supplicium post mortem

The Mr. Hicks series, Hair, tells the story of a boy who rebels against haircut regulations by getting his head shaved. The Headmaster flips out and sentences him to severe, protracted punishment. Other boys demonstrate their support for the culprit. They are eventually punished, too. A central theme: is it right to rebel against authority, to hold it to a standard of “reasonableness”? The story basically says: No. You don’t get to pick and choose which rules you like, but you are bound to follow them all.

These stories are more severe than I really like, but they did make me long for the kind of post-whacking soreness that lasts for days. That’s by-the-by. What I like in the series is the firm and unapologetic assertion of authority. On the one hand, the Headmaster is choleric, loses control, and goes way overboard with punishment. On the other hand, the discipline master – himself calm – asserts that the boys’ disobedience is indeed wrong. When challenged: “But it’s just a haircut,” he replies, “Oh, but is it?” He understands and shines a light on the undercurrent: of course the kid had his hair cut to spite the Headmaster, whom he loathed. It isn’t about a haircut for any of them, but about the question of whether or not they should submit to the Headmaster’s rules, or only submit to the ones they judge satisfactory. The story says: Submit to all of them.

And suddenly, this rather extreme M/m story became for me a metaphor for submission to the love and the will of God, which has been a fairly unappealing theme in the book I’m reading about Lent. The attitude in this school is peculiarly English, I think. In America we have more tradition for challenging and rebelling against authority (despotism!) if authority proves unfit to govern (in the eyes of the governed). In fact, there’s a sense of duty to search for injustice and challenge it, especially today. There’s also an obligation for authority to be “reasonable,” i.e. democratically acceptable. But are private schools democracies (even in the USA)? They aren’t on mmsa anyway! Clearly they can be democratically inclined, and many (esp. secondary schools) try hard to involve students in governance. But, because schools are 1) in loco parentis; and 2) there to educate, they can never, I argue, be honestly democratic.

Contrast with the grotesque example of the Hampshire water authority that consulted the population (after supplying them with informational pamphlets) on whether to add fluoride to the water supply. There was a legal obligation to consult the population, but not to abide by its wishes. Result: 72% said no fluoride, but they got it anyway. So, it’s at best a pseudo-democracy, and at worst a cynical hypocrisy. Would it be better to say, We don’t consult the population because we are in charge and we know best, thank you. People would still be angry over the water, but at least it would be an honest representation of the relationship between people and water authority. They’d all be spared the hypocrisy and illusion. I think a lot of schools today, especially progressive ones, are confused about their own authority and what it means. As a result, they are more like the Hampshire water authority than they realize. All of which makes me yearn for the clarity Mr. Hicks’s adults provide, if not exactly for their level of tgi.

Warning: self-pity within…!

I had a dream in which I was being called on to tutor a girl who had huge learning disabilities. She was borderline retarded, I was told. I agreed to meet her and see if I could help; they were desperate, and rich.

The dad was intense, worried, a little over-controlling. The girl, over-fixated upon but interesting, was not as dull as I expected. In fact, there was intelligence there. She seemed able to learn, but she said her memory was the problem. She could remember practically nothing. I probed this. Did she mean like Alzheimer’s, short and long term memory loss, like she wouldn’t remember this conversation? Or was it like she didn’t have a place to put information and so she couldn’t access it? Our session was short but we connected and I think she felt some hope.

When I came for session #2, her father told me gravely that Wayne had been. I was given to understand that “Wayne” was a brutal internal critic which had emerged from her consciousness and emotionally battered her for daring to have hope and imaging escaping her useless state. I understood at once, I thought, and went in to see how she was doing. She was shaken, and while we were talking, Wayne appeared in her. He was scary, sadistic, violent, and powerful. I told him/her that I knew exactly what was going on, that I knew what it was to be more than one person, that I wasn’t intimidated or confused. Wayne got violent and tried to tie me up with electrical wire, but I wrestled him/her to the bed and sat astride them. I’m more than one person, too! I yelled, You’ve messed with the wrong tutor! I was determined to help this girl by helping her defeat Wayne. But, she, as Wayne, was dangerous and even pulled a knife on me, albeit a paring knife. Was I underestimating Wayne? And was this actually severe MPD and not, as with me, a playful expression of different parts of the personality?

