Walking Down the Street

 

It’s day light savings today.  I might have missed it.  My mother reminded me last night.  But the phones these days update automatically.  My computer clock is set to whatever time I decide upon, unmoored from location.  Nostalgically, I’ve left it on Beijing time for the last year and a half or so.  When we are on day light savings, it is oddly eleven hours different and I am forever “falling back” but now we’ve resumed our proper place, precisely twelve hours behind things China.

 

The wind the night before last was remarkably pronounced.  At one point the lights flickerd off and then returned.  But come the morning things were tranquil. This morning was sunny but it is now afternoon.  Wind is howling suddenly and the trees are all bending, absorbing the gusts.  There are sporadic flakes of snow falling which is odd to see but not unpredictable.  We’re not out of winter yet.  The forecast confirms that it will rain for a few few hours.  I ought to suit up soon and go bicycle if I’m to get that in today.

 

I didn’t intend to.  Though perhaps I did.  It’s worth examining motives, as I spent the morning for this week’s reading assignments with my older one’s Freud and history course.  Freud is working through the concept of the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego, which I’d known of but never properly understood before.  Ego:  I’m walking down the street on my way to work. Id:  I would love to reach out and touch that woman’s legs.  Super Ego:  Vile wretch.  That’s why there are laws to protect others from people like you.

 

There are also the two books which consider the growth of the intellectual community around Freud.  I’ve been waiting for Jung to show on the scene.  Eli Zaretsky’s, Secrets of the Soul and in particularly George Makari’s, Revolution in Mind map out the community of largely Jewish intellectuals in Vienna with the more scientific, clinical scene of protestants in Zurich.  Even in this most aware and reflective crowd, perhaps because of it, the pursuit of truth clashes with fame and legacy and the power to decide.  Jung rebels and starts his own theory, though appropriately enough, he seems to have a breakdown in the process.  I am wondering as I read how this modernism took such hold in puritanical America and proletariat Russia and even in agrarian China. 

A dream deferred, my first visit to Budapest, this passage in the Zaretsky had me imagining what the Hungrary of Austro Hungarian Empire would have been like at the turn of the century: 

 

“In Hungary in 1900 Ferenczi had refused to review The Interpretation of Dreams for a local medical journal. “Not worth the effort,” he had remarked.  Jung convinced him to take Freud seriously.  Ferenczi was two years older than Jung, a member of a  cultivated Budapest family and a prolific writer of essays and poetry as well as a doctor.  His father was a bookstore owner who had emigrated from Poland and “”Magyarized” his Yiddish-sounding name (Fraenkel) out of enthusiasm for Hungary’s 1848 revolution.  His mother was president of the Union of Jewish Women.  A member of the Nyugat (Occident) circle, which included Georg Lukacs, the Hungarian poet Endre Ady and composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, Ferenczi had a long-standing interest in hypnotism, autosuggestion, and both male and female homosexuality . . .” p.73

 

Never having heard of Zoltan Kodaly, I queued a selection of his cello pieces up and took my ride.  As predicted there were flurries of snow and then glaring sunlight. 

 

 

 

Sunday, 03/14/21