sublingua

(Be present.)

(It's past.)

(Go there now.)

From Magdalene�s diary:

�Here is the reason it is just as hard to make friends as to find lovers. In both pursuits, the goal is to convince one's target that one is a worthy person uninterested in romance. When seducing, one must not succeed too much in the second goal or the partner will delight in friendship while searching out someone else to court. When befriending, one must not try too hard to attain the second goal because one's efforts will then resemble courtship.

But I wanted you for a friend. And my goal on the fourth was to get to know you. Well, I found you didn't drink and you found that I certainly did. But there was no flirtation, the night was a triumph, and I felt safe. But you left me with BG and MV and they drink. Quite a lot without losing power.

When I said you should have stayed behind to protect me, my heart lept up when you asked "from what?" But she was there, and if she'd seen me portray her as the source of evil, she would have known I was a liar.

But now that I have you all to myself, I'll tell you that you should have protected me from the two of them. Instead of telling you my cobbled together memories of what happened, I'll tell you all the times I should have been a victim and was not. Or about all the people who are not as lucky as you, those I want for things other than friendship. Or maybe I'll tell the whole story after all.�

As the BG in the above, I suppose that I could choose any one of several ways to respond to this: anger, sadness, sympathy, guilt, laughter. I won�t choose from any of those just yet. Instead, I choose to try to understand.

When I first met Magdalene, I wasn�t quite sure what to make of her. It was in a classroom, of course. We were both students. It was a summer class that met five days a week, so there was a shortened but intense period in which I got to know her student �vibe.� In the classroom, though not particularly outspoken (and that might�ve been a function of the first class we had together, which was taught by a professor whom I love, but who was perhaps not particularly open to students� opinions), she is obviously intelligent, very deterministic, ambitious (which is not a bad thing in my book), practical. Obviously, I love it when women are confident about their abilities, so I began to value her as the bright spot in a class of dullards. Magdalene brought up dancing in one of our earliest conversations, though I don�t recall the context. I thought she was joking about having �danced,� for specific reasons that I won�t trot out here but which had to do with my own prejudices about women who would go into that line of work. (That�s not explaining it very well�or at all even�but I�m going ahead, assuming forgiveness.)

We ended up in another class together this semester, the Shakespeare class, a class I was sitting in on because I happen to be madly in love with the professor and Shakespeare. We began talking before class and I really liked her sense of humor. We traded flatteries in that way that you do when you are trying to make a new friend and just want to see (and let them know that you see) their good qualities. I wanted to see the good qualities and did. So we talked about having taken Japanese from the same teacher (ten years apart, of course), about her interest in Asian studies, about her desire to be a lawyer.

One afternoon, she mentioned dancing again, and I thought, I have to hear more about this woman�s life, so I invited her for coffee. We went for coffee and I asked rather pointed questions, which she answered unhesitatingly. She was honest and open and I thought that a terrifically mature quality for someone in their early 20�s. I probably mistook it for something that was not as Magdalene-Sublingua specific as it has turned out to be, but rather thought that, like me, she was using the events of her past as a litmus test to rid her life of the idiots who would not or could not accept her and her actions.

I thought her fabulous and that great divide opened up within me where I wanted both to keep her to myself, to keep mining our friendship in private, and also to bring all my friends along to meet her, so that everyone might see what kind of intelligent women there are just floating around out there waiting to be your friends too.

After a few weeks�of drinking together, which is something I should�ve taken into account at several points in any narrative�she revealed that she had not only been a stripper but had also worked as an "escort." This led into a discussion about views on prostitution and sex and monogamy. She�d done a lot of thinking about all of them, and had very reasoned viewpoints. Though they were often different from mine, just as often they weren�t, and I tried to begin to let go of my own prejudices and understand her life from the inside out.

But I forget sometimes, when I�m hanging out with my friends who are younger, that I�ve been 21, and 22, and 23, but they�ve never been 32. I know that there were things that I believed when I was in my early (and not so early) 20's that turned out to be wrong. I sometimes forget that, at 30, I hit this strange, intense learning curve of lessons that only come with time and which consisted of things that you could never have convinced me (when I was in my 20's) were time-dependent or even true for that matter. And I forget that these lessons are lessons that they won�t see for years. For example, there is the lesson about not really having to care too much about what 99.99% of the population thinks about you. Or the lesson that you don�t have to hide your past or be ashamed of even the most shameful things that you�ve done because those things act like a litmus test to rid your life of judgmental people who are of no use to you. Or the lesson that no one really cares too much about what you do or did because they are either so busy wondering whether you care about what they do or did or they are not interested in judging you (and it's the latter kind of people that you especially want in your life). And I put all these things down here, knowing that, if I had been 23 and read them, my knowledge of these things would be theoretical at best. I might have believed them in a highly intellectualized way, but I would never have believed that they applied to my life in any real way. But at 32, I know these things because they are part of me, part of who I am, and not because someone said them to me or because I read them in some online diary.

But this wasn�t supposed to be about me. Except that I am trying to understand Magdalene by filtering her through me, which is the only way I know how to gain any true understanding of others.

