Dragons - Chapter 46 (DRAFT)

At nine-thirty I went down to the staff office to meet with Mary. She wasn’t there. At that moment, no one was there, everyone else evidently out running some aspect of the conference itself. Behind them they had left scattered banquet chairs, piles of torn cardboard boxes, and paper plates smeared with the remains of breakfast danishes. I sat down on one of the chairs and tried to gather my thoughts.

Fuck, I was tired. That was the first and overwhelming thought I remember pouring through my brain. It was only the first day of the conference and I already felt exhausted. I put my face in my hands and tried to rub the fatigue out of my eyes.

I wondered what was going to happen. The situation with Caroline, with Amy and Wes Howard; I knew it was a major problem, but at that time I didn’t have any idea what could possibly be done about it. And then, unexpectedly, almost as if I was channelling her, I felt a sudden onrush of Susan’s fury coursing through my veins. It was the fury she had shown on her return from the education conference, where the problem that was Amy and Wes Howard had first revealed itself. For an instant I was as angry as she had been, my vision clouded by her desperate and wailing cry for justice. But just as quickly as Susan’s fury came it passed, and swelling up in its place was my own all-enveloping sense of foreboding fear. Fear that something awful was bound to happen, and that no one, least of all me, could do anything to stop it.

I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty-six.

What quelled Susan’s fury and fed my own fear, I knew, was the memory of how Mary had reacted to Susan’s outrage. Where I could feel Susan’s anger, now as I did then, creeping in under my skin, raising the hair on the back of my neck, and compelling me towards some instinctive action, Mary, as she always seemed capable of being, had been simply cold, calm, and methodical. Despite Susan’s posture, a blustering dervish storming into her office, Mary, I remembered, had simply received the base information, pushed back on the accusations to test and understand them, and then decided on a direct course of action.

And what a decision it was. Susan had brought a problem named Wes Howard, but Mary had quickly and expertly turned it into a pair of problems named Amy Crawford and Caroline Abernathy. They were the ones who had acted inappropriately--disrespecting their supervisor and embarrassing the company in front of the clients it served. Susan, Mary had claimed, had no evidence of Wes’s misconduct, and therefore the smartest and safest thing to do was to discipline the employees who had been involved. Minutes later, a pair of meetings took place, Mary leaning heavily on Don Bascom to fire Amy and chew out Caroline.

I looked at my watch again. It was nine-thirty-eight.

I stood up. I was sweating. Wondering why it was so hot in the windowless room we had chosen as our staff office, I started pacing back and forth across the garish carpeting.

I saw the obvious parallel between that situation and the situation we were facing now. The scene was the same, only this time around, I realized with heart-skipping certainty, I had cast myself in the role of Susan Sanford. This time, it was me, not Susan, that had brought Mary the problem of Wes Howard and Amy Crawford. Did I really think Mary was going to do anything different this time? Why would she? The last time Wes caused trouble Mary pinned it on the involved staff. She would undoubtedly do so again. In fact, she may even gone out of her way to show me that was how she operated. What other reason was there for including me in both Amy’s termination and Caroline’s reprimand? I had no role to play in either meeting. Was that Mary’s attempt at a teachable moment? Was she coaching me? Showing me the way? Here, Alan. This is how we deal with problems around here. I felt my stomach drop to the floor as I realized that this might possibly be true.

At nine-forty-five I took out my cell phone and tried calling Mary. I listened to it ring four times and then her voicemail greeting kicked in. I hung up and tried redialing. This time it rang twice before the automated message picked up.

“Hello, this is Mary Walton. I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

I hung up again. Where was she? Now she was almost twenty minutes late, and I had to be somewhere else at ten o’clock. If she didn’t come soon, I would miss her, and then who knows when we would have another opportunity to connect.

I stopped myself short. The fear I had just been feeling helped put another idea in my head. Maybe it would be better if Mary and I did miss each other. Mary had already proven that she was not interested in solving the actual problem of Wes Howard, focusing instead on whatever was needed in order to preserve the relationship with the client. She was willing to sacrifice the careers or well being of her staff people for that objective.

Was I? A flurry of questions went racing through my mind. Weren’t there some circumstances where a client’s behavior was so egregious, so illegal, so wrong, that the right decision was to sever that relationship and protect the young and underpaid professionals who had been victimized? Was this one of those cases? And if so, did I have the wherewithal to do something about it?

