The Cell

“I am not at the crest of the world.
 The moment 
is not the stylite’s pillar,
time
doesn’t rise from my feet,
 doesn’t burst
in my skull in a silent black explosion,
illumination the same as blindness.
I am on the sixth floor,
 I am
in a cage hung from time.”

~Octavio Paz

You are surrounded by the barren lament of southwestern desert and sage lands, visible the primordial mesas with their slothful reaches pulled back to the ground like some climbing goo in battle against it’s own heaving mass. In the long shade of T. mountain, cradled in its valley lay the dusty and sad little town struggling to survive in misery. Within that yawning shade, in the heart of that town is a simple adobe courthouse; magisterial in it’s seriousness, yet unable to hide the ineptitude of the rinky-dink affairs inside. In the basement are many cages.

***

Now, imagine that you have turned down your thermostat down as low as it can go, stripped entirety naked, and slept on the frigid tile of your bathroom floor - with the light on, always on. For seven days a tape plays outside the door of profanities screamed, the dull thump of white knuckles on solid rock walls, and other unnameable struggles of men. Huddle in the corner now to conserve your body heat. This is that cage.

Now really, after around fifty hours exposed to the uniform color of the walls, and sink, and toilet your mind begins to crave the visual stimulation it is accustomed to receiving, so the mind is gracious and conjures it’s own. Images begin to appear. Quickly at first, so fast in fact you think it was simply a fluke of the imagination, a trick of the mind.

Sometime around the three day mark you realize these images are no fluke. They remain in sight now. A wicked face in the almost imperceptible shadows in the dimples of the wall. It’s grimace is real, but missing something about reality, or perhaps supra-real and somewhat sublime. It seems to possess a wavering smirk.

The plane along the top of the sink behind the faucet has quixotic riders three fingers high, in a slow trot when not stared at, but cease to move at all when looking directly at them (though they do seem to retain some semblance of movement when seen directly, blurred, and through other dimensions and back it seems). Again, the images are not apparently real in the normal sense of the word, but bear a gravitas far more visceral, much more penetrating than mere reality. This is that cage.

On the fourth evening, by the time you have taken to talking to yourself, to have something to do, really -playing with the echoes of sound in the various corners and crannies of the room, imagining their speedy ricochet- the the door clangs open sending your heart in your throat, the surge of adrenaline fingering all of your ribs and sternum preparing to smash out of your chest.

In walks another man. At this point it is irritating to you; your loneliness has been transformed into solitude through delusion and disorientation. Psychological desolation is an excruciating pain! The new bird doesn’t say a word or look your way, but his face and hands reek of dirt, and grime, and grotesque peasant criminality. Like a serpent you sense danger, like a lion you don’t let on. He sets up to sleep. So do you. Sleep — the only refuge outside complete madness, or the Sun Door, naturally.

You wake to the insane racket of the man smashing his plastic sandal against the door. You gather from his semi-literate ministries that he is going to kill the judge, and his court appointed defense attorney as well. You make out the obscene font of his neck tattoo — ‘ANGEL.’

(There are some who in these cages so compose themselves that they obtain a posture of observing, say, the culture present herein, others who occupy their time by turning inward, reconcile with themselves or self-condemn. Some are cowed by fear the entire time, kiss ass if only to survive, and do anything anyone wants in sleazy cowardice, but there are still more, like this man, for whom cages are a second home with many rules and much security; a place where freedom comes in bursts contingent upon timing, scheming, planning, plotting.)

Eventually his rage is enough to crack the wire reinforced plexiglass window, impenetrable though it may seem, and you realize just what strength this type of creatures’ anger may accomplish. Nevertheless he goes to sleep again. So do you. This is that cage.

