in the hall of mirrors

Lingue

A good day at the Jung-Institut – the middle one of three hot days. Tess's writing seminar was very good – why in fact doesn't she do this for four hours a day for three weeks? that would work – and when people chose to read their work it included a man with a beautiful voice in Portuguese, a woman in Hungarian, and Spanish, Korean... some people translated, some preferred not to. And it honestly didn't matter: the sense of a beautiful and personal memory was arresting in each case.

And then another party with the Italians, plus a bunch of others: great fun. An outdoor barbecue – there's nothing like a mitteleuropäische butcher's to give you a lot of stuff to put on the grill – and people added a lot of their own touches right up to the chocolate, and we were there from seven until midnight (at which point I dragged Thomas away from Giovanni who was protesting that he was just about to put on more coffee, because, as I severely said, I'm old and tired and have a class in the morning).

The theme of languages kept drifting through the party, though in this group it was much more chaotic, more languages being used, more people having only certain languages and not others. A funny but rather smart-mouthed young Swiss girl told me what she thought of Americans who couldn't speak anything but English, to which I replied: so, exactly how good is your Romansh?...

That stopped her momentarily, enough for us to get talking a bit more friendlily about everything. It was interesting, in fact, when she noted that some of us were studying at the Jung-Institut; she said, á propos of nothing, well, I'm busy and perfectly satisfied and have lots of friends and I like Zürich and I like the idea of my work, but I am a little bored it's true. I told her to start keeping a notebook and writing – well, whatever seemed to come up...

When I finally got home, I was digging through my bag looking for my room key, past the two double bags of Weißwurst that they'd given me (left over from the barbecue), and I thought: thank God I'm not a Freudian, I'd never get through this door.

As in a dream

Küsnacht/Zürich: classes, seminars, meetings. Although everything is very organized and conscious, especially the way I do it (iPad at the ready, taking many notes and tracking various things to do), we sometimes mention to each other that there is something strangely aware and resonant about things – we may dream more, we all get into various moods, and if the training is hardly a via regia to the unconscious (comparatively speaking), one nevertheless senses signposts and, perhaps, small, handheld GPS monitors giving conflicting directions to triangulate across various inner states....

But, while I remember most of the week, I'm not sure I remember the important parts, so I won't try. A pleasant first interview, the first of six to study at the Jung-Institut; he was very kind and pleasant – but he did say that the photograph, and the e-mail I sent to schedule our appointment, both seemed rather cold and formal.

I can't do much about the photo (taken in the subway station in Newcastle, in a booth whose lights bleached out my face while a sign on the wall commanded me not to smile); the e-mail... well, there are several aspects colliding here: I do generally get fairly tired of business e-mails; and probably my students get abrupt communications from me because e-mail just doesn't seem to be the place to discuss things (in fact with most students it's a better place to cut discussion short, and tell them to come see me in person).

And perhaps, most of all, I don't want to pretend to be friends when the analysts are trying to decide whether to accept me – better to be a bit cool and give them the freedom to make a decision. Yes? No? Or am I projecting some kind of anxiety... ah well. Anyway he said he enjoyed meeting me, more than he expected to from the photo and e-mail.

Some of the more entertaining times this week were spent running around with Antonio, who has reached the stage of taking his first two qualifying exams. Roberto was driving – in an excessively Italian way at some points; I suggested, as we made a U-turn in the town above the lake, that the Swiss police might not be amused. He laughed and agreed, and kept on driving like that. We had a sprawling, chaotic late-night dinner-and-cigarettes-and-grappa competition at a restaurant that was known for being founded by Italian leftists – everyone (including the waiter) kept telling me very proudly about its history, which I couldn't quite follow to be honest. All I'm sure of is that a lot of famous Marxists have had coffee there.

