in the hall of mirrors

Splitting, integration, symbolization

Having passed my remaining propaedeuticum exams in Zürich (which means: I passed the eight theoretical exams that end the first half of study; there will be seven final exams in two or three years, but they will be based more on practical experience), I have been recovering…

As we know (you in the back – didn’t you know?), I am an introverted intuitive thinking type. Which means: big concepts, rapid, complex absorption, and a lot of missing detail (even, missing accuracy, as my own students sometimes know).

But, of course, individuation – the Jungian holy (wholly?) grail – involves development of all of the parts of the self.

So, the fact that I callously pushed my sensate side (my most unconscious side) utterly out of the way while my primary functions took over for the past two months, so that I could study for all of these exams, is… well… not very impressive.

I’m fairly unimpressed with it, anyway.

The signs?... not remembering my dreams (have I really remembered only three or four dreams in the past two months?); anxiety, pressure, a ruthlessly Faustian focus; snapping and snarling at people (hey, some of them deserved it), pacing, waking at odd hours every night, restlessly; and, worst of all, a remarkable disintegration of my relationship with my own body.

After all, I did decide that I wouldn’t have time for yoga or meditation while studying… yes I get it, very, very stupid. In any case: painfully wrecked digestion such as I haven’t had for ages, and in the last week of exams an unprecedented bloom of allergic rashes at various sensitive spots across my body – and they really hurt.

Since last Tuesday, the last of the exams, I have been recovering – rapidly. Rested, skin almost clear (and, best of all, not hurting), digestion still querulous but settling down. Cheerful, sleeping well… and, yes, still highly self-critical.

So, I haven’t learned, at my age, to take this all in stride?... It reminds me of my PhD exams in the early 90s at UCLA. I had discovered something at a health food store, a so-called Sage’s Ginseng, which, alone out of an entire line of products, consisted not of a bottle of sixty or a hundred tablets but of just ten tablets, each in separate plastic envelopes. Which, I suppose, was a hint about how many you should take…

Well, I scarfed those things down for a couple of months, and wrote six three-hour exams – on a Mac SE, after arguing the department into letting me use one o' them newfangled personal computers. Several of the exam papers were fairly demented (a redefinition of disciplines through the metaphor of a divided Belgium? a justification of conceptual studies interspersed with paragraphs outlining Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel?), but I passed, and in fact later published versions of two of them.

However, I was definitely going to pieces – differently then than now, but still going to pieces. My acupuncturist, Maoshing Ni (still in Los Angeles, and a marvelously kind man), was really angry at me, for the only time I remember – he looked at the bottle of pills and said, do you know what these things do? All of your energy has been dragged upwards so strongly, your body is surviving on practically nothing – don’t ever take that much of this stuff again, not without checking with me at least.

As far as I know, you can’t buy Sage’s Ginseng any more, anyway…

And yes, I will try to get to the next set of exams in a more reasonable, saner way.

•••

Having had our student association party Friday night – which was fun, and four of us were announced as qualifying (tentatively) for moving on to the second half of studies – Saturday was quiet, laundry and recovery. In the evening, a brief drink with Barbara at an expensively chic bar in the Hauptbahnhof, before we both went off to do other things – we talked about what we want to do next, and – the tough question – where…

And then met Annick (who had saved me in exams, as we studied together), Jordie, Jim, John and Nada for dinner. (I’d already told Barbara I didn’t want to eat at a sort of Swiss version of Denny’s… which I thought should be called Denicqx’s.)

At dinner a lot of talking, chatting, connecting, and generalized griping became somehow transformed into an intense and resonant conversation about meaning, expectation, and wisdom… Jim leading, which is no surprise (he has that endless Bay Area kindness, a patience I always envy, and deeply miss). I wish I could reproduce it for you, but I can’t – one central move was the transformation of our views of the most difficult, least pleasant teaching analysts (as in an academic department, there are of course favorites and anti-favorites) when we see the possibility of what they’re aiming us towards; and Jordie chiming in about experiences of real wisdom and clarity that lead you through whatever silly confusions you have gotten entangled in…

Sorry that I can’t remember more details. Admittedly, I was shaking my head at some points, and Jim said to me, you don’t think so? But I wasn’t disagreeing: I was merely expressing my own perpetual doubt that I can remember what one needs to remember – that I can actually do what I absolutely agree one should do – that, after decades where I have known so many kind and wise people who have taken so much time with me, I am still so erratic, so unpredictable.

