takes a lifetime to know some things

Larry sent this about Merton and Lax.  Does it mean that Merton took thirty or forty years to realize who he really was?  Was he also an otrovert like Lax?  Or was his mimicry of Lax, if Larry is right, something else within his psyche?  

Great advice. I’ll forward your email to Josh. I wanted him to hear the way you addressed Lax in your book as an abstract painter and reader of Lax.  I was taken by a video interview with Lax on YouTube by how much Lax sounded like Merton. Same cadence, same pauses, same humor, same laugh as the Merton taped lectures and talks with the scholastics. I think Merton got this America New York voice directly from LAX because I myself remember talking  like my own mentors the first years I taught—hearing their voices in my own as I played back their eloquence in my own head in unconscious mimetic adoration.  LAX was a hero to Merton, I suppose, and became more of one as time went on. In fact, his search for a second hermitage out West mimics LAX's prior move years before.  Any thoughts?

Larry 

I know little about Merton.  Same birth years but his was the less stable childhood than Lax's, so he needed the church and the monastery much more than Lax needed the circus family.  Lax found his hermit nature much earlier, realized it more clearly from deep within his childhood, one supposes.  Would Merton have allowed himself to see his desire for a hermitage as a mimicry or as a finding of his true nature after long years of searching?  The whole thing of the voice is most interesting, think you are right about the new yorkishness of it.  From Buffalo to NYC.  Forget the exact Lax birthplace, near Buffalo.  

Once I've adopted Kaminski's reading of my life (superimposed) it is difficult to think away from it.  Joe clearly was an otrovert writer, just like Handke.  Maybe the great majority of writers are.  Writers, artists, with musicians a different story though.  Performing another dynamic but surely there are otrovert musicians too.  Joe and I were "friends" at a distance---the colleague structure gave us that link, across which we recognized each other and respected our differences.  Phil I guess was an introvert, much less need for a pleasant social face, much greater need to stay within the key communities of church and college.  

back to our trekking banker --- she dreads anyone knowing of her plan to cross the Sierra de Gredos

"as if my secret came to life, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches."  113  

inevitable that I go to the Pueblo Center this morning, Saturday . . . . tried to forego the notion yesterday but nothing doing ---  gorgeous day out now.  10:25

resistance and acquiescence

our heroine will be in constant argument with the famous author she wants to write her story and that will make the book long and dense or in great danger of being tedious or at least as formidable as an everest trek, or a passage across the sierra de gredos.  Is Handke sort of saying ok Derrida et al you want the logos deconstructed, the narrative no longer to follow the ancient and newly endorsed forms, let's go, let's do that, follow me.  First we will walk backwards to the airport to see if we can even get the journey started.   

Porous   And at the same time they were porous . . . in the direction of both day and night  between awake and the clarity of a dream 

didn't rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef?  98 

was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved. 99  says the chef   and of course, we think, the writer,  

now into chapter 9   What was he thinking as he wrote this book?  Write a book crazier than any other book that has ever been published?  Have the thinnest possible narrative thread or "thread"? and with that then invent as many topics to string along it as you can and word them as wildly as you can, as dream-like, as anti-novel as possible, as richly weird as you want (but no cheap horrors or sex tricks or lazy stealings).  

111 she strikes him in the throat      bit like the child on the plane hitting the woman in the throat 

glowing, shimmering, shining   a sphere, a dome   discovery as a way of  keeping possibilities open  112

slow trekking

 page 54 in Sierra could have been cited in full in Kaminski

without any reference to society or even to a community

without any sense of belonging

most truthful feelings  . . . people like her did not need . . .  a sense of community, let alone a sense of society  

always alone in the rain in the woodshed at her grandparents' house

and yes the power of Kaminski's book still with me and has convinced me that the otroic underlies all else, encompasses or situates the whole interior landscape before anything such as the glyphic comes into play

Frank Bowling's paintings!  yes.  much better than Rothko's, much more life and feeling.  He is apparently 90 now.  Sir.  British  Guyana.

