in the hall of mirrors

As in a dream

Küsnacht/Zürich: classes, seminars, meetings. Although everything is very organized and conscious, especially the way I do it (iPad at the ready, taking many notes and tracking various things to do), we sometimes mention to each other that there is something strangely aware and resonant about things – we may dream more, we all get into various moods, and if the training is hardly a via regia to the unconscious (comparatively speaking), one nevertheless senses signposts and, perhaps, small, handheld GPS monitors giving conflicting directions to triangulate across various inner states....

But, while I remember most of the week, I'm not sure I remember the important parts, so I won't try. A pleasant first interview, the first of six to study at the Jung-Institut; he was very kind and pleasant – but he did say that the photograph, and the e-mail I sent to schedule our appointment, both seemed rather cold and formal.

I can't do much about the photo (taken in the subway station in Newcastle, in a booth whose lights bleached out my face while a sign on the wall commanded me not to smile); the e-mail... well, there are several aspects colliding here: I do generally get fairly tired of business e-mails; and probably my students get abrupt communications from me because e-mail just doesn't seem to be the place to discuss things (in fact with most students it's a better place to cut discussion short, and tell them to come see me in person).

And perhaps, most of all, I don't want to pretend to be friends when the analysts are trying to decide whether to accept me – better to be a bit cool and give them the freedom to make a decision. Yes? No? Or am I projecting some kind of anxiety... ah well. Anyway he said he enjoyed meeting me, more than he expected to from the photo and e-mail.

Some of the more entertaining times this week were spent running around with Antonio, who has reached the stage of taking his first two qualifying exams. Roberto was driving – in an excessively Italian way at some points; I suggested, as we made a U-turn in the town above the lake, that the Swiss police might not be amused. He laughed and agreed, and kept on driving like that. We had a sprawling, chaotic late-night dinner-and-cigarettes-and-grappa competition at a restaurant that was known for being founded by Italian leftists – everyone (including the waiter) kept telling me very proudly about its history, which I couldn't quite follow to be honest. All I'm sure of is that a lot of famous Marxists have had coffee there.

At one point conversations were getting complicated, as I could really only speak with Antonio in English, and a mustached older historian in German, and a translator in French mixed with bits of ungrammatical Italian (I don't even remember Roberto's favorite language choice) – they were really happiest chatting at top speed in Italian among themselves, I think. When the waiter offered us Fernet Branca, at which everyone expressed disgust, I tried to explain the very strange and hilariously campy novel I was reading last month – Cooking with Fernet Branca – they may have thought I was a bit nuts, but in a far-left bar full of Italians that is not a social handicap. (If I haven't buttonholed you and tried to explain this novel, I can tell you that the narrator is an Englishman living in Tuscany who specializes in 'experimental' cuisine – garlic ice cream, oysters in chocolate, and other bizarre recipes – and thinks no one knows he's gay, when he is obviously the one who put the 'camp' into the Boy Scouts.)

Today I met Antonio and Cristina, who had come up from Milan by train for the weekend; and we met an old flame of Antonio's, a blonde German woman who was enormous fun. She had photos of all of them from twenty-five years ago – she was drop-dead gorgeous at the time; she had done some modeling and frankly looked like the exquisite star of an extremely chic European film that has a lot of people looking depressed in cafés. But now she's basically a hoot; when Antonio decided we should go down to the river and swim, we both said he could swim, we would act as parents and sit in the riverside café and drink beer. And make disapproving and parental comments. We had a great deal of fun, and talked about everything under the sun for a couple of hours as hunky Swiss guys (yes, I'm sure there were girls too) went up and down in swim trunks and the current season's tattoos....

But you must think I'm doing no work at all. Really: I am working hard. I am....

Zürich, noch einmal

I've been here in Zürich for a bit over a day now... a small apartment up in Asylstraße (Asylum Street – yeah yeah very funny I know). Very, very pleasant to have a small apartment, as opposed to the small hotel rooms without baths or kitchens I've taken for the past two years – and not much more expensive (three and a half weeks here is about £200 more than three weeks in a tiny guest-house room in Küsnacht). Although the cars in the street make a bit more noise getting up the hillside, and it's done up in Late IKEA – which means: good design, shoddy workmanship; there are already minor things broken, and the landlord will have to replace most it within a couple of years. Ah well, it's good enough; and I do love having a kitchen (saves money too).