At one point conversations were getting complicated, as I could really only speak with Antonio in English, and a mustached older historian in German, and a translator in French mixed with bits of ungrammatical Italian (I don't even remember Roberto's favorite language choice) – they were really happiest chatting at top speed in Italian among themselves, I think. When the waiter offered us Fernet Branca, at which everyone expressed disgust, I tried to explain the very strange and hilariously campy novel I was reading last month – Cooking with Fernet Branca – they may have thought I was a bit nuts, but in a far-left bar full of Italians that is not a social handicap. (If I haven't buttonholed you and tried to explain this novel, I can tell you that the narrator is an Englishman living in Tuscany who specializes in 'experimental' cuisine – garlic ice cream, oysters in chocolate, and other bizarre recipes – and thinks no one knows he's gay, when he is obviously the one who put the 'camp' into the Boy Scouts.)

Today I met Antonio and Cristina, who had come up from Milan by train for the weekend; and we met an old flame of Antonio's, a blonde German woman who was enormous fun. She had photos of all of them from twenty-five years ago – she was drop-dead gorgeous at the time; she had done some modeling and frankly looked like the exquisite star of an extremely chic European film that has a lot of people looking depressed in cafés. But now she's basically a hoot; when Antonio decided we should go down to the river and swim, we both said he could swim, we would act as parents and sit in the riverside café and drink beer. And make disapproving and parental comments. We had a great deal of fun, and talked about everything under the sun for a couple of hours as hunky Swiss guys (yes, I'm sure there were girls too) went up and down in swim trunks and the current season's tattoos....

But you must think I'm doing no work at all. Really: I am working hard. I am....

Zürich, noch einmal

I've been here in Zürich for a bit over a day now... a small apartment up in Asylstraße (Asylum Street – yeah yeah very funny I know). Very, very pleasant to have a small apartment, as opposed to the small hotel rooms without baths or kitchens I've taken for the past two years – and not much more expensive (three and a half weeks here is about £200 more than three weeks in a tiny guest-house room in Küsnacht). Although the cars in the street make a bit more noise getting up the hillside, and it's done up in Late IKEA – which means: good design, shoddy workmanship; there are already minor things broken, and the landlord will have to replace most it within a couple of years. Ah well, it's good enough; and I do love having a kitchen (saves money too).

The warm weather means that the Swiss are, on the one hand, tan, wearing loose and casual clothing, and being rather, well, sexy (a man on the tram rests his hand lightly on his wife's very lowest back); but, on the other hand, they still don't smile. Solemn to the point of being grim.

Which reminds me of something I was thinking last year... how does the general style of this city relate to Jung's concerns and ideas? Because obviously late 19th-century Vienna, with its overblown, self-indulgent eroticism and general neurotic fragmentation as the center of a disintegrating empire, is a major source for Freud's focus on sexuality, plus his insistence on rigidly controlling the analytic context. And people have talked for a long time about Jung's childhood in country towns and in eerily archaic Basel (I spent some time there in the late 1990s) as significant contributors to his ideas – intense Protestantism, layers of ancient and peasant cultures invading an apparently civilized landscape, and the sense of vast, hidden, mysterious roots growing under everything.

But Zürich, where he spent much of his adult life, is a banker's city: neat, cosmopolitan, orderly, a bit heartless – sort of like a very carefully designed fun park, that is actually slightly lifeless, with no real fun in it – none of which sounds even faintly like Jung, or his writings. Perhaps he was enough of an introvert that he simply ignored all that (which accounts for the pseudo-medieval stone house he built in Bollingen, I suppose); but I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something....

But it is evening; I've had some good rich rye bread, with solid cheese and meat; and must write up a summary of the love story in Gottfried's Tristan for tomorrow's seminar. The Swiss can, as they have infallibly reminded everyone throughout their history, take care of themselves.

Angels

In a few days I go to Zürich for another three-week study period at the Jung-Institut. This is also the time when I finally do entrance interviews – six interviews with three analysts – to see if I can become a fully matriculated student, not just a part of the 'further education' program. Exciting, a little nerve-wracking... but I'm fairly sanguine: I think I would probably be accepted, despite my lack of experience as a therapist (that wouldn't be unique, though I may need additional training in Britain) and any other limitations.

