Sorry for the lack of a post last week. I might--or might not--explain what's been occupying my head and my time at the next interlude. It involves someone else, so confidentiality is an issue.-D.
How do I tell when I'm done if Steve isn't? It's the question that I asked myself a few weeks ago. I mean, part of my assignment as a candidate has been to help Steve Bees learn to de-stress, and Steve's entire assignment so far, aside from teaching classes and workshops and such, has been to learn to de-stress with me. Since I'm expecting to earn my ring this year and he isn't, I'd been thinking that I'd have to leave at some point before my work with him was complete, so how could I identify that point?
I imagined talking to Charlie about it, but in my imagination he told me to figure it out myself (doesn't talking to an imagined person count as figuring it out myself? I felt vaguely angry at the unfairness of my imaginary version of Charlie until I realized how metaphysically twisted that was). So then I imagined talking about it to Allen, which proved more fruitful, and I sat in the garden in front of the Dining Hall imagining so hard that I didn't notice that the real Allen had joined me until he spoke.
"Who are you talking with?" he asked.
"You, actually," I said, as startled as you'd think. "How...?"
"Your lips were moving," he explained. "And you paused to give the other person time to respond. You were speaking to me? Really? Was I being helpful?"
"Yes, um...."
"Which version of me do you prefer?"
"Allen, I....The real one, of course."
"Not of course," he corrected me, with a smile. "Plenty of people make up people they like better."
"Yes, but that's horrible," I protested. "To prefer an imaginary person over a real one!"
"Maybe. But don't forget, Daniel, I am your friend even if you do the occasional horrible thing. Honesty is more important to me. Anyway, how do you know I'm not imaginary, too?"
I had to think about this for a bit.
"I don't," I admitted. "But I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining you, because if I had hallucinations that realistic, how could I function? Unless I'm only imagining functioning....Anyway, if you're imaginary, then I must be, too, whether I'm doing the imagining or not."
My cogent answer won me a small approving smile almost buried among all the other kinds of smile he had for me.
"It's the masks imagination places over real people that cause trouble," he told me. "All other uses of the imagination are fine by me. Speaking of which, if you don't mind my asking, what were you and I talking about? Or would you rather I leave you to get back to it?"
That Allen wanted to respect the privacy of my conversation with a made-up version of himself seemed really weird to me until I realized that he'd basically asked me what I was thinking, and of course my thoughts are private. The layers of reality moving back and forth made my head hurt. I rubbed my temples and he waited patiently until I caught up.
I caught him up on the basic problem and then explained my progress thus far.
"You said, I mean, I imagined you saying, that there were layers to unpack, that I was making unwarranted assumptions."
"Sounds like me so far. Go on."
"Well, I'd been assuming that Steve's entire assignment as a candidate will be the work he's doing with me. That's not necessarily true, and the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that it's not true. Also, I've been assuming that I have to finish with Steve before earning my ring. That's not necessarily true, either. I mean, Steve's not ever going to be a finished product, is he? He's a human being, not an, an...art project or a thesis. Once I have demonstrated that I can serve as his master in some respect, then I'm free to continue doing so as a master, right?"
"More or less," Allen said, with an expression suggesting I was missing something somewhere. "Let me ask you this: what are you doing with Steve, at at what point will you judge that he is finished with that particular process? Ready to move on?"
"I'm teaching him to self-center," I replied at once, then stopped. "No, that doesn't sound right. I don't mean make himself the center, I mean to center himself. I'm teaching him to find a larger context of meaning than the particular fights he engages with day-to-day. So he doesn't exhaust himself with stress and despair and everything."
Allen dislikes sloppy catch-all phrases like "and everything," and I saw him wince a little and then almost literally weigh my mistake, tilting his head back and forth. He evidently judged in favor of the smarter things I'd said.
"Good. And?"
"And how will you tell when he gets there?"
"When he starts seeking the larger context while at work--by going outside, for example. And I expect he'll seem calmer and more energized while working, too. I suppose I should enlist some spies, though I'm not really sure how that works--what occurs to me is that I am a writer, now. Maybe I can do an article about that class-action lawsuit he's been involved with for the last few years and interview some of his clients? They've been talking to him regularly and should notice a change--and care, since they depend on him not to be crazy, so they'll remember. They'll talk about it easily. I'll have to get a legitimate venue to publish the thing, though, or it wouldn't be ethical, and for something like that I'll need to line up a publisher first, which means learning a lot more about publishing than I know as yet, but that's not a bad thing. Somehow, whenever I think through a project, I talk myself into taking on more work."
"And just like that," said Allen, "you earned my vote."
I stared at him.
"To graduate? I thought I only need Charlie's vote at this level?"
Again the head-tilting.
"Yes and no. Technically speaking, you only need your master's vote, and then you go into the job interview. But, ah, don't tell anyone I told you, but I'm on your interview committee." And with that he stood up, patted the top of the stone wall near me a couple of times, and absented himself.
Well, then!
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