in the hall of mirrors

[Panic / anger / calm: shifting grounds]

[a]

Friday. I am upset.

No, that's not quite true: I am not pleased, but... it is as though the negative emotions are at least partly in brackets. I can see myself panicking a bit, angry and disoriented – but, perhaps because this is how psychoanalysis can work, the emotions are understandable but don't quite drive my actions, and don't quite hit me at the core.

It's simple enough, really – trivial I suppose – I returned from Zürich, elated and a bit tired, went to a nice dinner with Michael, Andrew and the gang, and...

and caught a really nasty summer flu. Which lasted about five days. Which is still fading in bursts of misery, tiredness – illness – to the point where I've essentially lost nearly two weeks...

two weeks of beautiful weather, of piles of things to do, of what had felt like a more direct, more easy-going relation to doing things.

As though I was thinking: yes, I'll have to fight my way through all of this – editing Gerhard's book, clearing junk off the floor of the middle room, setting up to start having clients – sending out an abstract, finding exchange universities for students who had lost out, connecting with various HIV patient groups over our counselling service... but whatever difficulties come up, I'll just handle them.

But now it doesn't feel like that – or, more accurately, in brackets as it were, I remember it not feeling like that: compare the terrible summer feelings that I tried to focus in Augusts, which I don't want to re-experience...

[b]

Monday. Calm... a connected sense of season and space. There is still too much to do; but I am coughing less...

the day is quiet, outside; this neighborhood tends to be somnolent in summer, occasional sounds of working (hammering, moving things in vans).

Sunny and hot some days, now cooler but still brightly lit – and bursts of rain that clear the air; the plants are, as you might think, ecstatic.

Trying to focus on big projects: to the detriment, of course, of scattered e-mails... but that can be borne.

An amazing glow of North Sea light, between the clouds... beautiful.

Vision

Not much to say here...

four days of an intermittently really nasty cold, and cold medicines (stopped taking them a day ago). (If someone sneezes in a room where you are, leave immediately, then text them with a made-up appointment – you absolutely don't want to get this one.)

And the last day or so remembering several dreams, perhaps two pages worth; and idyllically sunny weather, lying on the couch in a haze (a pleasant haze when the cold allowed, a less pleasant haze when it didn't).

But this evening's last dream threw me... can't... entirely describe it. Not because it wasn't fairly specific, but because I'm skeptical about any value from turning it into words. Wanting to remember, to record, as much as I can so as not to lose it – but of course worried about distorting and fragmenting it as a result.

Some kind of magic, suddenly fading magic, and rather than being silent I speak up to ask questions – a slim, dark man with a kind, calm face turns and says to me, what do you want to ask?

And I say, what about all of this – it is going, or is it about to be gone – everyday time is returning – time and space in our world are so much more predictable, yes, they are safer, but still it is all too plain and dull; and he says no, it’s still remarkable, you just have to see it –

And I'm left with strong, strange feeling of yearning, of longing, and the sorrow of being earthbound.

And awake, a warm twilight with gorgeous light across the sky, and people's voices in the street below as they pass.

And sadness, a lot of old, old sadness. Rereading the end of The King of Elfland's Daughter, and Lud-in-the-Mist..

(... a day after posting this, it would be dishonest to avoid adding: I know that people have seen the end of each of those books as a transcendent representation of death, and the triumph over, or of, time. Which doesn't worry me of course; but which perhaps should not be forgotten, by me, either.)

First-world problems

I understand the joke, 'first-world problems' – it's what we say when the refrigerator breaks or our flight is delayed. The sense is that we are rich and expect everything to be easy, and that our biggest problems are details, minor frustrations, compared with those in other parts of the world.

Especially when several other parts of the world are having rather spectacular, and better publicized than usual, meltdowns...

But there are first-world problems that I take seriously – every year, fifteen to twenty of my students apply to go abroad for an exchange year; and inevitably several of them are rejected. Not because they aren't good students – indeed, they are often among our best – but because of some chance mismatch between a student who plays a too-common instrument and an overcrowded conservatory, or a university department that abruptly feels as though they have enough local students at the moment.

And frankly my heart bleeds, a bit, for this. Every year I send e-mails, make calls, and badger colleagues at other institutions, who are often on vacation, in an effort to find an attractive place for these kids.

I know it must seem trivial: you are already at a respected Western university getting a degree, why are you complaining that you don't get a year abroad?... but for me it recalls despair and anger at not getting into certain schools (Claudio Spies, since you interviewed me, I'm looking at you – back in 1973 you probably thought, aah he's a flake, doesn't know what he's talking about, reject him).

