in the hall of mirrors

Addressed to the passions

(If you don't know that phrase, it is from one of the funniest and most touching of essays by Max Beerbohm, 'A Clergyman.' I suggest you find it and read it.)

An intense week... after another intense week, but this one was very different....

Well, for four days, at least: verve, intensity, demands on time and attention. Feeling smack in the midst of the swing of things.

Then minor stupidities on Friday morning – and I do mean minor: dressed in my best, because the party was that evening (don't be sarcastic, this really is the best clothing I brought), I thought I'd transfer the previous day's notes – seminars by Kast and Kime – to my laptop...

and did it backwards, losing a day's notes. Okay, well, not such a great disaster. But compounded by looking for a recovery program online – paying about £60 for it (yes, I know, far too expensive!) – and then couldn't retrieve the lost files...

And then I am forty minutes late for the colloquium, and everything about the day feels confused and stupid, and when I arrive, because I am late, my opportunity to present a case has been given to someone else.

Okay, so: ridiculous. Trivial. Pointless. But I felt so ground up in my own foolishness –

I did write an interesting half-page of single-spaced notes: what is going on in my head, what is this – crap? – Lucid, and I think it will be useful: I was able to watch myself go to pieces over something minor.

***

Monday's seminar, at the start of all this energy, was on the body – and I became a class example (voluntarily, if slightly uneasily) – an intense if brief experience coached by Dunlea: the entire class could see where my mind was going as I traced some unexpectedly deep connections to my father's kind attempts to educate a very young me into the physical world (help me fix the car, I'll take you to the Wright Brothers monument and you can sit on the floor and play with bits of solder while I work...).

Of course I think of myself as incompetent in the physical world (as I walked to the front of the class my leg was asleep, I tried to fight through it, and she made me stop and wait for the blood to come back – which was interesting, given my usual pattern of bulling through such things), but she gave me a breathtaking experience of how much that world actually means to me – the wood carvings on the wall of the Jung-Institut, my memories, my feelings – a deep trust in that part of the universe – which of course cross-connects me to my sisters' work in art, my brother's in engineering, my father's world...

Anyway. Powerful. And deeply illuminating: although it is clear that her training and ability in connecting to things that have been lost in the body are far beyond ours, she did (kindly, and with great practicality) give us basic structures for starting to work with analysands on their bodily memories.

***

I was walking on air for some time after that workshop...

It also felt strange, intense, as though I'd rediscovered a large chunk of me that had fallen out of sight.

Not only memory, emotion, body – but some cross-links with loss and sadness –

***

At Kime's thesis colloquium that night, I was still so charged from the day that something unexpected happened – I suddenly knew exactly what my dissertation would be: and sketched out a draft in a page, that expanded to a dense couple of pages, with other scraps following behind them.

It's AIDS and death, of course. But the map of the thing suddenly enveloped me: admittedly a rather massive map – if a postgrad brought such a thing to me I would say, hmm, you do know the joke about the Ph.D. exam question, don't you? – define the universe and give three examples?...

But this is, I think, doable – with a certain amount of carving and beating into place.

And those verbs seem appropriate: it has a powerful, solid quality, as though a lot of things (thirty-one years of HIV/AIDS?) have been forged, through the pressure of passing time, into a block of solid Carrera marble. (You'll allow me a certain passion for my own work at the moment, these ideas are new.) And all I have to do – all any sculptor needs to d0 – is carve away all the bits that don't look like a thesis....

In the last twenty minutes of the colloquium, I presented this new outline – strangely enough I was trembling slightly with the sheer charge of the day, the excitement and anxiety of this vision of this work – and everyone agreed: it's hefty, but makes sense, is exciting –

it was Philip who suggested that the title of the last section should become the title of the whole. Which gives it an unexpected boost into life: I said, I'm not willing to sidestep death and the darkest stuff, but – that title could work, it would be like re-reading the past thirty years in a way that changes their essential meaning – looking me in the eye (did I seem just a bit mad?) he agreed, saying, that is always possible, to understand our lives retroactively, differently.

A sense of deep power within me. And not only associated with death, with loss, this time: a way to write about this that reconnects it with living....

***

I have reached a point where my highly structured approach to living, eating, waking, laundry, in this small apartment, is such a familiar pattern...

A bit like a Zürich tram: the neat turn, the exact timing of its appearance. At times there is some squealing of the tracks, but ah well.

At the same time: I start to envision when all this work will be done, when I will no longer come here to study. A year or two – I feel much more aware of it – the combination of relief and loss...

The difference between the hyper-patterned structure I've built for myself over the past few years here... and those points when suddenly the sky opens up, into larger vistas: supervision, class, colloquium – something truly shattering becomes visible, a subtler but greater set of patterns clicks into view, an enormous space of seeing.

And then I go back to the tram approach to life: the exact timing of the train home, the predictable structure of my dinner options...

***

Winborn's tough, detailed seminars: his insistence for having read every piece of the history of a problem, and all its roots and reflections. A gentle man, deeply serious about his work – he reminds me of John. I told him he must write textbooks – which had never occurred to him before: I hope he makes some of these things happen.

Such a lot to do in both of his long seminars, Tuesday and Wednesday: a sense of work, solid work, hammered into great metal panes of something that cannot help but last. Like the working materials in Rodin's studio.

