It will be obvious to anyone who has read much of this blog that San Francisco still has, nearly thirteen long years after I last lived there, an intense fascination (or should I say obsession?) for me.
My love of small, beautiful cities, of gently artistic, liberal people, of hillside houses, of small neighborhoods stamped with vivid characters – a love that has been applied to my various experiences of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Sydney, Vancouver, and other cities that have at least some of those elements – is deeply embedded in my years in San Francisco (in the waking world, 1979-84 and 1992-6), and of course I always feel fairly unhappy (and admittedly a bit bedeviled) by my long exile from there.
Some of my strongest dreams have created eerie images of a San Francisco transformed, inventions of my imagination that I can still bring easily into my mind's eye: walking down a transformed Castro Street, cafés and shops burnished with a slightly golden glow in an evening bustling with happy, chatting people, paned sixteenth-century windows bulging outward, showing candlelit tables covered with beautiful objects inside the buildings; another transformed San Francisco of bamboo, pine totem sculptures and sunny weather, in levels separated by flowing, hand-carved banisters of tropical woods; and that dark, damaged San Francisco of grimy, rainy nights, abandoned buildings, wrecked cars, and people in dirty clothes fleeing from shadow to shadow....
Last night's San Francisco was the most unexpected yet: a truly immense city, climbing from the ocean beach, with huge, beautifully inventive buildings climbing a curving ridge, miles long, that ascends into impenetrable fog. A vast structure in a spiral, like a much larger Guggenheim Museum, filled with levels that hold smaller buildings along garden streets. Although the dream had a milder version of my usual frustrations in the background – dreamed endeavors to improve my station from temporary hired foreign servant to actually living there: a familiar mindset by now – it was still so calmly grand, so glorious, that when I wrote the dream down for my next analysis session I instinctively titled it: City of God.
A strange name coming from me – I can't really stand Augustine, and one of the sore points in my Jungian studies has been my lack of interest in medieval Christian imagery; although some of what I've been reading in von Franz over the past two months has made me feel a bit less uncomfortable about that, a bit more aware that such imagery can be meaningful, even for me.
But then it just seemed, well, I suppose the phrase has to be: so perfect....
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