Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 18

Weeding It Out. . .

—From CB—

I generally spend at least half an hour a day practicing genocide.  I refer, of course, to weeding the garden. Some green things just don’t belong.

It’s not that I HATE weeds. True, I get pissed at the intransigence of stinky weed, sticky weed, thorny weed, ejaculation weed, etc. But I understand their imperative to survive and replenish the Earth, starting with our garden, and I don’t intend to demean their botanical dignity by disparaging nicknames: it’s just the easiest way to describe them.

But I do feel, in process of wielding my digger, that I’m tapping into a disturbing psycho-political dimension. I’m seeking to purify. It’s what I remember as a small child swatting flies outdoors on my grandparents’ porch or squashing a vagrant ant just because it’s there. It’s the Puritans purging sin. It’s the satisfaction of erasing the chalkboard. It’s patrolling the Web for any linguistic peccadillo. Call it hatred-lite.

Or maybe it needs another word. “Hate” is as slippery a word as “love.” It doesn’t really resemble hatred as we’ve come to think of it in melodramatic action movies, with Nazis grinding their teeth as their blood pressure soars and their kidneys erupt. It’s evoked endlessly to characterize cops, political parties, races, genders, movie reviewers, etc.

The assertion that Inuit languages have an inordinate number of words for “snow” has been largely disproven, but it might be productive to consider that as “hate” plays such a great role in our culture, we need to develop a wider range of words to distinguish its varieties: does it come fluttering down gently, gracing the trees, or blow with blizzard force?

It’s maybe a too-useful word. How much crime, violence, stupid speech or actions that arise apparently from “hate” are the direct result of fear, frustration, humiliation, a desire to tidy up the human race, or that maddening weakness of the playground wimp that magnetically attracts the bully’s fist? We’ve written quite a number of plays, sketches, and prose fiction involving very ugly behavior, but in none of them would I say that the ROOT CAUSE is “hate.” Certainly there are cultures that make it simpler to make the leap to violence, exclusion, etc., but I don’t believe that anyone is “taught to hate,” though we’re taught many things that may lead to it.

I say this only because we’re all looking for ways to mitigate the rampant violence and division in our culture, which makes it all the more urgent to pin down actual motives, not just the blanket phrase-of-the-day. These are just some of the inconvenient thoughts that flit through my head as I go forth to do my daily weeding.

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Hail, Columbia. . .

—From EF—

I’m not in South Carolina any more.

I just finished a memoir draft revision of the chapter that chronicled 1966-68, our two years in Columbia, South Carolina, and celebrated again in memory the day when we crossed the state line en route to Milwaukee. Poor Columbia, it had the bad luck to have come right after three years in California, and I came in with a chip on my shoulder. Actually, a load of railroad ties. Many years later I came to understand the South much better and still have great fondness, but those two years—damn, they were weird.

It was the first life-experience after the seven years of unremitting labor that was Conrad’s chug toward the Ph.D. that would launch him into the real life of his academic career. Boom, goes the cannon, and then you land in Columbia. No theatre department there, just one man in the English department that directed plays and taught some acting classes. Now there was a second man.

It was a yeasty two years. We had a cadre of students who were nuts and fearless, who took the very strange stuff we gave them and helped create some of the most powerful and memorable theatre we’ve ever made. Nobody in Columbia gave an eff about plays unless they came from the community theatre, so we didn’t have an audience base to worry about. We weren’t much older than our student actors and we all hung out together in a local bar-cafe that had an underground room lined with aluminum foil. Drinking pitchers of beer inside a baked potato while singing blues and folk songs is a bonding experience.

It started on an agreeably rowdy basis with The Beggar’s Opera, a huge cast of street low-life performing the play that was later the model for The Threepenny Opera. I wrote catchy ditties that people could learn easily and we all had a ball. Next up was a grotesque 180, Woyzeck. The cast came along with us on a demented carnival ride of military abuse and dehumanization, and given what the US was doing in 1967, it wasn’t an abstraction. The next year was Hecuba, victorious Greeks and captive Trojan women all sweating out being marooned on a hot rocky island when the winds won’t blow. An acid reflection on our Asian war.