***

The party, Friday night – I was still tired, confused – but it was a pleasure: sitting across from Nancy and talking to her about, well, everything. Many of us were tired enough that it was hard to stay in that extrovert room for more than an hour or two, but we were happy enough.

When I came home, a PDF of the complete Stäbler book was in my email: final proofs? – a sense of being overwhelmed, but within 24 hours I'd managed to go through it – the dedication is missing, the first score excerpt shouldn't be adjacent to the poem fragment, the huge number of photographs at the end needs to be balanced by a couple at the beginning – I think it will look good.

We'll see how I get through that being finished, and looking polished, and rather beautiful.

***

Saturday, sleep. A lot of sleep: recovery, mostly? A relief not to leave my room, to quietly make tea, and go back to bed.

But, while I should have been reading Jung's Collected Works 5 – which feels like a slog at the moment – I read Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm instead. Which I haven't read in... how many years? And even then it wasn't such a favourite.

It makes more sense to me now. And I suddenly thought: aha – though I'm not a religious person – I'm putting too much of a Holy Vocation onto this work: you know how this goes – the priest in training who keeps frantically worrying about whether he is pure enough, strong enough – who is utterly exasperating in his insistence on worrying about everything –

Mitchell, on our usual Sunday night Skype (after he pointed out how hot it is in LA – I am, as always, frankly envious), knew exactly what I was talking about: the sin of scrupulosity. Basically: overdoing it. Something seminarians roll their eyes in exasperation over: the tiresomely fretful student.

Like when one of our postgraduates who is doing good work worries, and bemoans, and bemoans, and runs in circles, because it might not be good enough –

An antidote to the week. And, perhaps, an antidote to some mental habits I've gotten into around this training – and my ways of talking about it....

***

On Sunday we went to the Zürich Opera: Ariadne auf Naxos, which I have actually never seen live. Utterly enthralling: I sat with Anna, and we had a very classy box near the stage – Renae had what were probably more expensive orchestra seats, but we had the advantage of height. I have always thought Ariadne was a mess as plots go; but such an intense, high artistry, and of course we were very near the orchestra. Endless passion, and Schlag; and it took real nerve for Bacchus to light a fire in the midst of the table onstage, but boy was it worth it –

I'm not telling this coherently. This has already been a blog entry that tried to do too much; oh well.

Okay, one of my favourite things about Ariadne was that the second, major act took place in a stuffy mitteleuropäische restaurant (Bernhard corrected me about the location, pointing out that it was supposed to be Austrian not Swiss, which of course makes more sense). Ariadne herself, a tragically beautiful tall redhead in a black dress and coat, sits at a table near the front – a table with too many wine glasses already on it; the waiters and waitresses walk by, carefully seeming not to notice that she is still there. People come and go and sit at tables; the chaotic two plots play out across this restaurant space, and the three nymphs are of course waitresses – at one point they sit on a table and it rises in the air, and some of their gestures become suspiciously, and funnily, weialala-esque. Bacchus was amazing, the Composer was amazing (where did those ppp note beginnings come from?), and of course Ariadne was really, really amazing –

what would sopranos do with their lives, if Strauss hadn't existed? Their days would be distinctly grayer. And shorter, and more boring.

***

Enough. You can see all this energy and chaos. Tomorrow starts early, more reading to do –

at least my lunch is already made and in the refrigerator –

and so –

Evening, station

Arriving on the evening train home from Sheffield – after a day with emails, meetings, a lecture, a sandwich on the midday train to Sheffield, where my analyst kindly travels to see me weekly. The train is on time, 8:47, or a bit earlier, walking out of the station, everyone bumping along, some suitcases.

At the new rather grand glassed-in entrance to the station, I turn automatically to the right toward the taxis. As always.

There is someone playing the piano to my left...

A young man, a light piano – but it is not just a keyboard – has someone moved some kind of relatively portable Yamaha into the corner by the front doors? – a young woman stands near him, teetering on her shoes, listening...

the music is graceful, not complicated, meditative... winding through modal patterns in a questioning, long-winded, gradual melancholy...

Before I reach the glass doors I turn back in a wide circle, leaving a straggle of commuters; I walk a few feet back to a quiet place to stand halfway between the side doors and the pianist, the floating music.

She sees me paying attention, is quiet.

I just stand for a bit.

I don't put down my bag; my shoulders loosen.

A sense of time, of paying attention to something beautiful.

In analysis I spoke of my winter awareness over the past few weeks, that if Verena Kast weren't in Zürich I wouldn't be so certain of needing to study there – I spoke of my anxiety at my exam with her a year and a half ago, of how glad I am that she sets such a high standard, not only for psychoanalysis, but for life –

in my lecture today I found myself spending more time on A Chorus Line than I had expected, pointing out to them the focus on the individual dancers telling about their lives, the pain of being rejected: and lightly connecting it to the university, at how we all have these experiences of being judged, and we remember them forever –

It is a long time since I owned a piano, had a piano I could easily play. I miss my fingers meandering around on one, at night.

I don't listen to music so much any more – it often seems like work, like something from another part of my life than this one; but this has calmed me.

