in the hall of mirrors

Bologna - Train - Circeo

Five days in Bologna; with a vague idea of possibly living here some day...

Or, well, perhaps not.

There is a great deal of beauty in this town: the buildings, the food; the charming kindness of the two men who run the bed and breakfast that was suggested by some London friends. Of course there are also the graffiti, the posters... whole sections of the city where it feels as though the younger (student, or not necessarily so?) population includes a lot of people who think scrawling on walls is an expression of individuality – rather than conformity....

Hmm, I do sound like a grumpy old git, don't I.

Two truly extraordinary meals, the kind that make you wonder why you put up with some of the crap you eat in other countries: and there would have been more such meals in Bologna La Grassa, if I hadn't had some stomach problems (I have to watch it with coffee, and I'm still a bit fragile as a result, as I was a couple of months ago – I must develop the ability to refuse an espresso, even in Italy, even in the morning, even after a fine meal).

Though when I take a turn to the right off the main shopping streets, I discover a considerably more beautiful, fresher neighborhood, with wonderful old buildings in warm colors, small parks... what about if I did move here, and put together an analytic practice? A lot of this city is truly beautiful, in a calm and pleasant way.

But, with all the ups and downs, the sense that I may be not giving it enough of a chance – it feels a bit small – perhaps too small. I know about the intersecting links among various northern Italian cities, I know about the famous university, but... this might be just a more charming version of the problem of living in a place that isn't really mine, and isn't really big enough to have big surprises, unexpected events of the kind that I miss from the years in SF, LA, Berlin. And why should I go through all the trouble and expense of moving to a place like that?

I am of, at least, two minds... and think of Sara's dream about the two of us, which seemed to symbolically reflect our separate wishes to live in another country; and of Thomas' desire to live in Italy... and my own desire:

which may be, above all, to know just what it is that I want.

•••

A train from Bologna to Rome – I am braced for chaos and discomfort, but instead am amazed by a fast, clean, pleasant, air-conditioned (that bit is important) journey. At one point I realize I am not sure of my next train connection, and ask the businessman sitting next to me, who is using his iPad on the interwebs, how to figure that connection out – he is very kind and gives me the departure time, neatly locating it online. I thank him with gratitude...

Unfortunately the second train, the one that I am transferred to, is like an exaggerated satire on a horrible Italian train from the 1960s: ancient and dilapidated, minor things broken, full to bursting with sweating people – I stand in overwhelming heat, between the door and the toilet for an hour, watching my annoyingly heavy bag....

At this point, and yes I do realize we're talking about decisions based on absurdly brief chance experiences, any desire to live in Italy is evaporating fast.

•••

Circeo. Unless it's called San Felice Circeo – that doesn't seem quite clear: I think probably the little town at the tip of the peninsula, one along the long coast between Rome and Naples, is what is called San Felice Circeo – and Circeo is the area as a whole. Or maybe not, it doesn't seem to be terribly important.

A small town, a beautiful, indulgent hotel – with the most charmingly friendly front desk clerk imaginable (yes, he was gorgeous, I should have managed to sneak a picture, what else is an iPhone for?). Thomas drives us down from the dusty station and the hideous train to a charming paradise, and I am increasingly ready to forgive all. (Or, at least: to forgive the desk clerk.)

This is designed for people who are well off, I think: though perhaps the town has 'regular' people in it – but the villas in the hills, the gracefully curving white and blue houses designed by Alessandra's grandfather, are clearly designed for an upper-class income. The house where we are holding the conference is relaxedly beautiful, like a dream of a beach house – simple and casual in some ways, rounded corners and small staircases like a ship, but also absolutely complete, such that you could really live here.

And, of course, I am thinking of really living here... okay well not here, not in this house or its kin, that would be no more likely than living on the moon.

•••

But it is Thomas who makes sure that I see the town, on our last day: and it is truly amazing – you walk under a large arch, and are on a long piazza paved with cobblestones, entirely surrounded by houses that are about two or three stories high; warm brown to yellow stone, old fountains, children playing up and down the street. No cars: people are walking along and talking, they go into and out of the large and gratifyingly air-conditioned bar, which serves espresso and gelato all day; some shops, a lot of living spaces. The wide band of gold-grey stone rolls down towards the ocean...

Yes, I could most certainly live here, there is no doubt about it.

Thomas says: and there are places like this all over Italy. We have to see them...

In your car, perhaps, I say.

He says, let's do it.

And we walk up and down, with Alessandra, with my new friend the brilliant and witty Parisian Marie-Hélène and her cheerfully rough-edged Corsican brother, with Giovanni, with the serious young filmmaker Ludo, with my other new friend the down-to-earth American Dianna and her Italian husband, and with the others...

until we have to go back to the car, and leave paradise.

Masterworks

Before I leave Switzerland behind – the next to last night in Küsnacht, some people who were about to graduate (= who have now graduated) from the Jung-Institut told us about their dissertation topics.

I took substantial notes on at least four, because frankly – and yes, I did indeed say this out loud afterwards – they were absolutely fucking brilliant. (Cf. some psychology article I saw a few weeks ago said that people who swear a lot are often regarded as more honest – my students must think I never, ever lie).

Jerome was looking at a balance point between introversion and extroversion, experimenting with the idea that when we can locate that point, complexes have reduced energy and libido returns – which sounds as though it cross-connects Buddhist and Taoist ideas among others; and he was actually coming up with exercises to help do this. Johann was trying to work out a basis for a Jungian sociology – seeing what narcissism might mean in society, connecting Freud and Jung through dreams that impact a social group, etc. – a fairly big, post-Adornian idea to my ears.

Cheryl and Barbara both had remarkable ideas that seemed extraordinarily connected with deep suffering in groups of people that are often ignored. Cheryl had been working with a group of diabetes patients, doing personal analysis with them and looking at the tension of their medical regimes and life expectancies – as she put it: people who have decisions to make every day that could directly lead to their deaths, or not. And she obviously managed this with a huge amount of care, on several levels simultaneously, and with a real impact on their lives.

Barbara – yes, I know, Barbara is a dear friend so I'm probably kind of biased towards her. But really: what a courageous, tense, demanding topic –

okay well: Barbara has of course been working with international victims of torture, people who have fled to Geneva for one reason or another related to the UN, for some years. She had originally been planning to write about the archetype of time – and, as you might imagine, finally realized the topic was far too big. So, she started thinking about time as it is experienced by her patients –

time, over months of torture, when you don't have any reason to think you will survive. Because when people are tortured or raped, other people's time is imposed on them – and then there is the timeless time of sheer pain or suffering, when everything floats outside itself, and the veil of consciousness seems to lift. (Like an involuntary, evil version of what Jerome is looking for, above.)

Even in something as basic as keeping to a strict Swiss schedule for therapy sessions – with some of her patients, the normal rules about time need to be thrown out the window. More stress for the therapist, but there is just no other way to hold onto the patient's abject memories of terror and disorientation: if they have had time dictated to them in this hideous fashion, the therapist cannot become yet another person who controls their time.

I suppose I was especially surprised at the depth and intensity of some of these ideas: but perhaps I shouldn't be – these people are distinctly older, more experienced, than most of my postgraduates, and if they can work on areas that seem both more important and more difficult than those of many academic students, perhaps that simply makes sense.

All pretty amazing... and somehow it redirects some of my thinking: rather than looking at big Jungian theories and how or where they work – isn't there extraordinary power in focusing on the immediate change that you can make in something – something that doesn't really need a theory: some transformation or movement that happens right here, right now?...

relatively quiet – continuing developments

A calm day – mild rain since last night, Zürich is cooling off after a sunny week.

The hourly church bells – they have seemed remarkably reassuring for the past few days; perhaps I am getting accustomed to them. After, of course, several years – have I really been coming here, however irregularly, since 2009?

The work I have done over the past few weeks has metamorphosed – it is still work, but it seems to happen in large blocks – and occasionally with a certain flowing tai chi or Gestalt kind of connectedness. As though one simply keeps calmly moving through things, and they get done: without effort...

a way of being I've always envied, and never been particularly good at.