So – unindividuated. If there’s such a word.

And yes, I know: these aspects of oneself always look far worse from the inside.

But the conversation was amazing: a sense of returning to wisdom, connectedness. Of fusing together a lot of material from seminars into something that mattered…

•••

And then tonight, Sunday night: I had spent three or four weeks cajoling students to come to the Zürich Opera with me, to see Der Rosenkavalier. I didn’t speak to anyone who had heard it before, and selling a four-and-a-quarter-hour opera is fairly hard work. But finally Melissa, Anna, and Annick agreed – with some hedging – to go.

The first miracle was that, with our student cards, we were charged, not SFr 270,-, but SFr 20. We’ve had mineral water that cost more than that, and so were ecstatic – we were at the side of the orchestra, with a clear view of the stage (and subtitles, luckily). I’d explained the plot over drinks beforehand, so everyone was prepared for comedy and That Final Trio… as much as you can prepare, anyway. They were all ready to get into it – we were all thinking about passing time, love, change – couldn't help it really, frankly we all overidentified with all that stuff.

And the music was truly fantastic. The visual production was a bit silly; but the Baron was a hilarious deep bass, the strongest I’ve ever seen in the part; and Sophie had a magical way with the highest notes – the part has never seemed terribly interesting to me, but she was honestly fascinating. And the Marschallin and Octavian were magnificent – so the final trio was, well…

I told them about the New Yorker cartoon of the man in bed, his wife frowning at him from the door, and the caption – “I know the doctor said it was a cold, but just in case, can I hear the trio from Der Rosenkavalier one last time?...”

It was like that. Really.

Moon with clouds

Between the summer solstice and a major full moon, hidden in Zürich by cloud... two exams survived, two to go, in the next two days.

A feeling of being suspended, of waiting, of not moving.

It occurs to me that I don't need to study here at the Jung-Institut. Which has occurred to me before, etc. etc. This time with less anxiety than previous times – it no longer seems a problem or frightening, just... contingent.

As though I could do anything....

Annick and I, in the popular Café Odeon, after the friendly and obviously gay waiter managed to help Annick figure out which tea she wanted (it was a complicated procedure). We should be talking about exams – but she has reading to do tomorrow for her religion exam, and I am astoundingly dunderheaded as she questions me about my neuroses exam. (Fortunately I'll go through notes again tomorrow, across the psychiatry exam, and will hopefully survive it.)

We talk about what we want to do with our lives – Annick's vision of what she wants her life to look like, which frankly isn't much unlike mine.

The moon supports us. Probably encourages us, to tell the truth....

Calm air

A flight to Zürich that was bizarrely quick and easy...

Did you know that KLM doesn't even check passports a second time, while getting on the plane, any more? The American TSA must be absolutely furious.

Swift, sunny, calm. Roggenbrot, Käse; quick laundry, buy food. Go through documents on computer, transfer to phone and iPad so that everything's handy.

And the rest of today: study. When Annick arrives from Lausanne at 5 pm, we'll have a 'working' dinner in the little satellite of Hiltl (doesn't it have a different name?), and quiz each other on the different exams we have tomorrow.

Of course, yet another meteorological shift tomorrow: three days of intense heat, forecasting 91/33... hmm. It wouldn't be very classy to go to the exam in shorts, would it...

Verge

In the last half hour before the taxi comes – to take me to the airport, to go to Zürich, to return to studies at the Jung-Institut for the first time in a year, to take the second half of my first-half exams (if you can follow that – is it easier if I say, second-quarter?) –

last night I Skyped Nomi, with no warning which is kind of rude of course, but bless her she answered. And we talked for nearly two hours, about everything – and I was calmer at the end of it.

Because I began with a knot of tension – and a real knot, I've had increasing gastro problems the last month.

Which suggests that, despite all the other anticipations and plans and concerns and hopes, there is a startlingly important (projected, anyway) quality about this particular one. I've barely seen Michael, let alone Andrew and friends, for a week or four; I keep cancelling, anxiously focused on studying, or at least not having fun when I should be studying. And I stopped going to yoga, meditating... things that would make this all easier, yes? Okay, bad ideas all, but you can see how I'm thinking of all of this.

Of course, the instant I was speaking to Nomi, the obvious aspect of this showed up – that I am tending to push the anxiety down out of consciousness, away from the conscious mind into the unconscious one, and of course the body. Which is silly... but typical of me I suppose, especially after the past decade of general inertia.

