“Do you think a psychological orientation to the world and a political orientation to the world are always at odds? I mean, are they mutually exclusive? Or are they always both present, but in different proportions, so the painful part about sorting them out is that, at the end of the day, you still have to pick one?”

“Do you?”

“Do you what?”

“Have to pick one?”

S was silent now, forgetting even to hum.

“I think you do. In the sense that, like, if you don’t eat meat and it’s the end of the world and the only thing you can find to eat is a squirrel, then you have to either eat the squirrel or not eat the squirrel. You can’t both eat and not eat the squirrel. You have to eat the squirrel or die.”

“Does it have to be a squirrel?” E was laughing.

“I don’t know if you’re allowed to make fun of me yet.” S was also laughing but was no longer touching E’s knee.

“I don’t see the analogy exactly, I mean, the squirrel thing,” E said. “But I think I’m following what you mean. Soft psychology, hard politics, soft feeling, hard ideology, right? But isn’t it a false binary? If politics is relational, then who’s relating? Psychologies. Am I too simple, to be getting stuck there? Because I do.”

E had to bring the car nearly to a stop to let a family of turkeys cross.

“Why did you invite us all to come up here?” S said.

E turned to S. “All I did was post the address to the list.”

“Maybe we’re both too simple,” S said, as E pressed on the gas.

ASPECTS OF QUESTIONING

Pablo had stepped out, and now that Marina was alone, she was overcome with a sense of unease. What the fuck was this place, really? It was one thing to voice the question with Pablo, who, while still a stranger, was comfortably legible to Marina as a type: translators, interpreters, mediators, therapists, negotiators—it was easy to recognize something familial, a common practice if not a common approach or methodological orientation (the intensity of ideological battles within these fields was in fact a testament to that mutual recognition, which Marina always felt had something to do with listening, or at least with a desire to be listening).