A beginning
A look, a glance, a nonchalant contempt: poisoned pinpricks capable of reducing a grown man to the emotional state of a thwarted child. Force lurks ever-present in the shadows but is infrequently needed by the unappealable authority that rules this closed-up, fenced-in world. Every person so enclosed must a hundred times over stifle an impulse to respond to any of the provocations daily meted out. Resistance is reduced to its simplest form, keeping a sense of self from being lost even as each man’s entire character is subsumed by the category in which he has been placed. Every day dignity and self-respect are assaulted by a banal routine of indifference, a routine forced down unwilling throats by disembodied hands that seem to fade away when confronted. As days pass into years, the thinly traced scars left behind work their way deeper and deeper into the entire being of all so treated.
Swallowing pride, morsel-by-morsel, in order to retain what little of it is left for as long as possible, a man sits quietly by himself, giving no sign of the self-protective walls he is building inside himself. A blank expression hides the battle raging in his mind and in his heart as he struggles to preserve a semblance of sanity, escaping the present by floating off with a lover, a dream, or most tenaciously, the remembrance of a mundane detail from an existence now out of sight and out of reach. The eyes alone bear witness to the anger daily suppressed.
This struggle he replicates in myriad ways time and time again; a passing remark rankles, unimportant in and of itself, the man can’t get it out of his head. Frustration builds, his mind seizes on the all-too- numerous grievances otherwise passed over. Feverish, pacing back-and-forth like the caged animal he fears becoming, only the utmost effort enables him to maintain self-control. The man pauses, breathes deeply, slowly, forcing himself to relax, forcing his thoughts back into the outside world. The moment passes, the inner tension broken, another success scored in the battle to retain enough strength of will to bottle himself up, placing a firm lid on what he feels while holding at bay a meaningless explosion. What has been lost, however, in containing emotions denied their freedom can never be reclaimed.
Others are not as skillful or lucky in holding back – or simply find it healthier to act come what may. Suppressed rage explodes, fists fly, blood flows and between gurneys and handcuffs, bodies disappear. An excited silence prevails amongst the captive witnesses as the fight plays itself out. In minutes cell doors are locked, hours later unlocked, allowing the abnormal normality of this existence to resume. Initially small clusters of conversation retell and embellish what has been, but talk soon drifts back to ordinary preoccupations: futile discussions about the law, arguments over sports, interminable words describing unobtainable women, cars, food; other words forming reminiscences of family, friends of places lived, of events gone by – and gossip about everybody and everything not unlike what one might hear spoken by old folks sitting on a park bench. Card games are rejoined, television reasserts its hypnotic power, all seems as it was. Yet it isn’t. Like the humidity following a summer’s rainfall, the momentarily dissipated tension returns thick as ever.
So go the idle reflections of a man walking about in a building filled with intimate strangers, people encountered twenty times daily but still unknown. Sharing confidences without meaning, he is aware how each person he meets stands apart from all others as the life each lives behind these fences stand in uneasy relationship with life beyond them. He would like to focus on what parts of that past to retain, what to reject, though can’t as it is the totality of what was left behind he fears is being eclipsed. Yet if any past ties are to survive, he must learn to let go. Flights of desire mix with harsh reality, blurring the line between truth and illusion, making his very existence seem artificial. He tries to resist this state of being as he might resist a life of perpetual drunkenness; combating his lost sense of self by turning inward via an intense consciousness of his physical being, keeping thoughts and emotions shielded from prying eyes, friendly or unfriendly. A perfect formula, he knows, for a state of complete aloneness.
This aloneness doesn’t mean being alone, rather it translates into an awareness of separateness from others, as if one of thousands of jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered randomly on the floor. A sign, perhaps, that what is held in common in this sharply fragmented community is not an experience shared, but rather what is held back. His life is confined in a small space marked by uniformity of dress, capriciously enforced rules; confined too by perpetual doubt about what is happening or will happen, by never being given an answer to why. This life of perpetual rumor and generalized distrust further ato- mizes the already divided.
He is aware that it cannot be otherwise in such an unnatural existence – there is nothing natural in the suffocating inequality of relation- ships between those in charge and those ruled over. He has become one of the “wayward children” told to stand in a corner, then frozen in place. When freedom is denied a step-by-step path of paralysis is traveled, a process not unlike when a person’s breathing is blocked – air no longer flowing to the brain, successive bodily functions freeze, death at last takes hold.