That even applies to editing the book on Gerhard, astonishlingly enough. I'll admit to a faint anxiety that this may change, simply because it has changed around this project before, but... I seem to stand at the center of the work, neither pushed off to one side nor easily dislodged from that center. (For instance: last Monday I came across a note that mentioned two further translations from another book, that Gerhard had wanted to include... copied them from a PDF draft, revised the translations (fairly thoroughly – to be frank they were pretty clumsy), and they're now done....)

A trip to St. Gallen to speak to Verena Kast, too briefly, for two hours; and various seminars, especially the ones with Nancy and Philip, both of whom are bracingly intense. All three are at a particular end of a spectrum of Jungian analysts – what you might think of as the intensely intelligent seekers (like Zoja). Talking with them always has a quality of a sudden expansion in awareness –

•••

Days, moments, that feel a bit like – how can I express it? – big gestures floating in space, that seem to move slowly and without effort – but when your arms calmly fall at the end of a gesture, such a lot is created, completed, developed –

•••

St. Gallen – on the train I can see that it is increasingly cloudy, which is unexpected as I'd only looked at the Zürich forecast and have left my umbrella in the apartment.

A mountain rain begins as I walk up the long, winding hill path to Kast's house: but, unusually for me, I am laughing off the wetness as I come into her house, putting my things down and relaxing into the moment.

Verena is in a good mood, but does refocus me about some things: there is a sense that she is thinking of me as someone who may actually learn to do an acceptable job at this, and also one who shares some of her background (academe and philosophy, at least – it seems as though every time we meet a certain burst of names and referents is generated, as from thin air). And so she is definite about pushing me, more and more – which is fine with me.

•••

The train station – because, although I already purchased my rail pass on the first day, I have cleverly destroyed the new card – and kept the old one. Can't I even read the dates?...

As I wait, number in hand, Jerome sits down beside me – unexpectedly: another Jung-Institut student, he is graduating on Friday. He needs a train ticket to take some relatives on a brief tour of Switzerland before going back to San Francisco. A rapid exchange of plans, and my number is called –

the man behind the counter is entirely unruffled: of course we can replace the card, give me an address and we will send it. Ticket Zürich-Bologna, which class, reservation?...

The calmness of Swiss organization. Such a pleasure at times.

•••

Bob's office – the rows of books, the warm brown tones of elderly furniture, the sunny window. Bob is gentler than Verena, and in fact it seems as though he does not push, does not interrupt: but things do tend to shift and open up around him. I find myself talking about – well, almost everything: moving from analysand to analysand, back to myself, to the future and the past. And even to imagined lives: not only my own but those of various people around me...

•••

Several students who have graduated in the past two years are back, teaching seminars of their own. Admittedly there is variation in the ability to focus on a topic (as there is with the senior analysts – for some of them their attention is not on a logical progression of ideas, feelings types for the most part).

Philip is good – calm, strong-minded, a few points I don't completely agree with, yet – but you can see that his background as a neurosurgeon gives him a powerful connection to aspects of the mind on several levels at the same time. Which is the kind of instruction that ends up being especially meaningful....

At one point, someone – who was it? – says of the students who have graduated: Yes, it is an intense change – taking back all those projections onto teachers and supervisors and institutions. This is deeply familiar to me, of course, as it happens every year in a university – and as I have made this transition several times in my life, and especially as I have always created a lot of projections onto my own teachers and institutions. (A youngest child, what do you expect.)

Perhaps it is because this transition is so familiar to me that I can already shift out of it, in unexpected and fragmentary moments – an awareness that the supervisor or teacher will simply become a colleague, that my studies may seem remarkable or not from point to point, but that they are also partly illusory, as is all learning and change.

But no more illusory than real, of course.

•••

I discuss my ideas about working in Italy, in Bologna, with Sara: over dinner at the vegetarian buffet restaurant, she pulls out her iPad and drafts a detailed e-mail to the Italian psychologist licensing agency. The next day there is bad, though not entirely unexpected, news: it is impossible to be licensed in Italy without an undergraduate degree in psychology.

