[This file was written on March 28, 1996, hours after the divorce
verdict was announced. It incorporates text written in the days before
we went to court.]


From: gswann@mailhost.primenet.com (Greg Swann)
Subject: We Won
Cc: 
Bcc: 
X-Attachments: 

My time is short and the day was long, so this will consist
of a lot of cut and paste. Some of you saw some of this last
night; forgive me for replaying it for context. Some of you also got
news earlier tonight from Mr. Ken. Both Ken and I are guilty of
assuming you know too much about the late-breaking myopic details,
so I'll fill in what I can.

The custody evaluator's report was massively unfavorable to Ann.
Everyone expected this but Ann. She had the idea that posturing as
a good washer of dishes and wiper of noses (not wholly true IAC)
would overcome an abduction, incredible claims, her own rather
blatant character defects and the plan to alienate both children
from their father forever. A day or two ago I said to some of you:

>Dr. Joy's report is immensely unfavorable to Ann on precisely the grounds
>cited by me all over the stinkin' place. If I get nothing else out
>of this idiotic divorce, at least there's this: no secrets, no lies.

This is from the "Rationale for Recommendations" from the report, just to
give you the flavor:

"I feel that Cameron would fare best if he continues to have regular
and frequent access to both his parents. Since Mr. Swann had no desire
to follow his ex-wife and her romantic interest to Seattle, it appears
that Cameron should remain in Phoenix. If Mother chooses to leave the
state with Meredith, she will be contradicting many of the promises she
made regarding the strong sibling bond and the wonderful adjustment
these children are currently experiencing."

The custody case solely concerned Cameron, because I lost all rights
to Meredith when the Court of Appeals refused to set the paternity
order aside. Ann's position with Dr. Joy had been, "I am going to
Seattle with Meredith, with or without Cameron!" Dr. Joy's report
recommends that Cameron stay here, even if Ann chooses to move.
That is what got us to where we were last night, when I posted
(to some of you) the matter quoted between the >><<'s:

>>>>
First you have to turn around...

The night my children were abducted, I sent this swatch of text to Ken
Hooper, to Mike Arst, and to my dad. It's from Chapter 2 of Janio at a
Point, and I was making plain to them what had just happened.

        They start out wanting to have it both ways, wanting to have the
        _life_ of a human without the _identity._ They spurn the
        potency of a man, demanding instead the omnipotence of a god or
        the impotence of an animal. To achieve this mental abomination,
        they must erect and sustain a mental inversion. To erect it,
        they need to deny a premise they _know in advance_ to be true.
        And to maintain it, they need to _continue_ to deny their own
        knowledge, their own sense evidence and memory of experience.
        At full maturity, the SFE is a ravenous monster...
        
        Now, consider that _many_ people have more than one Madness...
        
        Yikes! _Now_ do you understand why they are so unhappy? Not
        quite yet...
        
        For there is one thing left to consider: what happens when a
        person has to choose between something he wants very badly and
        his Madness? This is reality's ultimate revenge on the
        Sleepwalker. Nature abuses his his body as the price of his
        error, and logic cripples his mind. But it is his own
        _personal_ identity, his _ego,_ that thrashes him when he
        chooses the zero of his Madness over the one of his spirit...
        
        Self-flagellation, self-mortification: they do have referents
        in our so modern world. They refer to Sleepwalkers... Because
        if he had to strive frantically to maintain his SFE _before_ it
        cost him anything, he must double his zeal afterward.
        
        This is where the aspect of self-punishment comes in. Each of
        them knows that he has renounced something he wants in order to
        sustain his SFE. In his private guilt, each will think of some
        specific value. But, at a deeper level, each has also renounced
        the desire to live life at its fullest that is the normal
        mental state of childhood. And self-renunciation is
        self-destruction in the very tightest sense, the dismantlement
        of the ego...
        
        Madness is self-destruction, and the Sleepwalker _knows_ it is.
        When he employs it to achieve even greater self-destruction, he
        is inflicting a grievous injury upon his ego. And he knows
        it...
        
