1. Which side of the glass?
I once went to a prison in California with a public defender named Neil to meet with one of his clients, a murderer. Neil was about 55 years old and I was 21 or 22, his legal assistant. This was mid-1990s and, for me, a summer job. Neil was also one of the wisest people I’d ever met or ever would meet. And one of his greatest professional achievements was keeping this man off death row.
The client was a former physician and his crime hadn’t been sensational enough to merit more than a blip on the news, but he was going to be in prison for life (instead of executed, thanks to Neil). This was way before the federal court order against capital punishment in the state. Back then, people like this only had people like Neil. And we may think, as I did at the time, too bad. He did the crime. He should pay. But I don’t think like that anymore.
We talked with the client for about 30 minutes. I remember him being articulate and personable, if a little twitchy. He wanted to know how his ex-wife was doing (because she, understandably, never visited him in prison). He didn’t want to talk about his case (though Neil insisted) or prison life (though Neil insisted). He wanted to show us his pen-and-ink drawings, which actually looked good. None of them were violent or about prison. All were from his memory of a life before, a life he couldn’t manage, a self he couldn’t control. They were simple scenes, a young man sitting on a bench, a horse, a balloon caught in power lines, a fountain in the park.
When we left, I remember feeling a bit sad. Neil wanted to know what I thought of the guy and I said as much. I said something like it’s strange how one person commits a crime and another doesn’t, how one person winds up in a cell for life and another lives free to age 90. And Neil said that was exactly right. It is strange. And there isn’t an answer to that question or a reason why.
I remember him saying, “Anyone can do anything at any time” and “The only thing that puts him on that side of the glass and us on this side is he did the thing and got caught.” But lots of people do the thing and don’t get caught. And lots of people get caught but never did the thing at all. And that’s why Neil was a public defender. The legal system, according to Neil, is inherently asymmetrical and perverse. I think the term he used is, “really fucked up.”
We all know this, even those who do their best to maintain the system. The law is made up of words, good policy intentions, and best possible premises. We like to imagine it’s a divine mandate, but it isn’t. Words can change. Intentions can change. Premises can shift. So we need to think about what right and wrong really mean, about mistakes and imperfections, about unrecoverable errors and the people who commit them.
We need to remember that the killer was once a child who liked comic books and wonder what brought him from that to being the worst sort of criminal. We need to mourn the victim and try as best we can to redress the harm; though, we know some crimes cannot be redressed. And we need to levy pressure on the system to make it work right so that there can be something approximating justice.
Neil always said, “There isn’t much difference between him and us.” I had a hard time accepting that. But having lived a lot and having seen a lot of different people in my life, I’m beginning to think that we are all equal in the end. As the saying goes, at the end of the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box. When I think back to that, now I hear Neil saying, because he is us, even though I don’t think he actually ever said those exact words.
2. Useful Fictions
There’s no way to tell whether the things we do, feel, or become arise from internal or external causes. Ultimately, there probably isn’t much separation between anything. It’s almost trite to quote Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren,” but he seems insightful when he writes, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
We can’t. Dancer and dance must always be one. And the circumstances of the dancer-dance. And the time it happened. And the cultural and historical moment and everything else. Nothing is separate. Everything emerges as part of everything else and recedes back into that all-encompassing whole. As some schools of Buddhism term it: “interdependent co-arising.” Dancer-dance, criminal-crime, dancer-crime, criminal-dance, dancing you, dancing me, one side of the glass or the other. We have to wonder about best possible premises and words and good intentions because, in the end, we cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends.
To have social order, there must be social accountability; however, in an absolute sense, nothing is truly personal. The mistakes we make are imminently human. And our achievements come about as much from an accident of time, space, and disposition as they do from intentional, willed action. Sure, we like to own our achievements and hide our mistakes. But in the end: the pine box.
3. Mention Me When They Ask You What Happened
If we become what we do, what we do must also circumscribe, interpenetrate, and inform us before and after we do it. That’s a convoluted way of saying there is no beginning, no end to who we are. Therefore, drawing distinctions between dancer and dance, between actor and action, seems like we’re creating a useful fiction—a way of seeing that helps us focus on one thing or another at the expense of the whole.
In this light, asking for forgiveness does no good. What happened took place because of us, because of everything within and around us, because of what came before us and what shall come after, and because of what is always emerging and passing away beyond our awareness but still within phenomenon of our lives.
Who can tell the dancer from the dance? Not me. Whatever happened is now an indestructible figment of all life everywhere and for all time. The error, the mistake exists. It is a fact of life. And you can’t make it un-exist no matter how much you wish you could. Forgiveness is pointless. Penance is a waste. Retribution must be, too. Where does that leave justice? Maybe it’s just another useful fiction, another way of keeping everyone as calm as possible while the minutes and days tick by.
Of course, we regret our mistakes when hindsight seems to make everything clear, but even that is a perspective trapped in space and time. If clarity depends on where we’re standing, it’s not true clarity, is it? Regret seems like that, a coin glimpsed at the bottom of a pail of muddy water. Do you see the truth? Are you sure? What’s down there, really? And why are you feeling this way about it?
We feel a certain way now because of what we think happened then. We can’t simply feel things in themselves; we never emote in a vacuum. Our errors, misapprehensions, insights, and revelations depend on context. Like folk healers who believed in the Doctrine of Signatures—essentially that divinity “wrote” the true name of a thing in its essence, shaping it according to its properties—we must believe that the world around us and the things moving through it mean something. Maybe we believe this just to stay sane in an insane world.
As Frankl might say, life asks us what the meaning of it is. And it’s our responsibility to come up with the answer. Whether our answer is mistaken or not is beside the point. How could we ever truly make a mistake if our perception of the world emerges from our experience, which is mostly out of our control? Like the Zen master who celebrated his long prison sentence because it was just like the monastery and provided time and space for him to practice, all we can do is bear witness to the moments of our lives and accept that even the act of bearing witness depends on who we are, where we are, how we are.
In this light, we might find that our thoughts are thinking us; our words are speaking us; our actions are doing us as much as we are doing them. And so we may find it far better to offer forgiveness than ask for it. With this insight, in order to pass judgment on anyone, we would have to acknowledge that there really is no separation between us and them.
If you understand the other, you understand yourself. If you understand yourself, you understand everything, which is another way of saying, judge someone and you judge yourself along with them. We are every criminal and every victim. We are the leaf that falls from the tree and the blade of grass on which it lands. As Luc Sante writes at the end of the “Unknown Soldier,” which is a prose poem about this idea: “Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.”