Later, I talked with her father, who was very disturbed at the violent turn. He was leaning towards institutionalizing her. Also, he was disturbed that I’d been so forceful with her. Wasn’t that abuse? he wondered. I tried to explain: 1) She was relieved by my forcefulness; 2) If I was forceful, it was with Wayne, not her.

Later, she mentioned yet another person, Mrs. M-something alliterative. I was like, Oh brother. But then I realized, hey, this Mrs. M can maybe be called in to fight Wayne. The dream ended before we sorted out whether I was going to work with this girl, when, and for how much.

I recount this dream because it was toying with the border between play/the others and insanity. It reminded me how peculiar it is to maintain a living relationship with Casey when there is no one to play with her. And yet, I can’t exactly give it up and pretend that she doesn’t exists, or that she’s irrelevant and has no place in my life. But it’s pretty impossible to play with her on my own. I’ve actually taken to speaking out loud to her sometimes, as if she’s there beside me – not just talking to her in my head and saying, Casey go to bed! In December we were driving upstate, or rather I was driving, she was in the passenger seat, and the dogs were in the back. I told her, actually out loud, that if there was any possible way for me to deal with her, to put her across my knee and settle her down, I would. Believe me, I would! Plus, she had desperately needed That Thing for days (due to prescription Codine for shingles), but neither of us could quite face the whole shebang. It was just too grievous.

Will he really never ever come back and take care of her? No matter how long I wait and how much I apologize or cry or change or whatever it takes?? It’s a lie, obviously, that you can accomplish whatever you want if you want it hard enough and try hard enough. Even this wish, lodged in the heart of God, will never ever be answered. Nothing can bring people back from the grave. Even people who are part of you and are absolutely indispensable and who go without any warning much, much, much too soon. I don’t want to be this person, this bereaved person whose life is over, but it feels like there isn’t anything for me in this world, nothing real.

God, do you have any ideas for me, about me? I hope you’re working on them double time. Let me tell you, I do not want to be a slave – and by that I mean I someone who snatches bits of nourishment here and there while I fulfill my “purpose” which is to help others while having nothing worthwhile for myself. I want to be the protagonist and I want a good thing! And a really good thing, the real deal, like you gave me the first time, and now, soon, before I get old and defeated. And, Lord, if you can’t send someone to look after Casey, properly, then could you kill her, too, and take her away to be with you and Marky and RP and Uncle Maurice and M, who love her. But please, don’t take her because if you did, you’d take me, the heart of me, and I’d be this tedious shell of responsibility and grown-up-ness and reasonableness and I’d never write anything worthwhile again and I’d become really invisible and there would really be no purpose.

So, OK, I see that and I don’t really want you to take Casey away. But listen: Casey is orphaned, bereaved and orphaned, and she has only this pro tem guardian – me – who can’t do anything with her. Please send her the perfect person. Please have pity on us. Stat.

In the side chapel when I was consumed in prayer/tears – or was it in the car park at terminal 7 when I was ditto? – it occurred to me, or was communicated to me, that if I want to find the real deal again, I have to be deeply honest about who I am and what my deepest longings are. I need to live the real me, not a fake me. I need to strive to be more and more honest, deeper and deeper every day. So maybe this blog can be part of that. It was through Casey that I found the last 13 years, and even though things don’t happen twice the same way (says Aslan to Lucy), Casey might be my channel of deepest truth, or one way into it.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Lucy. “And I was so pleased at finding you again. And I thought you’d let me stay. And I thought you’d come roaring in and frighten all the enemies away – like the last time. And now everything is going to be horrid.”

“It’s hard for you, little one,” said Aslan. “But things never happen the same way twice. It has been hard for us all in Narnia before now.”

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face. But there must have been magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her.

Prince Caspian, “The Return of the Lion”

About a month ago, just after I started blogging, I had an unusual experience while taking communion. I was thinking of Graham Greene’s protagonist in The Heart of the Matter, who saw communion as taking God in his mouth. When I got back to the pew, my mouth felt peculiar, like there was a mild and subtle chemical reaction going on inside it. I thought, Hey, something is happening in my mouth; maybe something will happen inside all of me. Presently, I had an unfocused, intuitive feeling that God was in fact moving pieces around in the world, working to redeem my life. I couldn’t see it yet, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to see it for a long time, but at that moment, my mouth throbbing, I felt the tremors of it and sensed a vague, undefined hope, however wispy.

chalice & paten

Why should I have felt that? Was it some projected wish generated by the increased casey activity? It was an event to start blogging, to get readers, and to find myself remembered and welcomed back by “assville.” It was an odd species of resurrection to think and write about all that again – like 14 years ago, but so severely different. I’m remembering and grieving the past (grieving the fact that it is past), and yet, in the act of writing for readers, I seem somehow also to be looking outward and forward for other connections.

