It Isn't Incomprehension, but rather Disbelief....

Much revolving, I have called Wendy, daughter of Bill Weaver, twice in the last ten days, and tried, and tried, to get her to talk the thing out with me.  She says she likes talking with me, and she does her best to answer specific questions, like "What is 'power'?  Why can't I understand what other people mean by 'power'?  What pleasure is there in submitting to another human being? What pleasure is there in pain?  What pleasure is there in helplessness?  What pleasure is there in dominating another human being?  What pleasure is there in hurting another human being?   Why aren't Dominant/submissive's as appalled as I am at the very idea of relating to other human beings on terms of inequality?  Why isn't everybody as sickened as I am at the very notion of "punishment"? Why isn't everybody as totally sold as I am on the ideal-reality of social and moral equality as the basis of all civilized, and every other sort of, intercourse?"  But curiously, she talks nonsense back at me--non-sequiturs, specious absurdities--things, I can tell, she thinks I want to hear.  And after all, she's doing me the honor of talking to me: I can scarcely be so rude as to say, "Wendy, why are you talking out of your ass at me?"  

But at least, from the odd inconsequence, strange temporizing, and seizing on what I have just said and feeding it back to me as if I were a hopeless solipsist, I gather that Wendy is telling me something obvious, to her, about me--It isn't the focus of my mind that's wrong, it's my inability to unfocus.   Bill her father often said something like that about me.  When I asked, "Why do I feel that I'm on the outside looking in?"  she batted that right back across the net, saying, "Don't you see? That is power--always having an outside referent.  People who are in the one-up/one-down position are totally subjective, totally powerless."  Well, that makes a kind of sense.

So, being, if not "content not to know," at least not insisting on its being resolved right away, I checked out three books from the state library on the Impotent Grand Progenitor of all Modern Unreason, Michel Foucault.  Not, I hasten to say, anything written by Foucault himself, but three books about him and the tedious nonsense of his "works."  As I patiently began reading The Cambridge Companion to Foucault--well, maybe not so patiently; maybe in fact (though metaphorically) holding my nose and reading at arm's length--I came early upon this signal instance of what at first appeared "difficult" or "obscure," until I realized that it wasn't a failure of my understanding, but rather, my refusal, for cause, to accept or believe it:  "...orthodox (what a wealth of ignorant disdain in that simple adjective!) historians..have every right to refute Foucault's general claims about...the status of the mad in eighteenth-century Europe or the fundamental mentality of the Classical Age.  But even if, read as standard (once again the sly, dismissive cavil!) history, his accounts are found inaccurate, they may still be adequate to the their task of grounding a historical critique of current malpractices."  Oh?  Prithee, how is that?  What if I should say, "No, they're not.  Inaccurate accounts can 'ground' nothing adequately.  Whatever such a critique might be, it can't be called 'historical'"?  And that is what I do say.  

And of a similar nature is my "failure to understand" the "difficult notions" of Dominance/submission and Sadomasochism:  There's really nothing in it, after all, that I'm having the least trouble understanding; but rather, several superficially, imagistically connected, half-thought-through, wishful absurdities of the sort affected by snobs, cowards and scoundrels, that I can plainly and unerringly identify, and which, as easily as I draw breath, I abominate, disdain and disbelieve. Ultimately, moreover, my beautiful inner, rational, reponsible, emotional Transcendental Self is never in the least burthensome to me; never, ever, even as I approach the limits of this life (as I have done, not too long ago, when I had a nearly terminal case of bacterial pneumonia) does it fail me, inhibit me, make me wish that someone else had my "reins" in hand, or prevent my feeling what I feel with a pall of "thought, sicklied o'er."  And as for pain:

Pain is my friend.

He lets me know

What's wrong--He's what's

Wrong.  But at least

He lets me know.