Not wanting to drown in his own breathlessness, the man seeks survival by retreating into a safe place within himself, a reawakening of his own notion of truth, his own guide of how to trust and whom to trust, the ways to let others in or keep them out; each a conscious step taken along the narrow road of day-to-day getting by. Such safety, however, is relative; it can’t prevent him from being at war with himself, holding on to and fending off painful remembrances of the equally missed good and bad of the life left outside. Memory for a traveler is a connecting link to a receding past and an envisioned tomorrow, whereas in this world past, present, future are all rolled up together in an unbroken circle of ever-changing sameness. Time itself seems to have stopped even as he continues to age, another reality that leads to conflicting desires: wishing as he does that time might speed up and so end this ordeal all the sooner, wishing as he does for time to slow down to minimize what is daily lost.
Caught up in the grip of an unending battle to maintain self-respect, he keeps himself alive to everything and anything that connects life to life, that removes his mind from the imposed degradation, which he, along with every other man he meets within, must endure. Back in the narrow space some call home, the man stares through the barred window looking at the unfettered sky without, his gaze wandering from sight to sight, whilst his body lies still. Gladly, he swallows up the unchained life visible in its fullness notwithstanding the way it reinforces the smallness of his immobility.
The man’s eyes focus on a tree in the distance, its crooked twisting limbs looking like a gnome‘s gnarled fingers, branches unable to hold onto something already lost. Possibly sought are the tree’s leaves, their impending flight visible in the green turned brown; a gentle breeze all that stands between them and a brief unbounded moment. He looks up, the clouds appear to beckon, whether to him or that tree uncertain, though the pattern of steps they form promise an ascent neither can reach – the leaves cannot fly so high, he cannot put a foot outside his cell.
Physically trapped, in his mind‘s eye he travels through space and time hoping to flee from an outside envisioned but not felt; an inside felt all too keenly. Now standing in a crowded subway car, squeezed in on all sides, the air stifling hot, the indecipherable murmuring constant. All around people coming, going, busy doing, arguing, laughing, worrying, planning, touching; the concerned, indifferent, uncertain jumbled together. He stands apart, trying yet failing to either lose himself or find himself in the crowd, seeking some note of recognition that will lead anywhere not here. Outside the wind blows, the leaves scatter and fall to the ground, the clouds sail away, the illusion shatters. He finds himself staring at metal bars.
Peering deeper into what lies hidden, he consciously creates his own illusion, a path to travel that will take him beyond himself. Gripped by a fever substituting motion for freedom, he runs through the visible woods; a path turns into a highway, his feet become a car. Speeding along, window open, music blaring, the landscape whizzing by in a kaleidoscope of ever-changing barely glimpsed images, his senses unwilling, unable to take in anything slower than their own frenzy. He savors the taste of liberty swallowed, unconcerned what is or is not real. Illusions, however, can run into limits too, the road within his mind turns into its own circle and no matter how fast it races, he is always returning into himself. Escaping nothing, the momentary thrill vanishes, everything again as it was.
Lying still, silence prevails. Fighting to maintain what he fears losing, he wills himself to remain within the grips of imagination. Again outside, staring at a path leading from the moon to Mars, to Venus, in a night sky which has replaced the blurry visions of before. No longer alone, a woman by his side, wished for words of tenderness softly breaking the quiet of the night air drifting into an enraptured silence. The two apart, the two entwined, eyes, hands, lips, legs, their bodies find themselves within each other – pleasure holding off pain, every touch a connection dissolving the isolation into which his life has descended. A dream of an instant of ecstasy, a hoped for discovery of self by discovery of another, in a future not yet lived, a present unfathomable, an illusion unsustainable.
As quickly as it appeared, the fantasy disappears; sensations numbed, the texture of a woman’s skin lost, reality reasserted. Incom- plete, he forces his eyes open, fully awake, as acutely aware as ever of his pain. A key in the door, he turns from the window, remembers himself. Another day’s circle to be traveled.
Freedom from, freedom to, ever present as desire, ever difficult to find, express, sustain. Always too the paradox that this most profound expression of our individual being can only be discovered and given meaning in relation to others; freedom only realized when shared. The fence the man looks at separating those within from those without is a wall that stands in order to inhibit any kind of sharing, a physical manifestation of the interrupted lives it contains, a symbol of other less tangible walls that exist inside and outside, in ourselves, in the world we all inhabit.
Life by its nature is transient, change, loss, death are inevitable. Freedom exists not in putting chains on reality in a vain attempt to prevent what will happen; rather, finding and extending the links through which we connect ourselves to others means living within transformation. The inward and outward voyage of discovery of Self in another has no predetermined end, relying instead in the assurance that exists in an embrace that says yes to all risk.
