Category: Dreaming
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Cracks in the world
A strange and fragmented time. It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder. Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar,…
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Existence
That in-the-midst-of sense… Time recently past: too much stress since about the first of June – some of which twisted at me such that my guts started to react: I felt relatively calm but my body didn't. I'd still like to ascribe this – partly – to current liver damage; which will hopefully be cured…
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The hard part
I've become increasingly aware, in a somewhat embarrassed way, of the difference between psychologically recovering from irrational complexes that hamper us, that keep us from living – and actually, actively, doing things in the world, doing things in life. I mean, okay, I've always kind of stunk at this. My sister and brother will easily…
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Solstice
In the dark of the year, I had the task of introducing one of our series of movie musicals at a local café. We'd chosen Meet Me in St. Louis – always an odd one: sentimental, structured – but at the same time there are strange, dark eruptions into the story: the youngest daughter in…
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[fragment]
[After a long day at the end of a long week with lots of things to do – but successful, even enjoyable, if a bit pressured: a student's year abroad rescued, two postgrads off in different research directions, supervision and personal analysis, analysands energetic but entangled, an HIV patients' meeting with a long list of…
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Men in autumn • fragments • a flash
I haven’t written here for a while… somewhat preoccupied, fairly busy. Walking through what feels like several lives at once: the university (with various changes in upper-level policy – an annoying time for British universities, as upper-level business savages try to extend control over non-business systems), my analysands (and another new one, and new chairs…
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Insight
How unexpected – some of the events and understandings of the past two months – with those of the past five or six years, with those of the past thirty-one years, and even with those of the past fifty-seven years – seem to have turned a narrowly configured corner, one that leads from the the…
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Vision
Not much to say here… four days of an intermittently really nasty cold, and cold medicines (stopped taking them a day ago). (If someone sneezes in a room where you are, leave immediately, then text them with a made-up appointment – you absolutely don't want to get this one.) And the last day or so…
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Brodkey
In an odd reflection of my blog entry a week or so ago, about Stefan Brecht… last night I was reading through John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists, an enjoyable collection of sharply drawn capsule careers of writers; and I tripped over Harold Brodkey. Who, of course, whatever else he had been, eventually became a…
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In-the-midst-of
A day that had one-thing-after-another in it: some are familiar, even long-repeated actions, some are new; there are pleasures, there are boring bits: and that quailty that has appeared in several (no: in a number) of my posts lately, of being transitional, of being sort of in-between. Liminal, perhaps. With students, cheerful or as though…
Paul Attinello 