Bollingen Tower

During my only trip to Europe many years ago, I had two primary goals. I wanted to go Arles, France, where van Gogh had lived and lost his mind and produced some of his most brilliant work. It was the only part of France that interested me. And I wanted to see Carl Jung’s castle on the shores of Lake Zurich in Bollingen, Switzerland.

My interest in van Gogh always felt like some remnant of a past life. I’m not an artist, but I love his work and the texture of his weird life fascinates me. He died impoverished. But in March 2021, Sotheby’s sold a van Gogh landscape for $15.4 million.

In the 1990s, Rob and I got to know a Richard Demian, a psychic from Brooklyn who we subsequently met several times. We called him Fids, although I’m not sure why. The first time we met him, Megan was really young, in a stroller,  and he gave her a beautiful gray teddy bear that she called The Fids Bear. That bear went everywhere with us. It eventually started falling apart- an ear, part of his nose, the neck leaned to the side.

Fids felt that the three of us had been together before, when he was van Gogh, Rob was his brother Theo and I was Theo’s wife. It felt oddly correct and explained my earlier intrigue and interest in Arles and van Gogh.

Then there’s Jung’s castle. I first became acquainted with his work when I was 18 and bought a copy of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching. Jung wrote the introduction for the book in 1949 and and connected it to his theory of synchronicity. The only place I really wanted to go in Switzerland was Bollingen, to see Jung’s castle on Lake Zurich.

In his brilliant autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he writes movingly about how he built it and why. I was traveling through Europe with Chris, a woman I worked with in social services at the welfare department. She didn’t understand why we needed to take a train trip to Bollingen, but went with me.

We missed our first train from Zurich, and that’s where the synchro begins. If we’d arrived earlier, we would have missed the man with his dog in the backyard of Jung’s place. He looked like photos I’d seen of a young Jung. I walked up to the fence and introduced myself.

He turned out to be Jung’s grandson. We spent about 30 minutes talking about synchronicity, dreams, the unconscious – and how the tower had changed since Jung had built it – like it now had electricity.

If we had made our first train, I wouldn’t have met Jung’s grandson.