Have you seen all my glorious recent posts? Today I have been derailed and I feel as I often do after a day on campus — except that I have not been on campus. It had to do with arguing about whether or not I should negotiate.
WHITEMAN TWO
I said, I have realized that our mutual friend has a drinking problem. I therefore do not want to socialize with this person in any serious way.
My acquaintance said, you are intolerant. If you have found our mutual friend’s drinking behavior unpleasant, it is because you have not set an adequate boundary with them. If you had, you would have found you could tolerate their drinking, and you would socialize with them.
I said, the boundary is, I do not want to socialize with this person. I will talk to them at parties but I will not seek them out for my own adventures.
I said, if you do not have friends with drinking problems, then you do not have to struggle to manage the situations which arise around these friends. If you do not try to manage these situations, then you do not have to blame yourself for poor management when they go awry. If you do not agree, in the name of friendship, to become a drinking partner of an alcoholic, then you do not have a sick friend with whom you must constantly draw boundaries.
My acquaintance repeated that I was intolerant and that it was not the outrageously rude behavior of our mutual friend that was the problem, it was my inability to better tolerate or manage it. In other words, someone else’s rude behavior was my problem, because it had been visited upon me and I had not headed it off at the pass quite as soon as might have been possible.
I said yes, I am not willing to tolerate rude behavior. If that is a problem, I have it, and the way I will handle this problem is not to tolerate rude behavior.
BACKGROUND
What actually irritates me about this acquaintance is not the attitude toward alcoholism or the codependency but the spirituality. They have breathing gurus and things like this, and they are interested in the healing arts. They are beginning to offer life coaching. But I think they are on the dark side. I discern a gaping hole in them where identity should be and that was exactly the look my Reeducator, who was por más señas from their emotionally deprived area, had about him. And I know from direct experience that if you kindly consider the things such people have to say, and try on the idea that up might be down and down up, you will begin to feel such a gap open in you. And then you have a gap in you right where the seat of writing lies. And that is why Reeducation stopped my writing. And I do not need to become more tolerant, but less so, and my refusal to donate my time and energy to these conversations is not judgmental — it shows discernment, which is a different thing.
COMMENT
And I notice how hard it is for people to recognize an alcoholic, and how bad things have to get before they will admit there is a problem. The excuses they make can be endless. What you have to consider, it seems to me, is not how much did they drink or how drunk do they seem, but how much chaos there is around them. If, for example, they are in a relationship with one person but hoping they are pregnant by another, they are not just being modern or doing what they need to do for their life. They are courting disaster.
WHITEMAN ONE
And what I do not like about spiritual people is the alibi spirituality gives them for abusiveness. As in this conversation, the final one, with the mutual friend:
MF: So how is your work going?
PZ: It is going well. I need it to go faster, but it feels as though that is about to happen, too.
MF: But will you finish what you have been assigned in time?
PZ: I have not “been assigned” anything. I have assigned myself a project. I am the director of it. I will report on it, and on my progress and findings, but I have not undertaken a set project under someone else’s direction.
MF: But it is not good to have the artist also be the director. Artists do not know how to direct projects.
PZ: It is not an art project, it is a research project. I do not work as an artist but as a research professional in a corporate university environment. It is part of my job to be a director. You also have a Ph.D., and you also run your own practice, so you should know that one can do these things.
MF: But if you are the one doing the work, someone else needs to be there to make sure you finish it in time.
PZ: Actually, I would say that you need to be absent for me to finish it in time. And about those artists — I do art as a hobby, and my teacher runs her own studio, and her business is in excellent shape, so perhaps you could take your comments and warnings to someone like her if you need to know how it is done.
FINDINGS
It would be ideal if I could just laugh at this kind of reasoning, but it enrages me. I still feel I have to negotiate with people like Whiteman Two. I want Whiteman Two to agree to my refusal to negotiate with Whiteman One. Whiteman Two is in no position to agree and I should realize this. If Whiteman One seeks companions in the dissemination of chaos, Whiteman Two seeks companions in negotiation. I easily extricate myself from Whiteman One but at this point I still have to defend myself by shooting Whiteman Two. If I do less they may pull me into the penumbra. Only after shooting Whiteman Two and feeling poisoned by it can I see what has happened. I know this and I am eager for that clarity, so I hasten to shoot Whiteman Two. In reality, however, all I need is a still greater degree of intolerance as well as less, not more negotiation.