But at least I can see it – conceptually, not immanently – and hopefully that gives me a little more space to breathe....

In the meantime: I seem to be focused on this taxi ride. Somewhat as an athlete focuses walking out of the dressing room to entire the track – or a gladiator going out to meet wild beasts: as though everything is about to come to a point –

Could-be-other

A beautiful day. A list of things done. A meeting, minor enough.

A couple of days ago, finishing up a preparatory paper for one of my upcoming exams, I realized I was tensing up enough to make myself uncomfortable, and in some actual pain – took a medication I had thought I didn't need any more. Perhaps that has made me feel slightly unreal, the past few days...

And being reminded that my exams are a choice, the entire project of studying at the Jung-Institut is a choice... that the very idea of becoming a Jungian analyst, of engaging in individuation (not just therapy, not just the helping profession thing, not just patch-them-up-and-put-them-back-into-the-rat-race) may be a goal, but it may also be an illusion. I want this to be about really moving towards something that is more real, more solid and with a real impact, than most things that we normally do in later life (retirement? being comfortable? gardening? going to see the kids... but of course I don't have kids, so...) but perhaps it is never quite that.

The alternatives that we do have. We are always deeply impressed by those dramatic life events that are not free – things we are thrown to, things that can not be any other way – diagnoses, firings, street accidents. Is it generally true of these serious, unavoidable, real things that they are always bad ones?... maybe not, I suppose it would be possible that one could win a lottery. But even then, that would be a not-quite-real thing – suddenly there is a lot of money, and then one would spend that money in various hallucinatory, not particularly real ways... or even being moved to another place, the same life with some different elements... at what point does change or loss or gain become more than protection, continuity, modification?

The sense of unreality, the sense of – contingency rather than necessity, I suppose: and even among the pleasant day and the pleasant people, nothing I am doing feels particularly real at the moment. Like a movie set, or more accurately the set of a long-running, not terribly successful situation comedy, an ensemble show with no major stars. Even the life I am (perhaps?) aiming to live, something in southern Europe, where the casual materiality of the daily world, the pleasure of it, would be greater – that of course does not guarantee its importance, its reality, its solidity.

The dream world, the world of illusions: it doesn't take much reading of Buddhist sutras to achieve that sense of vertigo. It is familiar also from years in Los Angeles, the pleasant not-quite-city, where being not-quite-real is a common state of being. And perhaps a lot of travel, a lot of living in very different places, helps to make everything seem even more contingent.

It is not that there is anything essentially wrong with the not-quite-real world, either; but it does feel as though there is literally no 'bottom', no core to it all.

Playing games, doing as-ifs... What is my next line? Can we run that again?...

Glorious

A glorious day – as we name it: yesterday was like this too. The first few days of June, and England seems to have remembered what it has been told by other countries, in those pubs where they all hang out, that in June it is summer, and in summer it is sunny and warm and pleasant.

Given how often it forgets all of this, that's a big deal.

I would compare it to California, but this is a much softer, gentler air – not the sea-chill of San Francisco, nor the desert blast of LA. This is a weather for vicarage parties (I believe this happens more often in the south of England, where vicars used to infest the copses and lanes – before the cull).

I have a lot to do today – there are still sixty-odd essays to mark, and I have to finish turning my erratic and incompetent preparation for the Jung-Institute's development exam into a short paper. The marking is slightly exasperating; and the short paper makes me feel like an idiot. But I can finish both today, I think.

And still it is sunny... which begs the question: how about all those people in their nineties who say, I wish I'd stopped working and gone outside more often? Understood. I get it. And this is an error I've committed repeatedly in my life – anxiously working at something while joy sits waiting somewhere.

Oh well; one justification – perhaps I can eventually end up in a sunnier clime, where it's like this fairly often.

And perhaps I feel more sharply attuned to time, change, awareness today – which makes it slightly hard to act on these immediate projects: yesterday's analysis session in York threw me way off balance, making me lie on the couch and snooze for hours afterwards. Keying into old sorrows – S. wanted to hear entire histories and stories that I'd forgotten I hadn't yet told her (and, frankly, wasn't really in the mood to revisit); we spent so much time on them that my list of dreams was put aside for next session.

Which all means: a subtly layered version of existential uncertainty – the sun and the birds at one level, the anxiety of the paper and exams at another, the comfortableness of the body lower down, the memories of failures and losses and deaths giving off a cloudy pedal point, like the background noises in Inception – seems to keep lurching along, various fragments shimmering to the surface, and fading again.