in the hall of mirrors

Existence

That in-the-midst-of sense...

Time recently past: too much stress since about the first of June – some of which twisted at me such that my guts started to react: I felt relatively calm but my body didn't.

I'd still like to ascribe this – partly – to current liver damage; which will hopefully be cured in August-October; which will perhaps improve the situation a bit... though yes, I know: once your body gets into certain tension/stress patterns it's there, perhaps, forever.

In any case: four or five days here in Zürich simply imploded into staying in my rented apartment, not going anywhere, cancelling everything...

then it was all calm, everything was fine.

Time present: a mixture of figuring out how to finish the Jung-Institut program in two years, or (only faintly possibly) eighteen months.

Summer, and the healthy energetics of Zürich, young people, people with leisure. A pleasant place, relaxed.

Good seminars, interesting discussions...

and, most electrically, Nancy R.'s seminar: she always has such a complex and vivid awareness of theory, possibility, existence, mind –

I undoubtedly think too much about my own mind/situation in this seminar, rather than my analysands (especially because of the anxieties of the past months); but the insights ring like huge bronze bells, and they transform the landscape. My analysands will feel the effects. A complex gamelan of developing and crossing lines, counter-lines, flashes of understanding, total or partial or transcendental.

At night, I read Robert Silverberg in his most intense period, around the late seventies, one after another: many are brilliant, but The Book of Skulls is such a shattering, powerfully made, complete thing:

and, as I was lately remembering some of the weirder traps and falls of my youth (see earlier posts connected with the Association Experiment), I could see how the dense anxieties of young men could be channeled into  madness –

and how utterly clear it is at the end of that book that, even if there is no magic formula, even if the two young men who aren't dead are being lied to, they cannot possibly acknowledge it: they have fallen into doing such terrible things that they would now claim anything to be true, as long as it justified their past actions...

Because belief is, for them, now the only thing that keeps them from seeing themselves as utterly evil. So they carefully lock themselves into the shared madness... because that is the only place that is safe.

I think of how fantastically lucky I've been: even the most manipulated structures and situations, or the accidental or contrived contacts with demented and dark people in my life, have always had several easy ways out – and, glory be, I've taken them: I remember a San Francisco apartment, a group of us looking wildly at each other as the owner screamed down the stairs, just get out, get out (which was ultimately a very good idea); a New York apartment that I couldn't later find again (which was absolutely lucky for me); a car in the suburbs of Los Angeles, listening to the driver and realising just what he had done to become the thing that he had fallen to; and other moments where madness was just a few feet away –

This sense of clarity, of awareness: it holds these mad places;

but, and again I realise how stunningly lucky I've been,

it holds me safe; because I've only seen these things from outside....

Lessons

On the plane from Amsterdam to Zurich, a large, angry-looking man is already sitting in the row in front of us. First one, then the other of the seats in his row are filled by men who have suitcases. But he has put some flowers in the overhead bin... Twice he explodes with rage at these fools who have the temerity to put suitcases next to, in front of, his flowers; he gets up and throws their bags to the floor, pulls out his flowers, snarls in a mixture of English and Dutch how many years he has flown; finally the conciliatory stewardesses take the flowers to put them elsewhere.

Through all this, I and the delicately beautiful young woman in my row, in a stylish summer dress and dark red high heels – Spanish, Israeli? – something like that – glance at each other cautiously, eyebrows raised, startled, amused, wary of the explosion two feet away. She unwraps an expensive slim chocolate bar, and a small parchment card falls out; she reads it. The man subsides, and when all is quiet, she leans over and shows me the card: ‘Gracefully I embrace all lessons in my life’.

I can't help it – one bark of laughter. No one notices; she smiles with me, laughs quietly. And we relax as the plane rises...

••• 

I show her this when it is written, and we talk; she is Turkish, but has grown up in the Netherlands. We talk about family, food, the places we’ve traveled, for two hours…

Oh, and her shoes. They are indeed very, very classy.

•••

The train from Zürich airport into the city has a number of people, no air conditioning – a generally fairly sweaty atmosphere. But there is a sense of, not misery or dirtiness, but just a certain intense and unproblematic physicality. The Swiss in summer; the young ones athletic or casual, the older often assertive walkers...

A change in the sense of what the body is, how it is supposed to be: especially given how difficult mine has been for the past week (hives at stress, peeling, embarrassment), I become oddly reassured: being pretty doesn't really matter. The body is physical, erotic, even when it is sweaty: my whole sense of bodies changes. It feels very central European – not the self-consciousness of Latin Europe, but the unquestioned animality of Germanic Europe, when the sun is high.

I think of Ralf König's quote of Westenhagen:

Tiere sind wir,

wir still'n uns're Gier,

süsser Gestank,

vor Geilheit ganz krank,

aber lieben werd'ich dich nie.

It's complicated

A complicated time.

The Book, the one I had all those bizarre death dreams about, arrived in my office TODAY. And yet I breathe.

Too much to do in the past weeks, some of it distinctly though not disastrously late...

Merrie and I performed duets on my students' musicals night. We made blunders but it was exciting, and the kids were... well, some of them were really fantastic. MJ would have been kind to us, but really pleased with them.

Then there was all that end-of-semester marking – so many students doing such intelligent work – a surprising number, perhaps three or four in each large class, are actually nearly publishable. And the ones that aren't quite that good are nevertheless smart, dedicated, imaginative, passionate in their investment...

And that applies not only to the enthusiastic class on musicals, but also to the large but remarkably successful class on philosophy and cultural theory.

But I did manage to make myself mildly ill while stressing over a computer disaster related to marking; and also over those duets – I really should be forced to memorise things weeks before they happen... very intense at some level of my memory and imagination, the one that remembers some of the concert and stage disasters from my intermittent but frequently undependable performing careers.

Ah, I shouldn't say that, it's like hacking away at myself...

And today, the final discussion of marks; I was left surprisingly angry and anxious over one probable error by another part of the university... everyone is trusting in university systems to repair a problem; but, in a department that reads so much Adorno and Foucault, can we really be unaware of the fact that large systems tend to protect themselves, even when they're wrong?... ah well.

I am definitely feeling the pain of one student who was affected by it – that awful existential moment when all your plans and hopes seem fall in ruins... I know it all too well.

We should not have marking at all: it should be like Black Mountain College was, once upon a time.

Tonight will be a short night, then several errands and running around, plane to Zürich, train to Locarno for a weekend in a beautiful part of Italian Switzerland... actually that adjective is kind of redundant, I can't think of any unattractive parts of Italian Switzerland.

My own memories, my own feelings, my own body – my own perpetual illness: how do I experience all of this, when summer beckons, when there is much to do?...

There have been points in the past two weeks when I've thought: but I am not calm, reasonable, sane! I am upset, I am thrown off base, my body is generating symptoms of anxiety and anger – is it allowed that I have years of analysis, that I am actually an analyst for others, and still be like this?

But all right: there is indeed a centre, one I don't always connect with, but I know it is there.

And nobody ever said that when you understood your own complexes and neuroses, you'd wake up the next day to sunshine and happiness...

So: keep

going.