To begin the story at the beginning, read "Part 1: Post 1: Beginning Again," published in January, 2013. To consult a description of the campus, read "Part 1: Post 14: The Greening of Campus," published in March, 2013.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Mastery Year 2: Part 1: Post 3: Yes

"So, are you a master, or a candidate?" asked Caryn at breakfast, of June. Caryn is one of the new yearlings. She knows novices don't wear brown, but not much else.
"Neither," said June, and took a bite of a bagel.

We don't normally have bagels here, but one of the second-years has an off-campus job at a bagel place in town brought in a large quantity of day-olds. Caryn, the yearling, looked at my wife in confusion.

"What are you?"
"What do I look like?"
"If this is a trick question, I don't get it."
"I win."
"June, be nice," I said. She smiled at me, briefly.

"I'm an ally. I've graduated, and now I've come back to help, just not as a candidate."

Come back to help and to live with your husband, I thought, while I piled pieces of a spinach omelette on a bagel. She doesn't have to help, Coffee Joe doesn't, particularly, she could just live with me, but that's her. She's as involved as any candidate is.

"Why do you do that?" asked Cristin, another yearling. "Masters, too, you get such a kick out of not giving us straight answers."
"We do give straight answers," I said. "The problem is your questions are crooked."
"We're brain-washing you, is what we're doing," said June with a straight face.
"I can't tell if you're joking," Caryn said.
"If she's not smiling, she's joking," I said.
"Also, when I am smiling," added June.
"Here's a hint," offered Ollie, "I think you need to know is not whether she's joking, but whether she's lying."

Afterwards, on our way out of the Dining Hall, June took my arm and leaned against my shoulder for a moment as we walked. I looked down at her and saw that she was smiling.

"You like messing with yearlings, don't you?" I said.
"I like messing with everybody," she answered. "But yearlings, they all seem so muddled and so clueless."
"As I recall, I didn't just seem muddled and clueless, I was muddled and clueless."
"I wasn't entirely joking about the brain-washing," she admitted.
"I know."
"It's not brain-washing, but it is...brain adjustment?"
"It's transformation. They agree to it and they ask for it, for the crooked questions they ask to be straightened by straight answers."
"From other students."
"Sometimes, yes."
"You did it for me."
"Yes," I acknowledged.
"And you let others do it for me."
"Yes."
"And I gave you such a hard time for it."
"Yes."
"I love you, Daniel. Did you know that?"
"Yes."


Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Mastery Year 2: Part I: Post 2: Reacquaintance

The beginning of a new year is always an interesting time, here. There are new people to meet, and the various versions of astonishment and confusion to watch—and the days after Brigid always remind me of my own first days, and also every subsequent year of being thus reminded, an ever-complexifying echo chamber of self-reflection.

Have I really been part of this community for eight years, now?

June has moved into my room. We discussed the possibility of my moving into hers, but the reality is I don’t just live in a room. I also live in, and belong to, a dorm, and I don’t belong to her dorm. Dorm membership isn’t a huge part of the program here, but it is part of it, and since I’m still a student and she’s not, it makes sense for me to stay in my dorm. It does feel strange to have a room-mate all of a sudden.

She has also just returned from a few days at her parents’ house. Usually, parents come pick up graduating students at the reception the morning after graduation, and while June isn’t leaving, her home is with me, we all thought it was better for her to leave campus as a student before returning as an ally, plus she hadn’t spent a lot of time with her parents in a while.

There are forty-one new yearlings, now, a big class. I haven’t really spoken to any of them yet, at least not in a more than incidental way. I did have dinner with Steve Bees last week, while June was away, to welcome him back. We’re in the same dorm, but we took our plates downstairs to eat at the little table by the window next to the library. From there we could look out on a world white with snow.

So, how was the real world?” I asked, joking.
You know,” he told me, “this world feels like the real one. The outside...it’s like I don’t quite believe in it anymore.”

I told him I knew exactly what he meant.

So, what did you do this past year?” he asked. We had talked a few times by phone or email during our Absence, but we hadn’t ever really caught up, and of course after I came back we could have no contact at all.
Same-old, same-old,” I replied, casually. “I taught some classes, went hiking a lot, got married….”

As intended, my deadpan delivery made him come very near to spitting his drink across the table.

Oh, wow!” he exclaimed, when he had swallowed. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

So, I told him all about June and about our year together and our plans going forward.

What about you?” I asked.
I passed the bar exam, got a job, and, um….” he showed me the wedding ring on his finger.
Congratulations!” I told him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”
Likewise.”
Ollie’s married, too. When I got engaged, I thought I’d be the first, but everybody’s getting hitched.”
Sorry to steal your thunder, man,” Steve offered, “but that’s not the half of it. We’re expecting.”
No kidding! When?”
Any day, now.”
Then what are you doing here?”
Steve laughed.
We don’t live that far away. When I get the call, I’ll meet her at the hospital.” He showed me his cell phone. “Anyway, I was there at the beginning of the pregnancy, so it’s probably ok if I’m not there at the end, too, right?”

My turn to laugh. The joke bordered on the ribald in a way I didn’t remember Steve doing much, but I suppose four years (and law school and marriage and impending fatherhood) might change a person. Come to think of it, though, something else about Steve seems different, too. I don’t remember him joking very much, but he seemed always to be smiling. Now...it took me a while to put my finger on it, but the difference is that he doesn’t smile if he doesn’t have a clear, obvious reason.

