Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith’s The Hermit from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Behind the card are various shells, stones and unnamed special objects. In the image, an elder dressed in all gray with a hood and long white beard is standing on the top of a snow-capped mountain in front of a teal background. The elder is holding a staff and a lantern with a shining star inside.
Forgiveness is a topic of perennial interest for me and for many. A couple weeks ago in Berkeley I told the Grail Legend to a small group of people with two possible endings.
The first was the version from Chretien de Troyes’ Perceval, which ends after Perceval confesses his sins to a hermit who grants him forgiveness and then sends him on his way. Before Perceval goes, the hermit whispers in his ear the most sacred names for god, to be uttered only in the gravest of dangers.
De Troyes’ manuscript ended there because the author died before finishing. And while it can certainly be read as incomplete, right now I prefer this ending to the other, more popular one. The one in which Perceval returns at long last to the grail castle, does the perfect thing that yields the total healing, and all’s restored; the king, the land, and the people.
In telling the version that ends with forgiveness, my aim was to invite a different sort of discussion than the ones that the more popular ending makes way for; conversations skewed toward neat morals and low-hanging ideas about redemption that I sometimes think are too easy for such complicated times.
I’m pretty new to the art of oral telling, but so far when I tell a story for a group I get very focused on the scenes for several weeks before the event and then it’s almost like the story departs from my body altogether afterward. In preparation for the berkeley event it was grail things, 24/7 for a lot of spring. And until a few days ago, I hadn’t thought much of Perceval and didn’t miss him.
And then I was listening to an episode of Chris Hoff’s Radical Therapist podcast which I really like, and there was an interview with psychologist Molly Andrews on the politics of forgiveness.
In the beginning of the interview, Andrews tells a story of an activist couple she knew in East Germany, one of whom was ultimately placed on house arrest and surveilled in confinement until the day he died. (I’m not including their names because I couldn’t find them online and didn’t want to get the spelling wrong, but you can hear them in the first ten minutes of the Andrews’ interview on The Radical Therapist.)
So Andrews asked the surviving partner whether she’d been able to forgive the people who had robbed her and her husband of enjoying freedom in those last days of his life. In Andrews’ words the surviving partner said, “it’s they who cannot forgive us, for what they’ve done to us. We are the living guilty conscience.” This framing of forgiveness was radical for me. Disruptive.
For the last couple of years I’ve been very slowly wading into the work of Algerian-born French philosopher Jaques Derrida, who understood binary logic to be the “founding gesture” of western philosophy (Jantzen, 1999). Derrida argued that binaries were complicit with an entire system of political oppression, in part because with a binary, one term is always privileged over the other.
A process of deconstruction—Derrida’s legacy—sometimes begins by identifying a binary and then inverting it, as a way to destabilize the taken for granted power dynamics between the two terms.
Andrews’ story is compelling because it troubles the binary that’s present in popular notions of forgiveness. Which side is privileged might depend on how you think about it, but generally forgiveness plays out between two pairs: the perpetrator and victim, harmer and harmed, the one who needs forgiveness and the one whose work it is to do the forgiving.