And, the truth is: if I weren't accepted, I would be very disappointed – my most interesting hopes/plans for the future center on studying there – but not shattered. I know I would need to discover some new purpose in some other way; but I feel that that would be possible, if I'm turned back (with a flaming sword, as it were).

The flaming sword?... perhaps it comes to mind because I'm spending time on a minor assignment for one of the courses at the Institute; we were given a list of books from various periods and asked to pick two and explain them in terms of their images of love. I picked Gottfried's Tristan (stranger than I expected – has anyone ever noticed that Tristan lies? I mean, he lies a lot? He's hardly Parsifal – or Galahad – or even Lancelot or Gawaine for that matter); and then e-mailed the teacher to suggest something non-heterosexual – and so he's allowing me to discuss Kushner's Angels in America.

A huge favorite of mine, of course... but it is a bit hard to read it, or alternatively to watch parts of the television production, again; it has always been incredibly involving, such that it distracts me from practically everything else. But if I can keep my emotional balance, keep working out a few small research projects, finish up the semester meetings, and start to pack for Saturday, I'll be all right.

It is interesting – and not very easy, given how sprawling and complex the work is – to think of how to briefly sum up the connections it makes between love and the archetypal. At first I thought, well really they're fairly separate – it is when relationships break down (Prior and Louis, Harper and Joe, plus the ghostly remains of relationships that involve Hannah, Belize, and even the angels) that the super- or ab-human breaks in. Which means either that the crises that destroy domestic love push the characters into various scary, lonely places from which they have to find their ways back; or that there is a metaphorical relation between them.

Anyway: it is good, if rather entangling, to spend time with this again....

Others

And the memory of Ted brings me back to memories of others, I don't know why...

First should be Paul P., partly because he would have put himself first. A brilliant composer who hadn't written many pieces, an especially intelligent student who intended to have a great future – I still have his complex, beautiful little piece The Standard-Bearers, somewhere between Feldman and Boulez in style – he became very ill for a long time, and was taken care of by his calm, undemonstrative friend Michael. Paul, perhaps because he lived for some years with serious illnesses, including lymphoma, and pain, was an example of the bitter patient - like Rodger several years before, he expected to be taken care of, including free rent at a friend's apartment in an expensive city (Rodger in New York, Paul in San Francisco) for years; but had so much rage for a lost career, he was always so angry, so sardonic about everything...

While Michael put up with it all, and handled the bills in between long hours at the office and flights around the world to his consultantships. I think Paul died near the end of the 80s – or was it the early 90s?...

Then there was John, a smart, very talkative, lively thinker, a sort of computer entrepreneur – and one who made no secret of an attraction to me: I thought about it – he wasn't at all unattractive – but I was still foolishly smitten with someone who didn't care about me, I forget who that could have been. And John moved too fast – or perhaps he wasn't mysterious enough, unavailable enough... So I avoided him, despite some lively conversations at his large upstairs apartment in the Haight. A few years later, I heard he had dementia – he was in a hospice on Noe Street, just two blocks from where I lived. So I went over there... he was not in good shape, not at all; I don't think he recognized me – he didn't seem to recognize anyone much at that point; I remember the other beds in what had been a pleasant small house, where they made people comfortable who weren't going to be around much longer.

Michael – tall, fair-haired, shy and very innocent; a roommate of mine for about six or eight months, with his large, friendly dog. Unfortunately, the dog, as the guitar tuning song goes, had fleas – for several years after he moved out, I would get bitten every summer by fleas who had found a place in the wooden floors, but nothing else to eat. A few months later – it wasn't long at all, maybe three or four months? – I heard he had already died. That was fast... and of course it was easy to feel guilty for being annoyed with him, for asking him to move out – but there were so many reasons to feel guilty, of which the best was always, of course, simply being alive.

At one point my friend (and accompanist, conductor, and occasional mentor) Bill, who still conducts the student choruses at UC Berkeley, told me he had been keeping a list of his friends and when they died. I already had a computer database of friends and their addresses; the number of names where I'd erased the phone number, adding "d." in the notes, was getting unwieldy. So I thought, ah well let's follow Bill's lead, and move those names over to a separate database...

