Showing posts with label psyche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psyche. Show all posts

Friday, October 14, 2016

The Soul and Three Cities

Last night, I picked up a book I've had for a while on psyche and the life of cities. I read two or three chapters some time ago and laid it aside; last night it happened to be sitting in a pile of books near at hand when I was looking for something to read. I started with the chapter on San Francisco, which I apparently hadn't gotten to before, since none of it seemed familiar. I picked the chapter out of curiosity, since I've visited the city a number of times and wanted to see what the author, a long-time resident and psychoanalyst, had to say about it.

A recent incident helped prompt my curiosity. I sometimes look at apartments and places to live in other cities, just for fun; I like to see how much things cost and to consider possibilities. I rarely look at San Francisco, but one night, in an idle moment, I did a search for apartments in an area of the city that I rather like. I did the search, pulled up some results, and looked at a couple of apartments; I was looking at one with a lovely view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge when I was hit by a feeling of claustrophobia that nearly amounted to revulsion. I had the sudden conviction that I couldn't see myself ever living in San Francisco, and the strange thing was how strong the feeling was.

The author of the San Francisco essay confirmed my feeling rather than dissuading me from it, despite the fact that he obviously loves his city. His essay suggested to me that it might be hard to feel grounded in San Francisco, that the distance between people in that city of people in pursuit of themselves could make meaningful connections difficult. The writer describes an unusually high degree of self-preoccupation there, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It may be unavoidable for the people who are drawn to live there, since the city's famous openness, as he tells it, almost demands that residents make a project of their individuality. It left me feeling, though, that San Francisco might be quite a lonely place, and a tenuous one, too.

I agree with the author that San Francisco is lovely to visit and has great physical charm; I also agree with his observation that the city probably doesn't reveal its inner life readily to a visitor. You could go to San Francisco for a week or 10 days and enjoy every minute of it as a tourist, but what you're seeing tells you very little about what it would be like to live there. This is true to some degree of most places, I think, but perhaps even more so of San Francisco. The author attributes this to a high degree of introversion among its residents, something a casual visitor wouldn't be likely to notice.

After the San Francisco chapter, I turned to the section on London, another city I have spent time in. It was, oddly, rather a relief to turn to this chapter, though the author's designation of the color red as the city's signature color, a provocative idea to start with, got to the heart of something I noticed when I was there. One of the fascinating things about London, as he points out, is the way its long history is layered so visibly in its buildings, layout, monuments, and place names. He pointed to the double nature of the color red, emblematic of life and vitality but also of death, a reminder of the many centuries of struggle and upheaval the city has endured.

I remember my long-ago first visit to London's Westminster Hall and the almost physical feeling of the weight of years that hit me while I was standing inside. I'd never had a sensation like that before, a feeling of being buried under layers of history, as if all the events that had ever taken place were still present in the room. It wasn't a pleasant feeling and was actually rather frightening, though that was the only time I really experienced it that way. As I got used to finding my way around, I was increasingly fascinated by the way pieces of the past were embedded in the present, sometimes subtly, so that you had to know they were there--a piece of Roman wall visible through the window of a basement, for instance, if you bent your head and looked.

After reading the London chapter last night, I found myself thinking: if I had to choose whether to spend six months in San Francisco or six months in London, which would it be? London appealed to me more. Somehow, London seems more definite and less ghostly to me than San Francisco does, strange though it may seem to say it. Even as an American, I think I could find my way around London more easily than I could around the Bay Area, which says more about me, of course, than it does about the merits of either place. I'm not saying the same thing would or should be true of anyone else.

This afternoon, I read the book's chapter on New York City, a place with which I have very little personal experience. I used to find the idea of New York positively overwhelming, but lately I've begun to feel that I wish I knew the city better. Maybe sometime I'll get the chance. In any event, I learned more about New York, its history, and its layout (which has always been a source of complete mystification to me) in just two hours than I've managed to pick up in decades of hearing about it and seeing it on television and in the movies. The author of the piece made no assumptions, as others sometimes do, about a reader's prior knowledge of the city, providing not only a pictorial overview but also a succinct summation of history and geography that helped give it shape in my mind.