This was Columbia, South Carolina, and our chorus of slave women were clad in body stockings painted to make them more naked than naked. They wore heavy collars on their necks and were chained together in a line. The Greek soldiers wore armor fashioned from romex and fender-mender to put their ribcages on the outside. It was grotesque, surreal, and effective. Nobody said, “You can’t do that.”

I was overjoyed to leave, to get back to grocery stores that sold fresh produce, to buy cheap table wine that wasn’t Mogen David, to be in a city that showed foreign movies and a climate that didn’t grow moss on my dining room table. But what had been given to us was something we weren’t leaving. It was an experience of working, even if in a bubble, with people who would take risks, say damn the torpedoes, and make art.   

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Comedy . . .

—From CB—

I’m doing the layout for an anthology of our comedies, to be published in the fall. Three are in the commedia dell’arte tradition, two are solo shows, one a surreal satire, and one a piece that’s hard to justify its being called a comedy.

Which leads me to think, “What’s a comedy?” We’re lucky that Aristotle’s treatise on comedy was lost. His analysis of tragedy, though astute for the plays he analyzed, has stretched countless playwrights on the rack of theory. There’s no lack of philosophical speculation on the nature of laughter, but comedy has mostly been left to the comics.

For us, first of all, it’s writing truth. Comedy’s a nasty paring knife that cuts deep in your thumb at the slightest bobble. It’s often dismissed as “entertainment,” though franchise movies with loads of blood and exploding heads also claim that title. We might say it’s any play where we get some laughs and the characters don’t die. Or better to say, perhaps, that it ends before they die, since we all tend to die.

Surely it involves laughter. With most comedies I’ve seen, it’s laughter at recognition, laughter at dilemma, laughter at embarrassment, laughter at surprise. In many eras, folks die at the end of tragedies; in comedies, they get married. But endings rarely raise much emotion: the fun is in getting there. And maybe comedy is more truthful than other genres in allowing—even depending on—incongruity. With judicious excision of a few monologues, HAMLET could be staged as a rollicking farce. Comedy depends on frustrated obsession, and that play teems with it. Remove our empathy with the hero, and his drive is absurd.

But unless you have a paid claque—a theatrical tradition for centuries, equivalent to the TV laugh-track—it depends on connection with your audience. We’ve had the experience of having a comedy hit in our repertory for many years once hit a stone wall, not a laugh. The danger factor—the prospect of sensing that Dr. Flop is on his way—is as essential to comedy as to the trapeze act.

We sometimes laugh at stuff that’s merely silly, but it won’t sustain. When Arlecchino tries to eat his own arm, his hunger must be real to us, as must the pain. When Pantalone fails a dozen attempts to kill himself, we need to believe both in his need to do it and in his embarrassment at failure. Of course we know it’s pretend—that allows it to be funny—but it corresponds to feelings we know.

Chekhov termed his plays comedies, though they contain suicide, lost love, thwarted ambition, wasted lives, and the occasional misguided director tries to “lighten” them with silly business or exaggerated characters. Indeed, when we see the word comedy, we’re primed to expect something light, escapist, and overblown. We’re much more familiar with dark comedy than in earlier days, but the theatregoer still asks, instinctively, how dark is dark? To our minds, the defining issue isn’t even the distinction that all characters survive at the end. Konstantin Treplev doesn’t, Tuzenbach doesn’t, and though Malvolio survives his humiliation, it’s as thorough as Shylock’s comeuppance. Rather, in our minds it involves a degree of objectivity in the face of obsession.

In one of our plays, a physician is obsessed with his profession to the point of farcical nightmare. His world demands this obsession, even as it sets up barriers against it. In the best comedy, there’s often a moment when the central character feels, I’m in a comedy! I shouldn’t be in a comedy! Our doctor comes back to that repeatedly, and comedy depends on that moment. Every vessel of truth has its outrigger of blunt objectivity, and comedy is merciless.

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Pronoia. . .

—From EF—

original sin vs. original blessing

paranoia vs pronoia

evil by nature vs decent by nature

The litany of human awfulness has been getting to me. I haven’t been quite to the point of cutting off Facebook and the news, but close. Close. It’s been helpful that good initiatives have been coming out of DC, but not at all helpful that the goopers are standing fast in their resolve to oppose everything. Gaah. Yuck. Phooey.