Strange that after finishing Kaminski's laser sharp analysis-presentation I get emails from Larry I telling me about his experiences over the past three years with group dream analysis.  Three years with eight people---started by a doctor

"My most interesting “hobby” post-retirement has been my participation in a “dream group” run by a local retired emergency room physician.  We’ve been together 3 years with the same 8 members and have evolved in unplanned and unexpected ways.

"“The first rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about Fight Club."

"First Rule of Dream Group: Don’t Talk about Dream Group.”

OK.  I can’t talk about specific people or specific dreams, but I can explain the dynamics that govern our weekly meetings. It is based upon the approach to dreams developed by Montague Ullman, physician and practicing psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Ullman’s books are plodding and boring and his best advocate and explicator is his protégé—a fellow named William R. Stimson-- who describes Ullman as having done for the study of Dreams what Jane Goodall did to the study of chimpanzees and Dian Fossey did to the study of gorillas.  He replaced deductive theorizing with experiential inductive field work—"learning from and communicating with the infinitely vaster intelligence that underlays our own mind.”

Stimson,

“He (Ullman) deftly lifted dreams completely out of science, no matter how correct that science might be, and he lifted them entirely out of psychotherapy, no matter how legitimate that psychotherapy might be, and he even lifted them right out of mythology or religion, no matter how true that mythology or religion might be.  And he returned dreams to the domain where they legitimately belong and can do the greatest good.  He gave dreams back to the dreamers who dreamed them.”

Only the dreamer knows what the dream means because every dream has its own scientific theory, psychological discovery, and mythological or religious illumination embedded within it---- borne in and through the experiences and body of the dreamer. But the dream ego cannot unpack these things on their own without the aid of a group of fellow  “students” because it’s hard to see one’s unconscious mind through the experiential images that “dress it up.”  It’s like trying to imagine how you’d look to yourself if the mirror didn’t reverse the features of your face. Or see through your waking thoughts with the clarity of a child who blurts out the unabashed truth, “Look the Emperor is naked!”  It helps to have a group for that.  In fact, only a group can do that!

Making sense of a dream in an Ullman Dream Group involves uncovering the deep inner core that knows the dreamer better than the dreamer knows themselves.

I’ll save you the step-by-step protocols that go into this process.  We’ve streamlined them over the years and learned a few things about how to remember dreams and their relationship to other dreams and their often-astonishing timeliness. Like metaphysical poetry, most dreams appear mundane and meaningless to the dreamer until their intricate formal dynamics are revealed and the revelations arrive on their own wings.

That's about the best I can for now. Thanks for asking.  L

---

and this morning a p s  "The book that most clearly explains the dream interpretation process per se along with "active imagination " is Robert Johnson's "Inner Work."

Larry 

the reference to fight club put me off a bit.  I remember reading Robert Johnson a bit years ago when Nicholas was super keen on dreams and dream analysis.  

this group dream work seems so far away from where I am at the moment   

and page 54 in Handke confirms this----Handke is my companion guide for this year and perhaps a while

The Gredos book is very long and very strange, like some of his other strange books, and I am comitted to reading it super slowly in the slow spiritual reading sort of way---same with Genet's Rites now too 

dream group would be so much like a committee meeting it gives me the willies just thinking about it, imagining it   ---  dreams themselves have never been that key for me ---  I sort of envied Nicholas as he talked about his vibrant and vivid and memorable his dreams were/are   Is that why his only? and primary activity on social media is posting images of paintings on facebook.  He has collected over the years in this way an exceptional body of work---huge and varied collection of photos of paintings, a curatorial masterwork of sorts, his private-public journey through images.  