Then I thought suddenly about the values project that Mary had put me in charge of, the draft statements still living unrealized on a forlorn document on my laptop. They had not yet been presented to our staff as official, Mary wanting everyone to get successfully through this conference before doing so. But I had long since committed them to memory. I was proud of them, or at least proud of the process we had used to create them, but now, some of those simple sentence fragments seemed to mock me.

Shows initiative.

Anticipates challenges.

Creatively applies resources to solve problems.

These were among the things we agreed were necessary for success in our environment, attributes it would be necessary for our staff to demonstrate. And they weren’t handed down from above, dictates from the mysterious figure in the corner office. They were developed by the very people who would need to embrace them in order to make them real. They were words on a piece of paper, of course they were, but they were also something more. Mary could pick and choose which ones she liked and which ones she didn’t, but they, in whatever combination she was comfortable with, were something larger than even her. They had a power, latent now, but there, and present, ready to be tapped when we needed them.

And now I realized with embarrassment that I had failed to live up to them. With regard to the problem that was Wes Howard, from the moment Susan had fatalistically brought it to my attention, I had done exactly the opposite of what our draft values required of me. What had I done instead? I punted. I had simply deferred the necessary decisions to Mary Walton.

I looked at my watch again. It was nine-fifty-five, and I was still all alone in our forgotten staff office.

To hell with it, and to hell with Mary Walton. I had to get myself to my ten o’clock appointment, and after that, I was determined to start taking matters into my own hands.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Thou Shalt Not Be Aware by Alice Miller

In the maternity wards of Western civilization there is little chance of consolation … The newborn infant, with his skin crying out for the ancient touch of smooth, warmth-radiating, living flesh, is wrapped in dry, lifeless cloth. He is put in a box where he is left, no matter how he weeps, in a limbo that is utterly motionless (for the first time in all his body’s experience, during the eons of it evolution or during its eternity of bliss in the womb). The only sounds he can hear are the wails of other victims of the same ineffable agony. The sound can mean nothing to him. He cries and cries; his lungs, new to air, are strained with the desperation in his heart. No one comes. Trusting in the rightness of life, as by nature he must, he does the only act he can, which is to cry on. Eventually, a timeless lifetime later, he falls asleep exhausted.

These are not Miller’s words. She is quoting an excerpt from The Continuum Concept, a work by her fellow psychotherapist Jean Liedloff. Miller uses this excerpt as a kind of interlude in her text, positioned between one chapter and the next. The excerpt continues…

He awakens in a mindless terror of the silence, the motionlessness. He screams. He is afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience. He gasps for breath and screams until his head is filled and throbbing with the sound. He screams until his chest aches, until his throat is sore. He can bear the pain no more and his sobs weaken and subside. He listens. He opens and closes his fists. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps. It is unbearable. He begins to cry again, but it is too much for his strained throat; he soon stops: He stiffens his desire-racked body and there is a shadow of relief. He waves his hands and kicks his feet. He stops, able to suffer, unable to think, unable to hope. He listens. Then he falls asleep again.

Why Miller uses the excerpt in this way -- and why I’m going to quote it in full -- is because it is both dramatically moving and central to the entire thesis of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware.

When he awakens he wets his diaper and is distracted from his torment by the event. But the pleasant feeling of wetting and the warm, damp, flowing sensation around his lower body are quickly gone. The warmth is now immobile and turning cold and clammy. He kicks his legs. Stiffens his body. Sobs. Desperate with longing, his lifeless surroundings wet and uncomfortable, he screams through his misery until it is stilled by lonely sleep.

That thesis? Be warned. It says something dark about each and every one of us, and a vast conspiracy of silence and betrayal that has been perpetrated against us.

Suddenly he is lifted; his expectations come forward for what is to be his. The wet diaper is taken away. Relief. Living hands touch his skin. His feet are lifted and a new, bone-dry, lifeless cloth is folded around his loins. In an instant it is as though the hands had never been there, nor the wet diaper. There is no conscious memory, no inkling of hope. He is in unbearable emptiness, timeless, motionless, silent, wanting, wanting. His continuum tries its emergency measures, but they are all meant for bridging short lapses in correct treatment or for summoning relief from someone, it is assumed, who will want to provide it. His continuum has no solution for this extremity. The situation is beyond its vast experience. The infant, after breathing air for only a few hours, has already reached a point of disorientation from his nature beyond the saving powers of the mighty continuum. His tenure in the womb was the last he is ever likely to know of the interrupted state of well-being in which it is his innate expectation that he will spend his lifetime. His nature is predicated upon the assumption that his mother is behaving suitably and that their motivations and consequent actions will naturally serve one another.

It is this:

It has always been taken for granted that children are responsible for what was done to them, and it has been essential that when children grow up, they not be aware of the true nature of their past. In return, they are given the right to treat their own children in the same fashion.

And in that thesis, we see how mistaken Liedloff’s little infant is.

Someone comes and lifts him deliciously through the air. He is in life. He is carried a bit too gingerly for his taste, but there is motion. Then he is in his place. All the agony he has undergone is nonexistent. He rests in the enfolding arms, and though his skin is sending no message of relief from the cloth, no news of live flesh on his flesh, his hands and mouth are reporting normal. The positive pleasure of life, which is continuum normal, is almost complete. The taste and texture of the breast are there, the warm milk is flowing into his eager mouth, there is a heartbeat, which should have been his link, his reassurance of continuity from the womb, there is movement perceptible to his dim vision. The sound of the voice is right, too. There is only the cloth and the smell (his mother uses cologne) that leave something missing. He sucks and when he feels full and rosy, dozes off.

It is a radical thesis, especially in the world of psychotherapy, because it is in direct opposition to Freud, who would claim that Miller’s thesis, that children are responsible for what was done to them, is true (in fact, is the very basis of psychoanalysis) and not the sociological fraud that Miller claims that it is.

Freud called it his drive theory, which includes his concepts of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. It is something he derived from his discussions and examinations of patients suffering from hysteria.

In his lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” published in 1896, Freud reports with great clarity, directness, and persuasiveness (at least for the reader of today) that in all eighteen cases of hysterical illness treated by him (six men and twelve women) he discovered in the course of the analytic work repression of sexual abuse by an adult or by an older sibling who had in turn previously been abused by adults. None of the eighteen patients was aware of this fact when treatment began, and Freud contends that their symptoms would not have appeared if these early memories had remained conscious. He is describing facts whose emergence came as a surprise even to him, and as a curious scientist of integrity he could hardly ignore this evidence; he seeks his audience’s understanding in spite of the moral indignation he feels himself. Sometimes one has the impression that he is trying to convince himself as well as his audience, because the facts in question strike him as monstrous. How was someone at the turn of the century who had learned to regard all adults as respected authority figures and who could not yet have any inkling of the knowledge we have today of ambivalence, the crucial importance of early childhood experiences, and the power of the repetition compulsion in the adult’s unconscious come to terms with such a discovery? Understandably, he was horrified and was inclined to pass moral judgment, something we as analysts of adults who abuse their children can perhaps not avoid until we have been able to experience with them the inner distress that goes with these acts. But Freud obviously had no knowledge at that point of the later ramifications of his finding, and he therefore had no choice but to consider these adults perverse. Since they were parents and therefore had to be respected at any cost, Freud was continually tempted not to believe what he discovered about his patients.

In other words, we are taught to trust authority, and under that banner authority abuses us, again and again. In the case of parents and children, that means for generations without end.

When he awakens he is in hell. No memory, no hope, no thought can bring the comfort of his visit to his mother into this bleak purgatory. Hours pass and days and nights. He screams, tires, sleeps. He wakes and wets his diaper. By now there is no pleasure in the act. No sooner is the pleasure of relief prompted by his innards than it is replaced, as the hot, acid urine touches his by-now chafed body, by a searing crescendo of pain. He screams. His exhausted lungs must scream to override the fiery stinging. He screams until the pain and screaming use him up before he falls asleep.

At his not unusual hospital the busy nurses change all diapers on schedule, whether they are dry, wet, or long wet, and send infants home chafed raw, to be healed by someone who has time for such things.

Miller will argue that from this first and simple inability to place blame on the authority figures that committed the abuse, the entirety of Freud’s drive theory was derived. When offered up to the psychological community, it was devoured in total, no student, like the innocent children of abuse, able to interpret the teachings of their betters outside any other context. It was true because those in authority said that it was. Miller calls this “poisonous pedagogy,” and much of her work is dedicated to illuminating its debilitating effects.

If it is an axiom of psychoanalytic training that everything that happened to the patient in childhood was the result of his drive conflicts, then sooner or later the patient must be taught to regard himself as wicked, destructive, megalomanic, or homosexual without understanding the reasons for his particular behavior. For those narcissistic traumas -- humiliation, rejection, mistreatment -- inflicted on the child and traditionally considered a normal part of child-rearing are not touched upon and thus cannot be experienced by the patient. Yet it is only by addressing these concrete situations that we can help the patient acknowledge his feelings of rage, hatred, indignation, and eventually, grief.

By the time he is taken to his mother’s home (surely it cannot be called his) he is well versed in the character of life. On a preconscious plane that will qualify all his further impressions, as it is qualified by them, he knows life to be unspeakably lonely, unresponsive to his signals, and full of pain.

But he has not given up. His vital forces will try forever to reinstate their balances, as long as there is life.

For some patients, this poisonous pedagogy becomes downright sadistic, something to be rebelled against rather than to buckle under and accept. Miller documents one such patient at some length.

In [this patient’s] report, the tragic traces of “poisonous pedagogy” are particularly striking. They can be seen not only in the approaches of the psychoanalytic training institutes, which often appear to have a veritable horror of originality, but, most tragically, in the years of wasted effort on the part of the patient and both [of her] analysts, all of whom were prevented from gaining access to the narcissistic traumas of early childhood because they were inhibited by the unspoken commandment to spare the parents and blame the child. For this reason, what [the patient] reports about her childhood, her parents, and her brothers remains sketchy and devoid of strong feelings … Now all [this patient’s] outrage is directed against psychoanalysis and her second analyst, who did not understand her. Would this woman have been able to struggle against her feelings for four years and bear such torment if she had not been brought up to ignore her inner voice and keep a stiff upper lip? The adults who figured in her early childhood are spared her rage, however. This is the rule, for the more or less conscious goal of adults in rearing infants is to make sure they will never find out later in life that they were trained not to become aware of how they were manipulated. Without “poisonous pedagogy” there would be no “poisonous psychoanalysis,” for patients would react negatively from the very beginning if they were misunderstood, ignored, not listened to, or belittled in order to be forced into a Procrustean bed of theories.

It is a vicious cycle. We are raised to ignore the abuse we have suffered, and when it causes a psychosis and we seek help, we are told that we are to blame for that abuse -- by someone who him or herself has been raised to ignore the abuse he or she has suffered, and taught to blame those abused for the abuse.

Home is essentially indistinguishable from the maternity ward except for the chafing. The infant’s waking hours are passed in yearning, wanting, and interminable waiting for rightness to replace the silent void. For a few minutes a day, his longing is suspended and his terrible skin-crawling need to be touched, to be held and moved about, is relieved. His mother is one who, after much thought, has decided to allow him access to her breast. She loves him with a tenderness she has never known before. At first, it is hard for her to put him down after his feeding, especially because he cries so desperately when she does. But she is convinced that she must, for her mother has told her (and she must know) that if she gives in to him now he will be spoiled and cause trouble later. She wants to do everything right; she feels for a moment that the little life she holds in her arms is more important than anything else on earth.

Because it is exactly this cycle -- the broken breaking the innocent because they are broken -- that Miller is primarily railing against.

Just as educators are convinced that their pedagogical measures are necessary for the child’s present and future well-being (and not for fulfilling their own needs), many psychotherapists honestly believe that their manipulative techniques are of life-sustaining importance for the patient and are not aware that they serve as a sometimes grandiose way of defending themselves against their own insecurity.

And it is this process that we especially see in the lengthy Liedloff excerpt -- all of it so much more painfully obvious because of how innocent a newborn baby has to be.

She sighs, and puts him gently in his crib, which is decorated with yellow ducklings and matches his whole room. She has worked hard to furnish it with fluffy curtains, a rug in the shape of a giant panda, white dresser, Bathinette and changing table equipped with powder, oil, soap, shampoo, and hairbrush, all made and packed in colors especially for babies. There are pictures on the wall of baby animals dressed as people. The chest of drawers is full of little undershirts, slumbersuits, bootees, caps, mittens, and diapers. There is a toy woolly lamb stood at a beguiling angle on top, and a vase of flowers -- which have been cut off from their roots, for his mother also “loves” flowers.

Because of course we are all innocent as babies and Freud’s drive theory is in error.