From Magdalene�s diary:

�To: WC

Re: BG

On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 06:41:22PM

+0000, [email protected] wrote:

> >It might all have been unconscious. MV was the most sober, and he got > the most out of it. But she created the situation.

> > What do you mean unconscious?

She might have unconciously exploited me as bait. In fact, that was probably it. She revealed things about me to him that would make me appealing to his Madonna/Whore complex. She encouraged me to be more than open about my past. She told him we were both on the rag. Together, we came up with a chore that he could do in return for the favor. He was to rewrite my paper, but she said "edit." Advertently or in, that caused me to insist it was a rewrite. So now we're haggling over the price. It was a perfect situation for MV: Two fallen women hormonally synchronized into filth, play whore and pimp as he lies there "drunkenly," about to submit to hideous, inexplicable sin. I don't know how much of my creation was instinctively trying to please her. I don't know how much of her pleasure was the product of MV's manipulation.

This reply is cryptic because I hate what happened and because I'm putting this message up on my diary site. When you wrote, I was just thinking that I had better put down the truth that I wasn't really victimized in the way some of my ilk are every day.�

So I wrote the narrative of what happened with Magdalene, Matthew and me, and knew, even as I tried to write with some kind of detached journalistic objectivity, that I was writing in a way that was ultimately protecting me and presenting me in the role that was characterized chiefly by a lack of responsibility, in a diminished-capacity kind of light. I was writing subjectively, and trying mostly to understand Matthew�s experience. And I rationalized putting Magdalene in the Demon Scapegoat role by thinking to myself: Well, she has a lot more experience than either me or Matthew at these kinds of sexual exploits, so she must therefore be more knowledgeable about the responsibilities and consequences that accompany them. But what was I forgetting?

I was forgetting my responsibilities to Magdalene. I was forgetting that, by relegating her to a supporting but solely responsible role, that I was revealing that I was hiding my own motivations or how others might perceive my motivations during the night in question. Reading her diary, I had to ask myself if I did do things the way Magdalene perceives my having done them? And if I didn�t think so, was I only kidding myself? Could I see my true motivations?

I didn�t think that I had introduced Magdalene to Matthew for any other reason than that I wanted him to see that there are people who have pasts that he might find shameful, but who are good people, and so you can�t judge people by their pasts. (This was all brought about by his being hyper-ashamed of his past�and maybe he should be, but see above in re: the learning curve you hit at 30). So I was, however unconsciously, putting Matthew at the center and forgetting that Magdalene might not agree to or appreciate being marginalized or �lesson-alized� this way. There was not a conscious desire on my part to have her play the Whore to my Madonna, but I can see how it could be seen this way. (But am I now only making excuses?)

I didn�t expect either that Matthew, seeing Magdalene in the role of Whore, might get the idea to exploit that or her, however unconsciously. (And he does seem to have this division of thought in which women are either to be respected or to be used.) So, really, what I�m saying is that, even though I was unconsciously marginalizing her, I didn�t expect him to do the same. (Na�ve much?) Because I know�or should have known, and know now�that what happens in his head goes through this kind of black box that I can�t see into (and that probably he can't see into either), but that sometimes reveals itself when he takes advantage of a situation without having to suffer any consequences that he chooses not to suffer. (Though I knew that often he conveniently can't or won't recognize or deal with consequences even when confronted very directly with them.) God, what does that mean? I suppose it means that I expected everyone involved to act honorably, respectfully, and responsibly, though no one involved had much of a definition of honor, respect, or responsibility.

Excerpts from a letter Magdalene sent to me the next day:

�Actually, I'm a figment of your imagination.

Which means you must be my voice. My problem to/last night was that I was not sufficiently silent and obedient to you while I was busy failing to be chaste.

I am sorry that I presumed too much simply because of his relationship with My Rebecca. I am doubly sorry for you if I attached too much meaning to his interactions with My Sublingua.

Are you still awake? Call me when you can, I'll answer.�

All of that said, however, I'll go back to the lessons of 32, which remind me that, at 23, I would have gladly been willing to accept victim status, all the while claiming not to be a victim. I would have wanted (as I do now, sometimes) to be able to play both sides of the equation, wanting to be the catalyst but also wanting to deny responsibility for any catalytic activity. That's human nature, isn't it? Or at least it is the nature of humans who haven't quite reached some level of--what?--you tell me. I want to be as sympathetic as I can be here, but I want understanding too. I want to be the Demon Who Can't Stop Seeing.

"The only way I know how to repay trust is with oral sex."--Magdalene

But in some matters regarding Magdalene, I thought I was the Demon Who Couldn�t Stop Seeing, but I was really the Demon Who Couldn�t See Anything at All, whose visions were selective at best. I was trying to see Matthew�as I think was she at some later point�but I was forgetting to look for Magdalene in all of this.

I�m sorry, Magdalene. There�s more to say about this, but it requires some thinking about before I can get it out.

�Nature�s impulses and habits were used by the world in which I grew to redeem anything, and sometimes to justify anything. It was easy to make the connection between nature and license.��Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire

retreat or surrender

More lies:
Waking Sleeping Demons II - Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011
Waking Sleeping Demons - Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
time - Friday, May. 20, 2011
- - Wednesday, Oct. 06, 2010
The Return - Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010