As he draws his melancholy improvisation to a light bit of closure, she gives him a small burst of applause, he relaxes before starting up again.

I turn, slightly reluctantly, moving more slowly.

I am now at the end of the line waiting for taxis...

not a problem, it won't be long...

I don't feel much like talking, in the taxi...

until I am home

Temporal anomalies

(... you know... as in Star Trek, I suppose.)

So, several weeks of the stress but not really misery, chaos but not really feeling frantic, the Stäbler book – working on it but not fast enough – and many smaller demands, extra classes coming out of nowhere, paperwork, and so on and so on. With echoes of Zürich and Rome, summer and winter, and other places all mixed up in between.

Today has been rather like the past few days – getting some things done but not the crucial ones – except, well, sometimes.

And tonight there were not one but two parties – one where I was to go with Rumana, one where I was to go with Michael and Andrew – I finally sent negations to both, settled down to... well, mostly to waste time, then had dinner, then actually started the Powerpoint slides for Monday's class. Which aren't hard, and which do indeed need to be finished.

And Michael texts me again, and his party is very near by – so I throw some clothes on and go over... bar, crowd, drinks, noisy music. I order a glass of wine (ah, I am the wild one) and sit down and talk to everyone.

The band gets up to play, the recorded music is shut off – a trio I've heard before, two older guys with one of my former students: basically folk, really. And they're really very good, but –

the problem with folk ballads, especially ones that refer to Ireland and Australia and working and distance and when-she-went-away stuff, is that you start to get into that mood. You know the one – Sad, Alone And Far from Home.

By the third tune I can see it getting to me – well, it is a good band – and drat, by the time I've got my coat and made good-byes and escaped, it's sort of set, and –

That sense of time, and distance, that is simultaneously both abstract and utterly concrete – all of those songs combine some broad concept of place (the outback) with a person who said something (I can still see her face when she...). This is all even more painful when you cross-reference any of this with San Francisco or Australia (because I don't much care about Connemara, do you?) – there is a very exasperating way that concepts of places simultaneously suggest worlds where things went badly, or could have gone wonderfully, and are in any case out of reach. Forever, naturally – not only in the song but also in reality.

Damn. So now I can't do any work at all. Good thing it's midnight, may as well give up on my slides – and we'll see if I can dream the folky sadness away....

Death in...

I, Aschenbach...

Perhaps, partially, because it is November: Scorpio, darkness... the weather has been suddenly, sharply colder the past two weeks; a couple of nights of miserably torrential rain, though more days are sunny than is usual for us here on the North Sea.

But Scorpio is always the darkest part of the year for me: though I promise you, no matter how arrogant and irritable I may seem at times, I am not myself actually a Scorpio – more precisely a Sagittarius, with Scorpio rising. As though we care, of course. But: so, you can see the symbolic reflection of my own dark edge, that I don't much like. And this is the time of year when it often seems to come to life, reflected in the world, back at me...

Though I can't complain much: perhaps because of being in analysis, studying at the Jung-Institut, and simply, finally, accepting that I do indeed live alone, far from my former lives, in a cold climate – even this darkest part of the year isn't so bad these days; at least over the past two or three autumns.

But, yes: I still watch for it....

•••

During my class on analyzing operas and musicals last week, a student told me that Opera North (the often brilliant, often modern/experimental opera company that tours out of Leeds) was in the midst of a Britten centenary festival – and that Death in Venice, my favorite Britten (up against Midsummer Night's Dream, Gloriana, Turn of the Screw, Phaedra) was playing That Very Night.

So I called D. – who has been painfully overworked for the past few months (the overblown British bureacratic mess that we call the REF, a government analysis of our research to prove that we are Useful) – and told him, we have got to go to the opera.

He hedged a bit – too much work, too tired – but he obviously wanted to go... and we finally did. A bit pricey, but good seats – unexpectly, right behind two friends of his, a pleasant couple around our age....

•••

I, Aschenbach.

A very good performance of a difficult work: in fact the Aschenbach was amazing – you were emotionally with him every moment, from beginning to end. (Which is good, as he's on stage for practically the entire night – I hadn't thought about it before, but the role must be absolutely exhausting.)

The spookiness of the choral parts: strangely enough, there is only one real character, Aschenbach – and a cluster of weirdly aggressive antagonists, played by a single baritone – and then a hallucinatory cloud of solos coming from the chorus. A brilliantly constructed though demanding chorus, one that suggests a world in a disturbing haze, one where everything blends into a slight unreality... a bit like Sondheim's Company, which I also showed the class this week.

It was a production that almost sidestepped all the 'gay' stuff – a girl played Tadzio, the boys at the beginning were butchly restrained; not like the ENO production on DVD, which is in fact so gay I wondered whether I really wanted to show it to the class. But still, because this stage production was honestly played, it didn't feel like a disappointment.

It was a production that made us all acutely aware of being older, of the darkness and loss of energy in later life: the four of us, D. and his two friends and I, were all deeply shaken by the end of it.

Though we also felt somehow validated: acknowledged, existent... the darkness understood.

Almost, even: welcomed.

••• 

I couldn't go to the other Britten productions – a shame, but I had to get on a train to London for a conference about Jani Christou: a Greek composer whose later works became savagely, brilliantly political, and who developed aspects of highly experimental performance art; and whose brother, Evangelos, had studied at the Jung-Institut in the 1950s.

