Today I went to York for the second time, to my new analyst, S.
I like her a great deal – and this might be a very good change for me: it feels as though my two major analysts, John and Mitch, have both been people who were fairly similar to me – which seemed necessary at the time; but lately I have become impatient with myself, and my dreams for six months have spoken with increasing urgency of a need to connect with the feminine, the sensate. And S. is sharply intelligent, but also kind, not sardonic; and she picks up on very different aspects of our discussion – ones that I would struggle to keep in focus for myself. So this might be a very good thing indeed.
***
The day was ruthlessly cold, but the train to York is much easier than the one that went beyond Leeds, and York itself is easy and charming enough that I walked through the weather to look at a small part of the town before taking the train home. In a used bookstore, which incidentally had a considerably larger and more sophisticated range than is the norm in my own city, I saw the second edition of Stefan Brecht's book on Robert Wilson, the one on the 'theatre of visions' – but ultimately didn't buy it, as I was fairly sure I had the first edition back at home.
And I do have it, though I haven't glanced at it in a long, lo-o-o-ong time. I once found it dense and remarkable – now it seems easy to rapidly grasp, to understand...
But understanding brings up some very strange lights: illuminations from when I first saw this, back in the 1980s; what I thought of the book and its subject then, what I thought of the author, what I thought, and what I now think, of myself.
Because this book, and the one from the same series on 'Queer Theatre' (which is also on my shelves), each trumpet on the flyleaf the same monumental list of nine books by Stefan Brecht – "The original theatre of the City of New York. From the mid-60s to the mid-70s." A phrase pregnant with possibility, full of the fantastic richness of a time that always makes me envious – and that makes me think, bloody hell (yes, after ten years in the UK I can think in British curses), why did he get to know all those amazing people – from Robert Wilson to Charles Ludlam, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Merce Cunningham... and here I am, just sitting in my flat with my books.
Ah well I shouldn't complain, I've actually worked with Monk and Wilson, met Cunningham and seen Foreman, so I haven't been completely out of the loop. Monk even recognizes me when she sees me, so I'm not a complete loss.
But in looking through the list of nine books, I thought: well, I should see if I can order some of the others on That List...
Well: they don't exist. Stefan Brecht wrote critical, documentary, intelligent but highly opinionated and personal books – two of them, and the Quuer Theatre one isn't very long, in any case – but he listed all those others, which simply don't exist. If you get the impression from the list of nine book titles that he intended to pass his ultimate judgment on a huge range of the successes and failures of an extraordinarily vivid time – and that is clearly the case – then, well...
he simply never did it. He died in 2009, the known-but-not-really-famous son of a famously arrogant (or: arrogantly famous) man, two of the books in existence, notes for two others to be published posthumously. And in looking through the Wilson book, I am struck by the final section, which I hadn't remembered – where (S.) Brecht explains how Robert Wilson, between 1974 and 1977, started to 'fail' his own visions....
Arrogant. Arguable, perhaps, that Wilson had to work through different means, move away from his original approach – but still the book became arrogant, high-handed, foolishly dismissive. And, in the same context as this dismissal, (S.) Brecht planned all these other books, in the grand monumental fashion of One Who Would Deliver Opinions On Everything (ouch! that hurts, when I turn it back onto myself). And the books are flawed with summary judgements, and most of them aren't written, and he married and taught at universities, and then he died in 2009 at the age of eighty-five....
Talk about failing your visions.
No, that's pointlessly nasty. Because I'm not angry about these unwritten books, any more than I'm angry about my own failure to write so many books, to do so many things. It is just that that huge List Of Books which is foregrounded in these two volumes is such a monument to the grandeur of expectations; to the certainty that one will walk up to life and knock it over, as though it were light as a feather...
And that anyone will deserve to have done so! Even now I am mildly indignant over that last section of the Wilson book, "Decline of the Theatre of Visions", where (S.) Brecht explains how Wilson started to – as far as (S.) Brecht was concerned – fail. Such an attack, embedded in such hubris: and a perfect illustration of the fact that people can only do what they do, including both Wilson and (S.) Brecht; that our fantasies of conquering the world are, at least for most of us (even for Genghis Khan?), truly empty fantasies...
***
Perhaps this seems so sharply, almost sardonically, brought to my attention today, because in order to pass one of my Jung Institute exams I have been reading on Buddhism, desire, compassion, and theories of reincarnation. And I am thinking, in a mildly amused way, or in a way that reflects past misery, about failure and success, about the book I really must complete in the next couple of months, about whether my own life is a success or a failure – usually I'd say it's a failure, but now I'd say that with a mild and increasingly unworried shrug, walking through the sparsely blowing snow of a street in York in my long black coat – and how that keeps getting reflected in my own analysis, and in trying to decide what I think of all of these discussions of death, of reincarnation, etc., etc.
And I am even thinking, perhaps, of love and happiness – if those aren't just memories for me. Yes, those things come up in my dreams, too.
So perhaps, if (S.) Brecht could manage to live out his life with these books blaringly, embarrassingly, painfully listing the huge projects he never finished (see! Debussy was smart enough to keep his list of projects in his work room, and not publish them like a fool); and if Wilson could go on making art works, even after being publicly told he'd failed, so early in his career; and if we all get second chances, or perhaps we get endless second chances; or even if we simply live such that we believe that we get second chances, then...
Maybe it's all not such a problem. Maybe I didn't miss out on everything that mattered in the seventies, or in life; and maybe what I'm doing right now is actually just what I'm supposed to be doing...
And maybe – could this, then, be true compassion? – (S.) Brecht is fine, just where he is.
Comments