Knowing Not

“Forgive them Father, they know not…” Lord forgive me, I have carried this around as the model for forgiveness for, well forever. Somebody hurts you and you see beneficently into their limits and let go of your frustration with their failings. Friend late to lunch, husband says something insensitive, stranger on the street scowls when you walk by, you’re disappointed in any way? Well, you understand don’t you? You don’t even need to bring it up, because, after all they are doing their best. Plus, aren’t you the generous one, to overlook shortcomings like that?

I have an ancient list of the pitfalls of reading too much. It includes, for example, an alertness to situational irony that gives rise to superstitious behavior. In books, the person who finally, after a long struggle, recovers from hypochondria is liable to have a lump emerge under her fingers in the shower that very evening, so I imagine my hypochondria keeps me safe. One becomes susceptible to apophenia, seeing symbols and connections everywhere, because, after all that is how books work. There is always forebodings of foreshadowing, thinking that we must be getting along to Act III now, and remembering the gun introduced in Act I. A literary cough is never, ever mere allergies.

The worst, most insidious pitfall of reading incessantly, though is thinking we have access to the interior lives of anyone else. I do writing exercises with Sarah where I tell about the same encounter from the points of view of four different characters, and each one is vividly real to me, I know, I think, exactly how it feels to be in that position, even though the knowledge is in contradiction to what I knew writing it from the other point of view.

So I imagine that I can write out the — I don’t want to say disagreement, but, um, working out of differences, maybe? with my husband from his point of view. I have lived with him fourteen years, know him better than I know anyone but myself, right? We seem to have had the same conversation again and again and again, theme and variations, so it is not hard to guess at his point of view. To play out the whole chess game, one move after another, based on how it has been played in the past, so you don’t even bother pulling the chess board out. Except. I am not allowed behind the curtain. Everything I know, everything he has told me, is what has been brought from behind the curtain, made exterior; the report of interior states is always an exterior act.

I don’t know if I even know what’s happening behind my own curtains.

So if I “forgive” with this little patronizing nod to his limitations, I lapse into the sort of illusion of superiority that has been my lifelong enemy The insecure superiority emerges from behind the curtain and (I imagine) appears to others as aloofness, generating a whole new string of disappointments, apartnesses. I think I have taken on all disappointment, all risk of rejection and hurt with this little reassuring nod to the self, surely, this doesn’t reflect on my lovability, therefore it’s the other person’s limitation. Which it could be? But there’s the terror of making the leap, of asking for what I need, of acknowledging the hurt, because if I say “it hurts me when you…” if I let the other person know I am hurt and take away the limitation that existed that he could not know he was hurting me, then if I am hurt again, maybe my amour propre will be more vulnerable? That the hurt was done knowingly? Maybe. This is one of those fears I open only very tentatively, gingerly. I have grown unfortunately attached the image of my magnanimous self who understands and forgives.

[What surprises me, though it maybe shouldn't, is that self-knowledge is subject to Russell's paradox, it tries to be a set containing sets that are not members of themselves. I am watching myself watching myself and the curtain is the only way I can explain the limits of everything I understand about myself and others. I am also profoundly grateful for the mystery, for existing as more than a set of pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed stimuli. If there were ever grace to meditate upon, it might start right there?]

But I think that, barring an omniscience I wasn’t built to bear, authentic forgiveness for me looks more like “I acknowledge my own hurt and I choose to put it to rest instead of nursing it or using it as evidence of my pure martyred saintliness.” Or something.