CONCLUSION
Life is wonderful when you live it with autonomy. It amazes me how many people do not lead adult lives and it also amazes me that, when I am feeling burdened, I often do not realize that it is because I have relinquished autonomy. And I can hear the objections from the chorus, so I hasten to say that by autonomy I do not mean autocracy.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It is the idea of the “artist” as feminine persona — the carrier of the emotions of the society around them. So my father, in my memoir, accused me of being “an artist”, when it was really he who craved scope for his creative drive.
YES. And the people who have *actually* admired me as an “artist” have never implied it meant incompetence.
Also, on the “spirituality” thing — these people were also going on about some man they know who is laid off from his job and who discerns he may be too old to get rehired in that field very easily, for which reason he is also looking at other lines of work.
They say that he should just think more positively, and that if he doesn’t get another job just like his old one it will be his fault for having seen the possible difficulties.
Some people are afraid of parts of their minds. They create mystical reasons not to go there.
I think it is because they actually have parts of their minds that are incredibly dark.
In retrospect I prefer the other dark conversation I had this week, in which my interlocutor, who had dark things to say, was not hiding.
These people also believe everything comes from the mind, and that one *cannot* see any reality. Various simple examples:
– my cat is a relaxed person because I am … he couldn’t just be that way himself
– if the banks will give you a loan, it means you really can afford to pay on it
– anything you perceive to be wrong, is what is wrong with you, and is not out in the world
– situations do not improve, only your perception of them does.
All of this is massively authoritarian. On the one hand, you have total control, you can make anything happen by believing in it. On the other, you have no control. This, although they don’t see it, enshrines hierarchies of power. The bank determines me, I determine the cat, and so on. And if the weather improves, it is not that it has simply shifted, it is that I have decided to enjoy whatever weather event takes place. And on, and on. One is always controlling or submitting somehow. Very tiresome.
And P.S. I am still vituperating on the alcoholic logic, which really pisses me off.
“You should be able to deal with alcoholics. We do — we just do it in moderation — and you shouldn’t want not to. A Bodhisattva would not feel the need to get away entirely. If you do want to get away entirely then the problem is you, and you should see yourself as a problem for not conforming.”
My God, what utter poison and mental slavery. I am so glad I have access to the world of health — I see what it is not to be able even to glimpse it, and it is horrifying.
It is the dishonesty of this all which bothers the hell out of me, and the manipulation, and the invasiveness, and the condescension.
Also: I do go out to hear music, always have, always will.
But: I have never gone out to get drunk and carouse, not even as a “youthful” thing. It does not seem fun.
People say: “I do not do that any more.” They think that going out to hear music is really going out to get drunk. They mean they are no longer interested in that last.
Other people say they go out to hear music and really they are going out to get drunk. I hate, hate it when such people tag along with me and I find I haven’t called their game in time. I deny that it is all my fault for not having seen their game, such that the real problem is me, not always having complete X ray vision on their game. I’d like to have better vision but that does not mean that their game is their game. !!!
Rant, rant, rant.
And. What was so irritating about Whiteman One. She was not only imposing, she was also apparently displeased that work was going well and was trying to find some way to tear it down.
These people also believe everything comes from the mind, and that one *cannot* see any reality
Yes–I recognise this attitude/approach and I have often tried to fight with it, in others. It’s an extreme form of subjectivism, that somehow seems to serve those who go for it well enough that they become habituated to using it as their only way of relating to the world. When I want to escape from this self-serving subjectivism, I talk to black Africans online. It’s a different cultural point of view generally, and not nearly so far gone.
Perhaps it is a consumerist modality that softens us? (I feel the softening starting to creep into my bones, as somewhat more money trickles in here.) The only morally unambiguous action — the one that is rewarded without question — is consuming. That is the key psychological attitude at the base of all postmodernist culture I’m convinced.