For if a child in the so-called phallic phase really had biologically determined, naturally sexual needs directed toward the parent of the opposite sex, there would not be any traumatic consequences if these desires were satisfied; then it would not be necessary to repress the experience of these needs so deeply that years of analysis are later required to uncover it. After all, how can a child have any knowledge of incestuous guilt? He or she comes to suspect it only because of secretive behavior on the part of adults. Only the adult knows there is an incest taboo, and only from the adult’s attitude does the child sense that something forbidden is being done to him. His own attitude is at bottom completely free of guilt. Why, then, should he experience any “drive conflicts”? The child seeks adults’ love because he cannot live without it; he meets all their demands to the extent that he is able -- for the sake of survival. He loves his parents, needs their presence, concern, and affection, and will learn to fit his attempt to win these indispensable treasures into the framework provided him by his parents from birth (e.g., by having his genitals massaged, tickled, or sucked, or by having orifices such as mouth and anus used for coitus-like purposes) may under certain circumstances come to regard this type of activity as love because he knows no other form of it. But to brand the child’s reactive desires as blameworthy, as implied in the drive theory, is undeniably a remnant of the ideology of “poisonous pedagogy,” which enables adults to delegate their guilt feelings to the child with the aid of various theories.

This, again, shows the value of the Liedloff excerpt. As adults, we view children through our own lens, never understanding theirs, nor how fundamentally different it is from our own, nor how our own oppressive viewpoint is what changes children into adults. Corruption preys on the innocent, not because it desires to befoul the innocent, but because it has no concrete way to see or understand the innocence that comes before it. Corruption corrupts the innocent, and blames the innocent for that corruption.

With that frame in mind, let’s finish with Liedloff before moving onto the next point.

She straightens baby’s undershirt and covers him with an embroidered sheet and a blanket bearing his initials. She notes them with satisfaction. Nothing has been spared in perfecting the baby’s room, though she and her young husband cannot yet afford all the furniture they have planned for the rest of the house. She bends to kiss the infant’s silky cheek and moves toward the door as the first agonized shriek shakes his body.

Softly, she closes the door. She has declared war upon him. Her will must prevail over his. Through the door she hears what sounds like someone being tortured. Her continuum recognizes it as such. Nature does not make clear signals that someone is being tortured unless it is the case. It is precisely as serious as it sounds.

She hesitates, her heart pulled toward him, but resists and goes on her way. He has just been changed and fed. She is sure he does not really need anything, therefore, and she lets him weep until he is exhausted.

He awakens and cries again. His mother looks in at the door to ascertain that he is in place; softly, so as not to awaken in him any false hope of attention, she shuts the door again. She hurries to the kitchen, where she is working, and leaves that door open so that she can hear the baby, in case “anything happens to him.”

The infant’s screams fade to quavering wails. As no response is forthcoming, the motive power of the signal loses itself in the confusion of barren emptiness where the relief ought, long since, to have arrived. He looks about. There is a wall beyond the bars of his crib. The light is dim. He cannot turn himself over. He sees only the bars, immobile, and the wall. He hears meaningless sounds in a distant world. There is no sound near him. He looks at the wall until his eyes close. When they open again, the bars and the wall are exactly as before, but the light is dimmer.

How Common Is The Sexual Abuse of Children?

As I read this book, this is the question that kept occurring to me, over and over again. I would read passages like this one...

It is quite natural for children to awaken sexual desire in the adult, because they tend to be beautiful, cuddly, affectionate, and because they admire the adult so much, probably more than anyone else does. If adults have a satisfying sex life with another adult, they have no need to act upon the desires aroused by the child or to ward them off. But if they feel themselves humiliated and not taken seriously by their partner, if their own needs were never allowed to unfold or mature, or if they were themselves seduced and violated as children, then these adults will show a strong tendency to impose their sexual needs on the child.

...and wonder, how common is this? And how much does it explain the dysfunction in our world? It seems clear that these cycles of abuse -- an abused child, grown to adulthood, abusing children, who grow into adults that abuse children…

Physical attraction and affection are always a part of love, and this has nothing to do with abuse. But parents who have had to repress the fact of having been abused and who have never consciously relived it can become very confused in this regard where their children are concerned. They will either suppress their genuine feelings of affection for fear of seducing their child or they will unconsciously do the same to the child that was done to them, without having any idea of how much harm they are causing, since they themselves always had to distance themselves from their suffering. How can these parents be helped? There is probably no possibility of curing their compulsion to repeat without extensive therapy. It is indeed difficult for people who as children were the property of their parents to realize when they are treating their own children like their property. Nevertheless, I see some hope if people become sensitive to the question, if they become conscious of these connections. This assumes that a person can at least admit that his or her parents were not gods or angels but often deprived and emotionally very isolated people for whom their child was the sole permissible object for the discharge of their affect; these parents, moreover, found justification for their behavior in various ideologies, including pedagogy and, not least of all, even psychoanalysis with its theory of “infantile sexuality.”