Evangelos died in a car crash, still young... leaving his Jung-Institut dissertation in loose pages of drafts and fragments, all over the desert road.

Which papers were gathered and put together by brother Jani into an intelligent if rather difficult book on Jungian epistemology – one that James Hillman regarded as worth introducing.

And then Jani and his wife died in yet another car crash, fourteen years later, in 1970...

•••

So anyway, I made a presentation on problems of archetypes and time in musical works. (Archetypes are often treated as timeless, much Jungian theory treats them and dreams as not functioning in linear time, musical works have to involve at least some linear time, schizoid time, intermittent attention, illusion of temporality, Wagner, Tippett, Scelsi, Christou, you can see where I'm going with all this.)

I was frantically reworking the presentation on the train... probably tried to include too much. But it did seem to work, and they liked it...

The conference, the workshop, the performances. A number of Greeks around: I made a point (with Makis' help, and Google's) of learning to say: Η μητέρα μου ήρθε από τη Θεσσαλονίκη.

(Which isn't quite accurate – her family came from another part of northern Greece, further west, a mountain town called Pentalofos (Πεντάλοφος) – a town she and my father visited once; where a shopkeeper said to her in Greek: I don't want your dirty American money; and my mother said back to her, in Greek, then I won't buy anything from you. And walked out, leaving the woman flabbergasted that an American actually spoke Greek.

But, for me, Greek is hard, I wasn't going to muck around trying to learn complicated phrases.)

There were a few conference problems: two presenters cancelled, a couple of days before (hmm, clichés about Mediterraneans).

The first presenter (he wasn't supposed to be first, but because of those cancellations...) was a shy young Greek man with very poor English, who struggled for a painful while... because they'd put me in charge of the session, I finally stopped him with a smile, saying: we have so many people who speak so many languages here, why don't you just say what you need to in Greek and we can translate for you? Then he actually relaxed, and things went much better after that. (Remarkably, he was doing a sort of avant-garde version of the kind of work John P. has done on Bruckner – he'd taken Christou's major unfinished graphic score and was working out the kinks, and creating excellent graphics on the computer to replace the messy drafts.)

Then there was a rehearsal workshop: our group, a mixture of academics and students, some performers and some evidently not, managed to invent a bizarre quasi-ritual – we were quite pleased with it; two of the young men were particularly imaginative/enthusiastic, and we decided later that we'd had the best group. Of course.

The more professionally prepared performances, by the ensemble Oiseaux exotiques (why do I think of Ravel's Oiseaux tristes?), were themselves extraordinarily intense: a shocking electric charge like the ones you get in Diamanda Galás – perhaps I should watch more Greek avant-garde artists, perhaps Diamanda is really sort of mainstream from certain angles... Andriana, who was running the performances, was herself startingly powerful as a pianist having a shattering nervous breakdown.

Young people, mostly Greek, but living all over the world (a nation of seafarers!): young men, some with aristocratic, sharp Greek faces; others more bearded and intense –

Yes, of course, there were women too. Some of them very beautiful, notably the kindly Maria, who organized the conference part. To the extent I could manage to pay as much attention to them, with all the Greek guys around.

A Skype screen during the performance, with a Greek lad on another continent, doing bizarre performance-art-with-store-bought-vegetables – I mean yes, he was very good at what he was doing, very funny; but he was also shatteringly sexy and friendly – he looked like your ideal boyfriend, like the guy you'd be glad to come home to.

And another man on stage for the performance, playing percussion instruments, with a severely passionate expression on his bluntly masculine face – among so much physical beauty (even the women!), a few men stood out in a way that left me... seriously disoriented.

Almost, a bit, in love... although I guess you can't call it in love unless you actually know their names, can you.

Tadzio, Tadzio...

•••

Between workshop and concerts, a film: a new film on the life of (J.) Christou. Good, and frankly surprising – the honest truth is: the performance works may seem interesting in score form, but they are arrestingly intense when actually enacted. (At least... when enacted by Greeks... which as you can see is part of the point of what I'm writing here.)

At the end of the film, a complex tape piece is playing, one with overlapping recorded voices and electronics. We are watching an old-fashioned tape player running, clearly playing the piece. A paragraph on the screen explains: this tape piece was left unfinished at Christou's death, it is not possible to finish it, it breaks off in the middle of a phrase –

and the piece does indeed break off. The screen goes black, for several minutes.

Then: credits.

•••

At the end of the film, there were some comments – mostly rather dry technical-historical ones from academics who seemed to want to generate historical theories...

for me this seemed to sort of miss the point. So for one last comment I said, in rather garbled way, that I was thankful that the filmmaker had expressed the infinite (archeytpal?) terror of death, and its closeness to the Christou family; and how hard it is for us to look directly at these things....

Afterwards, dinner with Keith and his wife, and Paul G., an Irish student who wanted to talk. Paul and I later went in search of the others – Greeks, performers, intellectuals. And... some men I really, really wanted to see again.

We couldn't find them... Paul G. regaled me with tales and conversation (yet another national stereotype: the dazzling Irish ability to just talk, and to entertain). Tired, we finally found our way home across a midnight, near-full-moon London....