The warm weather means that the Swiss are, on the one hand, tan, wearing loose and casual clothing, and being rather, well, sexy (a man on the tram rests his hand lightly on his wife's very lowest back); but, on the other hand, they still don't smile. Solemn to the point of being grim.

Which reminds me of something I was thinking last year... how does the general style of this city relate to Jung's concerns and ideas? Because obviously late 19th-century Vienna, with its overblown, self-indulgent eroticism and general neurotic fragmentation as the center of a disintegrating empire, is a major source for Freud's focus on sexuality, plus his insistence on rigidly controlling the analytic context. And people have talked for a long time about Jung's childhood in country towns and in eerily archaic Basel (I spent some time there in the late 1990s) as significant contributors to his ideas – intense Protestantism, layers of ancient and peasant cultures invading an apparently civilized landscape, and the sense of vast, hidden, mysterious roots growing under everything.

But Zürich, where he spent much of his adult life, is a banker's city: neat, cosmopolitan, orderly, a bit heartless – sort of like a very carefully designed fun park, that is actually slightly lifeless, with no real fun in it – none of which sounds even faintly like Jung, or his writings. Perhaps he was enough of an introvert that he simply ignored all that (which accounts for the pseudo-medieval stone house he built in Bollingen, I suppose); but I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something....

But it is evening; I've had some good rich rye bread, with solid cheese and meat; and must write up a summary of the love story in Gottfried's Tristan for tomorrow's seminar. The Swiss can, as they have infallibly reminded everyone throughout their history, take care of themselves.

A dream figure

A disturbing dream image from last week, that I discussed with my analyst today: in a chain of three dreams that conjured buildings, city streets, and figures of cryptic support, encouragement and change, an eerie version of Buffy the vampire slayer crashes into an otherwise benevolent continuity – where she seems so dangerous, so easily angered, that everyone is afraid of her.

And there is a violent fight, and I accidentally destroy a light projector of some kind – and the figure of Buffy vanishes, and I see that it is the projected mask for something much worse: a crippled, enraged Buffy wearing a stained yellow dress, stuck in a wheelchair, with a grotesquely damaged face, one ruined eye staring off to the side. Who, though she may not be as powerful or as fast as her projected image had seemed, is far more dangerous, because she has become feral, consumed with fury and resentment, and psychotically lost to any glimmer of empathy or reason....

And we manage, somehow, desperately, to kill her – in the dream.

Such an arresting way to show me my own long covered-over reactions to pain and powerlessness, and remind me of something that has made me increasingly uncomfortable over the past six months – that rage drives me at unguarded moments: and that pretending my shadow aspects are made up only of despair and envy is to underestimate their malevolence....

Though the analyst did reassure me: it is not unimportant that the dream figure is so damaged – and dying.

Damaged house

The middle of the night. Jung on Nietzsche, speaking of the problem of creativity and how one falls into inflation – as soon as you look back at what you've done with pompous satisfaction – I am the one who did that! – and so the creative moment dies and you fall into a false self.

Especially so familiar as the entire balance between what I've been for decades, between creativity and being versus looking back on creativity or being, is so heavily tilted toward the latter: as I'm such a tiresome case of someone who has been briefly touched at moments by fire, then has spent years after thinking about it. No wonder I am so angry at others who seem to be doing things wrong, so despairing at the point of doing anything at all.

It is like living in the house of myself: but there have been so many storms, such wreckage – the place is so damaged, so ruined; it is ridiculous to spend time picking things up and wiping them off, as walls creak and corners rot, windows crack, wind and rain blow through the hallway. Like dusting a table in a hurricane, trying to ignore the impossibility of ever fixing the crumbling, rotting, rusting mess of it.