I don’t think that individuals can defeat this massive globule, and I don’t know anything else to do but to wait for it to defeat itself — which may happen, eventually. In the mean time, it makes it very difficult to communicat anything worthwhile, because people hear what they want to hear, or what they think you’re saying, rather than what you are actually trying to get across.
The more I know, the more reticent I find that I’m becoming — there’s this overwhelming feeling that I’m right about things, particularly that the white(wo)man’s brain is not connected all the way down, which causes her feeling of internal agitation and disconnect.
I once tried the experiment of getting people to open up about what they really felt, and I discovered all the rotten attitudes that they dredged up from their basements, that had been buried there for all too long. I could have said, “That wasn’t what I meant, I’m afraid!” — but you are speaking to a different character structure, that can never know what it was you “meant”.
Consumerist attitude, yes — you are probably right on this although I couldn’t expound upon it. These people do have great taste and great stuff and keep consuming … I guess to calm that internal agitation.
Character structure that can never know what it was you “meant,” yes indeed.
Self serving subjectivism, yes. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. I think I shall become a hermit. Honestly — just get a kayak and row and commune with fish and a few other kayakers.
What strikes me about both of these conversations is that you shared something and the other person immediately proceeded to tell you that you were wrong and to try to argue you out of your decisions or positions. Extremely obnoxious, and it’s good to see it for what it is: busybodying, unsupportive, undermining.
Setting boundaries with alcoholics=healthy, rational, and necessary. The idea that something is wrong with you if you don’t deliberately submit yourself to an alcoholic’s chaos=someone who is in denial about their own life choices or complicity with such behavior.
People who want to tell you how to write/manage your writing/ and argue with you about your relationship to your writing? way the fuck out of line and someone with whom one might want to limit one’s conversation to ‘how’s the weather?”
You are recognizing this negativity for what it is. Just say no to busybodies!
“Busybodying, unsupportive, undermining.” Yes. Good point and it is also what the alcoholic at work does: try to argue me out of perfectly good decisions … and, I suddenly realize, it is also what people like GV, TRW, and other former friends tried to do (it was why I broke up with them as friends).
And it was what Reeducation did. I’ll keep this in mind for dealing with the alcoholic at work, especially, and mostly I’ll keep it in mind for dealing with anyone “spiritual.”
Great comment generally, merci.
*
But Whiteman Two says the whole problem is that I let Whiteman One come over in the first place. Were I a healthy person, I would not have. I would have known to only let Whiteman One come over in the daytime. Since I didn’t realize what Whiteman One was and let them come over at night, the whole thing is my fault, and I should learn to be friends with Whiteman Two in the daytime. But I don’t want to be friends with someone like that *at all*. This is what they don’t accept.
Whiteman Two also says that it is only because I project my neurosis into her that I do not like her shenanigans. She says that by going out to music with Whiteman One I have given her the impression that I could be used as a drinking partner, which is what Whiteman One seeks, so it is my fault.
But I have only just realized this about Whiteman One, and my feelings are hurt that this is what Whiteman One wants. I like her and would have been friends, but I am not interested in entering into a power struggle with someone I barely know about whether or not I can be used as a drinking partner.
The friend through whom I know Whitemen One and Two is in the thrall of Whiteman Two because of their common interest in alternative healing and so on. She would like us all to be friends but that means submitting to Whiteman Two. In that group only Friend’s husband sees through these people.
*****
The thing is that I barely know Whitemen One and Two. It is not as though Whiteman One were permanently in my life and I had to tolerate this but set boundaries. Whiteman One does not have to be in my life at all. This is what Whiteman Two does not accept — she thinks I have to have Whiteman One in my life and struggle with her.
And she thinks that because she is in alternative healing and has yoga books that she knows more than other people.
I had another disturbing encounter with Whiteman Two around Hallowe’en, and didn’t understand it, and thought part of it was my fault. But I see now what the combination is: dealing with 1 alcoholic (it was a different one, who I met once and have avoided since) + Whiteman Two and her “spirituality” … trying to get me to join one of her chanting circles or some such thing.