•••

The next day, Sunday, a lovely lunch at the restaurant where Maria plays piano from time to time. Discussing life and work, existentially, with Andriana – and giving her some rather heavy-handed advice. (I think I was right, but it that doesn't mean that you can simply inform people of things, and expect them to agree...) Everything seemed en famille: though of course this was not an actual family, but a created family of passionately friendly people.

Has anyone else noticed that London, these days, is so much more maneuverable – Google maps, Apple maps, buses with destinations flashing up in electronic lights, Oyster cards – that you don't actually need to know where you're going in order to get around? Which really changes the entire experience...

Before that lunch I had had coffee and pastries with the wonderful Emilja, who is organizing a Jungian conference in London for next year. Emilja, somewhat like/unlike my dear Nomi, is one of those Jungians who seems so constantly alive, awake – you feel as though you're not paying enough attention to your own life when you talk to them; and afterwards you feel really heard, really... existent. A pleasure, and a challenge.

Finally to the station, driven in the car of one of the more aristocratic young Greek men, who kindly left me off there. Some complicated, poorly informed dashing around to locate my left luggage, then finally: train, crowded, late Sunday so people who'd been drinking, then singing.

At long last home, near midnight, and my blessed bed.

•••

It's true: I did nothing else in London. Of course it was good to spend time with that Greek quasi-family, with Keith, with Emilja. And I was too busy, and there was little time...

Aging, or the projection of aging: I'll be 57 in two weeks, which for many is not old. I of course make myself older through staring death and loss in the face, too much... and yes, I know that is a mistake.

Age, death, loss, all come soon enough, as we all know.

Can I enjoy traveling to a city without wearing myself out – laying on the polyester cover of a single bed in a budget hotel at 9 pm, too tired to go anywhere? And perhaps, in any case, I have too few links with people... I do complain too much about my situation in life, I know that. But there are points where I can't help looking at all of this....

My mind beats on...

•••

Showing Sondheim's Company (the Esparza version – I've only just discovered that there is another new DVD with Neil Patrick Warren) to the students, which happened the morning of the day I saw Death in Venice, was also slightly risky for me. I get too emotionally involved when I hear Sondheim these days, and it is difficult to recover...

though admittedly, in line with the above discussions: it is not as hard to recover as it would have been, say, five or six years ago. Being in analysis lessens the sorrow left behind over the past couple of decades.

That's what it's really about, isn't it? That's what it's really about –

But there is a lot of overlap between watching Bobby struggle with the emptiness of his life, taking the Tube to a distant part of London alone to validate oneself through an academic presentation, having intensely living Greek men want to talk to you about ideas and existence, and watching a disoriented Aschenbach wander the streets of nighttime Venice...

•••

My apologies if I'm not focusing clearly on details of the performance of Death in Venice. Nor on the performances and professional activities of the Christou conference... nor on the details of the DVD of Company.

But that's not what this blog post is about, is it?

Not what it's really about....

Death – Thanatos, and eros: and November. And the points where my heart comes alive at the sight of an attractive man engaged in some passionate experience. And the dread created by art works that are essentially about dread – the cross-linked (rhizomatic?) dread of death, of being alone, of cold weather, of loneliness, of sorrow....

First-world problems

I understand the joke, 'first-world problems' – it's what we say when the refrigerator breaks or our flight is delayed. The sense is that we are rich and expect everything to be easy, and that our biggest problems are details, minor frustrations, compared with those in other parts of the world.

Especially when several other parts of the world are having rather spectacular, and better publicized than usual, meltdowns...

But there are first-world problems that I take seriously – every year, fifteen to twenty of my students apply to go abroad for an exchange year; and inevitably several of them are rejected. Not because they aren't good students – indeed, they are often among our best – but because of some chance mismatch between a student who plays a too-common instrument and an overcrowded conservatory, or a university department that abruptly feels as though they have enough local students at the moment.

And frankly my heart bleeds, a bit, for this. Every year I send e-mails, make calls, and badger colleagues at other institutions, who are often on vacation, in an effort to find an attractive place for these kids.

I know it must seem trivial: you are already at a respected Western university getting a degree, why are you complaining that you don't get a year abroad?... but for me it recalls despair and anger at not getting into certain schools (Claudio Spies, since you interviewed me, I'm looking at you – back in 1973 you probably thought, aah he's a flake, doesn't know what he's talking about, reject him).

And I unfortunately remember the long-term damage I did to my own expectations of life, success, and happiness, as a result of those rejections... I often try to tell our students they shouldn't take these things too seriously. At which point I am of course talking to my younger self, who was a fool about this type of thing, to his own misery.

And yes, okay, it's all very first-world: but the first world, if it is a place with money and security (even despite the chaos in Greece, or in the US for that matter – all of which remains relative, when you consider centuries of starving children catching bugs for dinner), is also a place of crowding, and thus of competition and rapid narrowing of higher levels of opportunities. We do have a system that tries to justify itself, in a rationalistic quasi-Adornian-Deleuzian manner – that says, if you were rejected before, even for an irrational or unfair reason, we will take advantage of the situation to reject you again, because simply making decisions is... difficult.

Ah, well...