That day, kneeling in the side chapel where M’s ashes are, I felt, in addition to the usual near-suicidal grief and crushing tears, a longing to have a purpose, like M had in his job; to do concrete good, and to be contained by a benevolent organization like he had been. And I was overwhelmed with tears for MW (the protagonist of my current novel), and prayed that I could fully realize him, this boy with such an over-bursting heart, and I sobbed with the pain of love for him, as for M.

I think it happened during M’s second visit to Gotham, about six weeks after his first. There was a lot of tgi during the trip, a lot of scenes, a lot of exploring what it was like to inhabit all these characters. The scenario was Mark and Casey were at “College,” a standard issue English Public School, in RP’s House with TL as the assistant housemaster. Casey was being provocative about so many things, and one I think was the issue of bedtime. I remember TL advising RP that if Casey (who at this time was 15ish and in the 5^th form – ha, what a joke!) was going to behave like a ten-year-old and not go to bed when she ought, then perhaps he should treat her that way. RP replied that she was definitely going to have a spanking for the bedtime issue, but he was more unsure about other matters with her. They discussed it more. And underneath the role of TL, I was burning all over my skin because I was so very ambivalent about that type of punishment. My line had thus far been – I only do English school discipline because it’s so unlike my own experience, and anything like my own experience is a turn-off. But here was RP announcing that an otk slippering was a perfectly natural matter of course that he was accustomed to taking when occasion demanded.

So, fast-forward, Casey got the slippering (across pyjamas), followed by a few strokes of the dorm cane unprotected (also the first time she received anything unprotected, which powerfully pushed against my/her excessive American modesty. When I was growing up, just having anyone see your underpants was enough to make you die of shame. cf. M’s English schoolboy upbringing where communal nudity was the norm, and his attitude that if anyone wanted to see his willy, it was a nice one and they could see all they wanted. Ha ha.) Long story short, this scene freaked Casey out so much that she decided to run away from College. She packed a knapsack. She was going to the airport. She was going to buy a plane ticket to Bolivia (where she’d visited once). She was escaping.

Scenes over, M and I go to sleep. In the middle of the night, though, Casey wakes up and sneaks out of the house. It was mild (for October) and wet out, that kind of warm, misty rain. The avenue outside the door was devoid of traffic, quiet, lit by yellow lamps. Casey – exhilarated – sprinted down the street, free!

Here’s where the extraordinary strangeness of playing kicks in, as anyone who’s really played will understand. At the corner: Casey out, another character in. Someone puts a quarter in the payphone (1995, ha ha), and dials a number which looks like my home number, but which is the number for College. It rings and rings, and for a while I wonder if he’ll answer it. Eventually, he picks up my ringing phone. Someone on my end asks for Mr. Prior and announces herself as Officer something. She’s found a runaway from his school, she thinks. He can come collect her at the station. Er…where is that, exactly, he asks? The officer gives helpful directions (go to x street, turn right, turn left at y street, one block up on the left). They ring off.

casey's rock (in daytime obv)

Casey, dejected, captured, makes her way to the appointed meeting point, perches on a large rock, and buries her head in her arms. Such despair. Such loneliness. Such longing.

And before too long, the footsteps of Church’s shoes are heard on the sidewalks of Gotham, and RP in his tweed jacket is walking towards her. He puts his hands in his pockets, stands near, and tells her gently to come on. She comes. They walk side by side, not touching, back to College in the mild, misting rain.

Inside, he tells her to change back into her pyjamas. She almost protests – I’m not staying! – but she doesn’t. He brings her a glass of water in the blue glass and sits next to her at the table. They talk, and she cries and cries.

