Verbal abuse makes women physically afraid because we don't know what the raging person will do next

May 30, 2008 11:30 pm

Dear L:

It's almost too awful to put into words, but tonight I had such an awful conversation with KD on the phone that I'm actually worried. I've double-locked my doors and put on all the lights outside, because I'm worried that KD might, in his rage, try to get into the house. It's not that he's ever done something like that before, but rather that he was so abusive, verbally, and so irrational, so impossible to speak to in ordinary, honest and direct language, and also that I know that he plans to come over here--he asked me to put a shirt that belongs to him in a bag outside so that he can pick it up. I put it in the bag and hung the bag from the outside of the fence around my front porch (he had asked me to put it on the porch, but I don't want him to come that close to me). In it I put a note that I had to rewrite three times that said:

Your behavior tonight was abusive, irrational, rude, and wholly unwarranted. I do not deserve this treatment and will not take it any more. I am angry and disgusted, frankly.

I really am beginning to think that everything that his last girlfriend said about him, and everything that he says she said about him, is true. I understand now why she wanted to get a restraining order against him. He's really frightening, really nasty, really violent in his temper. I think he must hate women deep down--and that he is really just full of himself, full of ego.

The conversation is not all that easy to reconstruct because he was so irrational--his responses to what I was trying to tell him. I had confessed that I believed that he had no real genuine interest in me, no real desire and that this was hard for me to say. Instead of hearing what I was saying and responding to it, he lashed into me, accusing me of doing things (such as dating various persons) which he knew very well I was not doing and had no interest in doing. Maybe he was drunk. I don't know.

I called a friend of mine, a man who has spent many years in Asia and who has thought about these things a lot--and described KD's words and behaviors. He said that Kevin was classically abusive, derisive of women, and driven by arrogance. KD is the kind of man who thinks that every woman wants him. Remember how he used to brag about me? He probably still does.

At any rate, he was terribly abusive and mean and nasty and I am never going to speak to him again. I want to let you know now what has happened--just in case he starts spreading terrible rumors about me or, goddess forbid, in case he comes here tonight and something awful happens. I will not answer his calls and will not come to the door, so I should be okay. But I will say that I'm worried and a little bit afraid.

My mother's legacy

Dream: I have been living here for a number of years--the same number of years that I have been teaching at XU. The rooms are on the bottom floor of a large, multi-story dormitory. It is incredibly cold during the winter because the walls do not reach all the way to the ground and sway like curtains from the top down. There is a gap of at least an inch in place between the ground and the wall. It is therefore impossible to keep the front door locked. Noise comes in, and light, and the weather. I have petitioned for a change but the institution has been very slow in responding to me.

I can't stand it for one more minute and resolve to send a scathing message (the office is closed) for the person in charge. But the phone is so decrepit that I can't pick out the right numbers to dial, and have to begin again and again. After trying to get the number correct about twenty times, I ring through but the number has been disconnected. I begin dialing a different number but see a university official of some sort outside my swinging walls and run out to grab his attention.

I bring him in and show him how terrible the conditions are, the walls that swing flimsily back and froth and do not meet the ground, the furniture that will not stay in place and keeps sliding out into the open because the floor dips towards the front; the tattered curtains, the bunk beds that are built far too high for any human being to get into, and my things all packed up in boxes. I am ready to move, but I don't yet have a new room. I am waiting on the university to give me one. "I would be happy to move just one floor above," I wail.

The official sees everything and agrees that this is a terrible place to live, far and away the worst housing in the entire institution, and asks me why it is suddenly so important to get to a new set of rooms, since I have obviously been able to stand these for a long time. "I am frightened. It isn't safe." I am worried that someone will break in and hurt me. I am also worried that they will steal my stuff. The official goes away without guaranteeing any change. I continue to hope that the institution will move me before the summer ends. I am losing my mind staying here.

Things quickly get worse. A couple who have been tormenting me return to abuse me some more. They are a couple from my department in real life, whom I know and particularly loathe because they are very popular and powerful but also very artificial. They are only nice to people who can do things for them, rude and cruel to persons whom they perceive to be beneath them in the pecking order. Each of them has been beastly to me in real life. They have both got tenure and a child. In my dream, they are much nastier.

The woman has stolen a number of items that belonged to my mother--mostly objects made of china: vases, bowls, a Della Robia relief; breakable things. Only they don't break. I have on several occasions screamed at this woman for taking what clearly does not belong to her--my mothers possessions, which she left to me. The thief is not related to my mother; she didn't even know her. She has plundered me of the very objects that I treasure the most. And she won't return them. The situation is so dire that I absolutely need to talk to someone about it. I try to reach my sister but I can't find her new phone number. I don't have any friends in town whom I could go to see. I have no friends. I am alone.

