[A post drafted in late November 2020; I have moved on from these things, a bit... and incidentally am now firmly of age, at 64. I apologize for the fragmentation: unfinished work, with later attempts to recapture some of the original content, and then some scraps of things I wanted to talk about – two and a half months ago....]
Mood is an interesting problem in psychology... mood disorders, CBT and medication to manage mood... if emotion or feeling is like the weather, then mood is more like climate.
In the time of strangeness brought on by COVID-19, I remain mostly pretty calm... but with occasional bursts of confrontative anger: I'm still intermittently a bit of an asshole, often right and sometimes wrong but always too direct, with various people. It's easier to recover than it once was, and fortunately it's easier to control myself and simply not respond....
I had a fairly major test of my still-and-probably-perpetually-clumsy ability to control my own emotional responses a couple of weeks ago: the online presentations of famous Jungians that we've been holding for six months, with marked public success, peaked in a book launch with Sonu Shamdasani, editor of the newly published Black Books by Jung. This collection is such a coup of research and background – I still find the Books almost unreadable, but Shamdasani's excellent introduction leads towards some possibility of understanding, and it keeps feeling as though real attention to this kind of creative work could have a real impact on me: a sense that change and growth remain possible, even two weeks before my sixty-fourth birthday....
Sixty-four: such a pleasingly solid number, one that always seemed to anchor the multiplication table among the weirder linkages that led to fifty-four, fifty-six, sixty-three, and the last familiar outpost before the chilly Plutonian distance of eighty-one. Now, of course, in an era of computer-driven binarism, the number remains solid and familiar, though it has a slightly archaic charm – back to the eighties and nineties, when we still cared about numbers as small as thirty-two, or sixty-four... a bit like telling them inattentive youngsters about diskettes. Which now feel nearly as far away as corsets.
In any case, our management of Shamdasani's online talk was friendly and enthusiastic, but fairly clumsy and crude, especially through the technology. This is hardly new: my lifelong involvement with the split between a polished performance and a sloppy, that's-good-enough presentation has resulted in an article or two, as well as many of my greatest or most recurrent anxieties. (It's probably the largest obstacle facing me now, as I fight with myself to write a shortish book based on my own lucid outline... the writing of words that are good enough should not be difficult and yet, always, for me, it is.)
Over the months we've been doing these online and video presentations, I've forced myself to accept being publicly sloppy (not, of course, for the first time). Having one presenter wish to rip my guts out when I couldn't play the short video he'd wanted (a Zoom update wouldn't allow VLC to function, and it crashed... and I spent nearly ten minutes battling in front of ninety or so Zoom attendees to produce some kind of audiovisual entertainment, and failed utterly) was a dramatic recurrence of these anxieties. It was interesting to respond to that disaster with a certain distant coolness – I apologized profusely of course, but after that there seemed nothing else to do, and it felt like a mark of maturity that my internal response was summed up in the immortal words: oh, well.
***
[At this point I'd planned to tell the tale from November 2020: a clumsy video, with far too much noise in the emcee's wifi connection; and some irritatingly and, for me, pointlessly aggressive questions; so, when Shamdasani asked us not to post it... well that led to strife and argument. Some members of the radical (that is to say, even further left than me) wing of Jungians regards Shamdasani's closeness to the Jung family as proof that he is a kind of collaborator, someone too closely linked to the old Jungian association with the self-protective rich... though I must admit, if there's one area where I have sympathy with the one per cent, it's in the trampling judgment of private individuals by the world of media.
In any case, as far as I'm concerned, Shamdasani is a solid researcher – more than that, really: one of those researchers that make the great mass of academics, historians, writers, and scholars look carelessly sloppy. And his dislike of being poked at – some of the questioners were pointlessly aggressive; and his preference for a polished presentation – the video book launches that he did approve were considerably more elegant and planned than ours – suggest to me some perfectly reasonable values to be held by a rather shy and seriously brilliant man.
So, when he didn't agree for us to make our video public, one person blew up, and many of the attendees were disappointed... but as for me, I thought: okay. A reasonable enough decision, and not a great loss. But the tempest, though it stayed in the teapot and ran for less than a week, was tiresome...
Perhaps I experienced it, also, as a rebuke of my own vanity: the success of this series has been remarkable, and I like people telling me that they enjoy our work, paying attention to my opinions in the Jungian lists, considering me Of Significance in the Field. A bit as I've been intermittently in musicology, since my career high points in the nineties and early two-thousands; as I've said before, of the seven deadly sins, vanity follows close behind envy for me.
