Category: Psychology
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The Manticore
So… during a time of relative quiet – home a lot, mulling around various work, making lists, and doing bits of it – last night a novel caught me: Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook / The Proof / The Third Lie; and caught me so definitely that I read it from about midnight to ten…
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Not so wrong after all…
Trudy, my student and friend from ten years ago, has grown from a Hong Kong pianist into a New York publisher/performer/gourmet chef, and friend to many people across several artistic communities. Her husband Frank, whom I met for the first time a few weeks ago, is a composer/journalist/intellectual – one who can connect to a…
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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…
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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…
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… 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…
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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 –…
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Types
Today was Steve's wake: of the 'eldest set' (and no, we don't have a term for ourselves – we are simply the members of the local HIV patient group who have lived the longest – generally from fifteen to twenty-odd years since diagnosis), he is actually the first, or perhaps the second, to die in…
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Maintenance
I tend to be disturbed by the times when practically everything there is to do in a given day, in this city, in the world seems to be a kind of maintenance – keeping things going, repetition – except for the things that are timewasters. Maintenance: I do tend to keep the apartment neat, I…
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Spinning
After Mom's death, recovering from what is apparently irritable bowel syndrome (sigh) and someone breaking into my office… At the analyst's. My dreams have no particular focus; I can discern an echo, like an invisible superstructure, of response to Mom's death around the edges, but otherwise there is not much to work with. He finally…
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Airports (II)
I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them…
Paul Attinello 