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....
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