Had this man ever doubted such a proposition he could do so no longer, for the world he inhabited was defined by a generalized fear which at every step inhibited the bonds that could allow love to flourish; a fear all the more enervating as it had no one source, no one point of origin. That is not a matter of physical fear, one survives intact or one doesn’t, there is little in between and not much thought given to it beyond keeping open eyes. Rather it is a state of being that lies in the uncertainty of existence which prevails when always standing on shift- ing grounds. Becoming unsure of who he was, the man questioned what lay within himself, his mind drifting in tune with his lost moorings, pre-occupied with how the threads holding his life together had frayed to the point of breaking. Each word spoken increasingly difficult because tentative, each assertion a cover for self-doubt – self-doubt made worse by circumstances which reduced him, beggar-like, to be always asking, asking, asking.
When one is subject to many and in control of nothing, powerless- ness becomes a way of life. Aware of this negative ending put at the back of freedom from, the question mark behind freedom to, he edged toward a bitterness against a world he was no longer certain how to trust. Each day involved circumnavigating his way through layer and layer of unaccountability. The whim of one, the whim of another, a higher or lower authority, the difference mattered not a bit; each can tell him what to do, other’s gradations meaningless when subordinate to all.
Knowing no answers will be forthcoming, nothing is questioned and everything is questioned, with the same pointlessness. Who made what decision, why, what does it mean, will rule “A” be enforced today, rule “B” tomorrow, is left right, up down, inside out? – the answer always as determined from above. In the enforced absence of freedom, confusion reigns. So too does that generalized distrust of one for another, the fragility of ties of trust between spheres of within and without. Moments occur when he suffers a bout of helplessness, not knowing where to turn, how to feel; he watches his voice freeze while speaking. Eliciting no response, he can no more make himself heard than he can make come alive the warmth of an imagined touch. He has many questions, knows many answers, but the two lie in a state of disequilibrium: answers for unasked questions, the questions asked unanswered. Weeks, months, years go by, too many days traveling his daily circle more dead than alive.
Unwilling to give up, he continues to look for a way out, some pathway to a still undefined salvation; his mind so filled with the unexpressed that sleep fails to come most nights. When sheer exhaustion works its magic, the rest provides little relief. Awake or asleep, emotional turmoil overcomes his tiredness, his mind moving from unspoken conversation to unspoken conversation filled with words he has no place to say aloud in this land of one-way conversations.
When one exists within a system in which those seen in charge are only play-acting for those in charge but rarely seen who in turn stand for those in charge but never seen, then a world has been entered premised on the principle that authority can do no wrong as power automatically converts wrong into right. Challenges made are met with a mixture of patronizing incomprehension alongside implied (or not so implied) threats. Over time, challenges take place with ever-greater infrequency as the futility becomes obvious.
If they are always right, then I am always wrong, that is the logic which slowly takes hold. Next something more insidious happens, for if they are always right even when they appear wrong, it becomes ever harder to make judgments for oneself. Body and mind rebel against such a conclusion and this is where his fight for survival takes place, for what is left of his humanity if he can neither think nor act. But a road to resistance is hard to travel in the face of a system so complete within itself that its self-fulfilling logic gobbles up everything; when each question asked is answered with an unanswerable question, with an incomprehension blocking all exits.
Interlude A1
It’s a working principle of the head bureau that the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account. The general principle is justified by the consum- mate organization of the whole authority, and it is necessary if the maximum speed in transacting business is to be attained. So it wasn’t within Sardini‘s power to make inquiries in other departments; besides, they simply wouldn’t have answered, because they would have guessed at once that it was a case of hunting out a possible error. “Allow me, Mr. Mayor, to interrupt you with a question,” said K. “Did you not mention once before a Control Authority? From your description the whole economy is one that would rouse one’s apprehensions if one could imagine the Control failing.”
“You’re very strict,” said the Mayor, “but multiply your strictness a thousand times and it would still be nothing compared with the strictness that the Auth- ority imposes on itself. Only a total stranger could ask a question like yours. Is there a Control Authority? There are only Control Authorities. Frankly it isn’t their function to hunt down errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don‘t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?”