What was it about that scene that made her cry so much? It was a few hours after her first otk experience, which deep down was what she needed and craved, even if she felt compelled to fight it to the point of trying to run away. Then there was the fact that RP was passing this test she’d unconsciously set for him. He’d come for her – out in the rain in the middle of the night, three blocks away to the big rock outside the “police station” [public library]. M was passing a test, too. He’d picked up a ringing telephone in a strange house in the middle of the night and answered the call to a scene – out in the rain in a foreign town, any time, anywhere, anyhow. No flinching, no hesitation, no limits on what he was prepared to play with me when summoned. And RP was handling Casey right, gently but firmly. There was no question of whacking her then, but neither was he backing away from what he’d done. I can’t really remember what he said or what she said, but I remember a lot of tears across the kitchen table, and on some level it was an admission of how much RP meant to her – and M to me. It was one episode in a long line of givings-in to that huge, drowning love.

A half-awake dreamlet: Jeremy Northam, what if he dated me? He’s tall, quite tall. Would I fit under his arm? We might be there, hanging out, but with him a star and me just me, how could we really get to know one another? Maybe, I thought, we’d play a game, but there would have to be a wager, or a penalty to keep it interesting.

Giving or receiving?

What kind of penalty? he’d ask.

I’d give him an inscrutable look: A spanking.

His surprise in return: Giving or receiving?

Me, suppressing a grin: Winner’s choice.

Him: You’re on.

Ha ha ha, which would he choose? As we played the game, there would be the other playfulness of toying with each other, sending conflicting signals about what our preference would be. Ha ha! I wonder if IRL Jeremy Northam is any fun, or just a fairly tedious interview, flippant and narcissistic as most actors are and as he seems on youtube. Yet here is a man, if gossip sites are to be believed, who got into a relationship (or marriage) with a woman fans judged unworthy of him, a woman from Canada who is perported to be a former model/callgirl? If that is not, in fact, true, then he’s 40-whatever and never been married, despite being a movie star and cute, so he must be gay or seriously screwed up.

James McAvoy

Now, James McAvoy, I’d take him in a second except he’s married and probably (to judge by his remarks) devotedly so. He’s closer to M in physique and holding pattern, even in Scottishness, certainly in playfulness. Plus, he’s a way better actor than JN. He’s the real deal. He can show up in any stupid scene or movie and turn it on its head with his performance. This is one reason why I have cast him as the seductive bully in my book.

But JN likes to cook in his Norfolk house. *sigh* It’s possible he’s worthwhile in private. He’s certainly awesome in Emma. (Love the “badly done, Emma” scene! Just needs some domestic discipline to finish it off…) However, I don’t think JN is trying very hard in most of his roles. I wonder what he was like as Daniel Day Lewis’s called-forth understudy in Hamlet. I quite fancy a taller man…

HA!!!

I think I must have grew superhero powers in my sleep cuz I convinced TL to let me tweet “on an experimental basis just during spring break.” hahahahaha. She never would have sed yes if RP was here. I have a feeling that tweeting on an experimental basis is like “just looking” at a litter of puppies. You never come home without one.

So what if I have nothing worth tweeting about? Who does? I don’t have an iphone or a phone with any text plan at all. I considered telling her I need an iphone, but even with my superpowrz I know no-way-no-how when I see it. Which is just as well. When I see people out in public snogging their phones, I think – get a room, already.

Maybe tweeting will help lift this blog out of its slough of despond. It’s a cheerful word, like the yellow walls in the study.

suive moi

3AM

The carbon monoxide detector just woke me the frack up because its battery is low. Those things are so fracking piercingly loud.

I was in the middle of a dream about accidentally outing myself to my family. In the dream, my RW father was here at the apartment (along with some other person or people). We were getting ready to go out for dinner or something, and he said that he’d meet me in the garage? Vestibule? Hall? On the way out, and there we’d discuss what had been happening (something I’d done that I shouldn’t?). He said discuss like RP, M et al used to say it, with a capital D. Except his wasn’t exactly capital, sort of a half-capital. I felt a flutter of panic and also a little excitement. The excitement (that he was maybe going to deal with casey) just outweighed the panic (that he knew about casey and tgi). Then, a minute later, he said basically we’d go to dinner after he’d given me my spanking, because then the air would be cleared and we could actually enjoy our food. Take previous emotions and ratchet them up about a thousand, with the panic part gaining ground.