And I unfortunately remember the long-term damage I did to my own expectations of life, success, and happiness, as a result of those rejections... I often try to tell our students they shouldn't take these things too seriously. At which point I am of course talking to my younger self, who was a fool about this type of thing, to his own misery.

And yes, okay, it's all very first-world: but the first world, if it is a place with money and security (even despite the chaos in Greece, or in the US for that matter – all of which remains relative, when you consider centuries of starving children catching bugs for dinner), is also a place of crowding, and thus of competition and rapid narrowing of higher levels of opportunities. We do have a system that tries to justify itself, in a rationalistic quasi-Adornian-Deleuzian manner – that says, if you were rejected before, even for an irrational or unfair reason, we will take advantage of the situation to reject you again, because simply making decisions is... difficult.

Ah, well...

But there is usually a happy ending: I am generally successful in finding my students a place – often in an unexpected city; but for the most part students have been (eventually) ecstatic with the results.

Even if I have to badger various Italians, Austrians and Spaniards, and lean very heavily on our previous friendships, to get it done... even today, on a Saturday.

Hmm, I probably owe my opposite numbers dinner, don't I?...

Restart / reset

Home. Weather warm and damp by local standards, but rather cool compared to the hot day in Zürich I just left. Recovery from packing, airport, plane – and I do know that this wasn't a difficult trip. After all I wasn't traveling to Asia, or using one of the painfully brutal American arilines, or doing anything really complicated. But it's still distinctly stressful.

Coming back into familiar life patterns does create an odd feeling – especially I think these days, when analysis and changes in my life keep shifting my basic ground. I'll suddenly reexperience some patterns (laundry, this shower, food, this bed – the books, the television – even the pattern of playing an internet crossword puzzle every day) and they all look – well, contingent rather than necessary, if I can use that metaphor again (it has been a favorite of mine lately, I know).

As though, with many basic habits, there is simply no reason to pick them up again – especially easy for an academic in midsummer. But even when the students come back: to simply not bother with them again.

Such an odd sense of clarity, of relaxation – of time – in the face of evaporated habits.

And, of course, some embarrassment that I ever was trapped by them....

Charged

Of course I still have had doubts at times about training (I didn't use the word 'studying' this time) at the Jung-Institut. Will I be inept and self-centered as an analyst, is it too late to bother starting a new career, is this all just another self-sustaining belief system....

But in the past week, there have been experiences that are so intensely full of transformation, change, suggesting a more charged life –

•••

Among the actions of completing my exams, changing to 'diploma' status, seminars, people, sunny and rainy days – my last interview, third of this set, when we travel around Zürich to meet with analysts who judge whether we really belong in this kind of work, if we should be allowed to proceed.

The interviewing analyst was someone I have known for several years; I expected our interview to be pleasant and unproblematic.

But I wasn't quite ready for – well, he quizzed me about various details of my exams and  things for the first five minutes. But then he simply dropped all of that, as though he already knew his decision – he started giving me advice, tips for starting my practice –

but most of all, he spent the rest of the hour beaming at me – almost, it seemed, joyous – as though –

he was utterly proud of me, and proud of what he expected me become, to grow into.

And since he is a kind man, someone who is brilliant in the worlds of emotion and attachment, that pride, that kindness, that affectionate certainty that I would do well, came at me like a blaze of light...

•••

Thursday I received an e-mail on my phone, in the middle of a seminar – Petra, notifying me that I have passed all the exams, interviews, internship, committee discussions, and am hereby advanced to candidacy. Then a meeting about what to expect – I pullled it back from other students asking about how they will eventually finish their degrees to say, but what do we do right now? A lot of changes in the next few months, it seems....

On Friday, because I have gone out with the Italians no less than four times this week, each time for pizza/pasta and wine, I felt kind of wrecked (one glass of wine four times in a week, yes I am a wimp with alcohol). So I slept in and walked onto the Institute grounds around midday –

And passed the brilliant, famous, no-nonsense Verena Kast, who was sitting on a stone bench in the garden. I frankly idolize Kast, more than practically anyone here, so when she abruptly asked why I wasn't in her Clinical Block class, I stuttered, of course well, um I just became a Diploma Candidate yesterday, uh I thought I wasn't supposed to take this until next, I don't have any clients yet and I'm not really...

She cut me off, said of course you can do this now, we start again at 2:30, be there.

Which I heard, correctly, as an order....

