Won si eht retniw fo ruo tentnocsid, as we wait for it to be over. Will Obama survive the Tea Party people, or his own presidency, and bipartisan aspirations? Does anyone really believe that two warring political parties are enough for three hundred million people? Does it matter, when we are dying anyway? Do we hope for utopia before we go? Can we create our own, even as we know we’re on a sinking ship called America? Can’t we get off this thing? It’s going down with a ton of money, never shared with us, but taking us with it. Atlantis here we come, with tons of useless money. While we chunter on about our lives and interests, the immortal Nero is flying in from Rome with his fiddle. Meantime, I’ve become hooked on the really low-brow Bachelor show. I want to know how it turns out. After weeks and weeks of the Bachelor voting off all but two of the twenty-five girls provided him to select his bride for life, the one he chooses has got to be interesting. I drew Ingrid into it, and she thinks he’ll take the sensible Tenley, who says she has slept with only one other man and that was her ex-husband; while I think he’ll go for the sexier Vienne, pron. Vienna, who did a bungee-jump with him early on, impressing him as a girl who will not only do anything, but be maternally protective as well. He was scared to do the jump, and she reassured him with hugs and murmurings while they were lashed together and launched over a cliff into a deep ravine. As a pop follower, my scandalized friends shouldn’t worry. My intellectual elitism is still intact. The other day a book heavier in weight and content than any in my library arrived from the city. It needs to be conveyed on airport travel wheels. It’s Carl Jung’s The Red Book of course—the psychiatric profession’s equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.1 Two Jung scholars talked Carl’s family out of keeping the book under lock and key in a Swiss bank vault, and springing it on an invisible or dwindling egghead public. It’s a wonderfully incomprehensible volume, requiring lifetimes of deconstruction. It’s also a very beautiful work of art—full of exquisite German Gothic calligraphic script (translated by chapters into English in the last part of the book), and facsimiles of richly, obsessively detailed, colorful paintings and drawings, either phantasmagoric or mandala-like in nature—not dissimilar to Outsider work by the hospitalized insane. A striking comparison can be made to the extraordinary work of Adolf Wolfli (1866-1930), incarcerated for 34 years in the Waldau Sanatorium near Bern.2 It took Jung sixteen years, beginning in 1913, to create his Red Book. An illuminated manuscript, it’s as post-medieval as can be. This man’s head was crammed with otherworldly visions and arcane thinking. I lead quite a prosaic life, and rarely remember my dreams. During the night, Ingrid works on prompting me without much success to recall the lives I’ve led, trying to distract me from realizing I can’t sleep. My old lives bore me now, and I don’t approve of some of them. I’d like to take them back, or do them over again, or be somebody else, and become a fiction writer. I tried to write my father’s memoir, and foundered after the first page. I can’t make things up at all. I should be happy I became a practiced investigative reporter to cover his worldwide bronze. The subject of one old life I had keeps appearing in newsprint in a hohum way—how one state or another will or will not pass the s-s marriage act. However, a single line emerged in the S.F. trial on California’s constitutionality of Proposition 8 that sounded new and promising. One lawyer in the case asked his client, “What does it mean to be a lesbian?” What a great question! I’ve wondered that myself. And the client’s answer was so revolutionary. She told the curious court how she had “slowly fallen in love” with her s-s partner. Wowie! Atlantis, we’re on our way. You guys can hold on to the soggy money. We’ll zoom down in a Cousteau craft to keep my Red Book, subbed Liber Novis, dry and pristine. Never fear, we’ll still be “guys.” When the Bachelor was first confronted with all twenty-five of his prospective brides, he addressed them gratefully for coming, using the salutation, “You guys.” During the time of a White House state dinner, I noted Michelle Obama plying the same two words over and over while speaking informally to a large group of girls about their future, or something. The future makes me think inevitably of the past. I was accused recently of living in the past, the implication being that I live nowhere else. It’s true. I’m not a futurist  (though I think planning is good, and speculation not a bad pastime), and I tend seriously to think the present doesn’t exist. I have lived to create memories, which can be useful in trying to get to sleep. They can also be therapeutic and exculpatory, showing how even the worst things one did could never have happened otherwise. Old lives unearthed are ever at hand. One is a big trip I made to Zurich in 1976 for an appointment with Carl Jung’s daughter Gret Baumann-Jung to have an astrological reading. I had been enduring my Jungian phase (most everyone I know has had one or more), excitedly reading Carl’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections,3 and his wife Emma Jung’s  book, The Grail Legend.4 Carl’s interests, much too extensive for him to pursue all by himself, were picked up as specialties by ex-patients, his women friends (also extensive) or family members. And Gret, the second of Carl and Emma’s four daughters (they also had a son) had appropriated astrology. I had no interest in or understanding of astrology, but I thought if there was anything to it at all, a daughter of Carl Jung’s might make it meaningful. And perhaps provide guidance, which I needed desperately on a daily basis, never mind futuristically. But really at the time I just liked the idea of meeting one of Carl’s close relatives. Ms. Magazine paid for the trip, the Voice ultimately published what I wrote about it, omitting a foray I had also made to Scotland to try to locate a castle said to belong to the Johnston