...but how common are these cycles? For how many of our friends and neighbors is this their sad and tragic fate?

Miller’s book never explicitly tells me. Near the end I stumbled across an uncited reference that “eighty percent of all female drug addicts and seventy percent of all prostitutes were sexually abused as children”, but that’s all the information it offers. Turning to Wikipedia, I find that the estimates for the sexual abuse of children in the United States vary widely. “A literature review of 23 studies found rates of 3% to 37% for males and 8% to 71% for females, which produced an average of 17% for boys and 28% for girls, while a statistical analysis based on 16 cross-sectional studies estimated the rate to be 7.2% for males and 14.5% for females.

Let’s go with the lowest numbers: 7% of males and 14% of females were victims of sexual abuse as children. With approximately 152 million males and 157 million females in the U.S. population (according to the 2010 census), that means that 10.6 million males and 22 million females have been the victims of sexual abuse as children. Put another way, for every 10 people you know, one of them was sexually abused as a child.

I don’t know that there is any other word for that than horrific. And it leads directly back to my previous speculation. When we’re confronted with dysfunction in our society, it seems reasonable to attribute some significant portion of it to the sexual abuse of children.

To Be Accursed

Miller’s last chapter, “Literature: Franz Kafka’s Suffering,” is a fascinating examination of several writers, Kafka among them, who, based on their writings, Miller suspects of having been sexually or otherwise abused as children. In this examination, Miller comes to the rational but troubling conclusion that their art was in many ways dependent on the abuse that they suffered.

There was much suffering in the childhood of all great writers because they experienced the wounds, humiliations, fears, and feelings of abandonment that are an inevitable part of that period of life much more strongly and intensely than others. By storing up the pain they suffered, by making it an essential part of themselves and of their later imaginative life and then expressing it in transfigured form, they guarantee the survival of their painful feelings.

My favorite example is the following story Miller tells about a young Gustave Flaubert.

At the age of fifteen, Gustave Flaubert wrote a story that he entitled “Quidquid volueris.” The hero of the tale is sixteen-year-old Djalioh, the offspring of an orangutan and a slave girl, a union that was planned and brought about in Brazil by Monsieur Paul, a young and ambitious scientist “with a cold heart.” Monsieur Paul takes the child and raises him, but he is unable to teach him human speech. Fifteen years later, when Paul returns to his native France to marry Adele, he brings Djalioh with him. The boy loves Adele, who regards him only as a poor, feeble-minded creature or a good-natured ape. Here are the final scenes of the story in the words of fifteen-year-old Flaubert:

It was in one of these city mansions that Djalioh lived with Monsieur Paul and his wife, and for almost two years much had been taking place in his soul, and the tears he had held back had hollowed out a deep cavity therein.

One morning -- it was that day I’m telling you about -- he got up and went into the garden, where a baby about a year old, wrapped in fine silks and linens, embroideries, and colorful ribbons, was asleep in a cradle whose top was gilded by the rays of the sun.

The child’s nurse was not there. Djalioh looked all around, approached the cradle, going right up to it, and quickly pulled back the covers; then he stood there a while -- looking at this poor, drowsy, sleeping creature, its chubby hands, its rounded contours, its white neck, its little fingernails. Finally he seized it with both hands, swung it round in the air over his head and dashed it with all his might to the ground, which reverberated with the impact. The baby cried out, and its brains spurted out ten paces away next to a gilly-flower.

Djalioh opened his pale lips and gave a forced laugh that was cold and terrible like the laughter of the dead. He immediately went to the house, up the staircase, opened the door to the dining room, closed it again, took the key to that room as well as to the hall door, and -- entering the vestibule of the salon -- threw them both out the window into the street. Finally, he entered the salon, softly, on tiptoe, and once there he double-locked the door behind him. What little light the carefully closed shutters allowed to penetrate into the room fell dimly upon him.

