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....

Comments

[Dave Robinson]

Nice to see you alive and enthused. I lol'ed at some of this. Let's talk soon about OCD.

love
D