By the first week of April I no longer had any idea what I might write in my journal. I felt completely stymied. I just had no further interest at all in voluntarily subjecting myself to the verbal abuse of my teacher.

 

To continue to do so made no sense to me.

 

I was reminded of the way a colleague of mine at the college had described the process by which all of us faculty were required to distribute institutional forms to our students and ask them to evaluate us:

 

"Here! Take this stick and beat me."

Ha!

 

Why should I submit to more of this? The master's most recent replies to my journal entries, I finally wrote, had been more of the same. Then from memory only and without the text of my journal in front of me to consult I simply listed the master's responses that I remembered.

 

The first:

 

"I'm not interested in stories of your day."

 

Though in the past the master had told me exactly that—he was not interested in stories of my day—he had not said so in reply to my most recent entries. Thus to my recollection of this remark the master now replied:

 

"I keep copies of student journal entries and my responses," the master said. "This response was not in your last week's journal."

 

The master's reply seemed to me—to say the least—beside the point. Did he want me to include in my journal stories of my day or not? From his previous remark I had inferred that he did not. In an effort to explain my impasse I had also restated yet another of the master's previous remarks:

 

"I'm not interested in your point of view."

 

"Nor was this response of mine in your last week's journal," the master replied.

 

Jesus!

 

I mentioned also in my journal that I had emailed Kent about the issue of verbal abuse. In reply Kent had sent me a short message about the confrontational method of Zen:

 

"We must reach the place where people's words, whether abusive or kind, do not sway us."

 

Yes.

 

"In my experience," Kent had added, "if the master sees that weakness then he will drive it from us."

 

"And what," the master inquired of me, "is your response to this?"

 

It did seem to me possible that by deliberately subjecting myself to verbal abuse I might eventually become immune to its power. I had been called a lot of names in my life, I had even written a poem about it and listed them in it, and I had become as a result a man hard to hurt.

 

Had this been the master's rationale?

 

To call me names, to belittle me and my beliefs, until I no longer cared? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words shall never hurt me. I'm rubber, you're glue, your names bounce off of me and stick on you. Those were rhymes my brother and I learned in childhood.

 

But Kent had also told me that he believed the master wanted us to stand up for ourselves and talk back and indeed the master himself had once told me that that was exactly what he hoped Dean, for example, would one day do.

 

But I'd done that—more than once. In my journal now I listed other responses I remembered from my teacher:

 

"You've done nothing but resist."

 

"Stupid."

 

"Bullshit."

 

"These three also were not in your last week's journal," the master replied.

 

I listed another of his responses:

 

"Blah blah blah."

 

The master replied that I had taken his blah blah blah out of context.

 

How funny—

I listed two more of his taunts:

 

"You don't like this, do you?"

 

"You don't like verbal harshness."

 

"This is only a small part of what I said," the master replied.

 

I listed another:

 

"You don't like conflict."

 

"This is also only a small part of what I said," the master stated.

Indeed.

 

From memory I listed two more of his sarcastic remarks:

 

"Your life is peachy keen!"

 

"How sweet!"

 

"There was more preceding each of these remarks that you've left out," the master responded.

 

I listed four more:

 

"Pollyanna."

 

"Avoidance."

 

"Denial."

 

"You're dishonest."

 

"None of these comments were in your last week's journal entry," replied the master.

 

This:

 

"How sad."

 

"This wasn't either," the master explained. "After you included your response to your son, I wrote, 'So you still won't reveal yourself to him. This is sad.'"

 

I ended my list:

 

"Chickenshit."

 

"This also was not in your last week's journal," the master replied. "The word was used in a longer response to something you said."

 

The master had then pasted into his reply his actual remarks from the preceding week.

 

"Maybe you should go back and look again," the master suggested, "and think about my responses more deeply in the context of your own comments that occasioned them."

 

Think.

 

"There is a lot here, Bob," the master continued. "I have spent a great deal of time and energy writing these comments in the hope that you would read them carefully and ponder them in relation to what you had written."

 

Think.

 

"Did you?" the master asked.

 

I had.

 

"If so, what did you learn?" he asked. "If not, why not?"

Uff da—

 

Here I was, three years later, still thinking about them.