[Fragments from several days, several locations. A certain connectedness – but be ready for jumps in continuity: like a student film.]
A lot of train trips the past few months: my analyst lives (fortunately very near the train station) in Leicester, about three and a half hours away... my 'local' supervisor in York (i.e. closer than the two in Zürich) an hour away.
And today a train to a conference in Cambridge – one that has me – well, trying to suspend judgment.
I wanted to go to more Jungian conferences; Nomi was going to this one, I applied, got accepted, Nomi backed out, then she decided to come again – so that's all right then. And Emilija is visiting from London, and Morgan from New York is giving a paper, and...
But I wonder about having a slightly chilly time in Cambridge – the weather, the mild but unexpected competition of southern Brits, especially around the great universities... there are often fragments of behavior that suggest a background of contempt, or at best disrespectful praise, for colonials, as well as for northerners. Few and far between, but one notices them...
And the paper itself, the one on death and the Katha Upanishad – in reducing it for presentation it seems careful, thorough, and not quite as interesting as I remember it. Since I hope to publish a version in a year or so, I may need to figure out why it seems a bit – well, lifeless. Hmm, bad puns, yes?...
•••
A busy, chiefly pleasant conference, with a few clashes between Jungians and Lacanians: and the paper was fine: and a few flashes of unease. But sunshine, and some good, social meals, at a Cambridge high table – on the last day Emilija and I get the seats at the center of the table facing the room: just as though we are the most important people there...
Oh, and meeting Susan. And Giorgio. And others.
•••
Rereading C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra (at night in a Cambridge student dorm) – isn’t it remarkable how the three books of that trilogy work, each grander and more resonant than the previous one? – I’m struck by something that drove me mad when I was younger: that Ransom, on the beautiful islands of this idyllic planet, talking to an innocently wise woman, constantly blunders through being ludicrously irritated, fearful, anxious, critical…
Of course this is really the drama of the book, which sharpens when Ransom must fight the devilish figure of the second half: that Ransom has to learn that his entire life, his existence, has been determined by the nature of a place where different kinds of ‘darkness’ are endlessly created, recycled, amplified. Anxiety, aggression, distrust are normal for us, because of course we are from Earth, and of course Earth is a failure, a disaster area of cosmic proportions.
I’ve always been impressed and irritated by these passages; but now I might read them from two newer angles – that Ransom is also from southern England, and therefore doesn’t always mean what he says; he tosses off mildly disparaging comments in an oblique way – but the Lady always catches him out with the clarity of her hearing, looking at him in alarm when he thinks he has gotten away with some snide, undercutting remark…
I am feeling like that, occasionally, at this conference. Of course there are plenty (no, tons) of projections associated with Oxbridge – I watch myself worry about southerners expressing oblique disdain for me as an American, as someone who teaches up North, as someone whose research goes into areas that are… well, obviously, tacky. Popular culture next to ‘high’ cultures’, Jungian ideas next to Freudian/Lacanian ones, etc.
And then there is the other angle of Perelandra, the psychological one – Ransom’s unpleasantness reflects such a lot of the damage that is embedded in him, as it is intended to do. He comes from a planet where people are forced to be defensive, uncertain, self-pitying… a planet where we imagine that we are fighting evil things, while actually, endlessly, creating evil. That’s Lewis’ approach, which is more religious/Christian – but psychologically it could be stated in terms of being endlessly neurotic, and then of course being neurotic about being neurotic.
Buddhist practitioners must have these same problems – hearing themselves being audibly grasping, cruel, defensive… and drawing back in alarm.
I often am appalled to hear myself, of course. Which, psychologically, suggests narcissism in its negative mode, anxiety, and an incompletely contained universe. Which can be another kind of projection – even at the Cambridge conference, at times appalled by aggressive or dismissive statements by others, I might then hear myself do something just as bad, horrified to recognize it –
but of course the people whom I know well don't hear most of what I say as so very awful; the illusion that one is utterly terrible (Philip Kime mentioned this in a lecture about the shadow – that we often need to perceive themselves as awful, instead of just shabby or incoherent; it’s a way of retrieving a sense of power, of importance…) is a familiar one… and, as J. said at my supervisory session last week, we are often much too hard on narcissism, negative or not: if we didn’t think we were important, how could we get along at all?...
•••
A cross-connection to all these contrasts might be my alternating moods this summer around health and HCV – what you might call the shifting grounds between steady clarity in thinking of prospective illness and death (something I’m always proud of) and what can only be called hypochondria: my tendency to panic at symptoms, at news, and overinterpret everything in an exaggerated, tragic (and secretly relieved, because death releases me from responsibilities) manner. Of course this repeats the shifting grounds that have run through what is now about thirty-odd years of my connection with HIV – the ability to face difficult things is also perpetually entangled with the doomed imagination, the despairing stasis of giving up, even when that imagination is fed only by the tiniest scraps of factual possibility.
The hard thing is, of course: where is the reality here?... okay well, any Buddhist, or Jungian, or really anyone who knows much philosophy or psychology would be perfectly aware that there is no exact reality – we choose our projections.
Though, of course, I keep wondering Just When I’m Being Rational, as opposed to When I’m Not. Ah well.
•••
These projections are actually tangled up in the (temporally) irrational complex that was tied to the much-overdue book project I finally, half-dementedly, finished just two weeks ago – which seemed to cross-link chains of my own anxieties about illness and death, about failure and inadequacy, even about just wasting time, into a long, winding, and unattractively colored braid…
It was truly strange to realize in August, in an analysis session with my marvelously alert analyst, that my unconscious had somehow entangled 1986-7 (the year I wrote my last composition and gave up on being a composer; the year I went to New York to meet my musical idols; the year I started psychoanalysis and writing; and most of all the year I was diagnosed HIV+, and gave up on – well – everything) with 1996-7 (the year of protease inhibitors and the news of survival, the year of my first professional job with a fantastic salary, the year I finished the PhD and moved to Hong Kong, and… the year that this, now finally completed, book project was planned). Overlapping those two turbulent times into one vast, strange chunk of my unconscious: something we noticed in my analytic sessions only because I kept saying 1986 for 1996, or 1997 for 1987, and then retracing my mistakes…
which is why a project that ought to have been a symbol of achievement, something easy and productive, could become a strange marker for death dreams. Such a bizarre experience of one’s own mechanisms.
B. said: it's not so strange, perhaps – in 86-87 you walked into the realm of death, in 96-97 you walked out of it. The same trip in reverse. And I pointed out that, this spring and summer, I was making short bus trips into the realm – as it were, for shopping; or looking at the pictures outside the real estate offices...
(And, in fact, this has been an extraordinarily important part of my life and its problems: apologies if I outline it here a bit quickly, at the end of various things – perhaps I can return to it someday. Or perhaps this is as much as there is to say, in sentences.)
•••
A Cambridge room, shabby but large, among pleasant grounds. Musing on the small and large things that have brought me to this place and time. And on the great shadows and lights that move, behind the scenes, through everything…