        At this point - at every point along the line - he has a
        choice: he can go on trying to sustain a falsehood, or he can
        face up to the truth and rebuild from where he is.
        Unfortunately for the Sleepwalker, he has habituated a
        completely invalid method for dealing with unpleasant facts: he
        ignores them...
        
        So, what happens? The Sleepwalker _acknowledges_ failing his
        ideal of life by embracing his Madness still more tightly...
        Recall, one cannot react without there having been a prior
        action; one cannot pretend not to know without first knowing.
        By his reaction, the Sleepwalker _demonstrates_ that he is
        aware he has failed his values. But to admit this consciously
        would require that he admit the invalidity of his SFE. So,
        instead, he strains still harder to pretend to himself that he
        believes his false premise.
        
        And where before the SFE was an invalid means to an end thought
        to be positive, it becomes a means to an end _known_ to be
        negative. For when he loses a value for which he _yearns_ due
        to his own willful errors, the Sleepwalker concludes that he is
        _unworthy_ of his values. Before he used his Madness to obtain
        values without having to earn them. But afterward, he uses it
        to deny values to himself, to negate himself in punishment for
        having negated himself...
        
        His self-flagellation simultaneously serves two contradictory
        purposes. He punishes the self of his deeds for having failed
        the self of his ideals. And he punishes the self of his ideals
        for demanding deeds he does not want to perform. He mortifies
        his spirit with more of the poison that made it ill: he
        renounces his desires and ignores his actions...
        
        He convicts himself of attempted suicide and executes himself
        as punishment...
        
        Madness...

Tomorrow, my wife is going to have to take the witness stand and make a
choice: will she admit that she is capable of abandoning my son, or
will she remain in Arizona in order to posture as a good mother? This
is the stark relief of art, and the drama of it is compellling. Art is
not _better_ than real life, art is simply real life accelerated and
stripped bare so that we can understand it in a glance. But here is
real life accelerated and stripped bare, clear for all to see. The via
de los lobos either way, since the only way back toward the via de las
aguilas is to stop trying to steal my daughter. But even so: Yikes!

In mail to Ann last April, I said:

        You've built yourself an exquisite hell, and you'll never escape it.

Sophie's Choice, but worse: be yourself, an openly despicable creature,
or condemn yourself to fourteen years of an elaborate charade. Choose
the hell of casting your children to the beast, or cast yourself
instead. I never give villains good bits at the climax, but Rand did.
But not even Rand ever built a collision this brutal. It is impossible
to do the right thing while you persist in indulging the Madness, so
you must select among two equally horrifying disasters.

And from Chapter 9, Janio comes calling:

        And _this_ is what philosophy is _for._ The ideas we make with
        our minds are _tools_ first, the tools with which we make our
        _lives..._ They are not silly toys or priceless treasures to be
        locked up in some dusty book. No, they are the very _substance_
        of our lives, The Truth And The Glory And The Meaning And The
        Beauty And The _Light_ of our being. We are no more and no less
        than we have caused ourselves to become, and where we find
        ourselves is where we _pointed_ ourselves - or failed to.

"Redemption is egoism _in action,"_ Janio says. It is never impossible to
make it to the via de las aguilas, no matter how far you've crawled down
the via de los lobos. But first you have to turn around...

Greg Swann
<<<<


Ann did a truly amazingly awful job on the witness stand today, lying
transparently and refusing to answer the question of high drama: if
Judge Dairman says Cameron can't go to Seattle, what will you do? This
question was asked in a dozen different ways, and Ann kept refusing to
consider the possibility, couldn't think it could be possible, had
never dared to imagine, ad hemming, ad hawing, ad nauseum. She _refused_
to say what she would do, proving that art is better after all, since
there is a living mind behind art. Not ironically, at one point in the
long refusal to answer, she said: "This isn't Sophie's Choice, after all."

What, asked the universe, will you bet...?

Mr. Ken has consistently referred to their (transparent) legal strategy
as a chess game. He thought we had been "forked" in early November,
led to a place where either way we moved we were mated. I lack Ken's
ability to sustain a metaphor for months, so I escaped the trap <g>.
But today in Judge Dairman's court Ann made it clear that Cameron
is her queen piece. She put it in jeopardy and _dared_ Judge Dairman
to take it. We can only speculate as to Judge Dairman's reasoning,
but it's easy to imagine that he was repulsed that this creature would
use her child as a token in a game of legal Chicken.