Before another twenty-four hours has elapsed there are two more men in the room, but you have finally settled into a long-sleep pattern, a sort of semi-delirious, mildly echoing conscious hibernation. Interrupting and influencing your dreams is the interminable sound of vomit splashing the inside of the toilet, along with grunts that could have just as easily come from a hog as they could a man; most likely heroin withdrawals. You drift back into the dream; you are in a hotel, in the bathtub, your wrists silently leak red, you dream that life and death in three dimensions are a wholesale experience in some other realm who only the most intrepid and ignorant dare attempt, you dream of chambers of horror trapped in an eternal present, that there is never an end and never will be, nor was there ever a beginning, you dream that you loved and sacrificed to entropy — out of empathy — you dream of CO’s entering your cell and looming above you with trays of food, as you squint upside down at the bright hall lights; you dream of primordial fears, fears that predate consciousness, the extent to which the psyche may endure and be cowed. This is that cage.

***

In this cage there is no time. You can no longer say how many days or nights have expired; there are no windows, no clocks, never have been, never will be. Here you are, and here you have been. Perhaps you deserve this after all. You can now recall in gruesome detail the suffering wrought by your own behavior. You remember every lie, and every mistake, every job you walked on, appointment you didn’t keep, every glare you gave, and every hatred you nursed. All of it can now be traced to you as the guilty party, and it is clear in every detail how you and you alone were the origin of so much upset. At the time it felt as if life were merely happening, most of it incidentally or accidentally, but now the contours of your decisions become as lineaments tracing a plot that only you could have written. Every heart you trashed, every time you could have helped, but didn’t. The backstabbing, the flat out cruelty you’ve administered. Even smaller crimes like the half-truths on resumes and the change you quietly never returned seem now serious offenses adding to the innumerable stack of reasons why, not only do you deserve to be in this cage, but should probably remain there and be subject to intensive treatment. When you could make that many mistakes and still be allowed to walk freely in society there is something very wrong. You needed to be apprehended, you require it. You realize even now that you would still deceive if it meant getting something you wanted, no matter how trivial the deception, or how minuscule the desire. You belong here for a time. Perhaps time will heal you of your disease, so that you may once again go among others as a trustworthy equal. There are so many innocents out there, and not one of them deserves to be wronged by you; there is already so much suffering in the world. You must now suffer. You must serve your time. This will teach you patience. You will learn more about yourself this way. Others will be happy for you if you perform your duty called by all of your malice and evil-doings. You will meditate on what it is to be a decent human being, one that can engage in society in productive and healthy ways. You really are a self-interested animal, perceiving every situation with an angle towards your own advantage, unable to do otherwise. Manipulative turns of phrases in conversations, plotting and planning and scheming ad nauseum to secure survival, at work, at home, in every setting. Always thinking what would be the best time to act, to pause, to fight, to play. You are so entirely self-interested it would be a tragedy to let you roam free. You now weep in ways in which only the guilty may indulge. This is that cage.

***

The speaker on the wall begins to bark.

“Do you want to go home?”

It’s the bail bondsmen, Erminio.

“Yes! Yes I do! Thank you Erminio.

You are free.

***

On the outside, you no longer have the energy to battle the intense heat in the summer sun. It weighs down in meaty conjunction with gravity and you barely resist. You feel old, tired, worn, and you do not do anything to combat the feelings. There is not an evening that passes that you don’t lay with your eyes closed, transitioning into sleep, wondering the many avenues of suicide.

You go about your work fully automated, yet split in two; inside the weight of the cosmos and the progressive tick of decay, outside a manic, but perfect language algorithm. The prison of flesh subjected to the worst of it, but all that is sacrificial triviality to survive long enough to take your own corporeal self. This isn’t to say there is no pain in this sacrifice, indeed there is an inordinate amount of suffering somewhere, and often somehow physical indeed. You seek only relief. Rest somehow. Whence repose if it be buried somewhere in the mind pressed down beneath consciousness?

***

At the end of your last tether you begin to glorify, to romanticize the cage, and finally idealize it’s space. A place to think, undisturbed. A place to fall and to steep in mysteries. The cage has space enough for the physical exertion required for survival, and meals delivered thrice daily. This is perhaps best for you, guilty as you are, you with your modus vita contemplativa, and deep affinities for the infinitudes of the abyss. Tis only natural for you to be where you are free to the uninhibited expansion of thought, of consciousness, of the deep psyche, and spirit from which it arises. Endless new vistas of inner experience far more convincing, in excess, more enticing, now, than any ordinary, insubstantial earthly reality.

This is your cell.

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