But there is usually a happy ending: I am generally successful in finding my students a place – often in an unexpected city; but for the most part students have been (eventually) ecstatic with the results.

Even if I have to badger various Italians, Austrians and Spaniards, and lean very heavily on our previous friendships, to get it done... even today, on a Saturday.

Hmm, I probably owe my opposite numbers dinner, don't I?...

Splitting, integration, symbolization

Having passed my remaining propaedeuticum exams in Zürich (which means: I passed the eight theoretical exams that end the first half of study; there will be seven final exams in two or three years, but they will be based more on practical experience), I have been recovering…

As we know (you in the back – didn’t you know?), I am an introverted intuitive thinking type. Which means: big concepts, rapid, complex absorption, and a lot of missing detail (even, missing accuracy, as my own students sometimes know).

But, of course, individuation – the Jungian holy (wholly?) grail – involves development of all of the parts of the self.

So, the fact that I callously pushed my sensate side (my most unconscious side) utterly out of the way while my primary functions took over for the past two months, so that I could study for all of these exams, is… well… not very impressive.

I’m fairly unimpressed with it, anyway.

The signs?... not remembering my dreams (have I really remembered only three or four dreams in the past two months?); anxiety, pressure, a ruthlessly Faustian focus; snapping and snarling at people (hey, some of them deserved it), pacing, waking at odd hours every night, restlessly; and, worst of all, a remarkable disintegration of my relationship with my own body.

After all, I did decide that I wouldn’t have time for yoga or meditation while studying… yes I get it, very, very stupid. In any case: painfully wrecked digestion such as I haven’t had for ages, and in the last week of exams an unprecedented bloom of allergic rashes at various sensitive spots across my body – and they really hurt.

Since last Tuesday, the last of the exams, I have been recovering – rapidly. Rested, skin almost clear (and, best of all, not hurting), digestion still querulous but settling down. Cheerful, sleeping well… and, yes, still highly self-critical.

So, I haven’t learned, at my age, to take this all in stride?... It reminds me of my PhD exams in the early 90s at UCLA. I had discovered something at a health food store, a so-called Sage’s Ginseng, which, alone out of an entire line of products, consisted not of a bottle of sixty or a hundred tablets but of just ten tablets, each in separate plastic envelopes. Which, I suppose, was a hint about how many you should take…

Well, I scarfed those things down for a couple of months, and wrote six three-hour exams – on a Mac SE, after arguing the department into letting me use one o' them newfangled personal computers. Several of the exam papers were fairly demented (a redefinition of disciplines through the metaphor of a divided Belgium? a justification of conceptual studies interspersed with paragraphs outlining Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel?), but I passed, and in fact later published versions of two of them.

However, I was definitely going to pieces – differently then than now, but still going to pieces. My acupuncturist, Maoshing Ni (still in Los Angeles, and a marvelously kind man), was really angry at me, for the only time I remember – he looked at the bottle of pills and said, do you know what these things do? All of your energy has been dragged upwards so strongly, your body is surviving on practically nothing – don’t ever take that much of this stuff again, not without checking with me at least.

As far as I know, you can’t buy Sage’s Ginseng any more, anyway…

And yes, I will try to get to the next set of exams in a more reasonable, saner way.

•••

Having had our student association party Friday night – which was fun, and four of us were announced as qualifying (tentatively) for moving on to the second half of studies – Saturday was quiet, laundry and recovery. In the evening, a brief drink with Barbara at an expensively chic bar in the Hauptbahnhof, before we both went off to do other things – we talked about what we want to do next, and – the tough question – where…

And then met Annick (who had saved me in exams, as we studied together), Jordie, Jim, John and Nada for dinner. (I’d already told Barbara I didn’t want to eat at a sort of Swiss version of Denny’s… which I thought should be called Denicqx’s.)

At dinner a lot of talking, chatting, connecting, and generalized griping became somehow transformed into an intense and resonant conversation about meaning, expectation, and wisdom… Jim leading, which is no surprise (he has that endless Bay Area kindness, a patience I always envy, and deeply miss). I wish I could reproduce it for you, but I can’t – one central move was the transformation of our views of the most difficult, least pleasant teaching analysts (as in an academic department, there are of course favorites and anti-favorites) when we see the possibility of what they’re aiming us towards; and Jordie chiming in about experiences of real wisdom and clarity that lead you through whatever silly confusions you have gotten entangled in…

Sorry that I can’t remember more details. Admittedly, I was shaking my head at some points, and Jim said to me, you don’t think so? But I wasn’t disagreeing: I was merely expressing my own perpetual doubt that I can remember what one needs to remember – that I can actually do what I absolutely agree one should do – that, after decades where I have known so many kind and wise people who have taken so much time with me, I am still so erratic, so unpredictable.

So – unindividuated. If there’s such a word.

And yes, I know: these aspects of oneself always look far worse from the inside.

But the conversation was amazing: a sense of returning to wisdom, connectedness. Of fusing together a lot of material from seminars into something that mattered…

•••

And then tonight, Sunday night: I had spent three or four weeks cajoling students to come to the Zürich Opera with me, to see Der Rosenkavalier. I didn’t speak to anyone who had heard it before, and selling a four-and-a-quarter-hour opera is fairly hard work. But finally Melissa, Anna, and Annick agreed – with some hedging – to go.

