Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot....
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A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience, difficult to describe because of its purity – this was not dark, or nonsensical. Could it be related to Jambo's work on my liver – if some of the body's long, depressed toxicity cracks and fades, is there an imaginative/psychological response?....
As for what I experienced: a sense of all the ones I've known who are dead (there are many), and it was as though they were standing around me – but charged with the extraordinary knowledge that I am alive, still alive, against any odds. And I could talk to them about it, tell them I missed them, though not with sadness; and they are happy – no, actually joyous – about this: not the envy of the ghosts one sees in a Japanese fairy tale, but a strange feeling that all of the dead are glad, even exultant, that I am alive. Blood flowing, the body with a vivid, concrete pulse: my body seemed so solid, so bright....
*
Nomi wants to chat on Skype: I realize that Mitchell, when he goes to Northampton for a year to teach at Amherst College, will live right near her. Two favorite people, and they would get on so incredibly well: and she is a Jungian analyst, and Mitchell will have left his analyst in Los Angeles – this might be quite wonderful. There is a feeling of family, of the connections that make the world hold together and grow.
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Thursday I was angry: really angry, at at least one colleague, one I usually like. Possibly undeservedly: I felt as though I'd had enough from him, and couldn't even speak to him. Consumed by it: and that evening, when a parent of a student called to harangue me about something over which I had no control, I was not pleasant to him. Nothing I'll get in trouble for: but the whole problem of the irrational 'customer'...
I didn't want to talk to anyone later that evening, about anything.
Friday morning was still darkened by this; then it passed, when I went to...
*
It is Monday night at my favorite Italian restaurant: the usual Italian lesson, though Barbara looked tired – perhaps it's good that she's off to Italy for two weeks; I hope she enjoys herself, she is a good and pleasant teacher.
After the beginner's class, while the intermediate class continued behind a curtain, I relaxed over a risotto and a glass of wine – and talked to all my favorite people there: the dark-haired, smart girl who is working on her dissertation (of course I always say: so have you gotten some work done? and then we discuss everything she is doing), the wiry one who plays football (and needs to take care of that knee problem, but he shrugs and throws his hands in the air), and... the one I'm always kind of in love with: a good man, with a charming face only slightly thrown off by a long nose beneath his warm and kindly eyes; he stops and makes up jokes with me, and I would like to just spend time with him; but I know enough to leave, laughing.
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Two weeks ago Saturday: Michael asks me over for dinner and a movie, while Andrew is out with friends. At first I think we're going to see an adventure movie I don't care about much, then he flips over a DVD of All About Eve. I pick it up, and say: Mitchell told me to watch this years ago – he even gave me a book about it for my birthday... Michael, incredulous: and you've never seen it? Are you sure you're gay?
So, after heating M&S Asian dishes and arranging them on trays, we watch this famous film: and it really is remarkable. Cooler and more controlled than I'd expected – the sniping is less overt: I was expecting wig-snatching, but what we get instead is sharp looks and obscure anxieties as the creepy Eve extends her web. A startling cameo by Marilyn Monroe, who turns a few dumb-blonde lines into memorable gold. Then of course the end, when Eve lies on the sofa uncaring and exhausted: for the first time in the film she isn't poised and acting, and it is brilliant...
now that she has all she wanted, it's ashes.
*
I run another session of people living with HIV, speaking to medical students – we do this every two weeks, January to June, for the past nine years. But I'm colliding with one of the guys: he is intensely intelligent, but he likes to take over and run the show – and a third guy, new and shy and not very articulate, is bowled over. I am sharper and sharper with the talkative one – and yes, you don't need to point out that this is shadow stuff for me: he is like me at my most irritating. By the end, the talkative one is in a barely controlled rage, the shy one shut down: and afterwards the shy one suggests maybe this isn't for him, and the talkative one sends out an enraged e-mail.
And I answer calmly, professionally, that we're grateful for his contribution, that we need to give everyone some space to talk. He is still not happy, but slightly mollified. I know I was careless, and this is partly my fault: but I can understand all that without anxiety.
And I am privately amazed that I can construct such a cool statement of reason: only slightly affected by the storm of feelings, it is as though I have a way to walk through such things, without them tearing at me....
*
Thomas telephones from Zürich on Wednesday evening: he has passed the last of his exams, and is now a Jungian analyst! He wants to thank me for helping him – I feel like a proud father, full of praise and affection. I tell him to say hello to everyone who is there for the winter semester. His graduation will be this summer, in the week after I take the last four of my first-half exams – hopefully I will have good news then, too.... I look forward to that party.