And suddenly I started reading a book sent to me for my birthday. It’s a BIG book and I was not in shape to start it, even though it was sent by one of my dearest lifetime friends—until now. And within two pages, something in my heart and brain went “tilt” and my brain opened up like a wide-screen zoom. I remembered two other writers who have consistently asserted the same premise: humanity is by nature essentially decent and caring.

Years ago we interviewed Matthew Fox for our radio series, “Hitchhiking Off the Map.” He had proposed the concept of “original blessing” rather than “original sin” and his church took considerable exception to that concept. He was a priest in the Dominican Order. Joseph Ratzinger of Opus Dei was a cardinal, and he forbade Fox to teach or lecture for a year. After the ban was lifted, Fox said, “As I was saying…” and went right on. One of his books, of which there are many, is Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.

Rob Brezhny has been a great spirit-lifter for me, many times posting an exuberant joyous contribution to Facebook when I most needed it. His excellent book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia, is subtitled “How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.” He is so magnetic and smart that he disarms my automatic rejection machine before I can begin to rev it up.

And my new fat book? Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. One of his opening shots across the bow of “Humans Suck” is his account of a real Lord of the Flies event. William Golding hit it big with his novel and it became almost a textbook for the veneer theory, which states that there is a thin level of civilization restraining our true natures as destructive beasts. Bregman began to wonder if there had ever been a real-life event that stranded schoolboys on a deserted island. He found one from 1966, telling the tale of six boys, aged thirteen to sixteen, who had been marooned for more than a year. By the time they were found, they had set up a commune with food garden, tree-trunk barrels to collect rainwater, a badminton court (!), chicken pens, and a fire that they never allowed to go out. When a physician finally evaluated them, they were in peak physical condition.

The writer describes the placebo effect, in which believing something will make you better often has that effect totally aside from literal causation. Then he proposes that there is also a nocebo effect, wherein something can cause harm just because it is believed to do so. He then suggests that our grim view of humanity is a nocebo.

Sure. Right. Anticipating this response, he lays out well-documented chapter and verse about how cynicism can claim that it is always right. By and large people are likely to assume that their family, friends, and neighbors are not dastardly, and would be likely to offer help in an emergency. It is when looking to others whom we only know through the news that the cynicism kicks in.

This is not an airy-fairy book. It is meticulously documented and footnoted and provides real research and real stories. It will take me a while to finish it, but I will. And Bregman has teamed up in my mind with Matthew Fox and Rob Brezhny to lift my ragged spirits.   

 

 

 

Work. . .

—From CB—

I get tired, which I guess is normal at 79. But what’s tending to tire me out these days is the past. I’ve been sorting and filing tons of the remnants of a life: scripts, photos, reviews, grant applications, correspondence, etc. etc. etc.—knowing that when I die I’ll inevitably leave a mess, but a less disorderly mess.

I’ve been a bit startled to see how much we’ve done in the last 20 years since moving from our pleasant & well-funded nest in Philadelphia: 19 stage productions (of which we’ve written 17); 92 episodes of a radio series; sculpting of 95 puppets; editing 4 dvds, 40 short stories (7 published); 8 novels and a memoir (5 published); two unproduced screenplays; plus a garden and two cats. Right now, I’m in the 3rd draft of a new novel, editing a memoir-in-progress by Elizabeth, doing interior layout for an anthology of our comedies, and waiting for the world to open up.

Our purpose in life? For sure, the urge of protoplasm to persist in its structure and to replicate itself is pretty certain. Anything beyond that is for us individually to decide. The sky’s the limit, even for those who want to get to Heaven. For me, it’s to offer love to my family; to tell stories any way I can; to behave like a decent human being; to struggle against the solipsism that stemmed from the genes and from being an only child; and to leave my campsite cleaner than I found it, or at least interesting.

Why the storytelling? Beats me. I’ve worked mostly on stage, but also on the page, in radio, video, puppetry—since the age of fifteen. At that time, the motive was clear: a way to meet girls. But by now I’ve met a number of girls and I still persist.

At one time, it was to get famous, to leave Iowa behind, to gain the means—money, prestige, connections—to enable more & better work, and for the work somehow to achieve longevity. That’s long gone.

In part, I guess, it’s curiosity: it’s a safe way to meet people, explore them and their deeds, always wondering why. Some writers write to express themselves; I think I write or act or direct to discover what’s in this creature and its fellows.

