This month, while work has stopped through no fault of my own, while I need to conserve what little funds I have (while I have more time than money), I will try to catch up; I will follow the syllabus of Love. I like to follow, but the syllabus has so many holes. In the beginning, I won’t try to plug them. I can’t make promises for the future—this being one of my failings, both in and out of love.
When I say work has stopped, I mean one-third of my work has stopped. I have three jobs, in two places, connected by a train. (I’m using the word place where before I used surround, though now neither term feels right.)
In one place, I work part-time in a café-bar that serves coffee, pie, and cheap wine in carafes. I like the job because the café-bar is slow and I can read; it’s so slow I wonder how the owner, whom I never see, covers the bills. I wonder if, after paying me and the other part-time worker, he breaks even.
I’ve done the math, and the money I earn at the café-bar just covers the expense of commuting to the other place (surround) to fulfill the obligations of my other two jobs: the expense of the train, some food and drink, and rent for the time-shared room in the corner apartment with the bodega/playground view. The job at the café-bar helps me break even.
I could just call the two places the village and the city, since that’s what they technically are.
My second job is different. My second job is as a mediator-in-training. When I get a call, I travel south to the city to assist my mentor with cases.
I can’t tell you about the cases; they’re covered by a confidentiality agreement I signed when I began my training, and which I sign again in front of each new set of clients. What I can tell you is that, to my mind, the work with my mentor is worth the hours I put in at the café-bar to support my commute. For one thing, the work is interesting; for another, it is the closest I have come to investing in my future: even at the apprentice stage, it pays the most of my three jobs.
But in the place where I am most often—in the village, where my life is manageable and where I work at the café-bar—it’s hard to come by employment as a mediator. Though sometimes working at the café-bar feels like supplemental training.
My third job, the one at which I met the capitalist, is a holdover from my former line of work. It’s a waged job, like the café-bar, but in the information sector rather than the service sector.
I don’t like my third job. I have arguments with its purpose. I would like, once my current obligations to the capitalist are complete, to cut back to just the two jobs. I have only one mouth to feed, after all.
Unfortunately, the work that has stopped through no fault of my own is not the third job, the one I argue with and want to leave behind. My mentor has vanished and isn’t returning my calls.
Now I have two jobs, but they aren’t the two jobs I want. Still, a hole in my schedule has created the opening necessary to catch up with Love.
This month, while work has stopped through no fault of my own, while I need to conserve what little funds I have (while I have more time than money), I will try to catch up; I will follow the syllabus of Love. I like to follow, but the syllabus has so many holes. In the beginning, I won’t try to plug them. I can’t make promises for the future—this being one of my failings, both in and out of love.
When I say work has stopped, I mean one-third of my work has stopped. I have three jobs, in two places, connected by a train. (I’m using the word place where before I used surround, though now neither term feels right.)
In one place, I work part-time in a café-bar that serves coffee, pie, and cheap wine in carafes. I like the job because the café-bar is slow and I can read; it’s so slow I wonder how the owner, whom I never see, covers the bills. I wonder if, after paying me and the other part-time worker, he breaks even.
I’ve done the math, and the money I earn at the café-bar just covers the expense of commuting to the other place (surround) to fulfill the obligations of my other two jobs: the expense of the train, some food and drink, and rent for the time-shared room in the corner apartment with the bodega/playground view. The job at the café-bar helps me break even.
I could just call the two places the village and the city, since that’s what they technically are.
My second job is different. My second job is as a mediator-in-training. When I get a call, I travel south to the city to assist my mentor with cases.
I can’t tell you about the cases; they’re covered by a confidentiality agreement I signed when I began my training, and which I sign again in front of each new set of clients. What I can tell you is that, to my mind, the work with my mentor is worth the hours I put in at the café-bar to support my commute. For one thing, the work is interesting; for another, it is the closest I have come to investing in my future: even at the apprentice stage, it pays the most of my three jobs.
But in the place where I am most often—in the village, where my life is manageable and where I work at the café-bar—it’s hard to come by employment as a mediator. Though sometimes working at the café-bar feels like supplemental training.
My third job, the one at which I met the capitalist, is a holdover from my former line of work. It’s a waged job, like the café-bar, but in the information sector rather than the service sector.
I don’t like my third job. I have arguments with its purpose. I would like, once my current obligations to the capitalist are complete, to cut back to just the two jobs. I have only one mouth to feed, after all.
Unfortunately, the work that has stopped through no fault of my own is not the third job, the one I argue with and want to leave behind. My mentor has vanished and isn’t returning my calls.
Now I have two jobs, but they aren’t the two jobs I want. Still, a hole in my schedule has created the opening necessary to catch up with Love.
I’ve fallen twice for philosophers. The first one studied a fascist—still does. The second one studied, still studies, forms of love.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out in classic triangulation:
—Love as Union
—Love as Valuing
—Love as Robust Concern
I recognize, from my Western philosophical formation, the triad of eros, agape, philia. I absorbed it as lust, altruism, friendship, often wondering in the intervening years how much damage that taxonomy, trivialized by time and lack of attention, has done.
The first philosopher and I never recovered from a betrayal. I succeeded, with the second, in transforming eros into philia, or finding the philia in eros—prying it out, over time. I sent him the syllabus to Love and he sent it back from his university post, annotated and marked. Love, stained already by Authority, History, Trust.
I messaged the list:
“Loves, I still haven’t met all of you in person, and I regret the demise of the IRL sessions. I did share the syllabus with my love philosopher, as requested. Annotations forthcoming. Yours, E.” This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.
We are not post-gender, but when it comes to names and pronouns—this decision predated my invitation to the group—Love tends toward the least binding. (This was explained to me as an experiment, a gesture.) On the list we are capital letters; we are all they/them.
Picture this against a backdrop of shift, a ground of categorical pause. Picture the clients: a husband and a wife, for instance. Their marriage has ended, something new has taken its place, within (provisionally, at least) the same walls. He walks around the house smiling for the first time in years. She retreats to her corner, begins the process of cleaning up and clearing out. They sleep separately, better than well. They put their arms around each other several times a day. Sometimes, for no reason but because they want to, they fuck.
(Is the story of the husband and the wife mine to tell? Does it preserve confidentiality to replace names with roles, details with abstractions? Does reducing it to gestures honor the contract, or break it?)
I jolted at S’s heart “for no reason.” Does it follow that I jolted because I wanted to?
The style of mediation I’m learning, have been learning, depends on the ability of the mediator to draw out unspoken needs from each party, to go beyond the surface narrative (“the conflict”) to find out what the right brain knows. The phrase used in the Manual is the story beneath the story.
You could say the mediator shares some traits with the therapist. According to the Argentine analyst, therapeutic treatment depends on love being present—if not mutual then at least unidirectional, from therapist to client. This love, the analyst admits, can take effort. And isn’t always possible to achieve.
Learning to draw out the stories beneath the stories told by my mentor’s clients takes effort, especially when a reaction of confusion or defensiveness is sparked within me. When confusion or defensiveness becomes apparent in my body, my task is to reorient toward the client’s story while taking note of the subject or dynamic that provoked me, on which I clearly still have work to do.
It’s only now that I’m not actively being called to the field of mediation that I’m most actively reflecting on that field, viewing it with the peculiar, intimate distance of the cartographer. (And viewing that cartographic distance with the suspicion of the skeptic.)
I don’t know if attention to this task of self-aware reorientation—if the labor it requires—falls under the category of agape. It may be just as important to eros and philia, or it may belong to a category of love still unnamed, or one named somewhere I have yet to encounter.
This category must be represented in Love’s syllabus by its holes.
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