December 24

Now, after a run of difficult days, I’m making another attempt to connect with myself through these exercises. It’s hopeless, of course, because “tonight is Christmas Eve and tomorrow is Christmas Day,” as the tango goes (and I can almost hear Gardel’s voice as I write). This means an onslaught of social engagements, intrusions, intolerable noise, and unhealthy food that’s completely unsuited to the time of year. Until now I’ve always successfully avoided the whole thing; most of the time I arrange to be by myself, reading a detective novel or doing some writing, occasionally seeing a friend (often someone Jewish) so we can get through the dark days together, eating reasonably and having reasonable conversations. But I’m not currently the “artist of my own destiny,” as the old self-help manuals used to say we should be, and instead I’m bound by the omnipotent will of a woman who is in turn completely bound by social conventions, an activist fighting for the cause of wakefulness, a solar woman (and I’m a lunar man). I wonder how much longer I’ll put up with this way of “life,” in which the essential, profound, true, authentic questions—for which we were created—are consistently displaced, indefinitely postponed, forgotten and sometimes even abused. I wonder how much longer I’ll keep up this cycle of hoping and losing hope. At my age I don’t have the luxury of waiting very long, and already too much time has passed since I was last in touch with myself. Happy Holidays.

December 27

I need to look into the idea of independence more deeply. It could, depending on how things go, either support a separation from Alicia or strengthen the relationship. If nothing else, it will be a break in the current status quo, which is the source of all my pathologies. On the subject of independence, this morning (or indeed around noon) the Unconscious presented me with quite a slipup. I was in my usual confused state upon getting out of bed, so I won’t be able to dredge up the full chain of my thoughts, but I remember one of its links relating to someone I knew. At that moment, to my immense surprise, I thought something like: “But Alicia doesn’t know that person,” even though she knows them perfectly well. I realized then that my image of Alicia, or rather my internal perception of Alicia, has been replaced with that of my mother. This pernicious identification of Alicia with my mother has been going on for some time (in dreams, for example), and I’ve never paid it enough attentionespecially considering how much it surely bothers me. But what happened this morning made me confront it, and I was able to do so willingly. I was also able to acknowledge that this idea has been trying to attract my attention for a while now, but that I’ve been ignoring it, refusing to think about it, brushing it to one side of my consciousness. It must be the main disrupting factor in my relationship with Alicia. I need to stay alert and consider the matter more carefully.