Winter Issue 3
Paraclete
By David Raimundo
A courtroom story inspired by René Girard and originally written as part of an art project for INDS 560 - Christian Imagination
I felt profoundly outraged when I realized that he had wronged me for the nth-time. Possessed by a zealous sense of self-righteousness and indignation, I immediately pressed charges against him and I began preparing my case as a self-appointed prosecutor. I was convinced that he had to suffer an exemplary penalty for what he had done — perhaps even paying with his own life. In retrospect, I am aware that my impetuous judgment might seem too harsh, too drastic. But harshness has always been the human resort when responding to such serious transgressions. Jurisprudence was on my side and I firmly believed that I would be able to argue my case successfully whether it was assigned to a single judge or presented before a jury. My outrage would certainly be contagious to the whole courtroom.
I locked myself in isolation for a few months to prepare my argument. I studied the laws that human societies have applied since immemorial times. They all agreed strongly with my case. History was unanimous: punishment was overdue. I felt empowered by the fact that I was imitating countless prosecutors from different eras. I felt that I was siding with Justice itself. I was right. I was fair.
On the date of the trial, I was eager to present my case and I felt more assured than ever. Months of preparation had left no question: only one sentence could be pronounced. He had triggered a deep and hurtful crisis and he was the only guilty party in all of it. When the moment arrived, I rolled up my sleeves, I employed all my rhetorical skills, I made the best of my thorough research, I brilliantly channeled the anger of the audience towards the one accused. For a split second, I felt proud of my ability to portray him as the guiltiest among all men. I could hear the anticipated verdict as a whisper across the courtroom: “Kill him! Kill the guilty one!” Yes, I had triumphantly turned the whole court against him.
Well, the whole court except one person. The defense attorney still had a chance to speak and I was not the least prepared for what he said next. Instead of defending the accused, he attempted to prove that I was in the wrong about righteousness and judgement. His bewildering argument did not try to emphasize the alleged innocence of the one accused nor some possible mitigating factors. Instead, he recalled several events that had happened before the events at trial, arguing that those events disclosed a spiral of mutual wrongdoings in which innocent and guilty parties could no longer be distinguished. He claimed that this never-ending cycle of gratuitous violent actions had been caused by all parties involved. According to him, the court could no longer decide who was the original offender: it was all an increasingly convoluted mimetic mechanism in which I was as guilty as the one accused. He even went as far as to argue that the capital punishment would actually work in such case as an unacknowledged attempt to expiate the prosecutor’s own offenses. The accused would be punished not only by his own transgressions, but as a single scapegoat for our collective and reciprocal transgressions. The defense attorney further claimed that he had been commissioned to disarm and expose the scapegoating mechanism which was hidden since the foundation of the world. He suggested that mutual forgiveness was the only good outcome of processes like this one. “Mutual forgiveness makes a public spectacle of the devilish mimetic violence that has long driven human nature.”
I could instantly tell that the defense attorney’s speech had a great impact but I am not sure whether the audience was mostly infuriated or convinced by it. Actually, I can’t yet discern my own reaction. I don’t know what to make of his argument. Am I as guilty as the one I am accusing? Am I a blind party inside a never-ending spiral of violence? As I write these words, I am waiting for the judge to return to the courtroom with his final deliberation. The confidence and sense of self-righteousness that I initially felt are now truly shaken. I don’t know which verdict I want to hear.
Tragedy of a Pendulum
By Sun Xiaoyu
A pendulum asks its pivot
Where do we go
the pivot answers
though you swing all the time
As long as I am immovable
you will never be lost
the pendulum trusts its pivot
wholeheartedly
But it does not know
that its original pivot
has been switched
when the pendulum was
not paying attention
and the pendulum
has been reframed
so many times
in different clocks
sometimes a clown
sometimes an snow mountain
sometimes a red queen
the pendulum swings on
or so it believes
Little does it know
it is really spinning
with a fake pivot
unhinged long ago
into the dumpster
Predicting the Worst
By Steven Gomez
As I write this, the sun is setting at the end of another surprisingly brilliant day with an almost crystal clear sky. But the weather forecast is predicting a very different kind of crystal for the week ahead: white, made of ice, and falling from grey clouds.
Snow during lockdown is perhaps one of the ultimate ironies. The air bites your face—it’s okay, I’m covering most of it anyway. The roads are impassable—doesn’t matter, I’m working from home. Amidst all the predictions of how a global pandemic will change society from here on out, I tend towards the cynical; what we needed to improve won’t change at all, and what we were good at is going to get worse. And one of my more cynical predictions, one that seems to be shared by quite a few people, is that our discovery of Zoom spells the end for one of our culture’s most time-honoured traditions…
Snow days.
Children who woke up to magical stacks of white powder on the backyard fence would gasp in excitement, knowing this meant at least 24 hours of no teachers, no textbooks, and no boring ‘educational’ videos; an excitement made all the more palpable in Vancouver, where such things happen pretty rarely. But if—as I expect they will—the lords of Efficiency and Order have their way, children from now on will only greet morning snow with a grumble and a yawn, knowing that it simply means they have to spend the day in front of a screen after, at most, an extra half hour in bed.
I plead the case for snow days. For school cancellations. For work to be derailed. Yes, it throws us off schedule and off plan and creates some chaos—but do I really need to point out that its impact is nothing compared to, say, a major public health crisis? If we want to educate our children, let’s give them the lesson that life comes with unplanned delays to our productivity and achievement. The lesson on how to find unexpected pleasure in the midst of circumstances we can’t control. Come to think of it, how well have we learned that lesson ourselves?
As I prepare this issue to go out, the snow still hasn’t come. The water hasn’t frozen as it falls from the sky and instead of making everything white, it makes everything wet. And while the app predicting the climate shows flakes mixed with drops for the next few days, Environment Canada has meekly withdrawn its weather alert. Snow days, it seems, can still teach us lessons even when they don’t show up; namely that our predictions—however dire or cynical—sometimes simply don’t come true. Perhaps I’m wrong about our school boards cancelling out closures. Perhaps our world will learn how to slow down after all, instead of Zooming around in the name of productivity. Perhaps I’ve predicted wrongly. I hope that I have. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Is that hail outside the window?
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