We never got to a literal tgi confrontation, but later he, my sister, and I were more or less discussing it, and I was saying how I’d told her [not true RW!], but I hadn’t thought he’d find out. He was hurt and annoyed that I hadn’t told him, which he considered tantamount to lying to him. [RW he'd never think this! If he did find out, my guess is he'd just never mention it to me. Remind me to tell you about how I originally found a.s.s in 1995...] I was torn between feeling relieved and feeling that freak-out feeling that he knew; plus, who else knew?

Later, the person I’d told changed from my sister into my friend who I actually have told. [a writing friend I told in extremis of grief, a couple of days after M died, when I had zero filters and cared nothing for anything, including my own mortal life. This friend was actually unfazed (or seemed to be), bless her. Recently, when I confessed to blogging about tgi, she professed herself un-shocked and claimed that once her kids were in school she'd be "getting her phreak on" too. I think the waiting until they are in school is due to the fact that she's too fatally exhausted right now to get anything on.] So this friend was telling me the whole situation wasn’t a big deal.

Also in the dream (here’s the too much internets), I was twittering with tgi acquaintances, like Natty, Barrister, and Mija (whose tweets from the Shadow Lane event in Vegas I liked a lot), and there was a feature where you 1) shared del.ici.ous bookmarks and 2) had the equivalent of twitter wordwars, tweeting real time in teams about whatever topic you wanted and seeing which team could post the most words in a set time. I was trying to get the  hang of it all.

I must be really far gone if I dreamed my real father had decided to deal with casey and I wasn’t even squicked by it. Traditionally, when I dream that someone in my family knows about tgi, I’m freaked out and the dream takes on the quality of panicked nightmare. This time, it was only a little uncomfortable. Must be the effects of too much blogsphere and worrying about compromising myself with online exposure. But also, as I said, an unappealing sign of desperation. I really am tired of myself, and I don’t need a cranky carbon monoxide detector to show me that.

Riding, the English Public School novel I wrote about before, has turned up on Google Books (limited preview). Both volume one and volume two appear to be live now. In volume one, I quite like this scene. In volume two, you might as well go for the chapter called “Crime and Punishment“, though to be fair there’s a lot to choose from in both volumes. If your limited preview gets exhausted, you can always buy it.

Turns out not to be such a dream come true. Actually, it takes all the satisfaction out of misbehaving. I still haven’t started my skool reports (which were due yesterday), and TL was actually reduced to bribing me tonight. OK, Casey, she sez when we finish walking the dogs, if we get pizza for dinner, then will you do your homework? You should have heard the pathetic pleading in her voice. Not like the TL marky used to call the Vamp (not cuz she vamped for men, but because it seemed like she never slept). I swear she must be cracking up, except there’s nothing fun about it. So we get the pizza and she tries to tell me I can’t watch t.v. until my homework is done, and I’m like, But Miss Lincoln, you don’t want me to eat dinner in front of the computer, so I’m just going to watch like 15 minutes while I eat. She sighs and goes off somewhere, and – long story short – I watch about an hour of The Devil Wears Prada, then the phone rings twice and the next thing you know it’s too late to start homework. So I win.

Except I don’t.  My stupid homework still isn’t done, and I know I’ve been a lazy cow, and there’s no one to help me with either one. In fact, for the record, here is the sum total of my useful accomplishments today:

• gave wolfhound bi-yearly shower (harder than it sounds) and post-shower grooming
• laundry
• writing in notebook
• showed some kid how to use excel to calculate averages
• explained to another kid what dew point means
• signed up for twitter – tho’ TL says I am forbidden to Tweet and if I do, even once, I’m going to be grounded from the internet for a week – and that’s just for the first offense. To be completely truthful, I don’t put much store by her threats, but I’m not planning to tweet because the fact is I have nothing to tweet about and no one to follow me even if I did. It would just depress me.

my slipper wot RP used to employ at times

Before, when I had bad days and felt useless and unaccomplishing, RP always had something to say about it. If I wound up getting in trouble (for that or something else), it helped cope with the frustration and self-loathing. Now, there is nothing to help me cope. I’m screwing up right, left, and center and all I’ve got is TL sighing at me, looking at me sadly in a way that says, You’re only hurting yourself. Well, I know that, don’t I? But what are you going to do about it? Answer: zilch. Hurrah for modern childhood. :-<

the business end (well worn, you'll note)