in the hall of mirrors

Midnight

In my small hotel room at the top of a guest house in Küsnacht, on Sunday night; the nearby church bell has just struck twelve.

Studying again at the Jung-Institut – busy, exciting, sometimes embarrassing or ridiculous, often wonderful – did I really take thirty-six pages of notes for a week's seminars? Single-spaced, mind you. Well, I'll certainly have something to study.

Yesterday I went into Zürich, walked for hours with Donatella (too far really, there are bright red blooms near my ankles – a bit scary; I think there's something off about my circulation since the stroke, my legs and feet don't seem happy when I travel). Wandered off to a famous gay gay restaurant that now serves distinctly good sushi, where because of a lack of tables I sat with a handsome lad at a table outside – he was amusing and brashly energetic, it was fun to talk to him; I was doing my charming-older-guy thing, which he seemed to enjoy.

But I was tired today – went into the city again but it was almost too much for the day... back by evening, and the thoughts have been crowding in so that it's hard to sleep. Was reading Charles Lamb, a collection that mixes the essays with letters, and gives such a strange sense of his hair-trigger awareness of people and their complexities. And thinking of Gerhard, whose brilliant lectures barreled through so many countries and lost pasts as he limped on his disintegrating hip, and the lovely Serbian musician, only twenty-five years old, in her summer batik skirt after she had lain by the lake today, discussing a workshop with me on the train into town.  

A sense of time: a few days ago was disoriented by listening to Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, something I know better than to do (it always leaves me too sad – Sondheim is eighty this year, I hope he is doing well). Somewhere among the optimistic excitement of studying, the retrospective sorrows of memory, the disoriented sense of different locations and time lines, even the painful sense of the difference between me and the young people I meet here, is that sense of time's always multiple nexus: how good it is to know so many people, places, events, and how hard it is also. How difficult it is, to live in time.

If years of travel and the AIDS epidemic hadn't left me alone, I'd probably comfort myself by listening to someone breathe in their sleep beside me. Instead, the bell brings me midnight, mockingly.

Citizen

And today I am a British citizen.

A pleasant ceremony, a bit long but the mayoress and city administrators were attentive to detail and acted as though they enjoyed it – well done, as it's already their tenth such ceremony this year.

A bagpiper played the Northumbrian pipes – my colleagues who play folk music would have liked his oblique dig when he explained that they were not Scottish bagpipes, and the difference was that Northumbrian bagpipes were for playing music. (Wait for it.... He and I laughed over the line afterward.)

My attitude toward citizenship has always been rather pragmatic: I am not generally impressed by governments and those who govern, on the whole; as far as I'm concerned their jobs are simply to take care of people, period. Not very sophisticated politically, but it puts me firmly on the left.

So it was rather nice that the British naturalization ceremony was less jingoistic than some I've heard – it emphasized democracy and tolerance, obedience to the laws, and allegiance to the Queen without any real strings attached. A fairly rational, modern naturalization for the most part; rather like a lot of modern European attitudes (though admittedly not all of them of course).

But, unexpectedly, something really struck me: a slightly sad, or relieved, sense that some of the other people at the ceremony – African, Chinese, a woman from Venezuela, a group of muscly young guys from an Arabic country, a fragile elderly lady who looked like she was from southern Europe, and a number of others, probably fifty or more – had been through seriously dangerous, frightening experiences in getting to that room, and to citizenship. Some, of course, looked comfortable and happy, or prosperous, or merely a bit frazzled from herding their children around and keeping all those small dresses and sports coats clean. But a surprising number – could it have been as many as half? – seemed to have haunted faces, the faces of people who have crawled away from a war, who have bargained their way past a border, who have been uncertain, perhaps for years, as to whether they would be sent back to a place where their lives would be ruined.

Even the tall, dramatically energetic African woman with two small sons – maybe 8-9 years old, each of them? – and then you notice that one of the sons was albino; and suddenly you'd recall what happens to albinos in some central African countries....

It's all guesses, impressions, of course; I don't know for sure. But a lot of people in the room looked as though they might have lived through something terrible, and survived.

Maybe that's why the city staff looked as though they weren't bored by the ceremony....