If I remember right, one of my friends from Reed used to say that a miracle is what happens when a person makes the decision to just pick up and move their life into something vastly different. Like just up and going to a different city. That kind of magic is the kind of thing he would call a miracle. It is a miraculous sort of thing to follow an inspiration and to pull it off.
Today,
I think that forgiveness is not about justifying, explaining, or finding ways to believe that some offense has been accepted, paid for, or can be mitigated.
I think I'd come to think of it that way, which surprises me by seeming foreign. And yet, I think I see it in my actions.
I don't like this view because it seems to me that if something is not ok, then attempts to make it so retroactively contribute to a sort of excuse-finding or rationalizing that I think is unhealthy because it begins to invalidate the significance of an offense/consequence and cast it as something other than it was. If we begin trying to say that something not ok is ok, I think that produces an unhealthiness as we succeed in confusing ourselves. It's true that there's more than one side to every story, but it's also true that there are consequences to actions. Some things, even if understandable or inevitable, are still not ok.
I was just remembering some Biblical concepts of repentance. Repentance is not about using the right words or actions in professing guilt, shame, justification, or indebtedness. Repentance is a complete 180-degree turn away from those characteristics and actions which caused an offense.
In the teachings of Jesus, when one person comes to another in a spirit of repentance, that person should be forgiven.
Forgiveness is the freedom to start from a newness and to make something different. It's a chance to learn from past mistakes, and when you come across a similar situation, to use what you know to make entirely different mistakes ;). Forgiveness doesn't mean that old things are 'ok', but it means that they don't have to get in the way of new things being possible, acceptable, and enjoyable.
I think that repentant persons are forgiven because this way, if the person has really changed direction, they are free to walk a new path, and meanwhile the old offense has not been made any less significant, just less relevant. Repentance and forgiveness together recognizes the significance of what was without obstructing what could still be. I think this sounds healthy when used with understanding.
In Chinese Humanities Lecture today,
Prof. Hyong Rhew lectured on
Song Poetry: Appetite for Olives and Nostalgia for Litchi
The title gets its name from this passage from Lun Song shi (On Song Poetry) by Miao Yue:
Tang poetry is superior in resonance, and thus is exalted. It prizes suggestive charms and nimbleness. Song poetry is superior in ideas, and thus is shrewd and intense. It prizes deep twists and penetrating thoroughness. The beauty of Tang poetry lies in words of emotion, and thus it is voluptuously rich; the beauty of Song petry lies in its forceful bones, and thus it is lean and vigorous. Tang poetry is like peonies and wild roses, flowers of lushness and rich colors; Song poetry is like plum blossoms in winter and Chrysanthemums in autumn, flowers of hidden elegance and cilled fragrance. Tang poetry is like eating litchi. With one in the mouth, the sweetness and fragrance fill between the cheeks. Song poetry is like chewing olives. Astringent at the beginning, but its aftertaste is deep and long-lasting. ...
Hyong began the lecture with a question,
"Have you ever been nostalgic about something? What is nostalgia?"
---longing for something based on a memory-- we cautiously agreed
"Memory?" He asked again, "Or SELECTIVE memory?
Partial? Incorrect? maybe a distorted form of memory...
So maybe
it's more about the present than the past."
The Tang poetic tradition preceded the Song, and, the way Hyong spoke, shadowed it in the similar way that a son aspiring to be a young man might feel overshadowed by the great name of his father. The Song tradition was a very different style, but nonetheless, Hyong argued that the Song poets were "influenced by the nostalgic memory of what SHOULD be the poetic ideal"
I thought it a curious tool to think with -
that the scribes of a different style of poetry would look back upon the previous as the ideal of what poetry should, or could, be. It's not so odd - looking back on the past as the 'good old days' is a familiar idea. I am reminded of a comment made by a friend of mine who took the class the previous year regarding how the old days are always better since it is the good which is more easily remembered and contrasted with the way things are now.
If I may project my thoughts of this lecture to a more general scale, asking an old question with some new terminology,
Are our ideals and hopes for how the future could be based only on a selectively recalled past? ... we cannot "go back" ...
I did some more thinking on paper later:
(edited)
"I'm still thinking about this idea of our ideals just being idealized selective nostalgia,
about how we can't understand or describe anything that isn't in terms of what we already know, how new experiences can only remind us of previous experiences, how our dreams of utopia will never stop becoming distopian because all we know how to do is take an old setting and push it to the limit of what we think is best. We'll never think of how to jump that gap ahead of time.
In the meantime, we'll fume over watching all our alchemy crumble heavily because we tried to label our imagined toys with the shining lie of something true and real.
All we know how to do is polish lead and try to call it a gold we've never seen.
If we ever get there,
it will be by nothing that we could have planned ahead of time."
When the hope we forgot about begins growing back,
regardless of our observation or preferences.
I don't recall the date on the page of the notebook this was lifted from
How do you know? I asked
It's like when someone writes something on the bottom of your shoe
she replied
You don't know what they wrote, but you can kind of feel it and you know it's there.
I have been wading through old notebooks.
2 years ago to the day, a younger version of myself wrote definitions for a poetry class:
Loneliness
The net
which once held crowded fish
withdraws
its sinews
unimpeded by the water
the mesh slides through
and strand by strand
the drips fall back
with no way to grasp
and no way to see beyond the waves
And the abruptly gutted sea
longs for the shadows of fishes
Ecstacy
flying past the Blue Bridge
THE SUN
is multiplied by
dynamic mosaic ripples
into thousands
of multicolored
blinding diamonds
Desire
The quivering nose
of a dog
at the end
of a leash
pulled taut
Greed
a sickness
for which the desired cure
makes plain the diagnosis
a sickness
which is, in itself,
a side effect
when the cure is ineffective
a sickness
for which there are never
enough spoonfulls of sugar
to keep the medicine
down
In the last few days, I've had the rare and remarkable opportunities to speak at length with collections of friends that I don't often see together.
The question was posed:
How would you define 'maturity'?
(This from the same guy who asked me how I would define aging, and to both his own reply was 'I'll let you know when I get there!')
(My eventual response: The process of becoming inflexible)
That night, my friends and I were speaking on an unrelated topic (It may have been about how one begins to establish mental categorizations for things [be it consonants or religions or humans], since that seemed to be the theme and variation for many of our discussions) that led to a discussion of how a person's perception of identity develops.
We remarked that from our experience, it seems that a person's early years are very influenced by their environment and molded by the kinds of people around them. As a person gets older, has more agency, and begins to wonder more about his or her identity, it is at first a more passive sort of wondering. The question Who am I, and who am I becoming? takes the attitude of a person watching and discovering who it is that the many outside forces acting upon their basic clay are making them into.
Continuing, a person may realize that they have an idea of the kind of person he or she wants to be and may perceive his or her identity as less of a lottery and more of a project. From here, the person may resist certain external events and pressures in favor of an internally-driven identity sculpting.
Independently, a friend and I realized that this might directly relate to the question posed to us earlier.
What is Maturity?
I think we agreed on the concept, so I will use my wording at the time:
the ability to mold oneself
And, by 'ability', I mean both the capability and the skill.
"As in individual development, so in the scientific group, maturity comes most surely to those who know how to wait"
-Thomas S. Kuhn, quoted in The Clash of Civilizations: An Islamicist's Critique by Mottahedeh, pp. 18,19
from The Essential Tension by Kuhn (Chicago, 1977), pp. 221-222
Discovered in the midst of reading for my reading for class
