Hi, all,
I’m continuing my
series of catch-up posts about storylines I didn’t adequately cover
during the past year, but want to continue over the next. Most of
these have, inevitably, been info dumps, but today’s post will be
mostly narrative, because there is a single scene that nicely
encapsulates most of the difficulty that my friend, Ebony, tackled
her first year back—and largely triumphed over. I would have liked
to tell the story of how she triumphed, of how she got to a place
where she was able, by the beginning of the second year of her
candidacy, to begin moving forward again. But, failing that, since I
did fail that, this scene alone will do.
It was within the
first week of our return, perhaps the day after Brigit, and I was
walking across the Great Hall, for some reason (when I write these
accounts, I often make up this type of lost detail, to provide the
illusion that I’m writing about fresh memories). The Mansion was
mostly deserted, most people being in some sort of workshop or
orientation activity being held in the Dining Hall—but there were
two people over by the couches, talking: Allen and Ebony.
I hadn’t had much
chance to talk to either of them yet, since getting back, so I angled
on over towards them, and got pretty close before I heard enough of
their conversation to understand it was private. And by that time
Allen, at least, knew I had heard, and it seemed wrong to just walk
away and pretend I hadn’t.
They were arguing,
or, rather, Ebony was arguing with Allen. Her voice was raised, and I
came in on the middle of her reciting a long list of problems that
had apparently occurred because Allen had neglected something. He,
characteristically, was not arguing back, he just half-sat on the
back of the couch, his hands clasped loosely on his thigh, listening
attentively. A stranger would have thought him working, quite
professionally, with a therapy client, but to me, who knew him well,
something in the way he held his head—pulled back,
ever-so-slightly—and some hint of a wince around his eyes,
suggested he was deeply uncomfortable.
“I did try,” he
said calmly, when she let him get a word in.
“You tried badly,”
she asserted. “And I needed better from you.”
Allen and I made
eye-contact over Ebony’s shoulder. Of course she didn’t know I
was there, yet (Ebony doesn’t really do the
compensating-with-heightened-awareness-of-her-remaining-senses thing)
and I must have looked kind of frantic trying to figure out how to
deal with the situation I’d walked myself into, an unintentional
eavesdropper.
“Oh, hello,
Daniel,” said Allen, resolving at least part of my problem. Ebony
spun to face me, shocked.
“You heard,” she
stated.
“Yes,” I
admitted. “Some of it. I didn’t mean to.”
She stared at me for
a few seconds—or, at least she faced me for a few seconds—and
then turned towards Allen and then back towards me.
“This is going to
become one of your stories, isn’t it?” she accused. “Fine. You
tell him.” She meant that Allen should tell me what we’d been
talking about, as she didn’t want to just then. She spun on her
heel and stomped off towards the Front Office, though her
melodramatic exit was somewhat spoiled when she nearly collided with
the door-frame. She had misplaced her cane again.
I had a reputation
for absorbing and remembering news and gossip about other people,
though I never passed it on lightly and hardly ever passed it on at
all. I liked, and still like, obviously, to know what’s going on
with people. Over the years, most people, most of the time, have
drawn comfort from knowing that I bear witness to things.
Occasionally, there are sudden, resentful exceptions.
“Now I don’t
know whether to ask you to tell me or not,” I said, turning to
Allen. “Normally, she’d want me to know, so she could talk to me
about it. Unless something has changed in the last four years?”
Remember, Ebony
graduated the year before I did. I was frankly surprised to find her
returning with me—I would have thought that if she was going to
return, she would have done it the year before.
“I don’t know,”
admitted Allen, looking after her. Then he turned towards me. “I’ll
tell you, but not for her. For me.”
It was the first
time Allen had so obviously sought support from me, as from an equal,
and it surprised me, but I didn’t overtly react. He climbed over
the back of the couch and slid into its seat, rather like a little
boy might, and I walked around and took a seat beside him. He looked
suddenly very tired.
“You remember when
I warned you and why?” he began.
“You mean just
before I graduated?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, you told me
to be careful, because I’d been living in a very supportive
atmosphere and things were going to change.”
He nodded.
“Did you believe
me?”
“No, I had no idea
what you were talking about.”
“Was I right?” A
hint of of a smile played on his face.
“Of course,” I
told him. “I got about a year in to graduate school and realized
I’d forgotten to have a life, since no one was there to remind me.