The first miracle was that, with our student cards, we were charged, not SFr 270,-, but SFr 20. We’ve had mineral water that cost more than that, and so were ecstatic – we were at the side of the orchestra, with a clear view of the stage (and subtitles, luckily). I’d explained the plot over drinks beforehand, so everyone was prepared for comedy and That Final Trio… as much as you can prepare, anyway. They were all ready to get into it – we were all thinking about passing time, love, change – couldn't help it really, frankly we all overidentified with all that stuff.

And the music was truly fantastic. The visual production was a bit silly; but the Baron was a hilarious deep bass, the strongest I’ve ever seen in the part; and Sophie had a magical way with the highest notes – the part has never seemed terribly interesting to me, but she was honestly fascinating. And the Marschallin and Octavian were magnificent – so the final trio was, well…

I told them about the New Yorker cartoon of the man in bed, his wife frowning at him from the door, and the caption – “I know the doctor said it was a cold, but just in case, can I hear the trio from Der Rosenkavalier one last time?...”

It was like that. Really.

Rachel's

Last year sometime I acquired a late album by the pomo/minimalist/post-genre group Rachel's. Over the past few weeks I started buying their remaining recordings; then today I managed to find mp3s of the two remaining ones that couldn't be purchased anywhere any more.

Lovely, often sad. Beautifully played. Something a lot of classical and miniimalist fans would love – though admittedly those who have a melancholy side.

The recordings, according to Wikipedia, spanned a decade, 1995-2005 – and Jason Noble, the original musician who started the group, died of cancer this year, still very young.

Thanks for the lovely music. Rest in peace.

Mathis

It is late, so I won't go on long... a really excellent, deeply passionate performance of the Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler here in Zürich. Thomas Hampson as Mathias Grünewald, and Gatti conducting in his last season before leaving, were especially good; but everyone was excellent.

For some reason I'd recalled hearing a recording of the entire opera years ago as a disappointment – I remembered lots of aimless recitative; but my memory must be hugely off, or I'm thinking of something else entirely. The opera is in strongly architectural scenes, more symphonic than operatic to be honest – you always know where all of the themes and counterpount are going. And such intensity – even the passages that are familiar from endless performances of the orchestral suite brought tears to my eyes.

Hindemith wrote his own libretto – but it's surprisingly successful: if it has a flaw, it is that the last three scenes pile up one or two too many 'final' gestures – a more experienced writer with more stagecraft would have combined a couple of them, so that the whole came into more definite focus. Probably Hindemith was feeling the sheer generalized panic of 1938 in Mitteleuropa – the opera certainly ties together all sorts of sharply painful references (book burning, ideological revolts and primitive, enraged street armies, chaotic change, and utter confusion over which way to run to avoid being rolled over by any of several simultaneous disasters).

It is almost a painful relief when, at the end, after so many losses, Mathias drops all the symbols of his life – his paint brushes, easel, even his memories – into a hole in the stage, and slowly walks off into intense light as the orchestra falls silent....

Gifts

Again, in Zürich/Küsnacht at the Jung-Institut, I keep intermittently experiencing myself as bitter, irritable, critical, unfair. Sigh. It's hard to disentangle or clarify this... as always. It doesn't feel as though it's all quite so maddening this time, though – and, also as usual, a number of people obviously experience me as pleasant, fun, even kindly (which I am... if intermittently).

My first exam in Fundamentals went well, if a bit weirdly – an exceptionally, well, idiosyncratic elder analyst somehow took my musical background as a cue for him to talk, for nearly fifteen minutes of the forty allotted, about how much he loved Richard Strauss... seeing the dismayed second examiner looking, only semi-covertly, at her watch, I leapt in with: yes, isn't Strauss fascinating, with all of those anima figures in the operas (name three or four), while his wife Pauline was so heavily animus-ridden but drove him to be creative (explain in two sentences), plus of course his identification with hero and trickster figures in the tone poems (from Till to Nietzsche), and then there's that immense drive towards a sort of final individuation shown in the last works such as Capriccio, Metamorphosen, Four Last Songs...

Anyway, I passed that one. With a first (he said, ever the proud schoolboy). Three more to go, including a distinctly exasperating one about Buddhism and psychotherapy. (They might fit together, but then again they might not, depending on what you are emphasizing, and whether you are feeling particularly dogmatically Zen-ish that day.)

This afternoon, while reading and taking notes, I was also musing uneasily on the emotional awkwardness I often see in myself here. And then I was looking at a postcard, tilted on the nightstand next to the bed in my small but Swisstically neat apartment – it is from Philip, another student; on Thursday, I think it was, we were chatting idly in the library, and he suddenly turned to the woman at the desk and bought two copies of a new postcard they have made with a mandala that Jung drew, and gave me one, saying, Here's a gift for you. I was slightly startled – Philip is senior to me here; he has about another year of studies, has been a surgeon all his life, and has just retired permanently from medicine to do this work (literally a few days before we started this set of training weeks). He has always been intelligent and businesslike, sometimes gruff or even humorously bitter – but he is obviously ecstatic to have left the scalpel behind (having done it so long – the Jungian idea that you want to do something very different in the second half of life). Giving me that postcard out of the blue was perhaps just part of the effervescence that he seemed to have for everything that day.

