"The value isn't in reaching a certain state of affairs, but in the process, wherever it may lead, whatever shape the results may take." Or: It doesn't matter whether, or in what form, our friendship continues, what matters is the quality of relationship [as a verb: the quality of relating] by which we do it now: if we do the process right, the outcomes can't be wrong. a) fiercely resisting what I neither asked nor offered, b) while remaining apparently oblivious to what I was actually asking, c) and demanding of me what no sensible, self-respecting person could accept."
with as much trust (giving maximum benefit of the doubt) and vulnerability (requiring as little benefit of the doubt)
as they can under the circumstances
-- brave to stimulate growth pains with criticism, but loath to cause injury with insult;
-- sensitive, generous, brave, willing...
thus likely to emerge, in time, with real "mutual understanding", however much
disagreeing about this or that, or cognizant of deep differences
among their respective tastes and temperaments,
-- and ready to discuss "What now?" at whatever degree of cooperation
or shared individuality fits the moment; and
if each were each to tell all to a third person, that person would recognize the two accounts
as contrasting aspects of a single account, and not be left to wonder importantly
which was the more right, and which the more insane?
Short Long Aside...
Sunday, 7 October 2007
See the |EXAMPLE| section at the bottom for clues to making sense of it all (more to follow, in time)...
NOTE: I WROTE THIS ON A COUPLE DIFFERENT OCCASIONS. THERE IS SURELY SOME REPETITION AMONG DIFFERENT SECTIONS WRITTEN AT DIFFERENT TIMES, BUT I CAN'T BE BOTHERED NOW TO TIGHTEN IT UP. Enjoy!?
In a relatively recent phone "conversation" (March '07) Eva made three assertions which stand uncomfortably next to each other, revealingly.
1) Eva: "I have answered your concerns - you just haven't liked my answers!" (And my problem with Eva is, presumably, a personal problem, for which her behavior bears no responsibility.)
2) Eva: [in a beleaguered, frustrated voice]: "I don't know what you want from me!"
So: she doesn't know what my concerns are but, whatever they might be, she has answered them.
Add to that picture statments of the sort I have long made and often repeated:
3) That she has systematically denied me a voice for myself and not allowing me to speak for myself: not so much refuting, or even just denying what I say, nor even just refusing to discuss the issues I've wanted to address, but simply not allowing them to exist, or to have ever existed, in the first place. (When is this EVER cool in ANY relationship?) She will recall my talk about her "negating" me, "inventing me", etc. Same thing.
EXAMPLE:
From the start, I told Eva what I wanted. I pointed out that we can think of relationship in a noun-sense, as things that we have, or in a dynamic sense, as process or activity.
Taking "Relationship" as a noun, security is a central concern: I have it, I want to keep it.
Taking it dynamically, what matters is doing it well. (And it is pointless to pass blame for past failures -- if they are passed.)
Long before our last meeting, in the Summer of '04, I had been uncomfortable with some aspects of our relationship, which only communication could resolve.. When on occasion I tried to discuss my concerns, she brushed them off with reassurances (mistaking my conerns for expressions of insecurity) or impatience.
I once questioned the reality of the basis of her overpowering Love for me. Oh no, she assured me (perhaps "re-assured" me, in her mind): it was very real, oh-so-incredibly real, intensely real, and absolutely wonderful!!!
When she told me that, after our first visit to Estonia in '03, her all-consuming love for her Malcolm-god had dampened, I asked whether that might not be a good thing?
No, she answered. Not at all. Something precious had been damaged.
But while I understood that it didn't feel good for her to descend a level from the Heavenly heights of Soaring, Mad Love, it might make it more likely that our Relationship could achieve some sober-footed grounding for longer-lasting stability. She had been rather ungrounded, carried away, in her infatuation with me. It couldn't continue forever as it was; I just never imagined that, when the "adjustments" finally came, they would be administered by Eva -- forced upon me by her -- and that I would be shut out of the process: as if our relationship had never been but something that had happened, and existed, for her alone, and in which I was just a role-player, or (sometimes) furniture.
The issues I'd long wanted to discuss? They remain undiscussed still. Meanwhile, the issues and outlooks in which she alone re-fashioned our relationship, have hardly suffered the same obscurity. Quite the opposite: unwilling to allow my Concerns even to exist, but having to account, somehow, for why I wouldn't alone just accept the role of ScapeGoat for our shared failings and run away on command, she has filled the vacuum where my Concerns should have been found, by attributing hers to me.
Example: When (in late 2005 or early '06, I think) she accused me of having nothing new to say, because I kept coming back to the same two issues again and again [at the time: my relationships to women and to alcohol]. This is jaw-droppingly jaw-dropping! Those were the issues she would force our "dialogue" back to any time I strayed from the path: the Twin Pillars of her defense of wanting to re-consider our status, first as lovers, then as friends and, when I continued to stand up for myself against her most intolerable abuses, as acquaintances of any kind. Indeed, the ONE THING I did that she absolutely would not tolerate!!! was stand up for myself against her worst attacks against me, against my dignity, and against her attempts to blame me for her own failures and decisions (as we will duly see exemplified). Long after there was any news about women or alcohol, (late in 2004) she offered to order order Estonian language materials for me on the Internet, and have them sent to me in England, so I could study for our next visit to Estonia together. But as I continued not obediently playing the role she cast for me in her Drama...
But I get ahead of the story. The point is, having denied me a voice for myself, she attributed to me her own concerns, then blamed me for what she herself was doing obsessively: driving the "discussion" back, always back, to her own concerns. Perhaps, if she didn't like continuing to talk about those things, she should have talked about something else -- or at least allowed me have some say.
This exemplifies a Theme will will see more of during this Course: her blaming me -- sometimes attacking me harshly -- for her own doings, or failings. Sometimes we shared in the Fault. But we will see that, around at least two issues, she has attacked me most bitterly for faults of which I (I claim) was absolutely innocent (and the strongest "evidence" against me vaporous and imaginative), while she herself was plainly, demonstrably and repeatedly guilty (as she will show you)!
From the start, I asked for an open, honest conversation by which we might resolve some of the longstanding problems in our relationship -- not for the sake of preserving our relationship-as-thing (I stated this clearly, repeatedly) but to improve the process in which we were both, as a matter of fact, involved. I repeated phrases like:
And approximately how it should go:
I listen openly to you, and respond appropriately, relevantly and in context. You listen openly to me, and respond appropriately, relevantly and in context. Back and forth, back and forth, until we have achieved some level of mutual understanding. That doesn't mean we have to agree with each other about everything, or even about the major points, but at least each should know how the Other accounts for themselves, as far as this Relationship is concerned. At a basic level, it requires Trust -- not just trust in the Other's sincerity, but trust in our own ability to listen and to speak at a level of integrity worthy of what we expect from the Other.
And:
"Do you disagree? But disagreeing with me has never been the problem: honest parties can resolve any disagreement respectfully, even if the resolution doesn't entail agreeing on all points: it's called disagreeing respectfully. "Mutual understanding" doesn't mean you and me subscribing to the same view of things. It means we talk to each other, and listen to each other, and understand each other. Not resist, not fantasize and project, not fight."
She did not live up the the commitment of trust, apparently on the excuse that I would have been unable to do so, so what difference did it make? While she hasn't said as much directly, she has said plenty that strongly supports that inference. For example,
"I'm afraid mutual understanding between us is not possible". (And also, not long ago [paraphrasing]: "you're incapable of an ordinary conversation" and, in 2005, [paraphrasing]: "It's possible to have simple conversations, you know" and "You always have way too complicated conversations" -- which she flat out denied saying moments later, though it was right there in the Yahoo! chat window
... for pointing out the last one, I was rewarded with a torrent of violent verbal abuse and her blocking my email...
...which she didn't inform me of, despite having grounds to be quite sure I would write futile, undeliverable emails (she could be sure I would write...though she and I would disagree on the reasons)...
...which blockage she lied about, saying at first (lamely) that she had told me, before quietly letting the matter drop (her demonstrable faults apparently being the wrong focus).
Mutual understanding: not undesirable, or too difficult, but "not possible"? What could she have been implying? Considering the overall tone of her "communications" with me, it's extremely implausible that she was implying some deficiency, or incapacity, of her own. Rather, consistent with her recent overall tone is the implication that she knew ["not possible": definitely knew] something about me that I didn't know: that I was incapable of upholding my own responsibilities in a process leading to the "mutual understanding" I claimed to want. (Indeed, this is totally consistent with what I have described as her "Project" to delegitimate me, self-servingly.)
Q: What if she is right about you? What would be wrong with acting on that?
For all she knows (sadly, incredibly) she might be right about me. Even so, it is totally wrong for her to act on that possibility, because to do so would be to exclude the possibility that she's wrong (which she is), and that's too big a risk, like power-testing a Lamborghini on city streets with a bottle of tequila in-ya: maybe nobody gets hurt, but that doesn't make it ok.
No human relationship is the private property of one of its parties, and if she were wrong, then she would be, in effect, taking over the relationship, with the power -- even the necessity -- to negate me and create me in order to fit me to her story. And she were wrong, there would be no way for her to manage the Game that will be okay with me, or possibly lead to a reasonable or harmonious resolution, because her freely disregarding my words, intentions and deeds in favor of interpretations that support the guess she would be (self-servingly and irrationally) committed herself to, would be massively offensive to anyone who wasn't stupid enough for her guess to been possibly right.
But where her Program runs into such self-contradictions, there will always be available a way to deepen the error while avoiding awareness of it (even scrunching her eyes shut and plugging her fingers into her ears works well enough, I have seen). For example, If I communicate upset over her treating me like a shockingly stupid idiot, she may simply ignore my words (whatever noise I may be making) and interpret it as the pitifully angry bleatings of a lonely, needy and shockingly stupid idiot who can't stand losing, at last, the friendship of herself, who once held him (or something loosely based on him) in Heart and Mind as a Love-object of godlike status (it is weird to recall).
if I accept her treatement of me, then I truly am a shockingly stupid idiot. But if I don't accept it, then I (obviously!) have a Problem with acceptance -- a deep presonal issue -- which ends up wasting lots of my time (which doesn't matter) and hers (which matters very much!), and making her unhappy as she continually fails to make me shut up and go away despite her ad-hoc repertoire of aggressive attacks; gentle reassurances and persuasions; mockery and insult; guilt over her victimhood; and the stiffest and most frigid of all shoulders -- all failing to satisfy me, and thus re-affirming that I'm not only a shockingly stupid idiot, but one so single-mindedly obsessed with his own bottomless needs [think: great white shark eyes] that I simply lack the capacity to be aware of Others' concerns and to take them wholly or seriously into account (being able to only so far as needed to beguile them to serve my own sick needs), and thus re-affirming (in a nice, satisfying circle) the original [inferred] thesis that "mutual understanding between us is not possible" because of my own psychosocial incapacities, rather than because of any rigid decision on her part to relate to me only (at all costs!) in ways that are incompatible with taking me or what I say (and thus her own relationships) seriously, and thus incompatible (incidentally) with the achievement of the "mutual understanding".
Again, there's little chance that withholding the benefit of the doubt might yield a reasonably wholesome resolution, and zero chance that it's a morally acceptable option. But we can try to answer the question by weighing the options on Utilitarian scales, too. How many completely fucked-up, smashed-to-pieces relationships -- stabbed-through with hatred and covered with shit -- are worth just one in which the parties to it:
The only way Eva could possibly know whether or not I was capable of upholding my end of a process of "resolution" leading to "mutual understanding" would be to undertake it herself -- to try to engage me fully, with integrity: to agree to "meet me on the ground of reality" (which entails vastly more than just having a few bits of truth -- or even shiploads of it -- in your arsenal) and see if I fail to show up...of if I might already be there, waiting (which "presence" can only be determined over time, in mutual engagement, really).
Instead, she was absolutely, positively, FIERCELY committed to avoiding such a meeting, such a communication -- at all costs!!!, no matter what!!!.
And, she was absolutely, positively, FIERCELY committed to blaming me for the failure of our communications -- at all costs!!!, no matter what!!!.
And the human toll has been considerable.
It makes little difference that she has broadly and summarily apologized, while prohibiting any discussion of specifics, since it is only through the discussion of specifics that it can be established that she's aware of what -- and how much -- she has to apologize for, and why, and how awful it all is!
It would not be necessary to pore over thousands of individual offenses, but at least enough to establish what the Big Picture of Our Terrible Mess is, and how enormous (or slight, if so) her load of responsibility for it is. Short of that, her "apology" simply seems like a thin, dusty, remorseless manipulative cookie to placate me and make me go away, because more aggressive manipulative tactics haven't worked.
...It was likely inspired by her noticing that I several times mentioned "apology" as somehow important, without substantially grasping of what I was saying -- or would have been saying if she'd allowed actual conversation to occur gain life beyond sound-bytes real or "perceived". As it is, I wasn't so easily placated, and when I didn't just accept the pitiful cookie and crawl in disgrace from her life, leaving her Vindicated and Victorious in a Battle she never seemed to realize I seldom joined her in -- and still with the blame for deserving my own abuse, not credit for having offered and pursued a better way -- the quickness of her fury suggested the depth of her understanding and remorse.
I think the only plausible surface-interpretation of her statement that "mutual understanding between us is not possible" is that I am incapable of my part.
But considering that she can't possibly know such a thing...
The only plausible deep-interpretation (how her statement bears out in practice) is that she was deciding not to allow open, honest communications that might lead to mutual understanding. The only thing she could be sure about is that, if she decided to prevent success, then it would be "impossible", exactly as she said.
Q. What has been involved in blaming me for this Disaster of failed communication -- for what have actually been the direct consequences [as not yet shown] of her own decision?
A. No less than the Program to "negate me", "throttle me", "deny my a voice for myself", "invent me", "decontextualize me", "demonize me", "pronounce me to be whatever your self-justifying fantasies require", "make a sad, ugly cartoon out of me to suit your own purposes" or, in words I used way back in late 2004, "to shove me into cramped and uncomfortable conceptual/judgmental boxes of your own making". In any case, nothing compatible with activity leading toward "mutual understanding".
So we have:
1) Eva doesn't know what I want from her, and has said so, but...
2) ...whatever it is, she has answered it -- or so she says;
3) I have long wanted to discuss some issues of "unreality" in our relationship (I've left out a lot above, but it will appear to fill things out later), which she
a) first denied, then
b) tried to attribute entirely to me (painting herself as a victim, even more so for my defending against her honesty-challenged accusations and assumptions)
4) She claims "You keep repeating yourself, over and over. There's nothing new in it." [Phone "conversation", March '07]
5) I assert that she has systematically dominated our communications, denying me a voice except so far as she can travesty it to suit her purposes.
6) I have steadfastly asserted that I want an open, honest conversation, leading to "mutual understanding";
7) She has asserted that such a conversation is "impossible".
8) She has refused to allow such a conversation, and insisted that I accept the blame for the disastrously fucked-up state of our relationship [meant broadly, not romanically: we have relationship with everyone in our lives, however peripheral].
9) As I have repeated to her multiply, she has been:
10) So much more.
How does all this fit together?
EXAMPLE.
In the section entitled Elementary Principles of Fairness in a Contentious Relationship one Principle regards the importance of giving doubt the benefit of itself:
In that same phone "conversation" of last March, I tried to bring up this issue. I was going to explain that to act prejudicially toward someone is to close off the possibility (practically speaking) that you may be mistaken in your judgment, and that, so far as sensitive Honesty admits Doubt where moral issues are involved, Integrity requires us to give each other the benefit of the doubt, so that we can be allowed to show ourselves by the proof of our living, and not be responsible for boxing each other in with what may turn out to be our own self-serving errors of judgment: we should avoid the risk of that hurtful responsibility. (Obvious exceptional cases being where there is immediate risk: the poisonous snake at your ankle might not be about to strike, but you don't give it the benefit of the doubt...unless you're a Jain.)
A
I wouldn't have mentioned that I had already, for a long time, been holding up my part of a potentially progressive conversation, and allowing her to "show herself by the proof of her own living" (according to the Principles of Fairness, yet to be finished) -- and that I thought I'd been doing fairly well, though with some exceptions (some deliberately tactical) that Eva would probably like to excerpt as "typical" of me. If I had made such a claim and tried to discuss it, it would have been consistent for her to mock and ridicule it without providing sound evidence, or any at all. It fits her Program: the so-far-unacceptable alternative would be to admit that our relations have been so massively disastrified exactly because of her own prevention of success, her own failures of Integrity.
Over time, the weight of her guilt becomes heavier. Before the end of 2004 I had judged it improbable that she would ever get close to acknowledging the full horror of what she has done (it has been massively time-wasting and emotionally draining for both of us). But in mid-June, 2005, I told her: if we never speak again, she won't have stopped abusing me.
She has never given me any situation a reasonable person easily walk free from: never anything better than that all my time simply trying to achieve a healing of something deeply sick -- giving benefit of the doubt to the Other who claims to want healthy relationship -- has been utterly wasted, and worse, by her efforts to prevent that at all costs: I have been exploited as a scapegoat so that the Eva can carry on self-righteously, leaving me covered shit-covered with her blame and contempt for deserving my own abuse. I have not deserved it, and I do not accept it. Still.
As I told Eva (also in June, 2005, I think), and as she so-typically ignored and disregarded: "this has no expiration date". She can avoid and abuse, avoid and abuse, avoid and abuse: but until she stops abusing me, I'm going to insist that she does stop. And the only way for her to stop is to face up to what she has done -- to do what is necessary to find out what she has done, and then find some way -- somehow! -- to make amends. I would never have been blocking the way to make it hard -- and I won't. She doesn't realize that I'm on her side, and always have been.
But (in one way to put it): I'm not so on-her side that I'll sacrifice Truth, or my Dignity, or Anything in the Universe, to support what is probably the biggest mistake/crime of her life. Another way to put it is: I am indeed "on her side" (and mine) enough to recognize that her best interests will be served through the hard work necessary to achieve a reasonable degree of "mutual understanding" (I'm afraid the detailed examination of specifics is unavoidable). But the hole she's dug herself in now, over 3-4 years, is very deep; it won't be easy but, if undertaken sincerely, I believe it will be richly rewarding. Nearly three years ago, I imagined that we could do the major work in about two hours on the phone. The clock has not begun ticking on those two hours, but I'm afraid it's a much longer time now -- so much needs to be discussed, she's in so deep.
To repeat: Since she indeed has actively prevented a reasonable, healthy resolution of our relationship, she cannot legitimately claim that I did not offer her one. Again: the only way she could have been able to claim that I didn't make such an offer (or that I still don't) would have been to take a different course than the Program of obsessive self-justification, scapegoating of me, and uncompromising avoidance of the most ordinary (if sometimes difficult) principles of human communication: to earn the right to claim that what she has done was justified, she must not have done it it the first place (therefore, it was never justified).
The only course that might have allowed her to judge whether I was, indeed, amenable to a healthy re/solution would have been to pursue one herself, and leave the failing to me: listen carefully, hear truly, think with critical open-mindedness, speak with honesty, watch, think, feel, listen, repeat.
Except in immediate danger, perhaps, it is never justified to use the presumption of another's future failure as an excuse for actively preventing success now (making it "impossible"): that is, as an excuse for one's own failure.
But in that phone conversation last March, I didn't actually go so far as to put forth the outrageous claim that I had, all along, not just been proposing a principled conversation, but practicing it, fairly well if imperfectly. (There's no reason to assume an all-or-nothing standard: perfection, or failure. There's nothing wrong with tolerance and forgiveness toward oneself, as long as one holds it equally for others.)
But I wouldn't have suggested that I already had been walking the Walk, and that she couldn't see it only because under her Insane Program there was apparently nothing I could do that might be allowed to be seen as such. I did start talking about the importance of giving the Other the benefit of the doubt, though.
