Author: paulattinello

  • Moon

    On this night after the full moon… I didn't do much that was useful today; papers and needed actions were before me on the table, but I hardly touched them. Instead I read vaguely, drifted past screens… glowing electronic screens of course, not the rice paper screens of Heian-kyo, but the effect is not dissimilar.…

  • Seminars

    Liz asked me to blog about what I actually did in Zürich (i.e., studied and heard), rather than about the peripheral experiences (admittedly the latter often make better stories – dinners with the Italians, bars and friends, day outings). Lots of seminars, some informational, some more investigative. A few workshops – these often have a…

  • Last night in Zürich

    After a month in Zürich, lectures and seminars and parties at the Jung-Institut, sharply cold weather shifting to rather warm weather (for which I have proven unprepared, still stalking around in my grand black coat and sweaters), I'm – packing, somewhat fussily and ineptly (isn't this supposed to be vastly easier on the way home,…

  • Frames and muddles

    The Jung-Institut, winter semester, third week. A week until I go home… and that tangle that I often reach at this stage of the course, of irritation alternating with clarity. Some lectures and workshops, and discussions and encounters and insights, are framed in vivid outline, or imbued with the aha! of treasured recognition. Others are…

  • Passion

    After four hours of classes today at the Jung-Institut – a slightly short day, but a good one; lectures by Roth, a psychiatrist who has a deep and powerful commitment to his psychotic and schizoid patients, reaching them and keeping them afloat in a way that few can match – I met Patricia, another analyst…

  • … wenn es schneit

    Zürich. Snow. Küsnacht. Jung. Green tea, clear cold light, scarves, and the realization that when I blithely think I can get away with wearing heavy cotton rather than wool I'm just fooling myself. This time, studying at the Jung-Institut seems well-defined, sharp-edged, demanding but utterly in focus. We will see how that develops, or shifts…

  • Stages

    The cloud of minor changes this month, anxiety over illness – three weeks of pains starting each night that turned out merely to be neuropathy, which, as I've explained to friends, is as though a dashboard light glows; but it doesn't indicate engine trouble, it just indicates that there's something wrong with the dashboard light…

  • Sherlocks

    Two Sherlocks in one week: the first episode of the second season of the brilliant BBC television series, and the second Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie film. Interesting as narrative that the film jumps to such a late place in the SH canon (Moriarty over the falls! that was originally the ending of everything), while the…

  • Retrospect

    I continue to be slightly… what? – unclear, disoriented, mildly frustrated? – about my previous post, about my feelings on Christmas night. There was a lucid sense of time and the year, of eternity and life and death, of change as perfect and inevitable. And, quite honestly – and this is rare for me –…

  • This Christmas night

    A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing…