Settling in

Just a quick blog-post to say I’m settling in and enjoying the new house. It still feels quite strange and I’m feeling guilty about not unpacking all the boxes and not doing this and that. I am pretty pleased with the Chagall though.

I am also feeling a bit overwhelmed by this move. The strain is definitely showing since my anxiety is definitely worse than usual. It’s making me cranky and irritable and worried. I’m frustrated that I can’t just be done with the move already. Why do I need to keep on unpacking and organising and tidying and throwing away and making decisions?

If I wasn’t so tired I could go to gym and feel better but … well, I just need to take it easy.

Some good news on the book front is that my new books arrived. I’m loving The River Midnight (Lilian’s “stunning debut novel” from 1999) and I’m astonished at how well Lilian has realised the Polish shtetl. Great dialogue and I’m loving the vilda bayas, the four friends (wild creatures) who are now grown up. I’m a slow reader so it could take me a couple of weeks to finish this but I’ll post a review when I’m through.

Also very happy to have started Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I read about this on Charlotte’s blog (I think) and have wanted to read it ever since. That’s good advice for writing and life – just take things bird by bird.

Steppenwolf on the couch

Illustration by Hermann Ackermann from the Heritage Collection edition

With Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (1927) still fairly fresh in my mind, I want to share a few thoughts in the form of an “On the couch” post. My idea for these posts is to take a defining moment in a novel, an event which might lead a main character to seek therapy, and then to broaden the discussion to include some reflections on the author and the circumstances in which the novel was written.

Name: Harry Haller (aka Steppenwolf)
Age: 48
Occupation: Writer
Lives in: Germany in the mid-1920s

Harry, the Steppenwolf of the title, is a troubled man. He sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes”, someone with a dual nature that is part human, part wolf-like. He feels as if the wolf in him is too savage and makes him unsuitable for human company while the “human” side lacks energy, purpose and contentment. Not content with either state, it is as if he’s at war with himself.

Descriptions of Harry:

Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man. He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well, though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed here and there a streak of grey. … Later I found out that his health was poor and that walking tired him. With a peculiar smile — at that time equally unpleasant to me — he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please at the same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps.

At the very first sight of him … I was at once astonished by something curious about him … I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in the course of time replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In the course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

He has recently taken a room in a boarding house and has been spending most of his time thinking, reading, writing, drinking and wandering the streets. On one of his wanderings a man hands him a pamphlet which is a “treatise on the Steppenwolf” and sets out the multifaceted nature of his character. It also tells him that he is one of the ‘suicides” — people who one day know that they will take their own life. For Harry, the day he has chosen for this ending is his 50th birthday. The knowledge that his suffering will come to an end comforts him but he also knows that this is an easy way out.

A chance encounter with a former colleague, a professor with whom he has often discussed Indian mythology, leads to a dinner invitation with the professor and his wife. The dinner is a disaster. The professor unwittingly insults Harry by criticising a column which he has written and Harry in turn insults the professor’s wife by criticising a picture she has of Goethe, which Harry finds thickly sentimental and insulting to Goethe’s true brilliance. At the end of the dinner, Harry is convinced that he’s not fit for polite society and resolves to return to his room and cut his throat. Instead he walks the streets, coming to rest at a dance hall where he meets a young woman, Hermine, who recognises his desperation and effectively takes him under her wing, alternately sympathising with him and mocking him and also providing him with a reason to live.

Here’s part of Harry and Hermine’s initial conversation:

Harry: Well, you see, it was really a small matter … it was a picture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know. But it was not in the least as he really looked. That of course nobody can know exactly … However, some artist of today had painted his portrait as he imagined him to have been and prettified him, and this annoyed me. It made me perfectly sick. I don’t know whether you can understand that.

Hermine: “… And so, Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of what he must have looked like, and you have a right to … But the artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has no right to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else — because you don’t like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor – laugh and be done with it. If you were out of your senses you would smash the picture in their faces. But as you’re only a little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. I’ve understood your story well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You make me laugh. But don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise you’ll get hot. But you have to be told everything – like a little child!”

The relationship between Harry and Hermine is an interesting one, not least because Hermine reminds Harry of his childhood friend Herman (and thus the author too) but also because she mothers him and treats him like a child. Their relationship never really gets beyond the mother-child or teacher-pupil dynamic but I found Hermine intriguing, especially with regards to power and vulnerability. Unlike Harry, Hermine is more rooted in the everyday world and she introduces him to a lover (Maria) and the saxophonist Pablo, who in turn introduces him to the world of the Magic Theatre. The Magic Theatre allows Harry’s imagination to run wild and he has a series of vivid fantasies which culminate in the ambiguous, violent ending. As a symbol of the power of projections, the Magic Theatre is really excellent.

While not wanting to give away the ending, I found it disappointing. Understandably, Hermine’s life is not considered separately from Harry’s, but she seems to exist only to advance his development. There’s a narcissism about Harry, which makes him preoccupied with his own nature (and fantasies) and seems to hold him back from ‘real’ relationships.

**
Wikipedia provides some insight into the novel and also Herman Hesse’s life, which seems to reflect much of what his Steppenwolf goes through.

“In 1924 Hermann Hesse remarried wedding singer Ruth Wenger. After several weeks however, he left Basel, only returning near the end of the year. Upon his return he rented a separate apartment, adding to his isolation. After a short trip to Germany with Wenger, Hesse stopped seeing her almost completely. The resulting feeling of isolation and inability to make lasting contact with the outside world, led to increasing despair and thoughts of suicide. Hesse began writing Steppenwolf in Basel, and finished it in Zürich.”

Wenger also apparently spent quite a bit of time in a mental hospital, which makes me want to read up on their relationship. Any pointers here, Litlove (or others)?

Playing House

I’m moving house this morning. Those six words are enough to put knots into my stomach and I’m trying to keep the anxiety at bay by reframing this as “playing house” rather than “moving house”. There’s no escaping the fact that moving is very stressful — some stress guides put it up there just below losing a parent or a spouse. Part of me is deeply unsettled by the prospect but I’m also quite excited. There’s good stress and bad stress all jumbled together and when you most need to retreat to your favourite place to regroup, well, it’s gone, hasn’t it? And then you can’t find anything that you need, despite the meticulous labelling on all the boxes.

There are many ways to approach a move and possibly the most sensible is to tackle it like a formidable military campaign. Preparation is everything and you need to-do lists, time schedules, contingency plans and good supply lines. I’m all for making the move as comfortable as possible but I’m trying not to get caught up in too much list-writing. It also helps that my new house is only five minutes drive from my parents’ place, where I’ve been staying for going on two years. So in terms of stressful life events, this really shouldn’t be a crippling, curl-up-into-a-ball-and-start-rocking move.

Last time I moved it was the end of 2007 and one image stands out for me from that time. It was the end of a long, gruelling year and I was having to go back to my parents while I finished my thesis and waited to start my community service as a psychologist in the military. I’d just packed up my entire house into two separate storage areas and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I remember sitting in the bath in an otherwise largely-deserted house and trying to cry and feeling utterly wretched. It was a miserable feeling but it did feel like a turning point and I could start going up again.

Today’s move seems like child’s play in comparison. For a start, the packing has largely been done. All the finding and gathering and ordering and throwing away and labelling and storing and all that. This is the fun part where I get to open boxes like presents and remember all the things that I used to have and will now have again. Books and CDs and coffee-tables and paintings and a whole assortment of unnecessary papers. I’m leaving the parental home for the last time (hopefully) at the ripe age of 39. Hallelujah! I’ve come of age! P and I are moving in together and will get a chance to play house.

Yesterday P and I got access to the house and it was such a relief to see that the keys worked, the alarm turned off and that the tenants had left it in good shape. They even left some wood in the fireplaces, which was a nice touch, although I was less thrilled to see that my new study has lilac-coloured walls and their daughter’s name on the door. In fairness to them, they did offer to paint the walls white again but I thought the lavender colour would be charming and also serve to remind us that if we ever decide to have a child, this room could easily be turned into a nursery once again. The child-like letters on the door, which now spell out “Milla” in different colours, will probably have to go but if you take away the “A” you have “mill”, which is quite a fitting name for a study. After all, it’s Freud who talks about everything being “grist for the mill”.

Apart from my hacking cough and P’s dripping nose, which are the inevitable hangers-on from a cold and wet Cape winter, we’re in pretty good shape for the move. My boxes are all packed and I’m meeting the movers at the storage park where they’ll transfer the contents of Unit 451 into a truck rather than a bakkie (fingers crossed here) and driving us to the “slum”. That rather charming image comes courtesy of my mom whose serious words of advice to me were not to let “Joschka [the dog] turn your house into a slum”. Thanks, ma, I really needed that image right now, just as I’m showing P the peeling paint and the window-frames that need replacing and the floorboards that need sanding and varnishing and who-knows-what-else.