I would be so happy to simply open the door and walk out – in some sort of Zen abnegation: but I don't know what to walk out into, and I remain so tied to myself, so unwilling to have the sheer guts to walk into nothing. Even though I can see what is here, I'm not fooled: I can see that there's nothing at all here that I really need, or care about – the collected detritus of what I have been for more than fifty years is not even worth dragging down to a charity shop, it should just be left behind.

But I can't just walk out the door, I don't know how –

Nietzschean

(Hmm, when would I last have had to check the spelling of that word, two or three times just to make sure – even though I am now sure it always frets at me a bit. But not as much as it used to.)

Full moon, lunar eclipse, solar equinox, near Christmas.

After a few days up and down mixing my third (and I hope last) cold/virus of the first half of winter with the changing timing of medication side effects – and annoyed and a bit frustrated at those side effects: they aren't bad, but they're happening in ways I can't seem to plan for correctly – it's not so bad after the shot, it's not even the next day, it's about, oh, 36-40 hours later that I seem to become thoroughly useless, disoriented, exhausted. For a day maybe. Somewhat tricky, given that supposedly clever planning (Shots Are Scheduled For Friday Evenings – I should put that on a printed sign) suddenly make me fairly useless on Sunday/Monday, or perhaps unpredictably on Tuesday...

But I go on and on about that silly nonsense. (It will be annoying to figure out when I'll be up for Christmas at Michael and Andrew's, or Boxing Day at Bennett and Merrie's, depending on the timing of my meds. I feel like I'm saying to my body, oh just give me a date will you, while rolling my eyes in exasperation. And it's ignoring me.)

Nietzsche has always seemed a mildly interesting madman to me, a mere justification of (and by) all sorts of overblown, egocentric looniness for people who don't like anybody (and are undoubtedly secretly afraid that nobody likes them), who want to blow things up, who think they are innately better than others because they go and live in caves, or shout at crowds in city streets.

Oh, and he overwrites. And cheesily.

I've ordered Jung's massive Nietzsche seminar as my Christmas gift-to-myself – pricey but hey, it's fascinated me since seeing it on my analyst's bookshelves – and yes I mean the whole two-volume hardback thing, not the silly one-volume shortened edition. I mean really, if you're going to read Jung on Nietzsche, can you imagine anything more inappropriate than going for the Cliff Notes version?

(Perhaps Nietzsche was driven mad just by trying to get people to spell his name correctly.)

Nietzsche was of course the great breakthrough for his time, the great move towards a liberatory higher ground, away from the fiddly, tepid concerns of previous thinkers. Maybe in fact all analytical philosophy is an uncomfortable result of Nietzsche – he certainly did scare the heck out of people, and you can imagine them going for pointless language games just to escape his shadow. And of course many of the philosophers I hugely respect – from Adorno to Deleuze – exist only because of Nietzsche, because of the huge space he blasted through the bedrock of dull culture and its self-justification.

But he still seems so unreadably mad, so polemically, parabolically, allusively... oh you know what I mean.

Anyway. Of course Nietzsche had a huge impact on his time, on both Jung and Freud and everybody else; and in a way many of Jung's ideas have Nietzschean echoes to them (Red Book, anyone? – some madness, some self-aggrandizement, some fantasy). It should be fascinating, assuming it arrives in the next few days.

And there's a full moon tonight, yes and that solstice; and the Christmas-time sense of a grand pause to the solar year, as there is a great stillness in the heavens, and despite all the celebrations so many human things seem to pause and become quiet to look up, back, inwards.

I've been rereading, again, Angela Carter's The War of Dreams (the American title of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – books retitled by publishers are often ridiculous, but I must admit in this case I prefer the revised version).

A grand book, a great book, one I have always loved – and always for me the most important of Carter's books, even though nobody seems to mention it much; it's pleasant to see that there's a new Penguin edition where the introduction agrees with me that it really is her best – apparently it did badly with the public and she retreated to slightly less bizarre writing for her later work. Since it's 3 am, and I'll be back in bed soon, I won't talk about it for long, but – I agree or identify with so many parts of the book, admittedly the earlier ones; and even the strangest or most symbolic of the later ones feel like stages of a journey I just haven't really gone far enough to experience.