I try to steal them back, but she threatens me. If I don't allow her to keep them, she says, she will begin to murder random, innocent, and helpless people. In my rage I pick up the items one by one and smash them against the ground--on the brilliant and rational principle that what I can't have no one can have--but they will not break. They refuse to shatter no matter how wildly I throw them, no matter how hard the ground. She goes out, but threatens her terrible threat again before going.

In her absence I plot how to get my mother's things back into my possession. I complain to anyone who will listen about the unfairness of the situation. I start to car them back to my pitiful, ragged and unsafe rooms. On my way--I am distracted by sexual need. I want to fuck, to be fucked, but remain frustrated. I have been yelling at the woman, who has taken something very important of mine with her. She hurls back insults and a bloody head. "Good!" I scream. "Give me your head!" But the head is not hers. It is attached to a different body, and both belong to a poor and hard-working elf from up the street. A completely innocent man, and now his blood is all over my apartment. I am stunned, beaten. Finally. "Who was he?" I ask a similarly small, impoverished, small-faced and small-bodied elf laboring up the stairs to his house, next door to mine. "He lived up the street. Can you please call off this vendetta so that we can stop worrying about being killed? We're all panicking here." I nod my assent, numbly, dumbly, and go back into my rooms, which adjoin the couple's house.

The man returns, in a foul mood. I point to the dead body. "Yeah, I tend to lose my temper. Told you you should shut up about the stuff." He is the murderer. And I am now at home alone with him. He gets a beer from the fridge, loosens his clothes, sighs. I am beaten, terrified, silenced, passive. I leave everything that she has stolen exactly where she has put it, or where I have thrown it. If an item is out of place he will kill again and I can't have that on my conscience.

She has what I deserve, what belongs to me, my mother's legacy to me, and people will die if I seek justice.

Possibly relevant facts for interpreting this dream: my mother died when I was pregnant with B. My colleague got to have her career and her child, but I had to give up directly rearing and mothering my child in order to have my career. I am stuck in my career.

Love and Debt

I received this email from J this morning:

Thank you for your lovely phone message yesterday. I responded in kind from bed last night, but the missive mysteriously disappeared when I attempted to send it. I am still looking for it, but it remains fugitive.

You are very generous with compliments and words of appreciation. I fear I am a bit astringent in this respect. I suppose that a stubborn masculine pride gets in my way; to express gratitude is to infer need.

I wrote back:

Dear J:

Thanks for this.

I like to compliment people. Sometimes they interpret it as some sort of fishing on my part, as though my generosity were not generous, but needy. I think they are afraid to be indebted to me. To receive the gift is to become obliged. This is the logic of many cultures, at least. To acknowledge a gift--a compliment is a gift--is to admit to a need for it. And we don't like to be indebted, to need.

I see your point, though. You know that you like to be complimented.

Or is it: we imagine that somehow we can escape the emotional economy, that we somehow exist as independent generators, producers, of emotional wealth, and don't need to get what we need, to have our needs met, by exchanging, giving and taking, buying and selling, trucking, it used to be called, with one another? The beauty, the mystery of the emotional Exchange (as in the marketplace) is that the feeling of being valuable is infinitely produceable without cost, it can be generated endlessly but only through interaction (commerce is just another word for conversation and also for sex), through the give-and-take between people who honor their interconnection and commitment to one another. Doris Lessing called this the Substance-Of-We-Feeling (SWOF), but she didn't quite comprehend it as an economy.

What am I talking about when I say that our feelings of well being are generated in an economy, in exchange with one another, but not the kind of economy in which someone gains only at the expense of another? I hope to make this clear. Well-being is Love--the Substance of We Feeling--the material experience, sensation, of being loved and being able to love. First: this feeling/sensation/experience is a substance because it takes place at the atomic level, the ground of our being. Second: this feeling/sensation/experience comes about only between ourselves in communication with one another. (Yes, a hermit can experience this but she or he is going to be experiencing a relationship with some Other, either in an I-Thou relationship [note to self: read Buber and comprehend him this time] or in a different kind of mystical relationship). We can't generate the Substance of We Feeling in isolation. And we cannot live without it. Human babies die in isolation; human beings reared in profound emotional deprivation do not function well. You know this. This boils down to the simple truth at the heart of so many religious traditions: we need one another.