“Only a total stranger,” yes, that he understands, a stranger, one who is estranged, kept at a distance from all surroundings; no wonder, his perpetual sense of being off-balance. Nonetheless, life inside just as outside falls into unconscious patterns, mirroring what is allowed rather than wanted. The rituals of living recur daily, rituals blindly followed – bed to work, yard-to-library, meal-to-meal, back again to housing unit, to those incessant counts; the beginning and endplace of all else. A routine so internalized that it is noticed only when disrupted, disruptions soon smoothed over so that routine, whatever it may be, soon returns as if never impeded.
A tolerable life in the literal sense of the word: he can tolerate it; to a degree make it acceptable. But be it judged good or bad, just or unjust, liked or disliked, it is a life become monstrous when the repetitiveness is exaggerated to the point of excluding all else. Or so it feels to him as he reviews how unchanging his life has become in this circular world in which no two points are further than minutes apart even when traversed by a slow walker. The traveled circle so familiar that days blend into each other seamlessly until it takes strength of mind and a determined will to remember what was yesterday, what the day before. Minutes take hours while years disappear as though weeks; life slipping away like a shadow at days end, silently without reminder of having been.
Live in the present he tells himself, think the way someone holding onto a precipice might: looking neither up or down, concentrating solely on where to place one hand, one foot, the other hand, the other foot. Survival or death dictated in this world as much as a mountain climber’s on whether a person maintains or loses grip. He, however, can‘t suppress the urge to look around.
Doing so he sees children no longer children; trying not to lose the past in the absent present, trying to see in that absent present the future that is theirs if not his. Moving on, he thinks back to friends, work, a life of uninhibited conversations so unlike the guarded words to which he is now limited; to being able to come and go with dignity unassaulted by routines of indignity no longer questioned, to moments shared without the ubiquitous eyes that in the name of security make insecur- ity the norm. And with that he can’t, won’t close his eyes to all the empty spaces of years ago – those also recalled so that when he pictures life rejoined it will not be as it was; to make up for what has been stolen he swears it must have more content, more meaning than before. Having lost everything he is determined never to take even what is simplest for granted. The future fills him with desire frightening in its intensity; to keep from collapsing under the weight of expectation he repeats his mantra: don’t look up, don’t look down, concentrate on where to place hand and foot.
Thoughts and dreams of a future life outside not inside can‘t be allowed to travel unhindered for they stand in violent contrast to his current life in which survival is centered on anticipating the next directive, the known and unknown rules that equally set the parameters within which he may walk his circle. Responding like Pavlov‘s dogs to artificial stimuli, obedience becomes internalized, choice exercised only in deciding how to occupy the space between the rules, how to live within the humiliation of being dictated rules by someone half his age, half his life experience; One step follows the next as circling the path day after day, week after week, becomes a narcotic-like repetition keeping him from dwelling on what he can’t change. A sameness he finds at time a comfort, more often as a dull oppressive ache.
This unrelieved sameness contributes to a breakdown of a sense of reality, weakening his ability to observe, judge, decide. And growing commensurate with the idle times on his hands is worry about whether life beyond will be all that different from the one he now lives, or if it will only be a matter of trading one circle for another, even if one larger and more varied. So he questions his dreams; he knows that danger lurks where life is sustained on illusions that are but a short step to disillusion. Yet it is hard to break free from the grasp of a longed-for future especially as in its absence there is danger of descending in the opposite direction, seeing no place, no home, no life for himself in the beyond. The flow of his mood from one extreme to the next is a natural outgrowth of a life of permanent transience from nowhere to nowhere and back again.
Fighting confusion, he tries to step back from himself and remember, truly remember, life as it was; the circles he had walked, the times he breached them – to remember that they could be breached. That life, he recalls, filled with its own big and small triumphs and defeats along- side all those words spoken by and to others; some which faded instantly into senseless sounds, others which pierced his soul and remain implanted in memory. An existence of too much rushing about; an existence hurried to attain an elusive goal, all the while failing to see deeper than what lies on the surface. In that larger circle of the outside world the issue is less what can be achieved, more not losing ground for the price of failure, of falling even a step behind is often paid by being trampled upon.
The goal he sets for himself: to remember without bitterness, to not lose what he was while searching for a way forward. A necessity, other- wise a break from the circle becomes impossible. Somehow living conscious of every moment, of every nuance enables him to better capture an image of what could be, might be, if he could only hold on. Looking within he tries to capture the essence of what he visualizes, desperate not to confuse fear or hope with what exists. Seeking to understand others, make himself understood, to prevent a wounded self-reflection from trapping him alone. Whether such is possible, possible to connect with another while walking this small circle, he cannot predict. What he does know is that staying alive to possibility now is the only path which might allow him to discover a road that leads somewhere other than here.
