Meta-Conversations: Wisdom

            “There are two ways to fail the trials that deliver a priest of Shame to the full use of his powers.”

            Shame—no, Mercy—sits beside me on the driveway, and looks up at alien stars through the branches of my storm-battered oak. The First Servant’s stole is gathered in the crooks of his elbows, hints of peach and flesh just visible thanks to the faint light shed by the sidewalk lamp near us.

            I feel like this conversation started a while ago and I missed a great deal of it, and yet all of it is implied in this question and, no doubt, about to be explicated. So I say, “I assume one way is to be incapable of bearing it.”

            “The other,” he says, “is to bear it all, and fail to learn from it.”

            This statement strikes me as nonsensical, but Kor is never nonsensical. So I sit with the words, and maybe my confusion is too evident, because he continues.

            “What did you spend a great deal of time denying this week? To your parent?”

            That conversation is so close to the surface that I’m not surprised he spotted it. “She said I was wise. But I can’t be wise. I’m not old enough to be wise.”

            “What is wisdom, then?”

            “I don’t know,” I say. “But it can’t be me spouting the same eternal truths that are so self-evident they’re repeated throughout human history in verse and aphorism and story. I said those things when I was a callow maiden, and again as a tempestuous young adult, and I’m still saying them and nothing in the words has changed. How can I be wise when I’m repeating other people’s wisdom? Which I haven’t ceased to do since I was very obviously not wise?”

            “Because you’ve lived those truths. You can hear a scar described, qirini, and be warned of the pain that created it, and imagine that pain, and even describe the scar and the pain to others accurately, if you listened carefully to the account. You can even surprise others with your knowledge if you combine it with observations of your own, of how that scar affects others, how it healed—well or poorly—and how it changes the person carrying it. But you don’t understand the pain and the change and the effect and the healing until you’ve experienced it yourself.” When I am silent, he says, “You read a great deal about sex. Were you prepared for it when you first had it?”

            “No.”

            “Pregnancy?”

            I say ruefully, “Not in the slightest.”

            “Childbirth?” I shake my head. “Devastating and abrupt injury? Physical insult?” A pause, and he continues, relentless but gentle, “The betrayal of a friend? The loss of a loved one? The confrontation of emethil?”

            I hug my knees. “And yet, the words I speak about these things are the same words I spoke before I lived through them.”

            He returns to studying the sky. “When a prospective Shame cannot bear the pain of the trials, Thirukedi ends them, and he becomes a priest, but with fewer tools to his hand. But when a prospective Shame endures the entire spectrum of Corrections, but does not inhabit them, take the experience into his body, make those experiences his… when those experiences do not link him to all those who came before him, but cause him to set himself further apart, then that person cannot be mantled as a priest at all. One can deny experience. One can live through it, and never stop living in it, and never be changed by it, and never gain perspective. When people say you are wise, datyani, it is because you now invest those timeworn truths with experience, and that experience has connected you to people, instead of setting you apart.”

            “Sometimes young people are wise….”

            “When the young are wise it is a tragedy, or a miracle. And before you say it, not all old people are wise. They never move through an experience. Wisdom happens after, not during, an encounter with the truth.” These are deep waters, and I feel like I’m drowning. He looks at me over his arm, and his coronal eyes are uncanny in the dark. I can see the shadows of his lashes on his irises, they’re so pale. “Tell me what you truly fear. Is it that you do not want to grow old?”

            “I don’t know who I am,” I say. “I only know that there is so much still to learn. I can’t possibly be wise, because I’m not done.” And then, I laugh. “And now you will say ‘none of us are done until we’re gone.’”

            “And we are perfect, and imperfect, thereby.”

            “I still think humility is the better part of…” I trail off.

            “Wisdom,” he says, and there’s a glint of humor in his face and it’s Kor now, again. “There’s no escaping it.”

            “It sounds intolerably conceited to make any claim to wisdom, though, so if it’s all the same I’ll continue denying it.”

            “A compromise,” he said. “Say nothing. Denial makes a mockery of other people’s feelings. Agreement is—to you—intolerably conceited. Say nothing. Or thank them.”

            “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” I say, exasperated.

            “I can’t believe you needed it. But it is good to see you again, qirini. I am glad you listened to your community.”

            I rest my chin on my knees, listening to the trilling of frogs. “They say there’s nothing new under the sun. It feels wrong to think that your experience of something eternal is sufficient to make you wise, when so many people before you have passed through those gates.”

            His laugh surprises me out of my gravity. “Qirini, have you heard nothing I’ve said? It’s not the experience that makes you wise. It’s the perspective you take away from it.” At my scowl he touches my arm, and his voice is low. “It truly bothers you.”

            “Help me, Mercy,” I say. “I really don’t know what’s going on this time.”

            “You are walking and the path is unfamiliar to you.” He squeezes, and I feel each individual finger, gentle but firm. “Keep going.”

            “It will take me to Kherishdar,” I say.

            “Then go there.” A smile, and it’s mischievous, and I can’t help smiling back. “But when you do, be there completely.”

            “If you were not Mercy,” I said, shaking my head, “I would cuff you.”

            “But I am Mercy, and also the Calligrapher’s ajzelin, so I will say: look up foshaf.” He stands. “And come home, soon, qirini.”

            I stay outside a while longer, just in case someone else descends on me; I’m a little glad that no one does, because that was certainly enough to chew on. Eventually, I go inside, and look up the word. And I think about ishan, and ishanjzal, and about priests of Shame who are, in the end, put through the trials as a way of compressing the wisdom of experience into as short a span as possible, so that they can bring that experience, distilled, into their perspective on other people. I had assumed that trial to be about other things. As usual, it was more than I knew before I understood it. And he called me wise! I hardly know what I’m doing.

            But I do know that I’m on a road, and I’m walking, and it’s going to take me home.

foshaf

[ foh SHAHF ]

noun

tracks; the literal sense takes the second declension ending, but a second, metaphorical sense, using the first declension endings, refers to a person's body of work, implying that one can "track" that person's development from beginning to end in their works or acts.

ishan

[ ee SHAWN ]

noun

appreciation of fullness of a thing's span, from its inception to its ending; implies that it is worthy at every moment of its existence, and acknowledges that it is different in the beginning from how it is at its peak and how it is at its end, and that this too is part of its worth.

ishanjal

[ ee shawn JZAHL ]

adjective

perfect as it is', with the understanding that what is, is incomplete. Recognizes ishan in everything, and finds it beautiful