One aspect of the new mediation technique is that even the attempt to create a shared narrative is intentionally, through the prolonged separation of parties during the interview stage, delayed. Of course, what the parties do on their own time—as with the husband and the wife, for example—is up to them.

It occurs to me that the games of dominance and submission that were at issue around Anti-Love’s makeshift table might be framed in a similar way: as an example of biding—while a conflict is slowly, exhaustively excavated—one’s time.

SUBSTITUTIONS

I’m supposed to be reading about love, but instead I keep reading about drugs.

The kinds of drugs I’m reading about fall into the category psychedelic, a category that—like notions of truth, honesty, and fidelity in thinking about love—is both more dull in its meaning and less clear in its relevance than people think.

Psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”) tells us nothing about the nature of the particular episode of manifestation, or the dynamics of power (for example) that may have led to its occurrence. Just as truth, honesty, etc., tell us nothing about love’s possibilities while telling us everything, though dully, about its corporate lie.

S strikes me—judging by their contributions to the list—as a person who would have a non-dull understanding of both love and drugs. As for the capitalist, I can’t tell.

Did I mention the capitalist has an accent, that uncanny accent I once heard described as English of the Global Elite?

When I said I have three jobs (counting the one that has, perhaps only temporarily, disappeared), that was an oversimplification, a wish. I have tall piles of tasks—paid, unpaid, underpaid—at every moment. Some tasks are stragglers, old obligations, much overdue. I finished one of them yesterday; it involved the accidental rediscovery of another philosopher of love, better known as an anarchist of Science, or anti-Science. This rediscovery led me further off the syllabus.

I considered writing to S to suggest adding the anarchist to the Love readings. Does S know of the anarchist already? Does the capitalist? The capitalist may: he’s an internationalist and an intellectual (and must of course, I remind myself, also be other things: parent, swinger, jock). I recall that among the members of Love is a bitterly anti-academic academic, and while I am not an academic, the anarchist philosopher is, or was.

Though he, too, must of course have been other things as well.

I resist writing to S. I am trying to learn to wait.