I'm not sure why I've always been content to have such a pleasantly vague notion of New York, to hear about Central Park, Greenwich Village, the Hudson River, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side without really having any idea of how they relate to one another. Curiosity finally seems to have kicked in, perhaps due in part to the many novels I've read in recent years that have managed to convey some sense of the city's allure, leading me to think that, while it's a tough place, it has its own magic. Why I have derived such a feeling for the city from reading fiction rather from seeing it in movies or on TV is a bit of a mystery. I do think that since 9/11, many Americans have developed a more protective feeling toward New York. The psychic wound created there still affects us all, and that may be another reason I feel drawn to the city.

After reading about New York, I posed myself another choice: "OK, what if you had to choose between San Francisco and New York?" A very interesting psychic exercise, to be sure, because there was a time I never would have said this (or even thought it), but New York appealed to me more. I wouldn't go so far as to say I can picture myself as a New Yorker, but if I had to choose a place for a longish visit, I'd pick New York. How strange that hard-edged, fast-paced New York should end up seeming more human to me than San Francisco, swathed in its fogs and soft hills, but that does seem to be the case. Again, this isn't a statement of absolute value but rather a reflection of a psychic shift on my part.

If you're interested in reading about the ways Jungian analysts describe the psychic life of their cities, the book I've been referring to is Psyche & the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis, edited by Thomas Singer. You may agree or disagree with the way a particular writer sees things, but Jungians are unusually sensitive to the inner life, distinctive rhythms, and peculiarities that give a place character, and this is reflected in their writing. Their intimate knowledge of the cities they live in may provide insight (or rebuttal) for experiences you've had as a visitor (or even as a resident) but couldn't quite explain. I'm still in shock over the way my psyche has rejected San Francisco (the home, after all, of Ghirardelli Chocolate--think about it!), but John Beebe's chapter on the city helped me to see some of the reasons why this may have happened.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Greetings from the Night Garden

A strange thing happened while I was writing this post, and it's never happened before since I've started the blog. I had most of the post written and was in editing mode when I noticed that the first two thirds of my essay had disappeared. Ouch! Horror! Fire! Calamity! No amount of hitting the back button has brought it back, so I have to conclude that all that Beautifully Constructed Prose is gone for good. I don't know exactly what happened, but of course word processors can be tricky. Trickster-y, too.

I was writing about the mysterious dark thing I thought I saw outside my window at work a week or so ago. Something fluttered by, and I only caught it out of the corner of my eye. I kept watching for it all week and kept seeing other things -- a leaf one day, a moth the next -- but I never saw what I thought I had seen the first time. Though only half-glimpsed, it had seemed bigger, darker, and more exotic somehow than a moth, like a creature from a night garden. What I really thought I had seen was a large black butterfly.

Since the butterfly is a symbol of psyche, and a black one carries implications of the shadow, the undeveloped part of our being that holds so much potential, this was a sighting guaranteed to spark the imagination of a Jungian. It might not be as exciting as the scarab beetle that bumped against the window of Jung's consulting room right after his client had dreamed about just such a beetle, but it was a break in the routine all the same. I was sitting there working, probably looking at news databases in Lexis-Nexis or doing something equally prosaic, when all of a sudden this creature appeared, hovering just on the edge of my vision and disappearing before I could get a good look.

But had I really seen it or had I seen something else, like that humble brown moth I spotted a few days later, and had my imagination turned it into something grander? That was the question.

I had somehow connected this to Jungian psychology, the quaternity, and the three men who appeared in my dream last night and dumped a yellow couch in my living room, but all of that has disappeared into the ether of Blogger's text editor. So maybe I should just say what actually happened.

On Friday afternoon, I was finishing up loose ends at my desk when something flew by my window, and I was quick enough to get a good look this time. It was a black butterfly, and an unusually large one, with big bold wings. I'm not sure where it came from, or even if it's the same one I saw a week ago. Now, the practical, rational side of me says, OK, a butterfly, you've seen one like it in the Arboretum. That's true. But my poetic side likes the contrast of midnight wings and bright sunlight, and the fact that it was flying so far from the ground.