Category: Imagined
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Negative capability
Analysis, a couple of weeks ago. For some months, I rarely bring dreams in: I know that I am dreaming but can't remember anything. The previous week's single dream: a teenager who was stubborn, wouldn't speak, was angry at everything: the adults talk around him, being social and polite, but he throws off all our timing, our…
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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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Shadows
… I don't feel well…. ••• Bits of news and experiences, some silly, some exasperating, exhausting. Some vaguely foreboding. I've mentioned my own error from late spring and summer, in taking charcoal capsules for stomach problems – which led to medications not being absorbed – which is now turning into a chain of events that has…
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Gastronomic, hypothetic, erotic
Barcelona… So, history: frequently, between about 2003-4 and 2008-9, Susan and Rob and I spent some time each summer in Barcelona, or Sitges, which is nearby enough. Changing circumstances, the deaths of Chris and then Dennis, and my increasing preoccupations in Zürich broke that pattern… And: a few years ago, Susan gave a seminar at…
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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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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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Pieces
Experiences lately seem to come in defined, outlined, characterized pieces: like bits of a mosaic. But since the mosaic isn't seen whole (at least not by me), I am constantly surprised by huge shifts in the ground underfoot…. * A couple of weeks ago, at the acupuncturist, while lying pierced: a really astounding ecstatic experience,…
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If we really…
At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or… – those clouds have moved into something unexpected… If, when we die, there is some…
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In between
Trying to catch – somewhere between the things I did in town today, and the many things I didn't do – the list is long at the moment of research and marking and administration – and sleeping and waking and working on the sofa, and the light, as the days are long – which might…
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The house, far from the city
Among large plans and changes: British citizenship, Zürich training, a big financial transfer – and small: a new jacket and shoes, a trip to northern Italy paid for by the the university, and most startling a re-engagement with two research projects that had dropped off the radar (just as though I were as productive as…
Paul Attinello 