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.

ANOTHER SYLLABUS

The last time Anti-Love met, we were down to three.

It was brutally cold; the streets were ice. The three of us sat around the big rectangular table, frequently rising to put the kettle back on or to extract a beer from the fridge.

The reading, which was from 1980, was about the politics of consensual sadomasochism in consciously anti-patriarchal love. Around our table, imbalances of experience were revealed, then modulated. I said “according to my friends” and “theoretically.” I said “Don’t you think the expulsion of ‘the natural’ from the erotic is the very definition of freedom?” My face grew warm, an embarrassment due less to an act of disclosure than to the desire to explain.

It occurs to me I could clarify that Anti-Love meets at the café-bar where I work—after hours, which isn’t late, since we close at seven. Sometimes I forget what you know.

I miss my mentor, and I miss the mediation sessions. The style of training I received, am receiving—in principle, if my mentor hasn’t permanently disappeared—is nontraditional, an attempt to redress assumptions that have historically plagued the field: assumptions of neutrality, of objectivity of terms, assumptions that all people have equal access to their ability to tell, fluently in the language of the mediation and without fear of retribution, their story. Let alone the story beneath it.

Sometimes the worst retribution is internal; this is among the hidden threats I’m being trained to see.

It occurs to me that the syllabus for Anti-Love was designed in part to redress assumptions that are analogous to those present in the old style of mediation, which the new style is attempting to correct. Problematic assumptions that may be all too present, that may linger (and this is part of our story, if you can call this a story) in the syllabus of Love.