Some words of advice from Martha Beck, the life coaching guru. I read an interesting column from Helena Dolny in this week’s Mail & Guardian in which she quotes Martha Beck’s advice on being steered by your own “body compass”:

Beck leads us through constructing our own body compass. It’s quite simple, really. Firstly, think of a time you consider to be one of your best moments ever, of feeling loved, feeling safe. … That’s you’re ‘plus-10’ reference point. Next, think of a time that was the worst of your life. … That’s your “minus 10”. … The next thing Martha asks you to do is to write down your “to do” list for the following week. … Then take your list, consider your own body compass you just set up and score the list. … Identifying the area of most dissatisfaction is the entry point into a possible conversation with yourself, or with someone you can think things through with.

There’s no doubt that the lowest score for me would be moving house. But now that I’ve visited the house again and sorted through the previous memories of moving in my mind, I think this move could also be quite fun. I’m not saying that the anxiety magically goes away but there’s room to enjoy some of the move rather than feeling on edge the whole time. What’s a dropped couch here and there in the broader scheme of things?

In Treatment

In Treatment (HBO, 2008) is a TV series (closely based on an Israeli TV drama called Be Tipul) which centres on Paul Weston, a 53-year old Maryland-based psychotherapist. Each episode depicts a single therapy session and provides an excellent exercise in dialogue and close camera work. Gabriel Byrne plays Paul and his soft blue eyes, wrinkled smile and lilting Irish accent work well to create the impression of a kind, likeable and intense therapist who is also quite preoccupied by his own troubled marriage and mid-life crisis.

I watched the first seven episodes of Season One this weekend and I was initially quite impressed. The sessions are divided up according to weeks. Monday is Laura (a young woman with Borderline tendencies who falls in love with Paul), Tuesday is Alex (a narcissistic Navy pilot who was responsible for the death of 16 Iraqi boys in a religious school), Wednesday is Sophie (suicidal teenager), Thursday is Jake and Amy (a bickering couple) and Friday sees Paul in his own supervision / therapy. The sessions are addictive and a little over-dramatic but I was pulled in and interested, at least for the first five or so episodes.

What I liked about In Treatment was the experimental format, the extended dialogue, the clever use of the therapeutic frame and other therapy devices. The troubled therapist adds an interesting dimension and I was intrigued to see how the Israeli influence would work in an American series. There were many issues which deserve a lot of discussion, such as erotic transference, empathy, narcissism and so on. What I didn’t like was the inevitable over-dramatisation, the sexual voyeurism, the lack of understanding between therapist and patient and what I took as simply bad therapeutic technique.

Many of Paul’s interpretations made me cringe. As a therapist I know when I’m off the mark with what I say and I had this same sensation for much of the episodes. Paul will gaze off into the middle distance and say something profound rather than staying with his patients and connecting with their experience. Of course a lot of this has to do with the demands of TV and it also has to do with the plot. Paul’s shortcomings as a therapist are partly what make this series interesting. It’s a classic case of “Doctor heal thyself”. One example of a bad interpretation: Paul starts telling Laura, the young woman patient who has fallen in love with him, about scuba diving and the bends rather than focusing on what she’s just presented to him, which is her engagement to her boyfriend.

I was interested to see the reaction on the Internet and it seems largely positive. What I would be more interested in is seeing the reaction from therapists themselves. My own initial impressions after seven episodes are very mixed. There’s a big difference between playing the role of a therapist and actually doing therapy. I really don’t think this is something you can read from a script. Empathy is something you can feel and it’s either there or it’s not. My initial impression was that it simply wasn’t there. Anyone else seen it? Does it work for you?

A trip with no story

I haven’t been able to blog since I came back from Kathu and I’m trying to understand why. Perhaps I’ve been too worn out by the trip. All the driving and the not sleeping very well and the disruption to my routine. Eating not terribly good food and just feeling unsettled for a week. This trip has also made me duller, more stupid and more of a blunt instrument. I’ve become a sluggish foot-soldier.

The purpose of the trip was to do a psychological risk inventory on the troops as part of their annual health assessment. The test itself is quite a blunt instrument. If you have any intelligence you can guess the correct answers but that’s not the point. You need to answer according to how you feel at the time. We interviewed the ones that ‘failed’ and then decided on their colour status (green or yellow) and how to proceed from there. The interviews amounted to mini mental status examinations where we were looking for pathology but also signs of coping and resilience and emotional stability.

I was quite anxious about the amount of driving that was required on the trip and I feared having an accident in the military car. Would my concentration hold up, would we be able to get petrol, would the car break down and would my cold deteriorate into swine flu? In the end, nothing bad happened. The car drove well and the journey there and back proceeded without incident.