In any case:

I won.

I won everything that I could have won today, and I won de_cis_ively.
I have sole (not joint) custody of Cameron, and I think that if they
_hadn't_ pulled their stupid paternity stunt, I might have sole
custody of both children. OTOH, Judge Dairman was clearly outraged
by the stupid paternity stunt, so maybe without it Ann could have
done a lot better. Dr. Joy would loved to have done joint legal/
joint physical of both, and I had no objection to that (I've been
offering it for months), so maybe that would have been the outcome.
Instead, Ann decided to use the law as a gun and shot herself in
the foot, demonstrating that in at least two cases Ayn Rand lived
and died in vain. What happens from here is anybody's guess. I'm
sure Dairman expects a deal, and that would suit me, too. I love
Cameron, and if this is as good as it gets, I can live with that.
But I love Meredith, too, and I didn't fight all this time for just
_one_ of my children. But: they could get in the Volvo tomorrow,
drive away and never come back. She said she would every day until
today in court, and she just might. Sophie did, didn't she?

This is a note drafted earlier today explaining the details of the
verdict:

>Judge Dairmain ruled from the bench as follows:
>
>We are divorced.
>
>All issues of property, debt, income-sharing arrears from me, and child
>support reimbursement from Wright are deferred to May 1.
>
>There is to be no award of attorneys fees in either direction (we
>hadn't asked for fees). [They had asked for $25,500 from me.]
>
>I am awarded sole custody of Cameron commencing at 6 pm this evening.
>
>Ann is accorded visitation every other weekend from 6 pm Friday to 6 pm
>Sunday beginning 4/5. Ann is also accorded a Wednesday night visit with
>Cameron from 4 pm to 7 pm beginning 4/3; I'm not sure if this is weekly
>or every other week.
>
>Child support from Ann to me is deferred to May 1.

No action on contempt of court for supposed arrears.

No action on contempt of court for supposed "harrassment" by the web page.
The preliminary restraining order is now void (since we're divorced), so I
doubt we'll hear any more about this ploy.

John Whalen: David Rose will talk to you now if you still want to talk to
him; evidently there are rules governing pre-trial publicity that he feared
to violate.

Gary McGath: my impression is that your silence throughout this mess
has been a complete betrayal of your (no)god-daughter. If you disagree
with this evaluation, that is your right. But if you do not, you will
never have a better opportunity than now to redeem yourself.

There is this: If you can hang in long enough, the truth will out.
If you believe you are right as to a matter of principle, and if you
dare to stand firm, you will triumph. You may lose, lose utterly.
But you may win. Either way, you will know that you have stared
tragedy in the face and said, "Do your worst. I will not kneel."
And win or lose, you will come out with your integrity intact, and
your integrity is your life's highest treasure. There is _nothing_
to be had in exchange for it. I've said all this a hundred times
before in stories and essays, and I'll say it all a thousand times
more. But right here, right now, I stand before you as living proof.

I want to thank you all for all you've done through this. Your
encouragement and support have been great. In particular, I want to
express my gratitude to Mike Arst, to my father, and to Ken Hooper.
Those three were here from the beginning, from the day _before_ the
adbuction. They've talked and listened and pondered and suggested
and have "been there" for me day and night for 15 long months.
They've also put their money where my mouth is, and not in small
amounts. And Mr. Ken especially has done a job I could never hope to
pay for, reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing, worrying
himself quite literally sick so that Mr. Greg could sleep like a
baby and make outrageous jokes at all hours of the day and night on
the telephone. I couldn't have done it without you folks, and
don't ever think I don't know it. The difference between brains
and I.Q. is gratitude, and I am very, very grateful.

My dad's in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. He's been phoning
all day, and failing to connect all day. He doesn't know what's
happened yet, but that's what he gets for taking a vacation at the
wrong moment <g>.

Cameron is here, sleeping peacefully. Seems like a nice idea...

Very Best,

Greg Swann
3/28/96