Bone

mid-conversation, lights, voices, window open

Tit:  ...omething healthy and something valuable in this moment of conflict.  We can learn from...

Tat:  We can learn how to be pig-headed.  Conflict is a choice.  It is not a teachable moment because it springs from a narrowness of vision that vastly underestimates both the complexity of being and our capability of sitting with and comprehending that complexity.  

Tit:  Your philosophising is ample entertainment and yet we are still in disagreement.  An impasse has occurred.  We are face to face.  What are you going to do about it.

Tat:  The petty part of me, which I admit can blow itself up to a sizable and even threatening appendage, could engage you in this battle.  One can easily decide that this or that is a worthy bone of contention.  

Tit:  You are afraid of the conflict.

Tat:  I am afraid of being smaller than I am.  I am afraid of letting you or even forcing you to be smaller than you are.

Tit:  You are unable to sit with dissonance.  Our relationship is in jeopardy and it frightens you.

Tat:  There is, of coarse, some truth to what you say.  

Tit:  Stay with it.

Tat:  Some truth...  only some.  Stay with me.  You are the person that argues that we are beings crowded with contradictions.  When you see the contradictions causing a client to be at odds with himself/herself you encourage the client to allow the dissonance inside them to subside.  In a Whitmanesque assertion of personal complexity you ask the client to allow their being to contain both, several, all of their possible, probable and improbable selves.

Tit:  Hmmmm...  "I contain multitudes."  I see.

Tat:  Why should you ask so much less of our relationship?

Tit:  But certainly, given this complexity you speak of, the individual components of a relationship merit examination...

Tat:  This is that examination.  It does not require us to settle on an individual bone to bite and fight about until jowls dripping with marrow we both appear hydrophobic, more animal than human, foaming at the mouth.  (pause, pause)  And what for?

Tit:  So we understand not only each other's positions but the dynamic that might--out of needless repetitions, out of fear of abandonment or loss, out of unconsciousness--imperil our success in living, that might hinder our growth.

Tat:  What do I gain from persuading you that my metaphor is right?  What do I give you by believing or pretending to believe your metaphor?

Tit:  What do you mean here by metaphor?

Tat:  I mean the bone has to mean something to you.  It can't just be a bone.  Because we are not dogs, we infuse the rotting femur with a value that will justify our contentiousness to our animus... hmmm, our animuses?  animis?

Tit:  I am not sure that is the word you want...

Tat:  Perhaps not...our psyches?

Tit:  Animus has a more privileged place in our lexicon than that.  And it is interesting that you should choose that word.

Tat:  Believe me I would have chosen my words more carefully to avoid stepping so sloppily right smack dab in the  middle of your religion.

Tit:  Not a religion.

Tat:  A mega-meme then.

Tit:  But of all the words, why animus?

Tat:  Because soul and ego and essence and pneuma were already taken.