One of the last sections is the intensely grand, physical, and dangerous time with the Centaurs, whose sheer inhuman intensity is threatening (as are many of the other places and people we fall or flee past in the book). And they are so Nietzschean – and they are so full-moon, so timeless and hieratic and intense and abhuman...

Well, I'll go back to bed. Because I'm merely human, because I'm tired after writing just these words, because even my Jungian moments (even, it seems at points, my inspiration to study to be an analyst) tend to be visionary rather than actionable, because I do indeed tend towards the trivial and irritable and the tame.

But that, on this moonlit night at the turning of the year, all this is certainly what it should all be about – the grandeur of intense and deeply real forces, the moon on the snow and the chill air, the pure sense of all time and space....

Deliberate crises

Lately there is a strange sense of a kind of semi-ordered chaos: as I am by turns angry and disoriented, or surprisingly pleased, or overwhelmed, or insulting, or reasonable, it seems as though I have been pushed (or: as though I have pushed myself?) into this psychological place.

The physical/real-world explanations are obvious: months of anxious preparation and attempted rigid control related to the medications I'll start on November 5, exacerbated by new, unexpected appointments and ultimatums delivered by the hospital and my acupuncturist over the past two weeks; plus the start of the school year, with the usual huge increase in questions, responsibilities, spreadsheets, meetings, and swarms of alternately sensible and nonsensical phone calls and e-mails. (And why am I waking/sleeping erratically, missing meals and not caring – even missing my pills?... no no I promise not much, just, well, twice in the last week. Which is a lot for me.)

After a quiet summer, with some too-rational part of me having pathetically planned to maintain total control over the medical situation, it all feels like an onslaught of demands: and the fact that I can handle many of its individual parts makes everything worse, because I cannot simply collapse and say, I can't deal with anything at all.

And then there are the more distant worries – that the trip to Berlin in two weeks will be chaotic and exhausting, that the school year will be difficult to get through, that winter will be uncommonly depressing... and, behind all these smaller things, like those low noises in the film Inception that signal the multileveled darkness of dream time, the sight over Skype, most weekends, of my mother in the hospital, with my sister talking to her kindly, taking such loving care of her: but Mom looks very, in fact painfully, near the end of her long disintegration... so, yes, you can figure it all out yourself: funeral, sorrow, loss, guilt, and that sense of disorientation and collapse that can't be sidestepped, no matter how long one has prepared for it.

There is one distant, nearly abstract idea that suggests that this is not all hopeless – that, in fact, I have deliberately driven myself (I have deliberately been driven?) into this space of what feels like crisis, chaos, disaster. (Rather than, for instance, depression: because becoming increasingly unable to feel is of course a strategy against stress and fear.)

It's connected to something reasonable but surprising that came up in a lecture at the Jung-Institut this summer, when a skilled analyst listed the personal traits that were required in a patient for (Jungian or Freudian, or Adlerian or Gestalt for that matter) analysis to be a good treatment choice.

One of them was a high tolerance level for anxiety: in other words, analysis is not at all like simple therapy – it's not to make you feel better, not in the short term anyway. It is designed to push you into the things you find most difficult to handle, into the parts of your mind that are the most primitive, or shallow, or confused, or even (slightly) damaged, so that you can learn to deal with them rather than avoid them.

Which might mean that my lack of control lately is a good thing... not much fun, admittedly; but a step forward, rather than one back.

Formal analysis of current status of complex

(As musicians, we are accustomed to formal analyses that don't emphasize the contents/material of what is analyzed. Herein a therefore relatively abstract reiteration of some of my understanding of the past 24 hours.)