H:  "at all public or political speeches she would make herself scarce, render herself invisible by going to sit or stand behind a curtain  . . . felt surrounded by a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm." 55

not having music and sitting in the dark   as a way of life    taking half a day to walk to the airport 

the line in K's book about the woman willing to pay for first class prompted this extrapolation during the night----maybe when I was coming to the end of high school the anxiety about what would happen next as we all headed off to college was such that I "chose" going into the monastery as a way to sacrifice everything in order to get a First Class ticket for the flight into the next phase of life as a way to insure more private space and distance from lots of other people!  Irony of course almost immediately was that I had no time to myself that first novitiate year, could not get away from the group at all and could have no time for one-to-one encounters. And friendships were even forbidden!!  "particular friendships" something I had never heard of and tried to puzzle out---was the particular nature of friendship not exactly the point, the pleasure to talking all night with one friend who returned full attention and interest?   No wonder I had to crash out, eject from, my first class seat through Eugenia Memorial, where I could finally be alone and sit in the dark with nothing bothering me in any way.  a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm.  

Kaminski

has me wondering if I do need to read Kafka.  "Franz Kafka's influence on Peter Handke is profound, particularly in how Handke constructs narratives of alienation, absurdity, and the intense focus on subjective perception. While Handke has not always been a sympathetic reader of Kafka, he has acknowledged Kafka's artistry as "pure" and "true" rather than just humorous. Or at least the Diaries.

great line from D H Lawrence on page 109  "Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.  The others have a certain stickiness; they stick to the mass."

Kaminski's book, finished it this morning, is an elegant piece of work, indeed.  The tale from medical history about handwashing (cadavers to birthing), how it was ignored and later proven true, key quotations about Frieda Kahlo, from David Foster Wallace, Lawrence, above, Dickinson's poem in the chapter about death, the Bedouin waiter's wisdom about love as a burn (131) and, last but not least, the only (I think, or maybe, one of the few) uses of the word feeling: "Those who accept verbal language as the only language of the mind remember mostly through words.  The otroverts remembers in feelings that cannot be articulated in words; these feelings are less likely to get lost in the recesses of memory, where they become irretrievable."  141   on 148 "the child's emotional aloofness in group settings is baffling to the rest" reminded me precisely of the key event of refusing to go to Catherine Schwininger's birthday party when I was in second grade (?).  

Other ways to say how the book surprised me.  Very impressive with the soft and quiet way he handled his own autobiographical details and then in the acknowledgement other life details.  And as finale the way he puts Janus Korczak, Warsaw pediatrician who died with his orphans under the Nazis against our current T hive cruel and selfish aggressiveness.  

Brilliant, the book, in every way.  Reviewed beautifully what I already knew, strengthened my sense of myself and my takes on all of these things over my lifetime.  

One more Key passage for resonance---page 117 "one otroverts I know lives  modest lifestyle but will always splurge on first-class plane tickets; she is willing to pay an exorbitant premium not for legroom or the three-course meal but for a modicum of additional privacy and distance from fellow passengers."

Yes, for sure!!!

such long hindsight

The wanderer took renewed interest in this new personality theory because it relieved pressure long felt over so many years to understand why if the glyphic reality was active from the beginning, from early awakening, why had no action really been prompted by it, why had it never expressed itself in any important move?  What had done so over so many years, so strongly that it felt like a long and familiar form of expressive behavior was something the new theory, call it for now, the otroic or the othroic, features right at the outset.  This from the website (as we wait for the book itself to arrive, now that it is on its way we can't wait for it):  "Unlike introverts, they are not shy or quiet, and do not quickly tire from one-on-one socializing. Yet in large groups they feel uncomfortable, alienated, and alone."  Do not quickly tired from one-on-one socializing.  That is the key.  How often over the years either in my office with one student or at a gathering where I stay with one person for as long as possible while the party swirls around me without tiring of being with that one person has this been the case?  And how it has explained everything about  the engagement with the person, even when strong feeling has been the case, usually because strong feeling has been the case, but how rarely if ever (I can think of only one instance where the "rule" was broken) was there any physical reaching out or movement of any kinds.  Conversation was always more thrilling and satisfying than anything else that could have been entertained or imagined.  