Djalioh stood still and heard only the sound of the pages Adele’s white hand was turning…

Finally, he approached the young woman and sat down beside her. She trembled suddenly and turned her troubled blue eyes to him. Her flowing dressing-gown of white chiffon was open at the neck, and her legs were crossed in such a way that in spite of her gown one could see the contours of her thighs. Surrounding her was an intoxicating perfume; her white gloves lying on the armchair with her sash, her handkerchief, her scarf -- all that had such a delicate and distinctive scent that Djalioh’s large nostrils opened wide to take in the aroma…

“What do you want of me?” she asked in fright as soon as she saw him.

And a long silence followed; he didn’t answer and fixed his devouring gaze on her. Then, drawing closer and closer, he seized her around the waist with both hands and pressed on her neck a burning kiss that seemed to stab Adele like the bite of a serpent. He saw her flesh redden and quiver.

“Oh! I’m going to call for help,” she cried in fright. “Help! Help! Oh! The monster!” she added, looking at him.

Djalioh did not respond, he only stammered and struck his head in rage. What! Not to be able to say a word to her! Not to be able to enumerate his torments and his sorrows and not to have anything to offer her but the tears of an animal and the sighs of a monster! And then to be thrust aside like a reptile! To be hated by what one loves and to be aware of the impossibility of saying anything! To be accursed and not be able to blaspheme!

It’s turgid, but powerful prose. It seems to sum up all that Miller and even Liedloff have to say about the impossible position and perspective of the abused child. To be hated by what one loves and to be aware of the impossibility of saying anything! To be accursed and not be able to blaspheme!

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 45 (DRAFT)

The exhibit hall opened without a hitch, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Angie Ferguson. When I found her, thirty minutes before show opening, standing astride the main aisle with a walkie-talkie in each hand, periodically barking orders into one or the other, her blocky frame surrounded by a swirl of electricians, independent construction contractors, and booth personnel, I have to admit I had my doubts. There were still crates to be removed from the floor, aisle carpet to be put down, and trash to be picked up. I didn’t see how it could all get done in thirty minutes, and waited impatiently for Angie to complete one of her seemingly continuous radio dialogues to express that very concern.

Angie could tell I was anxious and held up one of her fingers in the hand that was holding the walkie she wasn’t currently talking into.

“Booth five-zero-zero-one, Earl,” she was saying into the other one. “Right at the front of the hall. They’ve been waiting for internet access since six last night. Get someone over there and get it taken care of.”

I tried to say something, but Angie wagged her silencing finger at me.

The walkie-talkie next to her face crackled, and then Earl’s voice came back. “Okay. Booth five-zero-zero-one.”

“And then get a scissor lift over to booth seven-five-one-five. The sign your guys hung above their booth is crooked and they want it fixed.”

Crackle. “Seven-five-one-five. Got it.”

“And then get all the empty crates off the show floor. There’s a whole pile of them back by the south restrooms. We can’t start dropping aisle carpet until all the forklifts are off the floor.”

This time the crackle was slower in coming, but I knew better than to interrupt. Angie and I stood looking at each other, waiting for Earl to acknowledge.

Crackle. “Copy that.”

“What is it?” Angie asked me suddenly.

“Are we going to be ready?” I asked, popping my arm out to look at my wristwatch. “We’re supposed to open the hall in twenty-six minutes.

“Yes, no problem,” Angie replied matter-of-factly, handing me one of the walkie-talkies she was holding. “Go man the front entrance. Keep the ropes up until I signal you.”

I took the black Motorola from her, looking it over and trying to remember the insufficient orientation I had received in its use.

I had no time to ask. Before I could say another word, an exhibitor inserted herself between me and Angie and started complaining loudly about malfunctioning lights in her booth.

“Earl,” Angie said into her remaining radio, as she began moving purposefully in the direction of the frustrated exhibitor’s booth. “Have an electrician meet me in booth two-six-eight-two ASAP. Those lights are blinking out again.”

If Earl acknowledged that last command, I never knew, since Angie had already moved out of my earshot. Earl, I knew, was our service representative at the company we had hired to set-up, coordinate, and tear down our exhibit hall. He was a hard-working man, someone with a thick Chicago accent, who frequently took his clients out for drinks and who always looked like he had slept in his clothes. Where he was, and how he was coordinating all the things Angie demanded of him over her walkie-talkies; I didn’t have any idea.