Now I see what the combination is and I am not going to consider my flight reaction problematic again … I didn’t see then but do see now it is alcoholic + crazy faith healing type and the chorus telling me I shouldn’t just get away from the alcoholic completely and I should hang out with the faith healer. That is what Reeducation is like, and it is what Al-Anon is like, and it is why I hate them, they want you to enter this emotional jail and stay there.
P.S. This is exactly like being in Reeducation. If you allow someone chaotic to take over your life, of course it will be chaotic and you will feel chaotic emotionally.
I am SO glad my aunt paid for college so I didn’t have to stay at home … this gave me the chance to find out what it would be like not to live with alcoholics and codependents.
The reason I went to Reeducation was I was convinced there was something wrong with me for not wanting to live with alcoholics and codependents and not being able to concentrate well or function at the highest level while also dealing with these people.
Of Reeducation WAS one of these people and I could not believe it, since Reeducation was certified not to be. As we know, I told Reeducation that if I did what it wanted me to do, I would not be able to progress in life, and Reeducation told me that was denial.
Whiteman Two is saying EXACTLY the same thing.
*
And the first time I met Whiteman Two (this was the third time I had encountered her) she said she didn’t think I should write this book. She wanted me to get involved in life coaching with her to learn that I did not want to.
It is hard to believe she thinks she can do life coaching, because what she needs is serious therapy and/or deep religion (and not flaky New Age healing s***).
*
Anyway perhaps this is sort of like a vaccine or short version of an illness. I had never before seen so clearly that the submerged feeling I get from dealing with bad influences has to do with trying to negotiate with them, tolerate them, and so on.
I didn’t know that the difficulty concentrating I have had since Reeducation has to do with allowing myself to get submerged by someone else.
I didn’t know that the rage I feel at alcoholics and other insane people has to do with my thinking they have to *agree* to the boundaries I set, and that if they don’t, then they win (because my rights come second).
At my parents’ house I knew there was too much emotional chaos to concentrate on anything much and it is why I learned all this math and all these foreign languages — they were technical matters you could study in small stints.
Then I was fine until I hit Reeducation. I knew it had taken over my brainpower *and* that it was sucking my emotional blood, but I got used to placing myself second, third, and fourth in all situations.
Only recently have I relearned what it feels like to place oneself first. In Reeducation it meant you were an arrogant colonizer or something, but in reality it is just being an adult … as I was from about ages 17 to 34, before hitting Reeducation.
The family though it was selfish of me to be an autonomous person, and Reeducation thought it was arrogant, but none of it is true. You can be normal.
*
My mother, meanwhile, thought that while in college and graduate school I should take care of myself and not be caught in weirdness. I learned from this but Reeducation did not like the fact that I had learned the lesson.
*
It felt great to do these things and I only stopped because Reeducation said I must.
I then did them again from May through October, 2008, and it was great. And then this Whiteman Two said I could not, and I stopped for the month of November and part of December. And then I started again and it was great again. And now Whiteman Two reappears, the third time I ever see her, and says I cannot.
And I feel submerged, and I cannot concentrate on anything important. But I see what the pattern is.
And the pattern is easy: draw boundaries with alcoholics, and you’ll have a massively codependent type come out and abuse you for it, and if you don’t realize they are even worse than the alcoholic and must be avoided even more seriously, and especially if you negotiate with them or assume they can see reason or understand your position, you will be submerged.
And it is because it is all full of rabid codependents like this, who think they have found God and that they are incredibly competent and right, that I hate Al-Anon.
Since Google cannot discern the wheat from the chaff, one of your pieces landed in my email alerts. I’m an old fuck, been around writing, reading and publishing for a very long time, but your piece, your writing, your bullshit, is some of the dullest, transparent, phony, pseudo-intellectual, insecure, vapid, and light inconsequential stuff I’ve read in a long time. But I can take that. In fact, I could even admire the shakiness if not for the lack of heart, sweat, and risk that real “art” requires. Maybe it’s time for you to get out of a pretty limited environment and shave into new mirrors. Pack a bag, stick out your thumb, and land somewhere where words cannot be hidden behind. It might buck-up your backbone.