But it was hard to keep up with it; and people would vanish, or maybe vanish, and it was hard to find out whether they had simply moved, or died, or were just not hanging around in the same places as I was, any more. And, frankly, it wasn't a list that I really wanted to keep up to date...

But then that's part of the convenience of thinking you're going to die soon: any fussing over tasks left undone fades, every demand promises to evaporate into the thin, cold air.

Robert was an upsetting one: an incredibly handsome, muscular man – very sweet, and a bit prissy in the way some gay body builders (the ones with little dogs and manicured fingernails) can be. I was fascinated with him for some years, but wasn't his type (couldn't bench press worth a damn, sadly enough). But he was with me in the gay men's chorus, and we often saw each other as friends.

So it was a bit shattering – by which I mean, I suppose, a bit more shattering than usual – when he contracted cryptospiridium, a nasty opportunistic infection that left him blind in both eyes. He continued to live for a couple of years after that; but his big, clear blue eyes were filmed over...

And, of course, boisterous Andrzej the translator, with his outrageously handsome lover (I passed their old apartment in Berlin last fall, near my hotel). And Rich, shy, tall, a sort of country version of a man's man; and Brian, and Doug... although I wasn't around for any of their deaths, I only heard about them afterwards.

But all these names are becoming impossible; when I started this it was a clearly outlined handful of men, three or four – and now more and more of them gather around the trench by the pale river –

And I have papers to mark, and spreadsheets to correct. So, if I can, I will close this book and put it back on the shelf.

Hiccups

This evening, for some reason, I had the hiccups for a while – too much salt on the salmon for dinner, I don't know; something. A bit bothersome; they took a while to go away – and while I had them I flashed back on a strange, affectionate but excruciating memory.

Ted used to have a bunch of friends who were musicians come together at his house in the Valley to perform obscure musicals. This happened once a year, around his birthday – I remember us all performing the brilliant but peculiar She Loves Me (I had an especially funny couple of solos in that one as, I think, the obnoxious bass who runs the business), one of the Wodehouse musicals, and various other historical oddities. Ted would organize everything, rehearse us separately a few times in the weeks beforehand, and then manage the evening, playing piano, conducting, and putting together a complicated party/performance/workshop for about twenty people that left everyone elated, at the ease of putting something together and the electric challenge of making something interesting out of recently sightread music and comedy.

But, of course, this was the late 1980s, or perhaps the early 1990s. Ted got sick – very sick – and his mother moved into his house to take care of him. And it was nearing his birthday: he had not put on a show the previous year, as he had already not been in the best of shape; and on this, what was obviously going to be his final birthday, it was out of the question for him to do anything. He was thin, spotted with KS lesions – and, worst of all, he had the hiccups: he had had them for two or three months already, they were a minor side effect, and the doctor's couldn't manage to stop them, couldn't keep his diaphragm from spasming every minute or so, for months. And months.

It was agony to watch him: he looked so tired, so haunted – bad enough to be very sick and obviously dying, but the hiccups kept him from physically relaxing, from spacing out, as they went on through the night, every night.

We organized a performance for him, done in his living room, as usual; one of the women organized the music, a man took charge at the piano, and as we weren't as good as Ted at putting together a whole show it was a revue of different tunes, some favorites we'd done before, or isolated songs from here and there. It worked; he was obviously deeply touched, and his mother kept exclaiming, isn't that wonderful!, trying to convey some relaxed happiness to her son as he lay on the sofa in that sunny suburban LA living room, with a blanket over him and a towel around his pillow.

It was a good thing to do, and we enjoyed it, and he was so grateful that we had done this thing – an admittedly amateurish but heart-felt reflection of all the work he had put into creating his party-shows with, and for, other people. But it was a bit shattering to watch, and wait, for the next, inevitable hiccup, the obvious pain and exhaustion tied to it –

I hope that, at some point that day, however briefly, he forgot his body and its torments, in the music.