Crossing from one year to the next....
This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one place to another, I'm experiencing this is very different: to plan, to choose, step by step, feels like... well, a calmer, more conscious kind of life than I have lived, for most of sixty-six years.
Retiring from Newcastle University became entangled with an internal, then increasingly external, change in my relationship to organizations, schools, committees – community groups, support networks....
I realized I just wasn't interested in those things any more, that they had become mostly burdens. Which is unexpected as, for a number of decades (since the early 70s, really), I have alternated between trying to make things happen and, sometimes unhappily, giving up on making things happen. It's been a fairly basic pattern for me, entangled with wanting to be seen and heard (all that youngest-child stuff, amplified by the quieter social spaces of the last twenty years), plus wanting certain things to be understood differently, wanting to transform or expand or be a part of certain conversations – and then, as an analyst, getting entangled in professional conversations about taking care of people, of groups, of the world.
I do still tend to be project-focused, rather than any freer kind of being, which I realize has its limitations, even its hungry-ghost aspect. But there are vastly fewer projects now, and each is connected with far fewer people and practically no time anxieties. So, to go to an image from the first pages of Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, I spend far less time among those people panicking and fleeing the moon, as it looms above them....
I left a lot of committees and projects – including practically all the things I've joined in the past five years that were tied to my new persona, my third life and second career, as a Jungian analyst. I found myself habitually doing things like those I did as an academic – I was on the research committee of the Zürich institute, and the alumni board; helped Barbara with the internship project, wrote forewords and afterwords, taught a number of online classes (Zürich, Los Angeles, even far-away San Francisco!) – and of course helped manage the past three years of our online lecture series and videos; and the gay book group, plus showing them films under lockdown, and the online men's group, then meeting about the local men's group that never happened...
Leaving all those things, even when they were things or people I liked, ended up being a relief. A sense of quiet – even of great quiet, like the music at the beginning of act 3 of Britten's Midsummer: the forest is always there, mysterious and quiet, and if only the lovers would shut up they might be able to hear it....
•••
So, it's the change of the year: and a clear sense that all those things are done, and done.
It leaves a slightly strange vacuum: one I wish I'd experienced more often in my life – so many projects, so many things I wanted to do....
In this vacuum, it feels as though doing things has been one of my life's problems: why things were not finished, why the sadness or guilt of unfinished projects ended up coloring too many weeks, months, years, out of my life. Which now seems frankly silly: nobody insisted that I do these things – I can now hear, again, something as simple, as lucid, as Susan McClary telling me in the 90s: you are doing too many conferences and committees, stop, focus on real work.
That now seems obvious.
And – you may be pleased to hear – it also now seems easy, even for me.
No longer fleeing that menacing full moon, as it rolls across the sky...
•••
Listening to big choral works by Schütz: which links to the me of 1974 – nearly fifty years! – dazzled by the university's music library, those glorious collected works... and so joy in books, and music and history, and German-ness and serious dignity; but also in the sensual explosions that happened in the recordings of those works. As well as playing seventeenth- and twentieth-century pieces in the practice rooms, late at night.
•••
So, after getting rid of so many things – what is left?
The first book, then the second. (Maybe a third, we'll see.)
Analysands. I see about twenty people at the moment, but only ten or twelve in a given week (some of these relationships are rather itinerant, which is okay). I enjoy this work: the balance of the right numbers and timing is hard to hold on to, but I manage.
Some teaching. Not much, but some – mostly Jungian stuff, mostly online.
Aside from those, I still have a couple of Newcastle postgraduates; though I don't mind taking on more, I suspect the department will conserve and focus, both in relation to money and to keeping current staff working. (Our crazed, greedy Tory government has torn up a lot of pre-university music exams and teaching; that will all come back some day, but the next decade may leave music teachers and institutions struggling across the country).
•••
As the Hollywood joke goes: "But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"....
•••
Things are quieter. I'm a bit more like good old Montaigne (well, I wish), or like the old magician collecting herbs in the woods that I envisioned at the beginning of this pandemic.
Speaking of which – I've still never had COVID, that I know of, and would love to keep it that way...
In the larger frame of 2022, COVID, and the way everyone else seems to think of it – including Saturday Night Live – I have to confess, I don't see 2022 as such a disaster. Sure, COVID (but that was already familiar, and hasn't really gotten worse, it just hasn't gotten much better – so that feels kind of like the years 1984 to 1995 under AIDS). The Ukraine war is dangerous but not new – I'm still surprised by people who say, why don't you care about Yemen! – rather obviously, Russia has nuclear weapons that most of the world doesn't. And that is scary. But that cliff edge is something we've stood near several times in past decades. I didn't experience this year as seriously disorienting or fearful – perhaps that is just me. I always seem to come back to: it's not as though we haven't seem times that were just as bad.
Perhaps a big part of my reaction is based on my emotional shift towards being, well, less concerned – about everything – which follows processes that have been happening for maybe thirteen years now, since the 2009 stroke, since visiting the Zürich institute, since – well, since a kind of, perhaps implicit, decision that Things Needed To Change.
But this hasn't been the Bay of Pigs, or 9/11, or Prague 1968. Or the 2008 crash, or the election of Trump, or any of a mass of other dark things from past decades. Admittedly, events have happened in a more open cultural space, so we see more of them. And you can think of hyperobjects, and the sense that disasters these days seem further beyond us than earlier perceived disasters.
But I continue to feel calm....
•••
So, okay. Let's be traditional and think of 2023 – not with resolutions, exactly, but with things I want to do.
Continue writing, finish the larger stuff – while the (vastly fewer) small projects (one overview chapter, and the sprawling and disjointed blog entry about Barcelona that has meandered across the last three years, which should really get done) can be just polished off.
Visit Barcelona, and focus: should I, can I, move there? What do I do with my physical life, my books, how do I find a new place to live – with how many changes, accepted losses or benefits?... but that project can unfold over time.
Make, finally, a web page, with a new home for this blog, and a place to put it all together – work, writings, past. Something that looks decent enough... with a designer? I'll keep looking.
Clear out much of what I own, and get accustomed to walking away from things and projects without looking back.
Stay open to unexpected discussions that cross my mind, about time and experience and memory and death... and write them out, return to them. Which should be helped by the quieter spaces around me.
Manage the few project/event things on the 2023 calendar (the conference panel, the co-taught seminar, the handful of people asking for professional advice) without letting them get overgrown or entangled with similar things.
Relax a bit, walk more, listen to some of the music, read some of the books, that cover the walls of my life. Cook a bit...
Doesn't sound impossible. Not even improbable. Wouldn't be too shabby....
•••
(There are nights when I see the rooms and hallways of my life in Barcelona. They are pleasant and quiet – not bright but comfortable, book-lined. And, even if I never get there – those are good times....)
Most excellent dear Paul
Posted by: Larry Bittner | January 02, 2023 at 02:56 PM
Crossing a Creek
Crossing a creek requires three things -
Bare feet… a certain serenity of mind…
and
A sure trust that the snake we know
glides silently under water,
just beyond our vision
will choose to ignore the flesh
that cuts through its territory
and
we will pass through.
Some people think crossing a creek is easy,
but I say this:
All crossings are hard;
whether crees,
mountains, ot into other lives…
and,
we must always remember
the snakes at our feet,
just beyond our vision
will choose to ignore
the flesh that cuts through its territory
and
we must practice believing
we WILL come through…
Author Unknown
Posted by: Larry Bittner | January 02, 2023 at 03:06 PM