Author: paulattinello

  • Turning points

    The truth is: all points these days feel kind of like turning points. Somewhere between August and September; between summer and fall. Between the expected weather for this part of the world, and this gloriously sunny day, when we sat out in a lovely Italian garden restaurant, and where the warmth and food were almost…

  • Wings

    A sudden and amazingly heavy rain fall: plus a lot of hail – that strange sense of buckets of water and ice falling, and for a considerable while. The usual fragments of thought about climate change and problem weather, combined with the visceral excitement of it all, which is fortunately happening on the other side…

  • The Gap

    [This was written some days ago, in a dark mood… a mood partly generated by some of my experiences this last trip to Zürich; not because anything bad actually happened, but instead because of the combination of wrestling with certain concepts, and also working my way through unexpectly painful exercises where I wrote about things…

  • A leaf falls

    While I was in Zürich, back in Newcastle a friend died, basically of a heart attack. David H. was one of the old-timers in our HIV patient group – one of the six men (five gay, one straight) who appeared in a meeting room in the middle of Newcastle on June 30, 2003. We spent…

  • Cross-communication

    My last night in summery Zürich: the men are sunburnt and muscly, cafés are busy. There are no doubt some women around here also. The other Jung-Institut students and teachers have left – as usual I stay one or two days later, this time to see Patricia up in Thun on Sunday, then just to…

  • Island

    [From a workshop, where we created things – almost everyone else painting or clay or drawing, but I swerved over to my comfort zone: writing. With, yes, one small picture drawn in the corner of the original….] When I came to the island, it was late afternoon. Houses rose up from the water, from the…

  • 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…

  • Contests

    My last exam, in analytic implications of fairy tales, passed – at least in this group: that is, four, of the eight for the first half of the training. Dramatic: facing one of the most famous living analysts, a third-generation student of von Franz. The pleasant look – she likes me, we have talked –…

  • 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…

  • Packing

    … no, not *that* kind. I'm off to Zürich in an hour – the Jung-Institut, seminars, and my first series of exams. The weather is very warm there at the moment – entirely unlike here; trying to pack a variety of things, of course. Do you remember Sunday Bloody Sunday? Peter Finch and the incredible…