We often talk about good feeling, that sense of security, of self-worth, as something that ought to come from within, as though we were, each of us, independent engines of value, generating away in isolation from one another, or fountains infinitely pouring out from within ourselves light, peace and well-being. The Buddha is often mistakenly interpreted as advocating something like this--self-actualizing, automatic enlightenment that pours out of us, each one of us an burning sun. This is not entirely wrong--and I'd like to study Buddhism a lot more to grasp this better. Christians would interpret the burning sun within as the Spirit, as God, an energy source that comes from somewhere else, outside the self, who alone has value and who alone can give value. The reason that many people turn away from Christianity towards Buddhism is that they understand that well-being, worth, comes not from some extraterrestrial entity but rather from ourselves because we are in ourselves infinitely valuable. But we are infinitely valuable because we can love one another, because that is what we are, essentially, is what we can do: be loved and love one another. The Buddha understood this--his simple message is to have compassion--love--for ourselves and for one another.

The Substance of We Feeling is not simply the sense of ourselves as a collective, as an infinite and infinitely complex communion of Being in the universe, an incomprehensibly vast eco-system, but also, between ourselves as human beings, a sensation that we generate together in relation to one another. Some of us have a greater and others have a lesser store of it. I suppose I am thinking of emotional well-being as a kind of wealth that we generate, and that we give and take from one another. And this giving and taking creates a web of obligation between us, of debts that we have to one another. These debts bind us to one another.

Where does theidea of debt and our indebtedness to one another as a painful, unpleasant state of being come from? My study indicates that it derives from the Judeo-Christian interpretation of the covenant between God and Abraham and again between God and the people after the Flood--in which God commits to the people and the people commit to God. The Covenant is conceived as an economy in which there is only one source of energy, one source of value--that lies outside of the people and in God alone. So, whatever goodness that is received is to be understood as coming from God and as something that has to be repaid. Furthermore, the myth of the Fall is mixed up with this covenant so that the idea of repayment is perceived as an extended punishment.

The Parable of the Talents in the New Testament further interprets this debt as on that has to be repaid with interest, with more than what was received. If God alone is the source of value, then this is an interest that God alone can generate, but which the human being, condemned to labor throughout time, must labor to produce--and for whom? For God, the taskmaster, the overlord, the landowner, the corporate baron who sets his workers to generating profits that belong, in principle, fundamentally, to him alone (because they derive from him alone, from his ingenuity, his genius, his prior claim to all the value that is). The debt then becomes one that humanity is perpetually laboring to honor. Humanity, conceived as evil (according to John Milton, to be evil is to be in lack, in deprivation of the good, which is God) as unable to generate anything good from within themselves. They therefore continually fall short, and further into debt, from which God alone can redeem them. Debt, the state of having received a value that derives not from the creature but rather from the creator, is an experience of perpetual, miserable obligation, worthlessness, intransigence, truancy (the word truant derives from the Middle English for vagabond, idler).

Early modern English debtors went to prison. And early modern Christians frequently referred to their sojourn on earth as a period of imprisonment, or bondage, enslavement to sin from which God along could free them. Augustine spread the nasty notion that the body itself was a prison. Perverse sorts like John Donne got into the idea and begged God to fetter, batter, beat, and rape them out of themselves, emptying them of self--conceived as worthlessness, lack, absence of value--so that they could mystically unify with what they believed to be fullness, worth, an enslavement in "Christian liberty" which was the whole and utter recognition of their radical worthlessness and total indebtedness to an extraterrestial, incomprehensibly greater being. To be in debt was "good" insofar as it was a spiritual condition that involved renouncing any concept of worth in the self or in being in this life and in this body and this world. But it was also "bad" and painful because it involved acknowledging that this self and this being and this body and this world had absolutely no value. To be was to be in debt because being itself was bad.


How much easier we would all feel if we simply recognized that we are ourselves the source of the good and that the good is something that we create in relationships of love between ourselves! That we are all in debt to one another but that debt does not require that we conceive ourselves as empty of value and mere recipients of worth, but rather as agents of value and worth which we produce together in conversation and commerce with one another. When we make love to one another we generate value, the Substance of We Feeling. We also procreate, make more of ourselves, we increase and substantially expand the potential for the Substance of We Feeling, Love, to grow amongst ourselves? When we give to one another, to our beloved partners and children and families and friends and neighbors, we refine the web of generosity but also obligation between ourselves. We creates bonds, which are also debts, obligations to repay and to increase, to generate profits, Love itself, the profits and proliferations of love and well-being, when we give to and receive from one another.