And it was fantastic: twelve students talking about patients, the many directions the mind can take, what to do when things get complicated, digging rapidly into deep situations and a variety of red flags (Kast does not waste time – of course there may be various reasons she is like this, but I always feel (project!) a sense of conflict between a passionate investment in transformation and a sharp awareness of mortality – a sense of how much there is to do, and how little time we have to do it).

And there was a sense of power – responsible power, her impact on the tangled lives of so many confused, unhappy, disoriented people – and the possibility of learning to have a tiny bit, at least, of that kind of impact in the world....

•••

Saturday: graduation. The biggest the Institute has had for years, some fourteen people from the English and German programs. Speeches, guests, families, flowers, jokes, diplomas...

But the important part was an extraordinary sense of how some of these people have grown into intensely charged, intensely powerful versions of what they were when I first met them. Not all of them, admittedly, though of course such intuitions from my side can't ever be the whole story; but a few of the graduates seemed merely, well, pleasant therapists who had gotten some additional training.

But the many obviously charged ones – Philip, who has gone from being a reserved, cynical surgeon looking for something new to do, to a startlingly real force, someone connected to deep places, virtually a shaman; Carol, who no longer bothers with listing the reasons something might not work out, who seems calmly and solidly connected to everyone around her; and my dear Thomas, whose charming friendliness appears to have grown into something much bigger, much more aware, more assertively generous –

all amazing to see. A feeling that this kind of work, and the very idea of individuation, are not just wishful thinking by those who can't see any other way through the dryness and disconnection of the world; but that it really has a total impact, a value; that these people, and hopefully those they will work with, are more fully present – as though their energy, no longer so tangled in the background noise of complexes and frustrated sniping by fragments of the unconscious, becomes more than human...

Or, perhaps, becomes exactly as human as it should be – as we all should be.

•••

An entertaining dinner, with not quite enough places at the big tables – but Thomas, who wanted his parents to meet me, had reserved a seat for me at one end. So I went back and forth to chat with the students who couldn't fit, who were eating and drinking at tables outside by the Zürichsee – I told Gio it was fun to come down to the demimonde, to see all the demimondaines... she did kind of like that.

As dessert was cleared away, Thomas and Philip K. said we needed to have cigars. And brandy. And so, a collection of eight or nine men – plus the gentle Marianne – moved into a small, enclosed bar away from the dining rooms – and yes, I did smoke a cigar (my second ever, both at Thomas' instigation), though I drank port rather than brandy (the academic substitute, I suppose). The intense, slightly savage Russian boyfriend of one of the women who graduated (he looks like a gangster but no, he teaches tango in Moscow) stared at me with his slightly off-kilter, feral gaze for much of the time – he was a definite challenge to all of us, to smoke and drink Like Real Men... we managed not to embarrass ourselves, even including me. And Marianne, who said she has herself smoked cigars from time to time, held her own – a remarkable performance of calm femininity that was completely unafraid of a pack of mere men.

(Yes, you're right, except for the Russian, it was a fairly tame pack.)

•••

Then Giovanni said, near midnight, it's Zuri Fäscht, the triennial city festival – all these people are heading home, let's go out to a gay bar.

A long, intense conversation with G. about his prospects, professional and romantic. Drifting from one bar to another (sadly our favorite disco was closed this year, oh well, no real replacements yet). Some time watching the handsome bartender in Cranberry, over whom I'd been a tiny bit heartbroken last year – and suddenly finding myself able to turn to G. over the bizarre yellow-and-pink drinks we'd ordered because they were out of mojitos, and say: of course he's handsome, and probably a kind man, but I no longer have the fascination I had last year – because – perhaps – I no longer feel, quite so strongly, that happiness is outside me, in that way...

And, because the disco was closed, we clambered through the trash dropped by Fäscht (since this is Switzerland, a wild party isn't at all violent, it's just very... messy) and in and out of some of the bars. The two bars on the edge of the party area were a bit stranger – at the first a handsome young man gave me an unmistakeable look at the door, but turning to Giovanni I was able to confirm that this was where the hustlers worked; and in the other, as G. went to the bathroom and I was typing away on my phone, I felt a hand at my crotch – a very drunk Swiss man mumbling at me in even less-comprehensible-than-usual Schwyzerdütsch. I said politely that I wasn't interested, but since he apparently found that information difficult to absorb, I started telling him repeatedly to sit down – finally barking 'Sitz!', as though talking to an exasperating dog.

No, we didn't stay in either locale for long... stumbling more slowly along, talking to G.'s friends, finally heading back with crowds of mostly young people to the Hauptbahnhof around 5 am... and, as this is (still!) Switzerland, a tram punctually took me to my door...........

I was very, very ready for bed.