Recently understood aspects of complex formation suggest modification of my own emotional self-analysis:

(1) von Franz clarifies the basic structure of complexes is agglomerative; emotional/cognitive/interpretive elements are added to a given experiential node over the years of one's life, combining with unconscious elements to give the appearance of a vast interconnectedness (this may be obvious to many, but I'd never really understood it until a few months ago – thanks to a convenient drawing)

(2) the real process of analysis and individuation is one of taking those agglomerates apart – you cannot remove your experiences or judgements, but you can disentangle/disconnect them in such a way that all of the parts become more malleable, can develop or fade over time on their own – one becomes, simply, 'saner'

(3) my own long self-examination has tended not to take advantage of this – I've tended to allow events and emotions to continually refer to each other, which is artistically interesting (sort of, anyway) but emotionally tends to become crippling – i.e. as the complex grows to include masses of various things in the unconscious and conscious it becomes impossible to do almost anything, because every aspect of one's entire history/memory seems to refer only to other problems embedded in it

(4) all of this resembles an (oversimplified) Star Wars image of destroying the Death Star – except that you don't get to blow the thing up (as it consists of many parts of you), but you do get to take it apart, and some of the pieces that had seemed more depressing/menacing can then drift away into space, as it were

So, last night's viewing of The History Boys, which has many threads that are both fascinating and disturbing, ended up focusing for me on the whole problem of Getting Into The Great University. Short-term conclusions related to my own case:

(a) Not getting into my ideal college, and the rapid emotional disintegration that followed it, was a watershed event. At that point I combined various existing anxieties and losses (panic at thinking I was getting left behind when we moved at age 3, fears of school bullies, anxieties over growing up gay, new confidence and new embarrassments over the two years previous to this event) to attach them to each other in a massive conglomeration of hopeless resentment that enforced a certain permanent dejection. (N.B.: No need to explain to me that this was not 'really' important – I know that perfectly well – but in my emotional history it was important. These things are not, need I explain, rationally constructed.)

(b) Later ego developments (stage experience, sexual experience, emotional development, increased awareness of dangers and possibilities related to event (a)) tended to get attached to event (a); even the apparently grander and more serious journey related to AIDS, death, loss, and health issues, which then combined with experiences on four continents, interpretations of living environments and internal emotional contexts, retold stories and interpretations, etc., was actually overlaid across event (a) such that everything seemed to establish the basic status of my life.

(c) Thus, interestingly, beginning to separate sorrows and joys over people and relationships, loss and guilt and personal growth/insight related to AIDS and health, and disappointments with myself in a variety of contexts into separate elements, makes it hugely easier to move through, and develop more productive relationships with, all these elements.

On the other hand:

(a') Caveat: is it really possible for a central establishing element to appear so late as age 17? Freudian theory aside, of course. But unfortunately I don't have much understanding of, or awareness in, early developmental psychology; but certainly, though many Jungians spend time on childhood issues, others happily focus on adult events, rather than assuming that everything must have roots in early childhood.

(b') Certainly, childhood experiences loom very large in the unconscious and in the emotional world: but it's also possible (unless I've misunderstood) that some childhood elements may fade into unimportance over time, unless they are revivified or made important by later events. And that, of course, a 'Deathstar' complex can greatly expand after childhood – it may be based on earlier elements, but what makes it powerful may be delayed (I think).

(c') Not to mention: I've always been uncomfortable with the transformation of my expression in many photographs after the age of four or so, when I turn from cheerful into owlishly solemn, rather cautious... but I suspect that searching for a distinctive event to explain that transformation is not possible. Probably just the caution of the nerdy youngest dealing with siblings and peers.

Of course: I could be wrong....

I feel as though there should be a statistical chart for this presentation. Oh well: you can't have everything.

    •••

Was pretty satisfied with above insight; went for long walk on sunny day, and started to think: hmm, dubious that it's that simple. However, I do think the age-17 emotional event was central, not just built on earlier experiences.

Therefore: maybe it makes sense to think of this as a sort of 'molecular', as opposed to 'atomic', understanding of my inner workings... still useful though.

And no, I'm still not doing a cool chart...