And in part, it’s the same urge the cats have to chase a foam ball over the sofa, across the living room, and up the cat tree in the corner—not for the sake of the foam ball but just to feel the muscles. To feel alive.

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Music . . .

—From EF—

I am having a difficult time with an old lover: music. We had children, lots of them, and they got lost. Now they’re turning up and asking why I didn’t keep them, feed them, give them a life. I’m torn between joy and the pain of not knowing what to do now.

Music has been a huge part of my life, and not many people know that. The years of my being a keyboard performer are eminently forgettable, rightly so, but my decades of being a theatre composer are more problematic. I have boxes of old tapes and disks and files of music and am trying to organize and preserve them, and in the process I made a spreadsheet of all the productions we’ve done, and listed the ones for which I composed music. Sixty-three. That’s not counting five radio series.

Being the compulsive soul that I am, I am embarked on the process of transferring everything I have that is still playable to digital files, listening to them, and trying to decide what to do with them now. Over the years we’ve done many revue shows, so a lot of the music is like what you’d find between segments of a radio show, i.e., charming audio wallpaper. My problem is the rest of it.

This week I loaded and processed a show from 1969. We were in our first year at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, the Fine Arts School, and another new faculty member directed a production of Brecht’s A Man’s a Man. I did a new translation from the German, including song lyrics, then wrote music for the songs, arranged it for Widow Begbick’s all-girl canteen band, and played piano myself alongside the trumpet and drums. The trumpeter was brilliant, and the drummer was really cute in drag, being a skinny little guy with nice legs. As a promo before opening the theatre department loaded an upright piano on a pickup truck and we paraded through the streets playing my music, with me in a skimpy little fringed sequinned mini-dress trying not to congeal from the Milwaukee cold. It was a hit.

I’ve got a complete recording of a performance, not bad quality considering that this was reel-to-reel from fifty-two years ago. I listened to it and cried. That music was rowdy, energetic, and really good. It got gestated, birthed, did its job, and passed out of existence except for its ghost preserved on tape. I have about thirty more of these full-length scores.

That old lover has been patient for decades, but time is getting short. I just have to keep this process going, keep the kleenex handy, get new shoes for the kids and figure out where we’re all going.    

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Reality…

—From CB—

Each week has its challenge with reality. Sometimes it’s profound, sometimes trivial, though the trivial always has the potential of swelling into a hippopotamus. This week, the trivial stayed trivial.

We were in our usual Sunday place at the ocean. It was too windy to take our table out on the bluff for our picnic, so we stayed in the car, put an album on the radio, and ate our weekly sushi.

As we lounged in the distant crash of the waves and the sight of gulls riding the wind, we heard a sound. Something gravelly near the car. I thought it was to the left, since I was sitting on the left, Elizabeth thought it came from the right. To me, it sounded like a cranky radio tuning in. To her, it was a tree branch scraping the car.

I suggested it might be a radio scraping the car or a tree branch tuning in. She got out to look. Nothing. I backed up slowly so she could look underneath, but there was no snoozing wino.

We sat a while, drowsing, then started the long way home. Still on Highway 1, we suddenly heard the same scratchy sound. I pulled off the road, and she got out, checked under the car, under the hood, under her jacket—nothing. She did find a huge, impacted collection of leaves and pine needles under the hood, removed them. Later, we had a small squabble as to whether or not that was the source of our problem.

We went on.

There are elements of reality one can never decipher, even with an astute partner of sixty years and counting. It reminded me of our first venture into East Berlin, when the wall was still up and the border guards were poised to kill. For each car that went through the checkpoint, they had a little wheeled mirror device they rolled under the car to discover any concealed passenger. We were on a Vespa scooter, but they wheeled their device underneath, presumably to catch any freedom-loving pigeon making its escape.

Reality is sometimes hideous, sometimes almost fun.