[N. Ed.: I’ve corrected capitalization and spelling in this post, but I have not altered any wording. –Z.]
Hi, Norman! I take it you are this Norman Savage?
http://www.thundersandwich.com/ts5/savage5.html
And/or this one?
http://blog.smashwords.com/2009/02/exclusive-interview-norman-savage.html
Whoever you are, you sound pretty unhappy in the post above. You are also pretty abusive. It’s interesting that you would pick a post in which someone speaks openly about pain to come and be mean to. And it’s strange that if you didn’t like the blog you didn’t just read another.
I have railed a lot against the codependents of Al-Anon in this blog, but honestly, it sounds as though AA / Narcotics Anonymous / something like that could do you a lot of good if you would take it seriously.
Also, note that I dated an uncontrolled diabetic whose middle name was Norman and who liked to play the wild child. He also used to go on about how he was an “old fuck” and how he was always writing and publishing and how I was vapid, an intellectual lightweight, did not have a real life, and so on. It’s odd how similar you sound — although what I note more broadly is how similar drunks always sound, and how similar abusive people always sound.
Good luck, Norman. I hope things go well for you.
I shouldn’t just get away from the alcoholic completely and I should hang out with the faith healer.
I hear you. It’s very Christian. You are supposed to be the nursemaid to these people, and separating yourself from them is considered to be a way of divorcing yourself from your Xtian duty, which is to suffer. Suffering is considered to give you character, so in these terms you are also denying yourself the opportunity to develop character.
Anyway, that’s all it is. It’s Christianity.
Yes indeed … such people have not given up flaky versions of Christianity, they have just dressed it in different clothing. That is how they get to look hip while being right wing.
I never did believe that, about how suffering built character. It may reveal character. It may be possible to wrest character from suffering. But mostly, I think suffering undermines character. When it is chosen or recommended suffering, I think its very purpose is to undermine character.
In some instances, suffering can make you function from a different part or parts of your mind, if you are innovative enough to proceed with some changes. However, it is imperative to differentiate between needless suffering and that which one cannot avoid. Embracing needless suffering is sick.
Functioning from a different part or parts of the mind, that is true. And in that way suffering, when not needless, does in fact build perception and knowledge … and perhaps character.
If there is already character there, it can build more character. If there is none, then it can destroy what character is there.
Hmmmm… I am not sure I understand what you mean here, but I’ve seen enough people with permanent damage not to be able to say they didn’t have “character” (whatever that may really be) to start with. I’d also say that if there is no character in the first place, then suffering can destroy the potential for growing any.
On those New Agers, who are secretly right wingers and Xians, one of the conclusions to which I keep arriving is that traditional religions are better if only because they have some sort of intellectual rigor. In so called non denominational Xianity and in New Agity 😉 you have this mixing and matching, I’m OK-you’re OK theology, and you do not really have to commit to anything except the lemma of the moment. It occurs to me that one way to choose a religion if one was from another planet and had no familiarity, yet wanted a religion, would be to find one with well reasoned controversies in it: Zionism or not, Liberation Theology or not, etc. My thought is that if there are actual positions in it, and not just flavors (a little Reiki here, a little Goddess worship there), then it might be possible to be in it and yet retain an identity … or in religious terms, be in it and yet have a connection to the actual deity, not just to some priests. Do you think?
I think what I meant by “character”, oddly enough, comes down to something that is directly related to good nurturing at an early age — so it has more to do with “breeding” (in a sense) than morality as a system of rules or ideals.
I’m lucky enough not to be in a position where I encounter a lot of oddball religious types. I think that the consumerist approach to religion doth make superficial. But I don’t encounter that too much. I tend to think that people need a system of ethics as dry and as straightforward as possible, rather than a religion.
Excellent points. People here, though, think ethics can only come from religion, which is why I keep being asked why my non religious self does not just go out and commit random crimes.
