A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing.
My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this is what a long-term habit is like when its surrounding emotional complex is largely dismantled.
High points: patients – feeling the depth of winter in vivid dreams and rapid transitions, as am I; classes – including some good ones, ended with a student coming to my office to wait through several appointments to say to me, I wanted to tell you, I was dreading today's class on Freud and Jung, I thought I wouldn't be able to stand it, but it was wonderful; meeting with a local charity about our current explosion of activity in the group for people with AIDS, and having them be incredibly impressed, supportive, down-to-business...
oh, and our group's budget is nowhere near as depleted as I'd thought. Silly me, irrationally anxious about money.
Pack, refrigerator fruit & veg to the women downstairs, airport, plane, transfer in a slightly chaotic Schiphol (somebody decided on yet another refurbish?), buy Dutch cheeses, plane, bump into Cécile at the Zürich baggage claim, briefly meeting her family before they went off... and then the terribly organised train tickets–wifi–apartment keys–groceries bustle of that first day here. The one I've gotten down to a pattern.
When buying food, though, the bronzed, terrifically handsome, possibly Middle Eastern man at the checkout counter is friendly, charming – wants to know why I'm here... a moment of real warmth.
***
Somewhere in these past few days, somebody's Facebook reference led me to finally read Fight Club – malevolently funny, a very good book, but also – such deep red/black rage, such vivid, ruthless, demented passion embedded in it. It is a charge just to read it – and an unusual charge for me: when did I last let myself feel such blood lust, such impatient, visceral, imaginatively violent hatred of all things? Men, in packs....
(I haven't read American Psycho, and probably never will – I mean: ick – but suspect that's got some of the same fascination.)
And, because my iPad has many books scattered among its bytes, veered sideways to read The Enchanted April. A bit sharper than I'd realised – not quite sure I believe that these women would be so utterly transformed from their malevolent London irritability by the warm glories of Italy; or at least that those transformations would sit with permanence – but beautiful. And, uh, yes, somewhat different than Fight Club.
It seems that I read these things differently now – a slightly more psychological kind of reading: I'm not so much wondering restlessly whether I'm enjoying where I am in the book, but instead fascinated with understanding what's going on with the characters. So, perhaps, a lot of books I hadn't liked before will become more interesting – and not just in some chilly clinical sense, but in the sense of really wanting to understand the experience. And, perhaps, a more emotionally confident entry into that experience.
So there you are... Are they going to do a crossover movie of Fight Club with The Enchanted April? No? The scene where Russell Crowe remonstrates with Keira Knightley in the garden just before he goes to beat up the gardener?... no I suppose it wouldn't work all that well.
***
Back to last bursts of changes, and some irritation, around the Stäbler book: which supposedly is printed by the end of the month. Why such a messily updated projects list from him now?... ah well, you know how creative types are, roll my eyes and get on to it. Three sections revised tonight, two remaining...
but...
suddenly weak; extremely weak, shaky. To the point of leaving the computer, holding myself up across the seven or eight feet to the bed, lying down.
Up fifteen minutes later. Then another wave of weakness....
I told yet another friend the Story of this Book last week, that strange way my subconscious had become convinced that this book was tied up with dying for me.
I'm in good health at the moment.
Feeling strange, in a small Zürich apartment, snow on the windows... calm except when I stand.
Not frightened, not depressed: but somehow curious.
So, is it actually going to happen?...
Tomorrow, supervision with Kast... this week classes, colloquia, a visit to Lucerne to check on a new exchange agreement...
And of course finishing these last corrections.
Snow falling.
Could this, by any weird chance, really be it?...
I am curious... but I won't stop.
I'll just... pay attention....
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