So rather than posting a story about my trip, I’ll provide some fairly random thoughts instead.

The symbol of the battle school where we were is a red knight (the chess-piece kind) with a sword coming out of its head. Perhaps this is an appropriate symbol of madness. A disembodied horse’s head which is also an instrument of war.

Part of me remains the journalist. I go on a trip to an unusual destination and I’m looking for the story, the angle and wondering what I can deliver before deadline. But this is different. There’s no deadline, or rather the work deadline is completely different. We have to assess 250 people in 4 days. Sign the files. Write the referrals.

One of the best things about Kathu is its golf course. In the dry Northern Cape the golf course is watered from the iron ore mine. What this means is that the greens are green and the trees (mostly camel thorn trees) are flourishing. When my drive went astray (which it mostly did) and I couldn’t be bothered to go and find it in the long rough, I would take out my camera instead and try and capture a good picture of one of the trees.

I was interested in my fellow guests at the lodge, particularly the two guests who looked like they were high-ups or middle management from Kumba (the highly profitable iron ore mine which is part-owned by Anglo American). He was tall and black and well-dressed and looked the picture of the new mining executive. BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) to a tee. She was white and intelligent and less flashy although she still dressed in a corporate way. I noticed that they stayed in the Boutique Hotel side of the Lodge rather than the more plebby lodge side but they still joined us for meals. I wondered if they were a couple or just business colleagues. There was little to indicate that they were romantically involved but my thoughts ran to one of the local soapies and I thought that they would make a perfect new South African corporate couple. She was more aware of her fellow diners while he seemed quite wrapped up in himself. Perhaps he was thinking about the next board meeting and how to continue to maximise the profit from the mine. If he was visiting from Johannesburg there would be a certain seriousness attached to the visit. Goals, objectives, targets and so on.

Sitting at one of the breakfast tables, I was thinking of my last work trip in which I stayed at a decent hotel. Mauritius. We were there to do a short study of the country’s political, economic, social and corporate governance. We put in 12-hour work days for a week and then we took a day off to visit one of the island’s many holiday resorts. Sparling blue pools, lazy views of the bay, comfortable loungers, lots of light and healthy, suntanned Americans and Brits in abundance. The books on the loungers were bestsellers, thrillers largely. Nothing too challenging.

The food in Kathu was largely forgettable. As I sipped my small glass of orange juice and regretted the oil-rich food of fried eggs, fried bacon, fried sausage and some potato mixture (hash browns perhaps), I remembered my team in Mauritius. Those were good times. And now? A different career and working largely on my own (even though I’m part of an organisation).

My colleague on the trip was a young Afrikaans guy in his early thirties. Unmarried and with a distinct eye for pretty women. Not very broad-minded perhaps (although he’d worked in London for two years) but a really decent guy and someone who works hard and plays hard. A good golfer. The night we arrived he was soon chatting away to one of the waitresses, who was called Elandi and who called us “Meneer”. She told us that the local bar where we intended to play pool was pretty rough and that she never drank without her “verliefde” (her sweetheart). As she told us this, she touched the chain around her neck anxiously. On it there was a medallion of a saint.

Cold in Kathu

Greetings from Kathu in the remote Northern Cape. Just a quick post to say I’m still around but am recovering from a 13-hour drive yesterday from Cape Town to Kathu with a cold. Think of a typical man with a cold and you’ll get the idea. Lots of feeling sorry for myself, slightly muddled thinking and some anxiety about driving all that way in a slightly impaired state.

I’m still getting used to moving from this …

… to this in the space of a week.

It’s hard to convey the dry dustiness that is the Northern Cape in a picture. The first picture is of Windmill beach in Simonstown where we went to celebrate my cousin’s 50-something birthday. Nice, relaxing time away. This week I’m at a remote military battle school testing the mental health of 300-odd soldiers. If ever I needed some motivation to look for a better job!

But what I did want to blog about is the Booker longlist. I’m sure you’ve seen the longlist and have your thoughts on it. Is the Booker still relevant? Who do you want to win? I’m rooting for Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall (although haven’t read it) but would be interested to hear more about the other contenders. Not sure that I want to read another Coetzee right now when there are so many other good books that I haven’t read. I think Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (about a man with Alzheimer’s) should be interesting.

On the subject of men growing old and dying (how did we get onto that – oh yes, men and their colds) I also want to read SA author Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson, which won the Sunday Times fiction award.

I’ll be around a bit in the next few days but also a bit distracted with mental health matters. Have a good week.