The Closure Myth II: Advanced Forgiveness (cont'd from 12/26/04)

For some reason, Dan's email about forgiveness reminded me of the hindsight conversation. I didn't recognize the link until Scott said that he had assumed Dan's message was a sort of closure for me. By all means, Dan's message should have been a form of closure for me, if I believed in that sort of thing. After all, for years, and especially the past few months, I have been blaming myself for everything that ever went wrong in our relationship. I've been unable to forgive myself, and was even considering writing to Dan and asking for his forgiveness. So, when he wrote to me about learning that forgiveness is giving up the hope for a different past, and implicit in his message was that he forgave me, I should have felt much better. Not worse. Not devastated. Not like I was flung back to the day we separated every time I read his message and tried to respond. That's closure?

Hardly. Like The Moment That The Couple Realizes They Are Deeply In Love, closure is a myth. It is a literary device. There is no single moment of closure, no passing the former lover on the street and seeing them merely as one of the crowd, no phone conversation with a parent that goes off without tension. There are, of course, moments in our lives when we recognize that a person or situation has less immediacy than before, but this itself is not closure. This is merely recognition that something closure-like has been occurring over time, well below our conscious existence. It is simply the writerly act of "show, don't tell." Instead of saying that an event is no longer immediate and painful, we show an action that illustrates this point, and call it "closure." Although we can recognize that these moments have significance as they happen, we can not fully understand the significance without context: before the moment, the moment, after the moment. It is ridiculous to assume that we could fully grasp the significance of an event in life with only half of the context.

So, forgiveness. Learning that I have been forgiven makes me feel like shit, and I've come to realize that the act of forgiveness, like closure, is a myth. Implicit in the need to forgive some one is the reality that the person is somehow unacceptable. True forgiveness is acceptance of the person and the situation as an event in the universe that occurred because of the person acting the way people do, no more and no less. It's just a big fat IS in the universe. No more, no less. The act of consciously forgiving some one then, is pretense. The is a NEED to forgive necessitating an act of forgiveness, which means that forgiveness has not taken place. And it won't. Because like closure, it doesn't really exist on a conscious level. It's a myth. One can no more consciously forgive than one can consciously seek closure, because it doesn't exist.

I realized this - to come full circle - in contacting Astrophysicist Dave. I sent him an email last night, and he responded quickly, including an apology for losing touch over the years. I appreciated the apology, but it didn't even occur to me that this was something that warranted an apology until he apologized. Friends losing touch is a human thing that happens. It just is. Not necessarily good or bad. Just big fat IS.

And THAT is forgiveness - understanding without regard to ego that humans do human things.

(Thanks, Dave!)

The Closure Myth

Several years ago I had a conversation with Astrophysicist Dave about the influence of movies especially, but also books and theater, on the way people interperet meaning. Specifically, that movies, books, etc., are written in hindsight, and therefore include only the most significant details, and when using drama as an inspiration for life (instead of the other way around) people -we- attach unnecessary significance to events in our lives. In a movie, for example, we know that this is The Moment When The Couple Realizes They Are Deeply In Love. It is easily recognized in the context of a movie in which only significant things are going to be happening anyway. And knowing that, we stride into our relationships, looking for that essential moment when we realize that something is really something or other.

These quintessential moments are not the truth. They are moments that tell the truth of the story, as every moment in the story should, but they are not the truth itself. The Moment When The Couple Realizes They Are Deeply In Love, is NOT really the moment that the couple realizes they are deeply in love, it is really just a moment that explains to the audience that Deeply In Love is going on here.

Don't Read This

I've been working out like mad for the past few months, I've lost all the divorce weight, and I am in the best shape of my life. As a reward to myself for this accomplishment, I want to get some new tshirts to wear to the gym.

The snarky and/or retro tshirts that all the kiddies wear piss me off, and I get to see them every day, thanks to the gym's proximity to the local high school. So I've found some places that do customized tshirts, but I can't come up with a really concise way of saying "I am not a corporate billboard, and I don't buy into wearing tshirts that demean me by plastering a suggestive phrase across my boobs."

And unfortunately, "Fuck you, stop looking at my tits, I'm old enough to be your mother, you worthless jocksniffing prick," will probably get me kicked out of the gym.

While effective in conveying those messages and concise, "Lesbian" is factually inaccurate and might get me kicked out of the gym, and the county.

Maybe "fuck you" in binary. Or hex.

Alarming!

I was in the shower earlier today thinking about one morning, shortly after Dan and I split up and I moved into the apartment in Plymouth Meeting, when the fire alarm went off. The fire alarm had been going off every so often, and it usually took about 45 minutes from the time the alarm went off until the fire department arrived, checked the building, reset the system, and gave everyone the ok to go back to their apartments. So, this one particular morning the alarm went off, and rather than wait and risk being late for work, I grabbed the clothes I had set out the night before, and left for work an hour early. When I got to the office, only one other person was there. I ducked into the bathroom in the back of the building, changed, and started my day. That afternoon, I told the person who had been there when I arrived what had happened that morning. I remember she smiled and said that she saw me come in, and wondered if I was just coming in from a big date the night before.

I don't know what it was about my shower that reminded me of this, but as I replayed the story in my head, it occurred to me that the alarm didn't really go OFF that morning, the alarm went ON. It WAS off. Nothing was happening. No loud noises and flashing lights. But then something happened, and it went ON. There WERE loud noises and flashing lights coming from the alarm system. When the fire department arrived and reset the security system, the alarm went OFF.

Yet, people still continue to refer to an alarm going OFF when what has really occurred is that the alarm has gone ON. "My alarm went off at 5:30, but I hit snooze." No, ma'am, your alarm went ON at 5:30, the you hit snooze and turned it OFF.

None of this has anything to do with me taking a shower today.

Fort Wiener

On Thursday, my dog built a pillow fort.

She climbed up on the couch, arranged all of the throw pillows into a little hut, climbed in, and pulled a pillow behind her to create a little "door."

Un-nativity

Today I drove buy a funeral home that was decorated for Christmas. That's just weird.

Great Moments in Sports

At the gym today, I walked by a conversation just in time to hear only this statement:

"What is it with her and midgets?"