Let's see if Kaminski agrees here.  Meanwhile I can keep reading his site.  Now I did just notice that he claims atheist is part of the picture.  But he is not familiar with Burke and has a psychologist's shortcomings when it comes to language, symbol and drama.  And to the ways Beckett and all the other writers of mid-20th onward have handled these things.  Handke our current hero in this regard.  Just noticed the other day that one of his recent short works is a voicing of one of Beckett's characters who is silent in Beckett's work.  So to Kaminski atheist fits necessarily with belonging to no groups but agnostic fets better and believing fits fine so long as believing is signed as believing? and in who? and in what?  

Unknowing as a perfection of belonging-not belonging, or perfection?  How often Handke's narratives, especially in Moravian just recently, proceed less and less by statement but by questioning.  Handke I'm sure is Otrovert par excellence.  

But I may have him wrong.  After all his sense of belonging to his home village, to his birth landscape and language haunts him all his life and he finds he does go home againg and longs to go home forever.  

"Otroverts rarely feel lonely. And they don’t belong to any group, family, nationality, or ideology. They are not part of a group or a circle of friends. They have friendships with individuals, they can be deeply connected to a life partner and are likely to be very loving parents, but they are eternal outsiders. Once they understand their otherness and stop trying to “fit in” and be communal, they can enjoy a life of productive individuality with few but warm and authentic relationships."

This does give me some pause.  Perhaps I am wrong about myself after all.  When the book arrives and I go through it slowly I will go back and forth and forth and back.  If not fitting in is key then reading a book we will not want to have the book figure us out either; I refuse to fit in to what the expert propounds as the proper ways I will not want to fit in.  

"It is hard for otroverts to experience and connect with what attracts and preoccupies a group. Consequently, an otrovert is an observer but never a true participant."   What comes most clearly to mind here is that one time I served on that large committee examining Greek life on campus.  At the first meeting I said to the group---we can save ourselves a lot of time if we write the report we are expected to write now and forget the silly idea of interviewing lots of people.  We know in advance what we will say, why bother with lots of meetings and discussions.  They all looked at me as if I were from another planet.  We had weeks of meetings, so many people spoke, we eventually wrote the report that was wholly predictable from the first day.  I had no idea of how the group behaved as a group and wanted to do so.  

"an otrovert cannot help but feel lonely."  "However, in a group, where a sense of belonging is the cement holding a group together, an otrovert cannot help but feel lonely."  vs "Otroverts rarely feel lonely." 

"the risk of being seen as controversial, subversive, or even insane in certain circumstances."  Who was put into a mental hospital twice?  the whole religious life chapter of my life---the greatest mistake I made in my life---demonstrated once and for all the dynamic over which I nearly indeed almost killed myself even if I thought I was taking it lightly and not seriously. But in fact I did climb onto the window ledge, luckily it was a large one, and could indeed have fallen had I not been cautious.  True I was on those medications, did they help me be more cautious?  maybe so.  But there is that exception where I did take explicit, physical action, so rarely and was it not because one person was down on the lawn below mowing the grass?  It was an action in the direction of one person, not towards the whole group.  My actions in that drama were away from the group even while I could not say that to anyone (there was no one to talk to and the official psychologist made all of that even worse---withl him there was no emotional connection because he was the official face and voice of the group life).  

"Otroverts are risk-averse, apprehensive, and insecure outside of their comfort zone. The same daring spirit that takes them to unchartered regions of thought is absent from the experiential side of life."  