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San Gregorio Sands

—From EF—

We first came to California in 1963 after three years at Northwestern, and moving cross-country to a new life changed everything for me. The North Bay climate returned me to the happily embodied life I’d had when I was a pre-school proto-pagan playing in the Indiana woods and fields. The magnitude of this hit me the day we moved into our first California apartment. Once we got the VW unloaded, I kicked off my shoes and went outside. The drive from Evanston IL had been a long grind, we’d just finished an intense three days of apartment-hunting, and I was frazzled. But it was a sunny September day and the concrete patio was smooth and warm. As a kid I’d always gone barefoot in the Indiana summers and wiggled my toes in the sandy beach at our summer home in Michigan. Then I grew up, and sidewalks locked me into shoes, but enough was enough. This was my home now and dammit, I wanted my bare feet on the ground. I wasn’t prepared for that first moment. It was like a strong electric shock: the soles of my feet tingled and a current shot up my spine. It was an intense sensation of belonging, of being welcomed home. California moved into my being and never left, even during the thirty-three years when we lived elsewhere.

 

Stanford was a whirlwind schedule for both of us, but on weekends we could spend time at some of the relatively unpopulated beaches like San Gregorio and Pescadero, and I developed a ritual picnic menu: a plastic bag of chicken legs in teriyaki marinade, another bag of juicy figs, a chunk of Muenster cheese and a bottle of semi-dry ruby port.

The narrow winding road wound up and down the hills to the coast, and I loved the way I could make the VW dance on the curves. Turning south along the coast we’d pick our beach and park. I’d take the food sack in one hand and my sandals in the other and try not to yip at the sharp pleasure of being barefoot in the soft white sand. Conrad carried rolled beach towels and tatami mats, the bag of charcoal and a metal rack; a short walk south along the high bluffs usually gave us a place to ourselves in one of the sheltered coves among the huge rocks. We had swimsuits on under our clothes, but sometimes it was secluded enough to get naked.

Broiling the chicken didn’t require constant attention. I patrolled the waterline looking for treasures, and when I was sitting at the fire I could watch the hawks riding the updrafts. Sometimes I could count to a hundred before a wing moved. It was quiet, the air smelled like salt and seaweeds, the sun was gentle and my job at the orthodontist’s office was a million miles away. The barefoot bond I’d felt on my first day outside our California apartment was now humming through my whole body. I hadn’t felt so completely alive since my pre-school days wandering solo in woods and fields. I was home in my skin again.  

Conrad’s first teaching job was in South Carolina. Leaving was hard for both of us, but for me it was a piercing pain. I’d bonded fast and hard to California, and in these three years the bond had only deepened. Working for the orthodontist in San Carlos, I’d drive home every day with the intoxicating colors of sunset over my right shoulder behind the sharp silhouette of the hills. When I got home, I could walk barefoot on the soft dusty streets of our home neighborhood. As we were about to leave California a spontaneous song came to me, “San Gregorio Sands.” It was my celebration and farewell to that special place.

the last sweet drops of the tangerine sun
trickle down, and the surf is tangerine foam
San Gregorio sands are honey and gold
and the fog is waiting till we’ve gone on home

         perfect day — there’s a hawk there playing
         where the warm air climbs up the rocky cliff
         he can stay there floating forever
         like a daydream balanced on the point of “if”

if I had my way, that tangerine sun
would stay floating right there like the lazy hawk
and San Gregorio sands would always be warm
for an hour of love and a barefoot walk

         now the road is twisty and the summer is hot
         our bags are packed and we’re ready to go
         there’s not much time but we’ll take what we’ve got
         when San Gregorio calls we don’t say no

                  perfect day, and it’s almost over
                  but there’s two more sips of the ruby wine
                   we can stay for five more minutes
                  watching gulls play hopscotch at the water line

the sun is down, it’s past time to go
I’ll be back some day but I don’t know when
San Gregorio sands will be honey and gold
and l’ll shed my shoes and be home again.

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A Didactic Spasm…

—From CB—

What do I mean if I say octopus? The referent is fairly clear—a slimy sinuous thing rumored to be intelligent, and you might just ask, “So what about it?” But if I say love, that’s not so simple. You have to sort through a plethora of relationships you’ve had, movies you’ve seen, quotes from the Bible or self-help books—as many associations and implications as there are bacteria on your tongue or the tongue of your beloved.

It’d be convenient if the dictionary held all the meanings of words. But if you utter the words “Pork roast” at our table, you’ll get a laugh and you won’t know why. You’ll never find it in the dictionary. Language is an implicit agreement between us, but it takes long, long acquaintance to know when we speak the same language.