The other issue in the local brand of Catholicism is not having children. It is scandalous not to believe in God and not to have childbearing as a first priority.
This dyad says something. Note too that it is child bearing, not rearing, which is key. Somehow I smell patriarchy, essentialized womanhood, and so on.
No. People can learn ethics without an ideology that flatters them to believe they are a particular way in relation to others. Religion often gets it back to front — especially Christianity. You become moral in order to lord it over others. Really, you need to become ethical in order to prove your right to belong.
*Precisely.* Excellent formulation. I am going to quote/cite you IRL next time this comes up, which will be soon (it is a regular thing, there is always someone raising this).
People here understand ethics to be the appearance of wrongdoing. If you can avoid that, you are ethical. If you actually do not do wrong, or if you are justified in wrongdoing in some way, you are moral.
People here understand ethics to be the appearance of wrongdoing. If you can avoid that, you are ethical. If you actually do not do wrong, or if you are justified in wrongdoing in some way, you are moral.
It’s a Reality TV game of elimination by being found out for being who you really are.
Yes. And what people learn from child abuse, apparently, is not to be virtuous but how to better hide, deny, and otherwise get away with non virtue.
*
This whole state, I think sometimes, has low self esteem and therefore believes it deserves what it gets, accepts trashy behavior and being trashed because secretly it thinks it is trash, and so on.
*
On religions or spiritual practices — do you think they have any use at all?
I am *very* suspicious of mixed “spiritual” enterprises, e.g. these New Agey type cooperative where they have a little of this and a little of that, and I would strongly recommend that people go to a well established ashram or abbey or something, connected to a well established religion with a well published intellectual and cultural tradition, if they want to go on a meditation retreat.
I would say this because it will at least have some rigor to it, and some serious thought behind it. I mean, Archbishop Romero was a very far cry from the upstart “nondenominational” preacher around the corner who believes Obama is the Antichrist. Would you say that makes a difference, or is it all still too mystified and mystifying?
The NS comment doesn’t seem to connect with anything here.
Did I miss something? I’ve been reading your blog occasionally due to our shared interest in Spanish literature and Peru. I’m not enamored with your politics in general but is it not a mite disconcerting to refer to female acquaintances as ‘Whiteman One’ and ‘Whiteman Two’? Are you being ironic?
Hi Tom! Question for you: is it coincidental that a post complaining about alcoholics brings the sexist trolls out of the woodwork … as in a hostile comment or two I’ve gotten from people who don’t have blogs I am aware of and don’t normally comment here?
Hi Alex! You do not appear to have looked at this blog very closely.
It is a pseudonymous blog and names have been changed to preserve the guilty and the innocent.
Gender roles are socially constructed, as you may be aware, and in avant garde literature, which I am not writing here but which I do sometimes bow or curtsy to, authors will often scramble genders and names.
On the “whiteman” character here, see point 6 in the About page, and/or look at the entire series of posts tagged “Da Whiteman.”
Hi profacero,
No, I guess it’s probably not coincidental.
I just meant that Norman’s comment reads like an all-purpose hatchet job.
Yes – I know – it fascinates me. Either he’s sending this out to everyone today, or he uses the same hatchet job every time he objects to anything.
My X used to send basically this same paragraph to this blog, over and over. But I strongly suspect it isn’t him, but that this is the standard hatchet job that … patriarchy produces … ?
But I strongly suspect it isn’t him, but that this is the standard hatchet job that … patriarchy produces … ?
That’s the other way in which patriarchy undermines you with its confidence tricks, especially if you are rather more intelligent than the norm: It gives you the impression that others have all come to a very different conclusion about the world in a way that concurs with each other’s views, and must therefore be logical (whereas you see things differently, and hence must be illogical). Actually, it is the last clause about the logical basis of patriarchy is falsely attributed by the thinker who is not yet sufficiently cynical about the world. Everybody concurs with patriarchy because they are all conditioned to do so, and because they follow, like lightning, the path of least resistance. Apart from that, their views would not coincide, and we (others) would be less likely to attribute transcendent logic to their positions.