So, I suppose this was a kind of perfect storm, for me: and I'm pleased to say I could let it fade from sight with relative equanimity...]
***
Listening to music: I seem to have fallen into Sun Kil Moon and Kate Bush's Ariel, both of them styles that have a distant, thoughtful quality – moods that are generally calm: even the sad or the angry work is so tempered by time, or distance and (sometimes, with Mark Kozelek) a mildly alcoholic numbness. I am more comfortable with such moods today than anything else... or anything I've heard in some time...
Perhaps it's the quality of intense feeling held at a distance: not blocked, not refused, but not... indulged. Not exaggerated, not made into spectacle, let alone tragedy.
Which seems to give more space for really, well... feeling it.
***
Mood: a sunny northern day.
[And, two and a half months later, it is a similar kind of day, but this time with snow: and a clear sense that it will be the last snow – that the original and revisionary chunks of this entry bracket the enforcedly quiet winter of 2020-21.]
The background climate of my life is so different than it was even five years ago – certainly than it was ten years ago, let alone forty... I am so different now (though always of course still exactly the same).
Calm about things that used to seem impossibly difficult; and a bit testy about the insistence of so many who are safe and warm, so taken care of and free from the real, terrible worries of earlier centuries and real poverties, on creating worry, anxiety, even panic, out of such minor elements as having to wear a mask, or not being able to fly somewhere for vacation; or not seeing their grandchildren at this year's family meeting...
Riding the larger climate of anxiety, or relief around COVID, the American election, Brexit, and the Ragnarök of the massively incompetent governments of the English-speaking nations (except, of course, tiny, blessedly honest New Zealand).
[And now, in February, COVID continues, with people seeming a bit more rational, more sane in a realistically irritable and anxious kind of way - somewhat like way we were when we crossed that great line in 1996, when AIDS went from being the horrific end of the world, to an everyday, human, temporal kind of danger...
And of course the American election moved through a ludicrous and embarrassing crisis to a consummation devoutly to be wished, and Brexit actually took place, though without much visible impact in this weird half-life world; so the tangled overlay of what are to me hugely awful or mercifully recuperative have moved around, the strands twisting around each other in constantly refigured patterns.]
I seem to watch them all, slightly disengaged...
***
And now we are getting notices from the university that look towards a post-vaccine world: they might be a little premature, but I think I understand the mood.
And for the first time in months I imagine coming back to an everyday, though of course changed, world: admittedly with a little resistance (I'm comfortable here, don't drag me outside... it's a bit like not wanting to wake up when I was young, when my mother would play the radio loudly in the kitchen: the whole scene colored by her moods, which were cheerful and funny but anxious – she tended to worry endlessly, what would happen to us, would we wake up and work enough to survive – and I did end up as, of course, her greatest worry).
When I do get up it is so beautiful, this chilly sunny northern day. A consideration of where I am now: in a post-COVID I may get to revisit ideas of moving – in my own neighborhood, to a larger house – or, would it be possible to go back to those ideas of an apartment Barcelona, a shared country house in northern Italy?...
And a smaller range of issues: I would see analysands live again, and that would be a pleasure. A bit more reorganization and retooling: and I might finally get to meet some of my online patients live, for the first time.
I assume that the university would combine aspects of simplification and a return to normalcy (we would be back in classrooms, glory be, so much more alive and less attenuated than Zoom classes) with bursts of overblown institutional anxiety (I hope my more more anxious colleagues won't go into elaborate overreactions – we have at least one person who would feel a need to generate frantic questionnaires, instructions, policies, control systems to check whether students and academics feel overburdened... a problem that contains its own genesis, of course).
Life in town would return to – well: not the same, not recognizably normal, but –
And this disastrous government would continue to drag us down. I assume that my students, ex-students, friends, analysands, acquaintances – all the ones who are in more anxious situations under lockdown – would again be able to find employment and money. Depending, of course, on....
I assume we all know that, after we come “back,” people and systems and many things will be very altered. Some in good ways, I think; and others will not be able to continue.
A return to normal will not be, of course, a return to normal.
But at the moment, today at least, none of these things have any real sting or demand in them.
Moods, which are like climate, rather than weather....
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