The Way of the Couch

Today is Thursday May 19. Chris and I are taking an unplanned Ruhetag. (Rest day). We both woke up this morning with “an inexhaustible desire to do nothing” (to borrow a phrase from one of the quotes from Freud posted on benches along the Freud Promenade here - more about that later). We ate breakfast and returned to our room where we have read or played with our iPhones (Worldle, Duolingo, Facebook) pretty much all day except for a lovely walk to the nearby town of Lengmoos where we were surprised and delighted to find we could get coffee ice cream cones, then a leisurely loop home, so I got to show Chris the route of one of my early (before 8 am breakfast) walks. Here’s my favorite photo from the walk. 

But I’m not sure, maybe this is my favorite? I love both reflections in water and the contrast of soft rolling hills, small villages and the rugged mountains. 

Or this one, where the camera almost catches the roll downhill in the foreground. The kind that makes me want to be a little girl again and go rolling rolling rolling all the way down. 

And then of course there is a photo from today’s walk on the theme of benches. 

The bench theme has emerged originally from the series of bench photos that I took of Chris and her sister Hanna and of Hanna’s family that echo or rhyme with earlier family photos. But also from the benches along the Freud promenade with their quotes to illuminate Freud’s life and thought and relationship to this place (where he and Martha and family celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary). 

Francesco Marchioro, who developed the Promenade, wrote with truly mystic fervor about the benches in his book Freud’s Walk:

“A bench isn’t a decorative object but is intelligent, visionary; it is a visual machine, that guides the eyes and states of mind. In spite of its solipsistic look, the bench has a connecting role: it follows one of the most ancient and playful human experiences: the stroll.

“The benches are profane confessionals, places of intrigues, fantasy, chatter, readings, considerations, political gambit, trysts...

“They are also witnesses of games, laughter, jokes, hugs and greetings. They represent an unexpected anthropological observatory. In fact it is a place of a marginal condition, of existential problems: solitude, friendship, research, seduction The benches keep silent but at the same time talk, invite, welcome, admonish us. They are our ideal place to enter into contact with ourselves and making up for the close relation between the nature and the Self.

“They are places to take a break: they give us time to waste time. They are timekeepers for people passing by and gone off. They let us meditate on the passing of time: elegy, introspection, contact with the nature.

“They bring to mind a scene, that we can read in Old Masters of Thomas Bernard: for over thirty years, every other day, mister Egger, the protagonist, goes to the Pinacotheca of the Kunshistorisches Museum of Vienna. He confesses: «I do not come to the Bordone Room for Bordone, indeed not even for Tintoretto, even though I consider the White- Bearded Man one of the most magnificent paintings ever painted, I come to the Bordone Room here for this settee and for the ideal effect which the lighting has on my emotional capacity, actually for the ideal temperature conditions especially in the Bordone Room. (...) The Bordone Room is my thinking as well as my reading room. (...) I have not read a book at home for years, here in the Bordone Room I have read hundreds of books».

“How is it possible to feel such an “ideal influence” walking through Freud’s path? Let us explore the beginning of the “divine” and charming relationship between the woods of the Ritten/Renon and the brilliant traveller, Sigmund Freud.”

I couldn’t help thinking of the similarity between the bench and the couch, the site of Freud’s psychoanalytis (indeed this photo of the couch in Freud’s consulting room appears on one of the benches):

 Marchioro quotes Freud comparing the patient’s free association as he lies on the couch with traveling in a train. Freud tells his patient:

“… say whatever goes through your mind. Behave like a traveller who sits by the window of a railway carriage and describes to those who are inside the changing landscape before his eyes.”

By an odd coincidence, Chris had noticed the Stations of the Cross situated along one of the trails we walked and wondered about the number (it was 13) and then we discovered there were 13 benches along the Freud walk. I got to thinking about the Freud walk as a kind of contemplative exercise analogous to the Stations of the Cross. 

I was also struck by how a walk through the natural world resembles free association (a ride through one’s inner world in which the conscious self gazes out from the “train” of conscious verbalized thought at the larger landscape of inner experience). Freud for me is a master at exploring the tensions and complexities between our given embodied being and our conscious civilized verbal self (our “ich” or ego) - some of you read my blog about our tour, Exploring Freud’s World, and know how important Freud is to both Chris and me, and to our relationship. So, on the theme of benches, this photo seems to me to illustrate the psychoanalytic couch/bench with nature penetrating civilization. 