At the front entrance of the exhibit hall, a thin rope line had been set up, something to keep the gathering masses at bay while the sense-overwhelming experience of our exhibit hall was prepared for them. And the masses were starting to gather, at least a hundred milling about when I arrived at T minus eighteen minutes. A line of three hired security guards stood equally spaced immediately behind the rope line, guards who had let me pass minutes before on the evidence of my staff badge, but who didn’t know me from Adam. I waved my newly-acquired walkie-talkie at one of them as a symbol of my authority.

“Angie’s going to call me when it’s okay to open the hall,” I said.

The person I was speaking to simply nodded, his droopy eyes giving the appearance that he hadn’t slept in days. His uniform pants were too long for his legs and his coat was too big in the shoulders.

I looked at the other two in turn, repeating myself, waiting for someone to show a glimmer of recognition. I was not so rewarded, so I simply took my place among them. When they all silently adjusted their positions so that the four of us were equally spaced across the rope line, however, I couldn’t help but feel like I had been accepted, a little like an extra outfielder in the peewee leagues.

When they started rolling out the bright red aisle carpet, we had no more than five minutes to spare, and the crowd on the other side of the rope line had grown at least five fold. They were all pressed tightly against each other, forming a concentrated mass of humanity. Tall and short, fat and thin; they were there in strength. But they were, I realized, almost entirely old, or at least older than me, and all dressed in the same business attire one would wear to an interview. The men among them all looked like Paul Webster and the women all looked like Eleanor Rumford, certainly not in their skin colors and hairdos, but most certainly in their age, attire, and bodily presence. They were professionals, well established in their careers, and yet here they stood, willingly packed together like teenagers trying to get into a rock concert.

One of them met my eyes. It was a woman, the lanyard of her name badge hanging crookedly across her breast, and three bags -- a purse, a briefcase, and one of the throwaway convention bags we gave to each attendee -- hanging awkwardly from straps on her shoulders. She was pressed between two men, neither of them seemingly aware of her presence. For a moment a look of discomfort passed over her face, and then her eyes seemed to drift back into a kind of willing and learned obedience, like a beast of burden waiting for its turn at the feeding trough.

My walkie-talkie crackled. “This is Angie calling Alan.”

I looked at my watch. It was one minute before nine o’clock. I pushed one of the buttons on the walkie-talkie and waited for it to beep.

“Go ahead, Angie.”

Crackle. “You can open the hall now.”

“Ten-four,” I said, and without having to tell them the three security guards moved forward to unhook and remove the restraining rope. In an instant the crowd began flowing into the exhibit hall, exactly, I thought, like Christmas shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, anxious to get their hands and their credit cards on the shiny baubles that the witch doctors in a hundred different marketing departments had been working all year to convince they could not live without. I stood like an unyielding boulder in a stream, the people flowing all around me. At one point I even closed my eyes, and focused solely on the breezy sensation of their passing.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Ritual America by Adam Parfrey and Craig Heimbichner

This was a frustrating read.

The subtitle has much to recommend (at least to me): Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society. It’s a subject I know very little about, but when I stumbled across a reference to it in one of the podcasts I listen to, it sounded interesting, so I ordered it.

My overwhelming problem with it is that it is written as if the reader is already familiar with the subject. If you’re new to the subject and looking for an introductory overview, this is not the book for you. I was looking for some kind of true history of secret societies in America -- something told chronologically and with all the important turning points contextualized in their broader significance. What I got was a lot of jumbled excerpts and vignettes, all loosely cohering around the subtitle’s subject, but none of it forming any kind of narrative or drawing any conclusions.

The best example has got to be a chapter called Raising Tubal-Cain in which Tubal-Cain is never mentioned. I kind of know who the Bible says Tubal-Cain was, but I have to think that I’m relatively unique in that regard. Your average reader is not going to know who Tubal-Cain is, and even I came away with no understanding of why his name was used in the chapter’s title.

In the end, I had to come up with my own conclusion. Here it is. The secret societies described in this book all sound like either secular religions that in some cases supported and in other cases opposed the sectarian religions of their time, or they sound like social clubs arranged for networking and career advancement. They all incorporate the trappings of mysticism, but those trappings are exactly and only that -- trappings -- and it is those trappings that attract either the attention or the ire of outsiders.

I don’t see it going any deeper than that.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.