I am angry, disoriented for a day or two... fortunately this time I am able to write detailed notes and plans of what I need to check, the various things (really: places to live, lives to have) that I want.

Another meeting, hardly the first, with Anette, about prospects for working, or even for changing to one of the other degree programs. But she is reassuring – there are inconsistencies everywhere, but I need to ask somewhat different questions. It may be possible to practice in Italy – as it is even in Switzerland – under a different title, without being able to be reimbursed by insurance (which is not a big deal: most of the analysts I work with function at this level – I have no interest in working in a professional practice, with health service referrals). Or perhaps Barcelona, southern France, perhaps even Greece, if one pays careful attention to the local regulations...

And so the list of questions gets longer, but more interesting. More people to call....

•••

The trip to Bollingen – and Einsiedeln! A trip I haven't been allowed to go on for a year or two (the front office has a rule that students can only go once – a Swiss anxiety that masses of us will swamp the Jung family, and they will refuse to let anyone in ever again). But this year I am brought in as a sort of Camp Counselor (no jokes please) – Bob wants someone along to handle problems...

And a good thing too, because there are indeed problems, on a distinctly hot day. Is this the first time we've had not one but two newcomers who can't judge their ability to walk a few hundred yards? One in evident poor health (I walk with her – she is calm and articulate, but I can see she is in real pain); and another, cheerfully athletic, but who has not eaten or drunk any water for about fourteen hours... Bob takes care of her.

It is all a bit complicated. Fortunately the bus driver passes the second, with Bob, while on his way to see a friend for a few hours – he stops and takes them to the next village. (A good thing he didn't pass five minutes earlier.) As for mine, the Jung grandson – this one is the medical doctor, who has already given us a careful but occasionally slightly exasperated retelling of his grandfather's peculiar approach to existence – can see her health problems at a glance, and insists on driving her back to the bus....

So: handled.

But you can see the kind of day it was, in between the calmness of Jung's house at Bollingen, and the monastery library at Einsiedeln: it perhaps only made sense that, as Bob and I were talking about the day's confusions while I stepped onto a tram, the door closed and my backpack with iPad was left hanging outside, as I held (firmly) onto the strap on the inside.

At that point, there was nothing to do but roll my eyes, ignore the giggles of the girl behind me, and pull my backpack to safety at the next tram stop....

•••

Wednesday, two days before we all scatter, when I will go down to Bologna.

Dinner with Barbara. We wander from café to café, gossiping and dithering about where to eat – when we finally settle on a café I've always secretly thought was rather boring, we are fortunately kicked out because they no longer serve evening meals. And so, to our familiar pizza parlor...

But the conversation gets sticky. We have quizzed each other on health and happiness, but Barbara is clearly not satisfied with my answers: after I handle questions about my health panic (real or projected?) of the past couple of months, the confusion about where I will and/or want to end up living, she wants to know about My Love Life.

I talk coolly about the historic and/or geographically distant Hans-Rainer, but she wants to know (as did Makis) exactly what I'm doing about it. Maddening, these analysts.

I can easily articulate my own complexes and mental chaos – body, health, expectations, aging – cross-linked with panic over death and/or health – and, well, cross-linked with Hans-Rainer. Or happiness. Or misery. Or life. Or death. Or neither, or both.

Barbara is in no mood to let me go – good for her – and I am mildly disoriented and emotionally tired by the end of dinner, especially as I've gotten increasingly querulous at the Institut for the past three days. Three solid weeks of classes, seminars, meetings, and company get quite tiring, especially for Jungian introverts, especially when the discussions are often so... disorienting.

So, still thinking on all these things, I go back to my apartment, to collapse into a deep sleep. Tomorrow I will skip the morning seminar; I can't think any more, and even my awareness of my old complexes is drifting in tangled circles.

But there is also a bit more awareness: and I feel grateful for Barbara's bucket of existentially cold water over my head.

Which is lucky: because I can see that this discussion, whether it involves Barbara, or continues with my analyst, or even with my supervisors, continues between me and myself – or, even, and is this possible? ends up involving Hans-Rainer – is not over....