He seems tired, too.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Note

Hi,
I'll post tomorrow. Today I'm having computer problems.
-D.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Mastery Year 2: Part 1: Brigid

Happy Brigid! A new year, a new group of yearlings, several newly-awarded Green Rings, and, best of all, I think my wife is going to talk to me again!

I exaggerate; June never stopped talking to me, but I think she considered it. She's still angry.

She's angry with me, of course, for not telling her about the Ordeal which, in case you have forgotten, involves an about-to-graduate student being more or less kidnapped and stuck in a dark room alone for three days. Of course I didn't tell her; for the Ordeal to work, it has to be a surprise.

It's not hazing, it's the thing that hazing is a debased echo of--an initiatory experience. The word "experience" here is key. It's not an initiatory ritual or an initiatory event, it's an experience, and the experience does not occur if you're not in the right head-space for it. Not all forms of initiation require surprise, but many do. You can't be braced against the change you're about to experience.

Then, too, you have to decide real fast whether you trust your teachers when one of them pops a black-out bag over your head.

The thing that separates what we do from what many college fraternities and such do is that our initiation is not meant to be unpleasant or degrading. The person undergoing initiation is always reminded that they are free to quit, and they are encouraged to do so if they run into any sort of physical or mental trouble. They are closely monitored, offered plenty of food and water and opportunity to sleep. They are asked to trust, never to submit.

And yet being taken out of your day-to-day life and hidden away for an undetermined about of time is no joke. And to have it done by the masters--who have always obviously been up to something, that's part of the point--while to realize that your spouse is complicit is something else again.

She must be wondering whose side I'm on. She'll realize eventually that I am on the side of the masters and that now, so is she--that's what the initiation experience is for.

It's not as if I wasn't worried. It's one thing to go through the Ordeal yourself and afterwards to know that it doesn't hurt, it isn't scary (except for that first startling moment under the black-out bag, in the seconds before you hear their reassurances). It's not actually all that much different than a long trip on a Greyhound bus, except there's no view and the toilet doesn't stink. But it's quite another thing to watch your wife leave your dorm-room to go to a meeting and to know she thinks she's coming back in an hour--and she's wrong. And you don't say anything. To spend those three days, however you spend them and whatever you're doing, periodically casting your attention to your wife, knowing that at that very moment she is in the dark, sworn not to speak, and she doesn't know where she is or when she's getting out. To spend all the hours of that final day constantly looking at your watch thinking ok, now they're going to get her. Now she's seeing daylight again for the first time in the wing of the stage in the Chapel. Now the sun has set and she's still in the wing with all the other new initiates, in the dark again, waiting for the ceremony to start.

It's warm down in the basement, where the Ordeal rooms are, but it's cold in the wing of the Chapel.

Then I was back in the audience, sitting in a cold, metal folding chair in a dim room that smelled of wool and honey, and the little bell was ringing, ding! ding! ding! as the masters processed in carrying their as yet unlit candles. I was sitting with Ebony and Eddie and Aidan (it was his seventh birthday), as I often have before, but for only the second time in my experience of Brigid in that hall, Kayla wasn't sitting with me. She was waiting in the wing with June to graduate.

Was the Ordeal a surprise for Kayla? She certainly knew the rooms were down there, because that's where she went to be out of the way when she thought she was dying but was actually giving birth to Aidan when she was twelve. Did she know what those rooms were used for? She learned a lot of the school's secrets, just being a kid on campus, and of course secrecy is mostly maintained using the principles of stage magic--and when you're not part of the target audience, frequently the illusion does not work. I never once saw anyone being escorted to their Ordeal the whole time I was a novice, but this year, not being the target of the illusion anymore, I saw three of them without even trying to look. So, I imagine Kayla had seen some of them, too, over the years, and probably asked questions about them. Direct questions always receive honest (though sometimes legalistically narrow) answers around here. So maybe she knew.

On the other hand, would she really have asked all the right questions? Might the masters have evaded her, at least partly, in case she grew up to want to join the school? I don't know.

In any case, watching that twenty-year-old woman walk across the stage, a young but not prodigious college graduate, and thinking about where she was and why eight years earlier, was quite something. Almost as big a deal to me as watching June walk across the stage and knowing that the period of our being on different sides of a divide, of it being part of my job to keep secrets from her and hold distance from her, was over. We're both initiates, now, both entitled to wear the brown uniform, and I knew that starting that night, and from here on in, we'd share the same room.

The thing about uniforms--of course, novices wear white uniforms with black cloaks, candidates and allies without the Green Ring wear brown except for white belts, and people with the Ring wear all brown. So the symbolism of dress is important, here. When you graduate, one of the masters takes off your cloak and underneath is the outfit you choose to symbolize your life after the school. At least one person almost every year is naked and everybody laughs, and otherwise you get everything from suits to graduation gowns to jeans. When it was my turn I wore cargo pants, a turtleneck, and a flannel, which was my guess as to what I might be wearing in grad school (a good guess, as it happened). June hadn't told me her plans. She ended up wearing the same brown uniform she'll be entitled to wear every other day she spends on campus, unless and until she gets her ring.

"Because I don't think I'm leaving," she explained, later.

Afterwards, we watched Andy and Veronica receive their rings--I found Andy's graduation very moving, too, considering where he started and how far he has come--and then the masters processed away again, to do whatever it is they do on Brigid Night.

But I hadn't gotten a good look when the newly arrived candidates stood to introduce themselves at the beginning of the ceremony. I was sitting fr back and couldn't see or hear them well, I could only gather that there were two of them, a man and a woman. Afterwards, I sought them out to see who it was and found that the returnees are Raven G. and Steve.

Steve Bees is back.