And Eva helpfully interrupted to explain, in effect, that my claim to the benefit of the doubt was expired -- that she had given me the benefit of the doubt with respect to alcohol and women (the Two Topics, it's a small exaggeration to say, she thinks I'm perpetually drawn back to, instead of her) and look how I blew it! (As if she still were under the spell of the misapprehension that she needed to justify not wanting to be my lover, or friend...? Or, perhaps, as if it were obvious that I had had those topics in mind just then, or something relevant to that line of thought -- just as it had been apparently obvious all the other times she'd stolen my point before I could speak it, or after she'd disregarded it, and adapted it to her purposes as if she answering what I'd wanted to say?!)
She continued with a querulously, factually compromised and decontextualized account of my boozing and womanizing (typically, with kernels of truth, but false in the whole -- so I say). Still, that was all stuff for another discussion -- a calmer discussion on another occasion (she was agitated, as typical with me).
But it was unrelated to MY point about giving the benefit of the doubt. Which was...
She doesn't remember. She can't remember. She drove the conversation over to Women and Booze, yet again!, and shut the conversation down there, with serious dialogue unstarted and no satisfaction by anyone on any point. She started with some statements I had to defend myself against because they were just wrong -- not in every detail, but in their character portrayal of me, which was deeply insulting, unhelpful and untrue. I don't remember exactly, but typically I would have tried to distinguish what was valid from what was not, admit the one and challenge the other, and be prepared to discuss them in light of their possible relevance to our current situation: not just the substance of her accusations, but her own purposes and tactics to serve them...
Like, her "cartooning" of me: some features exaggerated, others reduced, yet others eliminated, or [], and the whole thing over-simplified far beyond realism and abstracted from context -- and yet resembling reality enough that, if one were to reject the whole thing, she would be correct to charge Denial! Which hasn't consistently made a difference to her -- as, for example, when she charged me with being "in denial about having a problem with alcohol" -- something I had never denied, though I have resisted cartooning and rejected false "facts" (while being willing, if only she were, to discuss the realities -- and to back up my accounts of them.).
I'd hoped to return to MY point soon. But this would not be a conversation, it would be another justification of why she didn't want to talk to me, and shouldn't have to, and wouldn't.
...
Now we can understand how Eva might say of that phone call that she "answered my Concerns, but I just didn't like her answers".
We can also understand how I might say that my Concerns never even came into existence.
We can understand why she might be sure she is right in her assertion.
And we can understand, with certainty, that she is mistaken.
Everyone makes mistakes. It would be a harsh and unpleasant person who could not tolerate and forgive them, even where they occasionally cause great harm -- even loss of life.
In January, '05 I first mentioned Eva's crimes against me: beyond mistakes: her apparently programmatic and absolute loyalty to her mistakes -- entailing her unwillingness to admit any considerations that might reveal rationally inescapable doubts (avoidable only irrationally) that Integrity would require her to give me the benefit of.
A Socratic view: all "crimes" are, at bottom, mistakes: nobody willingly does what they deeply apprehend the wrongness of, nobody is wilfully evil, there are only wisdom/virtue and ignorance/vice, varyingly. And I accept that such a way of seeing things is viable -- after all, I originated it myself, before I read it in Plato. So I use "crime" with provisional meaning, in a more ordinary usage: Eva didn't just trip and -- oops! there go three years of resisting every possibility of doing the right thing, with total commitment and dedication.
Stopping would require Eva's ending the avoid-attack cycle. Ending fighting -- even if she mistakenly believed that I would continue fighting with her, or that I already was.
There has always been a way: a right way, a healthy way, a fruitful and satisfying way, a way of resolution. This has not been it (DUH!).
Three years on: countless hours have been wasted in, and against, a program of self-justification and avoidance of responsibility, yielding untold unhappiness.
Those two hours have not STARTED to begin.
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Anita Hill Resisting Re-Invention. See? He ain't the only one!
The NYT publishes an op-ed by Anita Hill, who says that although Justice Clarence Thomas "has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir ... I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me." Hill says Thomas includes several unsubstantiated claims about her and his descriptions are full of inconsistencies. Still, she is not surprised as "this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace" is fairly common.
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