Hotel, party, graveyard

In Küsnacht, at the end of the second of three endlessly busy weeks studying at the Jung-Institut. Sixty-five pages of typed, single-spaced notes (I am not obsessive-compulsive, and can prove it with a handy alphabetized chart); three or four trips, some great meals and some ludicrously bad ones, a vast array of lectures, seminars and discussions on Jungian topics, some of which were brilliant, some were useful or practical, and only two or three were inane. (Not a bad statistical range, actually – I'm sure my own students have days when they wonder why I'm bothering to babble away at them about some sort of drivel that interests only me, for hours on end.)

And today, in a small hotel room, I have been putting myself together – a shower, running through piles of papers and pamphlets to toss the useless ones, cutting fingernails. The Indian cleaner, who is always obscurely sweet-tempered, smiles mysteriously at me, the large dot on her forehead punctuating her relaxed, round face as she goes from room to room. The exhaustingly hot weather has broken for a day – and the forecast is that it will be more intermittent this week, which will give us more time to recover in between the oven-days.

Last night was one of the two or three celebratory parties where the students and teachers get together to relax and recover; they are always energetic and very affectionate, showing how deeply this group has connected over the years. The students who had stayed in Küsnacht for nine hours of colloquia were already showered and dressed in cheerful party clothes; the other half of us who had taken a twelve-hour day trip to Bollingen and Einsiedeln looked more as though we had climbed a mountain and stumbled chaotically back, arriving just in time for the salads and appetizers. But everyone mixed easily and happily; I am even developing more respect, myself, for the little gang of intensely stylish young women, who are obviously more committed than I would have given them credit for. Andrés sets off his beautiful face with a blue shirt while introducing his exquisite Columbian girlfriend with her huge eyes, Barbara has somehow found time between leading meetings to put on yet another beautiful dress covered with blue shiny circles, Geordie is relaxed and funny, the slim Argentine beauty who reminds me of Penelope Cruz asks me to watch her place as she goes to another table, the philosophy professor from Boston is waving his hands while explaining yet more ideas, Tess and Robert trade old battle stories at one end of the table as Otto yodels at the other. The Italian restaurateurs obviously enjoy feeding such an appreciative crowd.

This afternoon I'll wander into Zürich to see what's up for Carnival (spelled, in a Swiss German that is gradually become slightly less incomprehensible, Züri Fäscht); it was slightly funny though not unpleasant to go to their big opening celebration Friday night with my student Annie and her parents, although when Zürich gets wild one has a faint sense of dealing with an Aunt Muriel with three little dogs and doilies on the furniture, who is gasping with excitement that so many people are drinking tea in the front room.

But I can now bring memory and imagination back into this hotel room, back to a Swiss summer sky with enough clouds to break the heat. A few more scraps of paper to dispose of, the phone is charged, the day is pleasant... actually, in such calm, a visit to see Jung's grave, near the one shared by Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hannah, might have just the right sense of gentle quietness....

•••

[Later that evening.] I saw the graves – the graveyard is actually just about two blocks from my hotel, a very Swiss-modern setting. Jung's is a family grave, his name in the midst of several others; von Franz and Hannah have one about fifteen feet away, a bit more modern/severe in outline. But both are dignified, large stones, with beautiful plants around them, both as it happens with small stone fonts with water in them.

It has been, as I've indicated, a hot day – the graveyard nearly empty, except for occasional visitors at its other ends, the gravestones a bit dusty, fonts nearly empty. There was a large watering can at an outdoor faucet; I thought, well, here goes – and poured eight or nine cans full over the stones, over the flowers and small trees, refreshing them and clearing out and filling the fonts.

It seemed like the thing to do....

Spring

And finally, here it is, what we've been waiting for. Nearly a week after Easter (and apparently this year Roman Easter and Greek Easter were the same day, which is in itself a fairly weird result of changing calendars and seasons).

A young father, slightly anxious-looking but in a light t-shirt, walks with a child on a plastic tricycle behind my house; the child falls and he stops, helps, wipes off a hand. In front of the house a car stops to pick up someone, radio blaring – oh well, not all the flashes of outdoor behavior are pleasant; I wonder if there is a generation coming, perhaps in fifty years, that isn't as fascinated with loud musics as are most people who grew up since the mid-60s. The radio is turned down after a few minutes, there is laughter, a car door slamming. I'm getting ready to go out, to meet Michael and Andrew in town, and meanwhile bringing the computer, to sit in a café and continue working.

