Analysis, a couple of weeks ago.
For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything.
The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our confidence.
Later, when I go back to my room – a round room in a stone castle, with ancient hangings, a modern bed in the middle of the floor that looks awkward; my suitcase is open on it –
he is there, sitting in my chair, and he refuses to leave. I am angry, I pick him up, in an ungainly fashion, holding him in front of me with his legs folded – I try to drag him to the door – but then as I wake we begin to talk, as though we haven't been fighting –
•••
My analyst starts laughing (he is usually gentle and polite, but today he is... I don't know: a bit rambunctious?). He loves this dream: the teenager is obstinate, he's at my desk!...
He’s bright, he’s curious… he doesn’t do things the right way because well, dammit, that’s the point of adolescence – that’s why we need children, to invent the world anew…
And he says something unexpectedly direct, out of the blue:
'How have you ever gotten anything done? You're the problem, not him!'
•••
I am wrestling with the teenager in the dream: Jacob and the angel?...
My mother used to wake me in the morning by turning the radio up loud in the kitchen: I was always angry, wanting to stay asleep.
My analyst sees: in that intermediate place between sleeping and waking, the young man and I are able to communicate: that feels so dramatic, as though my control is down.
It feels as though there’s gold in the dream, but it’s out of my reach...
•••
A strange couple of sessions: these images and feelings vibrate, are alive with energy –
but at the same time there is a dark line around them, one of sadness: I keep feeling sure that, fascinating as all this is, any real energy or understanding that is embedded in these strange images will not be available to me.
Why not?
Because... because of the story of the Buddhist abbot, and the resulting promise: that I will have lifetimes where things are out of my control, so that I become less arrogant, so that I pay attention to those in my care.
Because I am too old, because I waited too long, because I have been too slow in my analysis, avoiding the hardest things and their sensations, their emotions.
Because I'm so tired lately, feeling ill with side effects, worried that I'll have to retire early, give up on moving anywhere, on any future change or hope –
Because, when I went to the local funeral in Bali in the late 1990s with an Aussie boyfriend, he could see them dancing and cutting themselves with knives, but not bleeding – while I saw nothing, just had a sense of several hours passing, looking at the stage, where I felt antsy and uncomfortable, but I couldn't remember what had happened.
Because, although I don't disbelieve in the transcendental, I can never see any of it: and that may include my own power, my creativity, my happiness –
•••
My analyst says: is this something the young man would know something about? He doesn’t want to leave because he wants something from you.
I mention meeting with a struggling student last week: I told him he might go into the depressed place, like walking into a cave with a torch – just to see what is there, not to solve anything.
My analyst continues: you know exactly how the young man in the dream feels, or nearly… He needs empathy and help, rather than coercion.
•••
When I finally finished my PhD dissertation in the summer of 1997 in Hong Kong – thirteen years after starting graduate school, when no one thought I could do it – I don't even remember the summer. It was written, by me, but I don't remember doing it.
I wasn't at my normal level of consciousness.
Which is something like not being able to see the Balinese knife dancers...
•••
My analyst: this dream feels different from my other dreams – the same, but different… it’s emotionally much clearer.
I note that this is a castle, which is unusual – the hangings are tapestries, not something modern. It's very old: is it almost like the broken stone platform far beneath the surface, except we are inside it this time?...
My analyst: the teenager is fairly inarticulate, because that’s what teenagers are –as are complexes when we try to engage them.
I say: he’s too angry to articulate it – the others in the dream are exasperated that we can’t convince him to do what we want. He looks civilised enough, well dressed, but we can’t get him to fit into our social conversations...
My analyst: he’s not even shadow, he’s you from the outside! This is big…
•••
Since before the session, all day, in the train coming here, the tram, I've felt something else, there is some other meaning here: I am having some sense of something I can't quite define –
my analyst makes suggestions, I tell him sharply to stop: it's not clear to me, and if we keep talking about concepts and specifics I'll lose what I'm trying to see in myself –
almost like a shape, like a shape of my own internal world and ideas:
I've told my own analysands that sometimes the hardest things to understand are like the astrophysical nature of a black hole in space, of space/time that is distorted, but invisibly so: and that distortion, that extraordinary gravity and pressure, controls us, but can't be seen by us.
This feels similar: I can't quite articulate it, though I keep trying –
I don't want to let these things, this mystery, collapse into some concrete solution: fall into something merely two-dimensional, when my experience of it is – well, clearly a lot more than two dimensions.
I am fighting to see this – whatever it is –
•••
My analyst, who has backed off from ideas and questions, sees that I need to be allowed to go my own way in this (I rarely snap at him – he's very sweet, we get along very well) –
he tells me about negative capability: Keats' comment in a letter about the special, difficult ability – really, the willingness – to keep something suspended, unknown –
it is like Jung's ideas of holding the tension: the difficulty of being willing to not know what is going on, to stay with it until it becomes what it needs to be.
In Keats' famous letter, he uses Coleridge as a counterexample – Coleridge, older, a critic, more certain, who instructs the younger poets in the ways of the world: but Keats recognises the flaw in Coleridge, that he needs to reach a conclusion, he needs to decide how to do things, what things are for, very quickly. Which means he loses any possibility of understanding something he didn't already understand...
My analyst says it's also like Nagarjuna's stanzas on emptiness. I'll take his word for it – I can look that one up later.
•••
I want to change everything.
Do you know that I moved often in the late seventies, and in the nineties? And then for the past fourteen years I haven't moved at all – a loss of momentum, in fact too much anxiety over the exhausting moves of 1992 to 2002.
I can even list them - fourteen, or fifteen (depending on how you count them) homes in the ten years between 1992 and 2002:
4/85-11/92 Spaulding Avenue, LA, with various roommates, especially Paul P.
11/92-8/93 Cumberland Street, SF – the most beautiful hillside apartment
1993 Kiel – six weeks for the language course for the Fulbright
1993 Darmstadt – the first part of the Fulbright
1993 Berlin – renting a room from a pharmacist who had a habit – kicked out
1994 Berlin, Alexanderplatz – the huge streets, the old-fashioned Ossi apartment
9-12 1994 Irvine, CA, for the seminar with famous musicologists
12/94 – 3/97 Market Street, San Francisco – the shabby druggie building; expected end...
3/97 – 5/98 Hong Kong, above the ocean – a professional, age 40! A glorious apartment.
8/98-7/01 Hong Kong, Central – more high-density, closer to things.
7/00-1/01 Los Angeles, Westwood – visiting professor; intensely ill... a strange time.
1/01-7/01 Hong Kong: I plan to move to the job in Sydney... which blows up in my face.
2001-2 Adelaide (Sydney) – living with handsome John, but no job...
2002, summer Los Angeles, Susan & Rob’s – with my boxes, for another huge move
September 2002 Newcastle: at Ian's for a month, then this apartment...
with the money gone on the move and the year without a job... and a sense of having climbed to something, and crashed: life is in ruins...
No wonder there has been such a feeling of lostness in the past fourteen years.
•••
When I try to throw the young man out of my office, I wrestle him, I hold on to him – like the legend of Proteus, who will only tell you what you want to know if you hold on and don't let go:
like negative capability – holding onto the shape of myself that has formed out of all the events of my life –
No, I know better than that: I wasn't formed by the events.
I was formed by what I thought of the events: what I made them mean....
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