It has felt like a rather heavy month at points....
Or no, it hasn't, or perhaps it has intermittently. Cheerful bits, lively bits, confidence and –
and a disappointed sense of stuckness (a partial stuckness, admittedly) around the thesis, around moving into large things, as opposed to falling back from them.
Which has admittedly been a central problem for me, yes? – the disappointing failure to do things, the slightly too-unfocused drifting through life.
Well, I tend to see it that way.
There were two planned launches into the skies of (possible) academic success... I let them go by; perhaps I'll try them next year.
And the experience of having a piece of writing dumped in what seemed a remarkably ratty and unprofessional way, by some colleagues in an adjacent profession... with a major publisher to boot. My bit was only a foreword, but still... it stung.
•••
All right, this isn't making much sense, is it?
Will it make more sense if I try to put it this way: on a daily basis things are going well enough; on a long-term basis some things have stalled, but mostly without immediate disasters; and...
The really difficult part is that sense of dullness, of failure, of having been not paying attention when the important points of my life should have been happening.
Of course this is not an entirely new projection onto myself – and also not one that seems as tragic to me at this point in my life: that's the benefit of analysis, by now I can walk through these depressive spaces without taking up residence.
(Even on the night last week when the above colleagues did their Unpleasant Thing... I just slept more heavily for a night or two; which shows something that we in the business call Resilience.)
•••
In the midst of this November mood, a strange flash of – not quite dream, not quite imagination:
I have a sense as I’m half awake that I can rebuild my own ego: after being disappointed at the Xxxxx Press snafu, I can choose a different set of parameters to function as my ego/complexes – just choose them, just be otherwise: that I’ve reached a stage in analysis that all these things become freely chosen or not, rather than apparently inevitable.
I tell M. about this when we Skype a few days later.
M. has a passion for complicated and unusual branches of psychoanalysis, such as Matte Blanco (five strata for the unconscious – really? – I'll buy into immense variation and fluid complexity in the unconscious, but five distinct levels just sounds like... well, it sounds like all that Darmstadt stuff I've spent so much of my life on. I mean, charming, but unreal, yes?). But, even for M., this idea that I've half-dreamt sounds impossible – but he allows that it is worth imagining.
Strangely enough, that night, it really seemed as though I could do this thing... would some of the more arcane Buddhists agree: if mind is illusion, then can you simply reconstruct it into more apposite forms?....
•••
A dream fragment, a day or two later:
In the back of a book, there are advertising pages of other books that are available – but they are from different publishers, and some from a more amateurish publisher. Many of them seem to be about time and awareness, and in different kinds of tale/story form; some are more essays or science, also related to time – I am interested in these, and I circle some of them…
•••
So, there has been this feeling of disconnection, of being increasingly lost to the joys of the world...
Tonight, the next thing to do: scan and wipe my plastic notebook for my patients' notes – a fiddly but not unpleasant task; I fall into the role of the quiet older man doing necessary tasks at his desk, in a book-lined apartment, on a winter night, in a small northern city.
And then I am suddenly interrupted, to fall into contact with two men whom I love: one who is far away, not only geographically but located, as he is, in the midst of my life in Berlin in the mid-1990s, suddenly rings me on a late-night Skype call (Wie geht's, und dein Gesundheit, gibt's dieser Mann in deinem Leben?...)...
and affectionately enthusiastic text messages from another, interrupting the end of the call...
that sense of warmth and light.
Which is what I needed, this November night.