mystical Germans, who preach from ten 'til four"... though that was written too early to refer to Jung.)

But life isn't chaotic or annoying, particularly, except in some of the details; things are going fairly acceptably. Given how nervy I was about getting back into the saddle with my first years, and teaching a new course on an ambiguous and messy topic, it's all turned out to be incredibly easy... acknowledging of course the usual masses of obsessive-compulsive over-preparation. (What must my students think when they see a seven-page introductory bibliography.)

Perhaps because under all this I'm reading... there is a seminar in feminine psychology during the Zürich study week and we're supposed to read either Robert Johnson's She (a sloppy pamphlet, even lower than his usual rather easy level, a plagiarization of Neumann with actual published grammatical mistakes!, and something I read in half an evening); Neumann's Amor and Psyche, which is intelligent and deep and fascinating, and which I'm finding surprisingly apposite to my own concerns; or von Franz' Golden Ass of Apuleius, which I'll read this week. (Yes, I know: I am most certainly a bibliomane and a grind, reading all three possible texts.)

Perhaps the von Franz, written by a strong woman and (apparently?) power dyke, and twenty years after Neumann, will reassure me about my vague background concerns about essentialism. Neumann is very intelligent and complex about it, but still... a certain gender essentialism is always the most disorienting thing about Jungian reading.

But: this has felt like important reading, like reading that gets somewhere. It is possible, no, probable, that I won't be able to start serious studies as a Jungian any time soon (all possible supervisors are in dismayingly awkward locations); but I'm engaged with it. Reading about something that actually matters, becoming aware of things that matter: a sense of change and growth and movement, like – strange as it may seem, in mid-February, with snow outside – fresh green leaves....