So, it is good to be generous because giving generates the good; but in order to do so it has to be received in some way. And more good is generated when the recipient acknowledges the gift not necessarily by returning the favor in kind but by doing something generous in the world, either by expressing compassion for the self, which is loving but tender and vulnerable, or by expressing compassion for another. To express compassion, to have compassion, to own it, to claim it as a property, propre, proper to and of the self.

So, forgive me for pointing this out (to ask you to forgive me, of course is itself to acknowledge my obligation to you, my bond to you), but when you write that you are "astringent" with compliments and affection, don't you mean "stingy"? You hold back, you hoard, you are miserly--not because this is your true nature but because you are afraid to acknowledge your indebtedness to me and to people in general, your need for the Substance of We Feeling, for Love, that you need to live? You are forgetting that this is a profit, an increase in well-being that can only be generated in exchange, the exchange across the synapse. And when you fail to acknowledge your need and are stingy you suffer because you deprive yourself (and me) of what we both need and can create only together.

I didn't go to art class today. I didn't feel like being underground, for one, and wanted to be here, in my backyard, with myself and my cats (with whom I also exist in this is commerce, this commercial economy I'm talking about here), painting--or creating an expression of myself in the world.

Comforting arms

Spent the night at J's last night. Dark-eyed, handsome J, who cooks brilliantly, and loves his three daughters so well. This is what I love about him: I can arrive at his house trailing clouds of misery, which dissipate like fog in sunshine in his quiet, compassionate presence. He puts his arms around me. He lifts me up with stories. He makes me laugh. He reads me to sleep in bed.

How lovely it is to be with someone who cares for me. J sees my lonely, aching heart, acknowledges my terrible losses, all of my failings, all of my weaknesses, my drinking too much, my promiscuity, my heaviness, my comings and goings; he accepts it all and still sees the good in me. How could I not love this man? I do.
But there is the penis problem. He tells me that I 'm the only one who finds it inadequate. The size is fine, of course. But it never quite stiffens up to the task. It can be pushed in like an overly soft banana, but then I can't quite feel it in there. And feeling the rod of my beloved's desire for me is, well, rather necessary. I like it. It's kind of key to sexual pleasure. Am I so unusual for wanting this, for needing this?

And yet a hard man is obviously not always good to find. The night before I, weakly, had gone to bed with K, whose equipment works well enough, and whose strong hands arouse and open me adequately. Not spectacularly. I'm fond of him, frequently seduced by him, for he's as charismatic as the devil, but not loved by him. What was I looking for? Certainly not comfort. He never offers that. No, it was something more like achievement, or accomplishment. After all those weeks that we spent together while he spurned me, K had started to tell me that he couldn't get me out of his mind. I had suddenly become the necessary object of his lust. Stil, why did I care? why did I sleep with him?

What was I believing? That I would somehow be recognized, realized? As though I were nothing if not sexy, not even here, not alive if not beautiful and desirable? Is this narcissism? Vanity? Or something much more deeply rooted? What, after all, did my parents and my culture, the movies, the magazines, television shows teach me if not this--that to be worthwhile, to be acceptable, to be lovable, to be wanted, a girl/woman must be sexually attractive. We all dreamed of Jeannie. We all believed that, to love us, they would have to be Bewitched. And the attending negative, right? All women who bewitch are witches, whores, demons in disguise. Necessary but evil.

The morning after this conquest (his or mine?), I fell into the pit. I thought I have given "it" (what?) up too quickly. I knew he cared about me somewhat but didn't love me. There was no emotional connection there--I gave up looking for that intimacy with him months ago. I gave him sex, not myself. I knew now, also, that he'd still be dying to see me had he not already had me. But he is dead--this is the problem. He can't love me. He never makes me feel good. I always feel empty and sad after I've spent time with him. There's so little there there. But he's pretty, and affectionate, if also needy and predictable. I keep hoping that he's be someone else.

I wanted him to want me, to long for me. It would have been easy to continue denying him, to hold him off in a way that would have prolonged his longing. But that would have meant playing the dull game that I've never enjoyed or been very good at. And I wanted to test, to see whether or not he sincerely cared for me.

Why do we do this? Why do we sleep with men whom we know quite well don't care for us the way we want, need, and deserve to be cared for? What are we doing? It is like drowning ourselves in the same lake over and over and over again.

In his bed I had a dream that I think has something to do with this. A group, a family--two sisters, a brother, and a baby-- were traveling. They--we--had seen a film about a man who had either been a part of this group or who had insinuated his way into it. This man had murdered all of them, brutally, with a knife, in a motel room, and then framed the brother (whom he had not killed but mortally wounded) for the crime. Only after the murderer's death did the truth come out. This group WAS that group but alive again. They had seen the movie. And yet they followed all the same steps that they had followed before. They turned into the very same motel on the same empty desert road they had turned into before, checked into the same room. And he murdered them again. This time, I fought back--wrested the knife away and stabbed and stabbed at his face. In futility. He killed us all, the baby first, spraying blood all over the room. I saw it happen again and died again. He framed the brother and got away with it. Again.