(That mandala... I've seen the original in Bob Hinshaw's sitting room in Daimon Verlag, in Einsiedeln – a Jungian publishing house. Someone had decided years ago to tape it to cardboard, then cover it in some kind of cellophane, neither of which held up well. It's good to see someone made a decent reproduction of it – despite his disclaimers, Jung could draw quite well, as you can see in the Red Book.)

Then, while I was studying over lunch in the student room, Carlos was roaming around and taking photographs of favorite places. A picture of me with The Great Man (Jung did hate the 'great' thing, and didn't even want to allow for a Jung-Institut) was another gift, along with pictures through some of the round stained-glass windows into the garden.

These casually kindly gifts... perhaps I shouldn't worry too much about being so annoying: somehow there seems to be something there, not something logical, but something that can draw my attention....

Changes and recoveries

A remarkable analysis session today... after feeling stuck for some weeks, rapid inner change and reflection. I walked away thinking of fun house mirrors – how one inevitably looks at oneself and the world through all kinds of distortions; and the power of analysis is the increasing ability to sense the distortions, to become easily skeptical about ideas or feelings that don't seem worth holding on to....

And it is remarkable to have a shadow figure in a dream tease me – intending fun of the kind that should reflect intimacy and trust – and that I would be so enraged, so utterly furious. This is, after all, my usual response: I am always the ruthlessly serious little boy with glasses, looking both utterly stricken and deeply angry when anyone makes fun of him – and no, I will still probably never be good at taking a ribbing of any kind. (Which is slightly unfortunate here in northern England – where, like Australia, Bali, Thailand, and other cultures, making fun of people is the social norm. But, as usual, I'll get along somehow.)

I can't help also connecting this with my current concern: of the four Jung-Institut exams I'll take in a couple of weeks, the one on ethnology, which somehow (?) ended up being about Buddhism and analysis, is by far the least prepared; so, I am reading, frantically. In some ways you can fit the two processes together, in other ways they seem diametrically opposed (especially if you get too concerned about the immediate surface of Zen practice)... but is one supposed to go into the feelings, the past, the experience, mucky as it is, or try to hold oneself above and away from it? Ah well I suppose that's the point of the exam: to untie a few knots, and then to go ahead re-tie a few, and show that I know where they are.

•••

And in other changes, some famous deaths – Dietrich Fischer Dieskau; it was perfect that Alex Ross said he was the "heart" of the great original recording of Britten's War Requiem, because that is absolutely true. The other performers are wonderful, but you end up becoming Dieskau, seeing the whole war through his eyes. Ross quotes a shattering passage from the young Fischer-Dieskau's journal, when he was a teenage soldier in the midst of World War Two – already reflective in the midst of terrible things, the boy writes: "yet there is something stubborn that keeps saying, you are going to live."

I should take something from that, I guess.

•••

And Ray Bradbury. Yes, he wrote a number of books that are famous; yes, the Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes are amazing. But the really important book is Dandelion Wine, and if you haven't read it, you are missing something that you... well, that you need.

And I say that as someone who didn't grow up anywhere near the Midwest, nor in a small town.

The problem of the new lawnmower, John's farewell, the Ladies' Lodge and the ridiculous potion, Mrs. Bentley relearning time, Douglas' terrible fever and Mr. Jonas' rescue, the replacement for Leo's machine... the intense calm of Great-Grandmother's death....

But my huge, huge favorite is always the chapter where Aunt Rose buys Grandma glasses and completely organizes her kitchen, thereby ruining her chaotically magical ability with food. They finally, and comically, rid themselves of Aunt Rose – but Grandma (still wearing those glasses) hasn't gotten her talent back, and runs weeping from the dining room. It's too long to quote the whole chapter, but things aren't really rescued until after midnight:

"Then he began to move. He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar and sifted it into a familiar series of smaller bins marked spices, cutlery, string. He put the cloves where they had lain for years, littering the bottom of half a dozen drawers. He brought the dishes and the knives and forks and spoons back out on top of the tables.

"He found Grandma's new eyeglasses on the parlor mantel and hid them in the cellar. He kindled a great fire in the old wood-burning stove, using pages from the new cookbook. By one o'clock in the still morning a huge husking roar shot up in the black stovepipe, such a wild roar that the house, if it had ever slept at all, awoke. He heard the rustle of Grandma's slippers down the hall stairs. She stood in the kitchen, blinking at the chaos. Douglas was hidden behind the pantry door.

"At one-thirty in the deep dark summer morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen – lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.

"Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell.

"Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room.

"As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes.

"At three-thirty on Sunday morning, with the house warm with eaten food and friendly spirits, Grandfather pushed back his chair and gestured magnificently. From the library he fetched a copy of Shakespeare. He laid it on a platter, which he presented to his wife.

"'Grandma', he said, 'I ask only that tomorrow night for supper you cook us this very fine volume. I am certain we all agree that by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at twilight it will be delicate, succulent, brown and tender as the breast of the autumn pheasant.'

"Grandma held the book in her hands and cried happily."

•••

I think Ray will sleep deep in Green Town tonight....