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Last week: a tricky and exasperating administrative task, sitting with Jo at the computer – but we gradually get more and more hilarious over the ineptly designed university software, over the piles of work she has to do, over everything, really. And it all turns into a great joke, a familial burst of joy: and, as the audio technician at the next desk watches us amazed, this silly administration turns into the most fun I'd had in days...
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No dreams. This worries me: an analytic session in just three days, and I remember no dreams at all?... yes, I am dreaming, I know it: but the door clicks shut just as I wake, and I have no idea what happened, not a fragment or a figure or a street. What is going on, how can I get back in touch with... but of course I am always too heavy-handed with this relationship between the conscious and the unconscious: which is probably one reason that the door sometimes stays shut for weeks....
*
A student comes into my office – in his years here, he has always been especially smart, especially alert, hard-working – and darkly cynical about everything: life is hopeless, people are stupid, nothing ever gets better. He and I have argued about this a number of times, in lectures and seminars, and his attitudes have softened a bit... but we give each other a certain polite distance.
Today he is disappointed in his mark, which is high, but not as high as he would like. We talk, and increasingly something unexpected pours out: among the rapidly shifting opportunities and losses that he is crashing through in his last year, he is feeling despair, a strange grief: he is nearly in tears at the complexity of the impending successes and failures of life. And I pull us away from the discussion of the mark to tell him: go home and write down how you are feeling. Yes, write your dissertation, write your papers, work on your recital: but this is serious, you must face it, catch it, stay with it. And I'm here if you want anything, at all.
There is a clarity on his face, and a frightened but excited sense that there may be a way forward, as he leaves...
Left behind in my office, I realize that I couldn't have planned my response: it was intuition, not training, and I still don't know how I could do that as a professional analyst. But it was arrestingly right: and with no time wasted looking for the solution....
*
Laura Mvula, on Graham Norton's show: while two other stars were pleasant and professional, and Mark Wahlberg made a fool of himself, this exquisitely present young singer, with her passionately alive instrumentalists and singers, came in like a ray of real beauty in a tired chain of media commercials. Not so much a matter of virtuosity, though she and they were all hugely capable: but of a deep, full connection to the music – that sense that they could inhabit it completely, without doubt and confusion, while aware of everything that it could mean. And, of course, shift from one thing to another without professional concerns: watching the guitarists clap in counterpoint... beautiful: her song 'She' has this quality.
After she has sung, she comes out and sits with the guests – sitting straight upright, slim and fresh-looking, paying attention to everything: it is all new, she doesn't want to miss a beat. But she answers Graham's questions with confidence and grace: looking like the most real person in the room...
*
Another acupuncture session yesterday: again, an experience that was rich and strange, though not so ecstatic as the first. Lying there, I was looking back through my life, at particular scenes, in so many cities and towns, on four continents: and the results were...
well: it was as though I knew that what I needed to do was to take back parts of myself, from all these memories, from all these selves. It will come as no surprise if I admit to a great deal of living in the past, in memory: I am always tied to the dead, to places where I was happy or excited or sad, or had great expectations of what I would do with my life, what I would become.
And, of course, in this small northern city, I have tended to live for ten years as though everything is already over: as though my real life happened in San Francisco, in Los Angeles – in Berlin, in Hong Kong, in Adelaide. In Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen; in a field with a gamelan near Ubud; in streets at night and sunny avenues, in bed and on a bicycle and, more than thirty-five years ago, in a small, nearly vertical apartment in the Village in New York...
So it was strange to – so rapidly and assertively, though with kindness – go back to all of these selves, tap them on the shoulder, and tell them: it's time to leave this place, and come back to me. And somehow they all seemed to come into me: the lonely boy walking near the golf course in Virginia, and the laughing man wearing leather chaps while working the door in the Berlin bar at 6 am – even the intensely tired thirty-five-year-old looking at his face in the mirror in Joe's bathroom in San Francisco, up for a visit that showed me that my past was already getting lost.
Hardest of all was a version of me from the early 1980s, sleeping in that beautiful small apartment with its green garden through the glass doors: morning sun, and I am next to Adam – he is asleep, but I am happy...
But even that self gets a tap on the shoulder, and I say to him: you have to come back to me now; Adam is long dead, this place is gone. This is all memory, you can't live here any more.
When Jambo came back in, I told him about it... Of course I was crying. What did you think I was doing?
That was all about twenty-four hours ago: I am still strangely awake, relaxed, working fairly fast.
As though I have more blood, more air: more life....
*
Sun today, and the past few days. The light of the North Sea: and the sharp clarity of the promise of a northern spring...