I was so charmed by it (and my idea of the Freud walk as the Way of the Couch, analogous to the Way of the Cross embodied in walking along the stations of the cross) that I chose this bench to draw in my zoom art visit with my sister Judy. 

The analogy between psychoanalysis and the stations of the cross got me to reflecting on therapy and the Catholic Church as two great loves in my life. The church was a youthful love and I left it early unable to hold the ambivalence when I discovered it’s dark side. Therapy became a mature love (like my marriage) in which I learned to live with its imperfections (and more painfully it’s ability to mirror my own) and to remain in relationship with it and with the people I encountered through it. All this led me to think about the Stations of the Cross (a prayer practice I never explored in my brief romance with the Church). So of course I googled and the first website to catch my eye sent me to a video of prayers for the stations of the cross by a gay Irish poet-theologian named Pádraig Ó Tuama. Here’s the link:

https://youtu.be/O_o90DCQ6GQ

When I went to the link, I was surprised to recognize the initial image - it was the church at the Dublin airport that had so enchanted me at the very start of this journey, particularly because of the colorful stained glass stations of the cross. 

This coincidence felt like a leading so I listened to the prayers. Then I bought the book. Then I walked the stations of the cross (along a trail near here) in my early morning walk yesterday and prayed the prayers aloud. They brought me to tears several times. Here’s the dawn sky on my morning prayer walk. 

Yesterday turned out to be a long day. Chris and I went for a long walk during the day (including to two new trails also with Stations of the Cross) and then at 4 pm we went to a wine tasting that lasted almost 3 hours. It included a long lecture in German on the history, geography, agriculture etc of wine. Chris and I have a joke (from the movie The Two Popes) that German jokes don’t have to be funny. I decided that German wine tastings (yes this is Italy but a formerly Austrian part of Italy where most people speak German) involve 30 minutes of lecture for every sip of wine. But it was fun to see how wine relaxed us all and got us connecting with one another and laughing. The most surprising connection was between Chris and Thomas (the wine pourer/lecturer). When he found out Chris’s story of leaving Germany in 1935, he spoke of his groß groß Mutter (Great grandmother) also Jewish who left Germany in 1933. He really became enamored with Chris and brought out two extra, very special, wines wanting to really please her. Here they are saying goodbye after the wine tasting. 

Chris and I were utterly exhausted after the wine tasting, and before that my early morning hike (and Stations of the Cross) and our day hike (and more Stations of the Cross). We woke up this morning still tired. No morning hike for River and no long day hike for River and Chris. Just that “inexhaustible desire to do nothing.”

But - on the other hand - the very next bench in the Freud walk (after the one with the reference to the desire to do nothing) has a quote that mentions Freud’s “consuming passion” for psychoanalysis. “A man like me cannot live without … a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits.”

So…my passion to blog about the Stations of the Cross. Crazy River wants to find a way to do the impossible - to share with you the deep experience I had walking through this beautiful landscape and saying these prayers. Mystical moments are nearly impossible to communicate but the urge to do so is irresistible. Of course my teenage love for the Church was full of that longing for fusion with others that is a part of the mystical urge. It can grow very strong in adolescence - the unconscious opposite of the push to become a totally separate and autonomous individual. I remember how powerful communion was - the sense of becoming one in the mystery of Christ‘s willing and redemptive experience of suffering. Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks of our human need for a story big enough to wrap ourselves in - and I think the Catholic Church offered that to me as a teenager. My pain and the pain of my family felt too big for any words or story, too big for anyone to see or to hear. In the vivid suffering of Jesus depicted as tortured and dying on the cross, and in the Catholic liturgy, I found a way to see and feel seen, to hear and feel heard in all my pain. Somehow Pádraig Ó Tuama’s simple prayers allowed me to revisit that long ago feeling.

I didn’t take any photos of the Stations of the Cross where I prayed yesterday morning, with one exception. The 13th and last station was in bright sunlight as I emerged from a long stretch in the shade. 

Station 13. Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother 

Here’s the prayer to go with it;

Mary, Mother of Death, 

You held the corpse of your young son −

the worst of fears − 

in your arms, 

as he went where we have not yet gone. 

We mark this with silence and art. 

May we also learn from fear, 

because fear won’t save us 

from anything. 

Amen. 

In the afternoon, on the two other trails with Stations of the Cross, I did take photographs. I will share them with you, should you have the time and energy and inclination to walk them with me, along with the rest of the prayers, in a separate blog. 

Thank you for walking these last few days with us. I so appreciate your presence and I trust that you know that.