What, for example, does freedom mean? We fight, kill and die for it, but what does it mean? America, God, equality… Theoretically, we could put our hands on that octopus, but no way these abstractions. Yet these are what we fight for most vehemently.

In high school, I had a spate of reading about semantics, the meaning of meaning, and I made myself fairly obnoxious in class by asking, at one point, what was concretely meant in an inspirational assembly, and in another what a poet meant by “white peace.”

Recently, I’ve come back to those questions as I read FB hassles involving cultural appropriation, white supremacy, defunding police, nihilism, First Amendment, mansplaining, transgender, capitalism, patriarchy, etc. The folks who have something to say on those issues know what they mean, whichever side they’re on. What they don’t seem to know or care, with rare exceptions, are what those terms may mean to anyone else.

In part, that’s tribal. If you pronounce shibboleth the right way you’re fine; if not, we kill you. Now we have laws that get in the way, but we still have the tribal instinct.

So I feel we spend enormous effort in arguing over semantics. “What do you mean by that?” should be the most frequent question, but it’s rarely asked. Are we really talking about the same thing? Do we really care what’s in this other person’s head? Is it easier to inveigh against something that’s not meant than to confront what is?

I’m not suggesting that an agreement on definitions is the ultimate answer to the desire to kill. But I am suggesting that we’d save many electrons—and perhaps lower our blood pressure a few points—by an occasional questioning what’s meant by whatever terms we’re debating. And an understanding that each person’s life gives meaning to the words in the head.

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Poof…

—From EF—

Poof. It’s a gentle sound, not alarming, and it’s accompanied by a modest puff of pearly smoke. It’s me seeing a pattern that’s been there forever, a pattern that suddenly shifted like a kaleidoscope and settled into something distinct, and distinctly different. Poof. Look at this again.

In high school I began to find an affinity for acting through the Drama Club, whose initial attraction was that it rehearsed at 7:30 AM and got me out of the house soon after my father left for work: anything to cut down alone-time with my mother. To begin with, it was the experience of getting the parts that the cute girls wouldn’t touch, like Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. She was outrageous and bossy and had comic lines crafted to land like mortar shells. I didn’t remotely have the craft to support this, but I could feel the potential. Not for a moment did I comprehend that this had been the center of my mother’s profession.

She’d been a vaudeville comedienne for ten years, touring all over the country and earning very nice money once she got established. In vaudeville comedy you’d better be able to land zingers, and she knew how. It’s how she could reduce me to tears and snot in thirty seconds flat.

When I was a senior, the German teacher I had a huge crush on decided that the junior class should do a play, and it would be Our Town. I wasn’t in it, but I did some support work, and I saw the cast come together to become the beating heart that is the center of this play. I had no way of knowing that at the same time an Iowa high school actor was seeing part of this same play at a state contest, and that it would change his life forever. I only knew that I loved what John Deethardt had directed and given to the junior class. It was not at all what I’d been doing in the Drama Club, and it was what I wanted.

I graduated and went to the University of Michigan as a pre-med honors student, a goal I’d fixated on for four years, and then I got deeply involved with theatre. My mother was not supportive of this idea. “You have no heart, no looks, no voice, and no sense of humor. Forget it.” It was a pretty strong assault, but it wasn’t effective. I’ve lived my life in the theatre and I’ve been good at it.

Here’s what I didn’t realize. Theatre was her world. She’d fled a damaging childhood, made her way through elite theatre training in New York, and had become a self-supporting respected performer in a very harsh world. It was her world, and she’d paid her dues. Who was I to try to gate-crash? She’d voluntarily left that world to become a wife, possibly a mother, but I was a Hail-Mary adoption when that didn’t happen. I should be her fulfillment, not her competitor.

I never quite understood her vicious attacks on my attraction to theatre. I thought of it as an attack on me, but I never thought of it as a defense of what had been hers. Her image of me had been created by her own parenting, and it was the image of an unattractive weakling suited only for quiet intellectual activity. But in the Chinese zodiac, I wasn’t just a dragon, I was a Golden Dragon. In time, I realized that and claimed a world that was rightfully mine.

I came long ago to the point where I could forgive her abuse. Now, realizing that she was defending her private territory, the arena where she herself had come to power, gives me a new insight into forgiveness.

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