Then it was over and I was on a ladder with my sister, pulling what seemed an endless amount of boxes and suitcases and loose items out of a closet. I was holding everyone up. They were waiting in the car and I had to pack up all of this stuff so that I could take it with me. I was up there on the ladder thinking about how junky it all was. Did I really need to keep two incomplete sets of electric rollers that had belonged to my mother? "Do you want one of these?" I asked my sister. I expected her to sneer at the very idea of holding on to such crap and was hoping for the excuse to chuck it. But when she enthusiastically responded in favor the sets suddenly acquired great value. I could remember my mother putting up my hair--into poofy 1950s styles that made me look so lame that no one but the weird boy with the red hair and white shoes would ask me to dance. It came to me: all these broken, worn-out and worthless things that our mother had used once--loose bobby pins, chipped cheap china that she had stored make-up in, stained house slippers--signified not the strength and vitality of our mother but rather the pitifulness of ourselves grasping after her, trying to hold onto what was irrevocably departed. It was our loss that we were commemorating and clinging to, our own pettiness, really, our smallness. We were not remembering that we already owned what she had left to us: our own selves, our lives.

What's the relationship between the first and the second dream? No idea, but for the rest of the day I was preoccupied with loss and disappointment, a sense of having diminished myself. I missed my mother and my son and arrived at J's door in desperation. He took me in without questions, fed me steak and salad, fresh corn and Spanish wine. And when we got up this morning at 5.30, he brought me coffee in bed and mused with me while the sun rose. When I got up to go, he told me that I was beautiful.

Dreaming

This entire weekend I have spent in mourning. I miss B with an intensity that I frequently experience, but only in very small doses. These past few days I've been flooded with the aching loss of him. I'm mourning the lost years.

It makes sense that I should then dream so often about his father. Last night it was again the usual story, that M and I were going to get back together. But with a twist. I was on the phone--in a giant selling-all-things store like Costo or Walmart (in which, curiously, X, a woman whose divorce and career more or less coincides with my own, but who has become a much more prolific and well-known scholar, was working)--to my sister. I was telling her that M and I had gotten engaged. "What?" she squawked at me. "You can't do that! He was horrible to you!" I wanted her to be wrong but knew she was right. What I longed to do was fall back into sleep, into the fantasy that at last my loneliness would come to an end, and that M would love and treat me kindly. My sister brought be back to the truth, that he had been incredibly cruel to me, that his family had cut me away from them and left me to die.

Considering this, I turned to him and said, "You were horrible to me. You hurt me really badly. It was terrible what you did and said to me when we were breaking up." He responded gruffly. "You deserved it." He would not apologize for hurting me. He would not acknowledge that he had hurt me.

I realized that I was still under his power, and that life with him would be like living in a blizzard. In fact, I could not see that I could not see, that I was standing on a hillside or mountain slope engulfed in snow and darkness and cold. I was dying.

My grandmother FRL, was there. She had been hoping that would return to M and find happiness with him, but now she, too, could see that I could not see, that I was still crippled--literally, and she or someone was stitching it up.

The dark clouds, the snow and ice that surrounded me, I understood, were M's malevolence against me. What I needed to do was to visualize sunlight and color; I had somehow to exercise my own power to drive the darkness away. But I was weak, and lonely, and cold. Too weak to survive. It came to me then: I had to appeal to my grandmother, who represented my entire family. She would cover me with blankets and bring me food. She could extend her trip to me (she had bought a ticket) for a few more days, long enough for me to recover from my knee injury. She would clothe me and feed me until I could walk again.

And then the clouds began to dissipate, and the sun to shine, at first wanly and intermittently, but the hills were green again and it was growing warmer. M's father was there, and he was telling me to stay off my leg for two more days--so I wouldn't be able to go to the gym. This upset me because I need to work out every day in order to keep my mind at peace. When I don't keep to my regime, as I haven't for the past two days, I seem to fall into weeping and loneliness. I begin to think--or thoughts come into my mind, and despair, and I wonder what the last seven years of sacrifice have been for. Why have I spent the last seven years in the libray, in isolation, in loneliness, separated from my only child, in whose company alone I feel whole?

But I awoke and realized that my legs were whole and that I could get my workout after all.