The horror and adrenaline overdose of our whole road to Coroico adventure! A lifetime adrenaline trauma still felt in my chest memory.  

help on the back cover

Starting again into Crossing the Sierra Gredos.  Never has he tried a woman as main character.  She is a banker.  Before a geologist, a pharmacist, now a banker.  Outskirts of a river port, against previous life and modern life in general, sets out on quest---what else?---and has hired a famous writer (not a failed writer as in Moravian) to be her biographer.  She wants him to write her authentic biography.  She travels to meet him and passes through Five! stations, going across the Sierra and through La Mancha.  Escape from voracious mass media and commercialization of all life, all lives.  Yes, this time I have asked for help from the back cover text to get me re-started.  It is a long book, bent upon what Paul West calls "subtle unostentatious delicacy."  Oh, dear, here we go.  Again.  

finally

realized during the wee hours that I of course should be reading Rami Kaminski's book and so I ordered it even though it is hardback.  

RAMI KAMINSKI, MD, is a renowned psychiatrist and the founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City. A true pioneer in the psychiatric field, Dr. Kaminski has served in every facet of psychiatry—from academic and research work, through clinical, government,... 

Handke writes the same book over and over throughout his career, sort of.  And the Odyssey haunts them, the exile, war and "war", wanderings, endless events, landscape as innerscape, maybe even landscape as war, scene of battles, geology as foundation of every scene in the series of dramas.  Writing and the compulsion to write primary source of his feelings of guilt (238 Moravian), guilt about his mother as well.

I kept surmising that he might just as well be a otrovirt and then it dawned on me at 3 am, well, whether he fits that new label you need to explore the fellow's book for yourself because if you resonate so deeply with Handke's ways of responding, imagining, thinking, wandering, then Kaminski has some things to say that you may find invaluable as well.  Why block him out after spending so many years being fascinated by Jung and Myers-Briggs and Enneagram?  Let's see what he says about all of that.  

but then we are in chapter 10 and the obsession with the former country of the Balkans reappears.  The karst basin above Trieste.  The sudden deaths of aging members of the conferences centered on Central Europe.  Maybe all of the satire in this chapter goes over my head.  Survivors unable to get the rusted bell to clang.  Days each with a special creature or event. "everything greening in that incomparable Balkan way."  Buses, a newspaper of a traveler, his own name as a former writer by a reporter named Melchior. 

undertaken the tour to get away from himself.  still weird in many ways Boy at the front of the bus with a smirk, uttering the shortest of all Balkan curses: "May the mouse fuck you!"  The boy has become it, in Jakob Böhme's words, in his beautiful yet terrible problem, the next writer.  

12 Porodin  gone.  every step led deeper into the fairy-tale-like unknown.  

walking the bomb craters to the river 248 his laundry number in boarding school

the woman in his arms did exist but did not belong to him    he was at odds with himself for good 

three angels  the guardian angel   the warning angel   and now the reassuring angel    geography of dreams stay with me now and in the hour of my death  

May you be the son of your moment.  And may the moment be your breath.  312  

he wrote it Jan-Nov in 2007   a meditation on what were the Balkans, what was that war, is it now gone forever

after Moravian Night comes Don Juan  (I could read it again now that I got his angle on the tale)

in 2011 The Great Fall  about an actor  and Storm Still and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez 

2012 the essay on the Quiet Place  --- a late work, then, not an early one  

2013  Days and Works   and a new English version of Repetition

2014  Storm Still   epic about his Slovene roots 

2015  in German, The Innocent, Me and the Unknown Woman"

2016  English version of The Moravian Night 2008 

2017  The Fruit Thief  Or, One-Way Journey into the Interior

2018  The Great Fall  and Til Day You Do Part  Seagull Books 

2019  The Great Fall in English  Seagull Books   Nobel Prize 

2020  The Second Sword

2021  My Day in the Other Country 

2022 in German  The Ballad of the Last Guest  

reminder   in 2000 it was On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House

so I need to go back and pick up where I left off---Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

not sure how I got out of line with Moravian Night  

time in May is running out   Today is the 1st   Looks like The Tunnel will not be until next year !  if ever