Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 27, 2026
A line came across my desk this week, offered the way such lines usually are — as consolation: if you remove the blame, you remove the pain.
I have been turning it over for days, because I am either the worst possible audience for that sentence or the best one. I was a federal prosecutor. People hear that and assume the job was blame, but that gets the direction of it backwards — nobody handed me blame to distribute. The job was building cases. Blame was the conclusion, and you were entitled to it only when the evidence could carry it; the deepest obligation of the office ran the other way — to decline, to drop what could not be proven, whatever you privately suspected. Blame without a case was the one thing the job forbade. So when the therapeutic culture tells me blame is a poison to be flushed, I want to agree — I have seen what the unproven, private version does to people — and something in me also stands up to object on behalf of the earned kind.
I think both instincts are right, and the interesting work is finding the seam between them.
Give the consolation its full strength first, because it is not wrong.
The psychologists distinguish pain from suffering. Pain is the clean strike — the loss, the betrayal, the failure. Suffering is the story we build around the strike, and blame is the story's favorite architecture. The Buddhists have the best image for it: the two arrows. The first arrow is the event, and it hurts. The second arrow is the one you fire into yourself — the why me, the they should not have, the if only I had — and it lands in the same wound, over and over, for as long as you keep drawing the bow.
Anyone who has lain awake prosecuting a ten-year-old conversation knows the second arrow. The event is long over; the trial is still in session. And it is true — observably, clinically true — that people who put the trial down heal, and people who cannot put it down do not. On this the consolation stands.
But here is what a prosecutor knows that the consolation forgets: blame, done properly, is one of civilization's genuine achievements.
A trial is blame with rules. Before we had it, harm was answered by the injured family at a time of their choosing, at a scale of their choosing, and the answer bred answers for generations. The courtroom took that fire and built a hearth around it. Evidence instead of rumor. A neutral finder of fact instead of the angriest man in the village. Proportion instead of escalation. The victim gets something no amount of private serenity provides — a public finding that the thing happened, that it was wrong, and that it was not their fault — and the community gets to say so out loud, once, in a form that ends.
So when someone tells me blame itself is the disease, I think: no. A society that removes blame has not found peace. It has found either chaos, where harm is answered privately again, or amnesia, where harm is not answered at all — and the victims of both arrangements could tell you which arrows those fire.
Blame cannot be simply poison. The whole legal order is proof that it can be medicine. And yet the sleepless man retrying his old conversation is genuinely being destroyed by it. Both things are true. What is the difference?
The difference is not the blame. It is everything built around it.
Consider what the courtroom has that the mind at three in the morning does not.
A charging standard. A prosecutor who cannot prove a case is obligated not to bring it — suspicion is not an indictment, and most of the office's power is exercised in declining. The internal court has no such threshold. It indicts on a feeling and proceeds directly to trial, every night, on charges no grand jury would return.
Rules of evidence. A court excludes hearsay, speculation, and prejudice. The internal trial admits everything — the imagined motive, the reconstructed tone of voice, the testimony of your worst opinion of yourself, delivered by a witness who is never cross-examined.
A statute of limitations. Every legal system on earth declines to prosecute most wrongs after enough time has passed — not because the wrong stops mattering, but because the law understands that evidence rots, that people change, and that a society cannot function with every old wound eternally justiciable. The court you run on yourself has no such statute. It will hear a case from 1994 tonight, and treat the evidence as fresh.
Double jeopardy. Once acquitted, a defendant cannot be tried again for the same act. The internal court retries the same case a hundred times, and — this is the cruelest part — a verdict in your favor is never final. You can win the retrial on Tuesday and be back in the dock on Thursday, same charge, same evidence, no appeal.
And above all: adjournment. A real trial is designed to end. Verdict, sentence, gavel. However it comes out, there is a moment after which the matter is decided, and the machinery that decided it shuts down. This is not a side feature of the justice system. It is the point. We built the whole apparatus so that blame could happen once, properly, and then stop.
The internal court has no gavel. That is the entire pathology. The blame that destroys people is not blame in excess — it is blame without procedure: a case with no rules of evidence, no limitations period, no protection against retrial, and no mechanism, anywhere in the building, for bringing the proceedings to a close.
So the consolation has it almost right, and almost is worth correcting. Removing the blame does not remove the pain. The first arrow is real; grief is not a procedural error. What removing blame removes is the retrial — and what actually needs removing was never the finding of fault. It is the court that cannot adjourn.
Bob Dylan wrote "I Shall Be Released" in 1967, in the quiet after his motorcycle crash, and it has been sung ever since as a hymn — usually by a room full of people at the end of the night, which is the right way.
Everyone remembers it as a song about freedom. What is easy to miss is the character Dylan puts in the next cell: a man who spends the song insisting, to anyone who will listen, that he is not to blame — that he was framed, that the fault lies elsewhere. The detail that matters is where this man is standing while he says it. He is in the prison. His argument may even be correct. It has not released him.
That is the sharpest thing in the song, and it cuts both ways. It means the trial holds you regardless of which table you sit at. The man conducting his own eternal defense is exactly as imprisoned as the man conducting his own eternal prosecution — the proceedings are the sentence, whichever side you argue. You can be innocent and still spend your life in that courtroom, swearing it.
And notice what the title does. It is not a motion. The refrain does not argue, appeal, or hope; it states a certainty about a release that is already on its way, the way you would state tomorrow's sunrise. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Kabbalists' distinction between faith and bitachon — trust so settled it behaves as if the outcome already exists. The song is bitachon in three chords. Release, it says, is not the verdict at the end of a well-argued case. It arrives from somewhere the argument cannot reach, and the man still litigating in the next cell demonstrates why: no one argues their way out. The door does not open in that direction.
Which suggests the actual instruction hiding inside the consolation, and it is more precise than stop blaming.
Close the case.
Closing is not acquittal — that is the confusion that keeps the court in session. The mind refuses to adjourn because it believes adjournment means declaring itself innocent, or declaring the other party innocent, and it cannot honestly do either. But courts do not only close on acquittals. They close on convictions too. It is permitted to find that the fault was real — yours or theirs — to assess what is genuinely owed, to pay it or accept that it will never be paid, and then to bring down the gavel anyway. The finding stands. The sentence is served. What ends is not the truth of the matter. What ends is the proceeding.
George Harrison, who had better cause than most — I wrote recently about the decade he spent unheard by his own band — walked out of that wreckage and made an album whose title track is about exactly this, and whose whole spirit refuses the indictment it was entitled to file. All Things Must Pass is not a verdict on the Beatles. It is an adjournment. The case against John and Paul was there to be brought, and it would have been strong, and he let the court close instead — not because no one was to blame, but because he had somewhere better to be.
That is what I would salvage from the consolation. Do not remove the blame; some of it is true, and pretending otherwise is just a different false verdict. Remove the retrial. Hold the trial once, honestly, with rules — and then adjourn, whichever way it came out.
The pain that remains after the gavel is the first arrow, and it heals the way wounds heal, in ordinary time.
The pain that never heals was never the wound. It was the docket.