There have been flashes of good weather, increasing during the week – Bennett and I went to the large garden store up in Northumberland the other day, and it seemed almost warm and sunny at the beginning of the trip, then chill and gray by its end. Then yesterday when I planted my bought herbs, it was pleasant in the morning, miserable in the evening.

But today the sun seems pretty solid, fairly well established in its presence... there is rain predicted later, but the look of things seems serenely springlike. Perhaps it's time to do just one more planter – there are now four planters of baby herbs, but I haven't done the seeds; although I clearly need more compost/dirt, and unfortunately my tiny strip of garden doesn't really have any extra soil I can use. (A shame that my otherwise very helpful/pleasant landlord decided to turn the whole thing into a deck eight years ago.)

And I did some work on the book on Gerhard yesterday; there will be more done today... this is really so easy, it's ridiculous that I didn't finish it a decade or more ago. And that would be a great burden shifted: it would mean that practically all research, all projects, that involved someone else's career would be gone – and I wouldn't take up any more: I am too flaky in my writing to have other people depend on me, and don't want it to happen again.

Possibilities seem generally easier, futures seem lighter and more casually bright. As noted in the Jungian literature, breaking through old problems, old complexes, isn't often about grand fights with horrible creatures, although one always anticipates and dreams that they will be. It is more often about things that used to seem impossible, or awful, or miserable, fading into relative unimportance over time and through change; they become either manageable or they simply stop mattering. Even better, it is about chunks of complexes that seemed knotted all in one great, terrible 'deathstar' of unhappiness or tension disintegrating into little pieces of things, each of which are easily handled. It is a bit like legends of dangerous beasts that come apart into smaller, more easily squashed creatures; and you wonder why you wasted years, decades, worrying about mere gnats, small pests that can be ignored or overcome without difficulty.

And sometimes the changes in seasons help, too....

Making

A tutorial with a smart but thus far undisciplined masters student, where I was quite definite about the draft paper he'd sent me – I thought it was chaotic and touched on an unmanageable array of topics, and said so. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind, and went home to rewrite the whole thing (not a stressful prospect for him – he may be scattered but he is highly productive, more than I was at his age, or in fact ever).

Much like O., another smart masters student, he is (or has been) a composer, also – so that the entire network of questions around creativity, freedom, and what all this work is about becomes important, but also harder to answer. Is writing a critical paper like creating a work of art? – well, yes and no: although admittedly my own writings have been very speculative, in bizarre forms or containing peculiar material not common in scholarly rhetoric, I do hope that I have tried to focus on material that has some meaningful relation to the subjects at hand, that helps and interests a reader rather than merely indulging a writer. But it does make me wonder if I'm being too hard on my more creative, although admittedly sloppier, students....

At one time I was enchanted by the idea of making: making music, making compositions, making writing, poems, stories. Great operas, novels, art. Creating things that would somehow... well, I don't know just what they were all supposed to do; but they would do it with fantastic power.

Then I discovered I wasn't much of a composer: a handful of small works, a few worth hearing, and no prospect of developing the talent or ability to write anything much larger. I was better at poems and stories, but still not good enough to have a creative career; and I abandoned those fields, content to have done a few pleasant things in them, and comfortable that I would never be a great conqueror of materials and visions – that I would never really be a maker.

My recent interest in becoming an analyst is somehow linked to all of this: I don't want to worry about things that have been made, not any more – not by me, and not much by other people. I want to go back to the people themselves, and their existences, thoughts, dreams – these things seem more real, more important, more alive than the things that are made. Because made things, though they may have incredible life in the process of being made, quickly become merely records of experiences: we may have experiences when we re-play them, but in themselves they are memories, echoes, not realities.

Or at least that's how I feel at this point in my life. I hope that I'm not just being hard on that creative instinct – the one that also drove Michael, the one that drives many of my colleagues – in order to justify my own abandonment of the field....