I think I noticed a few years earlier than I would have, because of
your warning, though. I was able to start correcting the problem.”
He laughed a little,
almost shyly.
“Well, Ebony
needed a similar warning, only more so. She’d never really talked
about transability* before she came here, and when she did talk about
it with us, we all pretty much believed her. I knew she needed to
prepare coping mechanisms for dealing with a world where most people
wouldn’t….”
“But you knew she
wouldn’t believe you,” I finished for him.
“Exactly. It’s
very difficult to anticipate a genuine change of context like that.
But I couldn’t depend on her just ignoring me if she wasn’t ready
to hear it, the way you did, the way most students I decide to warn
do. I mean, she wanted to go to graduate school so she could teach
visual art. She was walking into a lion’s den, and you know
how she would have reacted had I told her so.”
“She would have
thought you didn’t have faith in her.”
“Or worse, that
I’d never believed her in first place, that I wanted her to
capitulate and just be blind. That is one of the things being
a magician has taught me, Daniel—the mechanics of perception are
the same for both illusion and truth, that’s why we need reason.
And perception, even perception of the truth, is easily shattered.”
As he spoke, he made a large, foil-wrapped chocolate coin appear out
of nowhere in his fingers, then he made it vanish again—and then,
with a movement of his wrist, he showed me where he’d put his
“vanished” coin, deliberately destroying the trick for me. He
smiled, sadly.
“So, you said
nothing?” It didn’t seem like him.
“I encouraged her
not to go into absence initially, to stay in active contact with me
for a while. I couldn’t warn her, but I hoped to be able to catch
her when she fell.”
“What happened?”
“She fell, and I
couldn’t catch her. She was trying to explain to her college what
she wanted to do, so she could get the classes she needed, the
accommodations she needed...I’d been trying to validate her, but I
can’t replace an entire supportive community, particularly not over
the phone once or twice a week. She was getting discouraged and...losing ground, somehow.
So I decided to be honest with her and hope she understood it later. I
told her she should just go ahead and learn to teach art to blind
students, like her school wanted her to. I mean, a teaching credential is a teaching credential. She
could come back here to learn how to make the professional
transition.”
“And she didn’t
take it well?”
He gave me an
eloquent look.
“She hung up on
me, and hadn’t talked to me since, until today. Now, it seems she
blames me for not preparing her better. Which, of course, I
didn’t. She’s right as far as it goes. But how could I have done
any differently? What else could I have said?”
“Well, she’s
here now,” I pointed out. “She’s following the plan you
outlined, in a way. So, maybe she did hear you, eventually, as I
did?”
“Maybe. But, you
know, of course I sponsored** her return, but I don’t know if she’s
going want to work with me. I don’t know if we’re going to ever
be friends again.”
Some students,
clearly, are just students to the masters—people they care about
out of professional duty and strictly in a professional way. But, to
varying degrees, they all also make friends with some of the people
they teach. Sometimes that friendship means the two cease to be
master and student, as in Allen’s decision to tell me his troubles
as he might to any good friend, but sometimes, instead, the teaching
relationship itself deepens. Think of Charlie and Sarah, or Greg and
Karen. That’s what Ebony had become to Allen.
“I’m sorry,” I
said, thinking of the real vulnerability the masters take on and almost never acknowledge. Particularly I was thinking of Charlie, who had just spoken to me recently, for the first time in years, and who had seemed unsure whether I'd forgiven him for his more difficult teachings--and was willing to risk alienating me all over again, for the sake of giving me the help I'd asked him for.
Again Allen gave me that sad,
ironic, eloquent look.
“It came down to a
choice,” he said. “Which is more important to me, that I love
her—and act like it—or that she continue to love me?”
“That sounds very
difficult,” I said.
He almost shrugged,
a kind of dismissive twitch.
“I probably could
have handled it better,” he acknowledged. “Said something better,
done something different. Strictly speaking, she’s right, I did let
her down. But I don’t know what else I could have said or done.”
He looked at me again. “Daniel, there are some things I just can’t
see.”
* “Transability”
is Ebony’s term for her paradoxical identification as sighted,
despite not being able to see. She likens her situation to that of
transgender people.
** To return as a
candidate, a student must have a master vouch for the student’s
ability to benefit from the program. Usually that master is the one
who was most involved during the student’s novitiate, and who then
goes on to guide the student’s candidacy, as Charlie did for me.
But the returning candidate is free to work with someone else
instead.
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