The truth is: all points these days feel kind of like turning points.
Somewhere between August and September; between summer and fall. Between the expected weather for this part of the world, and this gloriously sunny day, when we sat out in a lovely Italian garden restaurant, and where the warmth and food were almost exactly like my memories of LA.
Between sabbatical and back to school, between stages of study at the Jung-Institut, between crucial points of applying for a research grant. Between various research projects.
Between waking reality and shifting dreams, between other people and myself... between memories of other people, and people who are here now....
Nineteen days ago, Thomas S. came to visit from München. He is a friend from the Jung-Institut, he has to write his dissertation, and has been panicked about it – our agreement: I will help him write it, tell him what to do next, keep him from getting lost, if he keeps me working. We both succeed and fail on a daily basis: but with the other one around, we can always get back to work the next day.
(Perhaps that's the true, deep part of this in-between-ness: I am in between ways of processing my own complexes around getting work done – I am absolutely not, by any means, successful, not yet; but no longer perpetually failing either.)
Since today was Thomas' fortieth birthday, we (Thomas, Rumana and I) went to the abovementioned lovely restaurant – a rarity up here: although it's possible to sit outside at a lot of restaurants, I've never been in one where the part outside was so pleasant and easy-going. So realio Italy, so trulio Spain... so memorably like California.
(Will I dream of Californias tonight? There should have been a Rimbaud poem about traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco – there is a line from something like Le bateau ivre that is almost in my mind's reach... no, I can't quite get it.)
At the table, I began, slightly incoherently (champagne) and tangentially (sunshine) to explain my love for Paul Monette's first novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, which is so intensely beautiful, which has such dense sentences, all hung around with a young man's deep desire to understand his own sad and joyous feelings, and the dense desires of others: and the gorgeous ending, with fireworks, and all the friends, outside, on the lawn. Where the narrator, who has always worried too much about time and life, who has been so deeply frightened by the passing years that he does nothing that could have anything to do with them, has finally relaxed, to be happy with people he cares for.
I do wonder, at the back of my mind, whether this calm transitional feeling will pass, and I will be anxious again, worried again, in that deeply nostalgia-possessed way typical of me (as it is of Rick, the narrator of the book): but, for today, I can see time passing, change happening, and simply marvel at how beautiful it all is....
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