Most days he functions automaton-like, adjusting to the shifting rules unthinkingly, dwelling all the while on what could be answers to the questions that preoccupy him. When least aware of the tasks he is performing is when he wonders most if he can ever be re-sensitized, break free of the numbness in which he’s encased himself as a shield; knowing full well that to do so means resurfacing hurt, the loss of a hiding place from pain. Living in a land of lies and illusions, he has no tolerance for his own, needing now to see beyond surface appearances into the essence of the life that could be even if that life is now contained and imprisoned by razor wire. To refuse surrender to the lack of freedom “from,” refuse to give up on a search for freedom “to.”
A search inhibited by authority’s pretense of omnipotence, an illusion maintained by hiding the exercise of power in the denial of possibility of error. Despair flows from confrontations that are not confrontations because repression is the norm not the exception and therefore – so logic would dictate – not repression at all. Perception is called into question, the obvious denied, independent self-action dead at the door of self-doubt for those on the reverse end of an all-seeing, all-knowing power. Inability to distinguish what is true from what is false condemns a person to a lifetime of going round and round; the search for a way out not so much fruitless as meaningless. What follows: a literal depression, a bowing down under the blows of life; sadness not visible, always present, controlled only by a slowing down of thoughts, feelings, and actions.
All reflections of uncertainties within an imposed life that lacks an anchor, questions left unfinished so as to deny the possibility of beginning a reply. Questions that can’t be articulated for they lead to others – was that smile really a smile, the offer to help given with intent to aid or disarm, the handshake with the right hand to distract from the dagger in the left? Or is such thinking itself a symptom of no longer seeing, trusting, understanding, of becoming what those who watch and control wish to reduce him?
And so he asks himself, how can I ever again know what I know, know others, know myself, know the line where truth crosses into untruth.
Interlude B2
“… but the fact that in moments of depression – and we often have such moments, none too rarely, Barnabus and I – it makes us doubt everything. Is it really Castle service Barnabus is doing, we ask ourselves then; granted, he goes into the offices, but are the offices part of the real Castle? And even if there are offices actually in the Castle, are they the offices that Barnabus is allowed to enter? He’s admitted into certain rooms, but they’re only a part of the whole, for there are barriers behind which there are more rooms. Not that he’s actually forbidden to pass the barriers, but he can’t very well push past them once he has met his superiors and been dismissed by them. Besides, everybody is watched there, at least so we believe. And even if he did push on farther, what good would it be to him if he had no official duties to carry out and was a mere intruder? And you mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a defi- nite dividing-line; Barnabus is always impressing that on me. There are barriers even at the entrance to the rooms where he’s admitted, so you see there are barriers he can pass, and they’re just the same as the one’s he’s never yet passed, which looks as if one ought not to suppose that behind the ultimate barriers the offices are any different from those Barnabus has already seen. Only that’s what we do suppose in moments of depression. And the doubt doesn‘t stop there, we can’t keep it within bounds. Barnabus speaks with officials, Barnabus is given messages. But who are those officials, and what are the messages? Now, so he says, he’s assigned to Klamm, who gives him his instructions in person. Well, that would be a great deal, even higher grade servants don‘t get so far as that, it’s almost too much to believe, almost terrifying. Only think, directly assigned to Klamm, speaking with him face to face! But is it really so? Well, suppose it is so, then why does Barnabus doubt that the offi- cial who is referred to as Klamm is really Klamm.
If errors are not errors, truth isn’t truth, then all that is left is doubt. A doubt become an all-encompassing fear so deep that a person might crawl into the corner of a cage rather than jump at the chance to run away were the door to be left open. After all, the door may not be a door, the cage not a cage, freedom not freedom. Caught in the self- inflicted trap of adding his own walls to those placed around him by others, the man punches a wall – the pain at least is real, that he knows is true.
One has to accept pain in order to overcome the sense of being trapped, in order to breathe the hope of possibility. It is, he knows, fear of being hurt by what he does not know that causes him to crave his own isolation; fear of being unable to discover the one freedom walls can’t deny, the freedom that comes from a shared love with another.
That kind of freedom entails its own search for truth, a truth defined as a connection becomes authentic. Whatever his perception and moods, the world spins on its way, his being confined within the narrow limits of space doesn’t prevent the geese he watches from flight here and there come what may. Leaves grow, change color, blow away, make space for new ones while the sun shines or the moon reveals itself in whole, part or not at all. Whatever he believes, fears or hopes, each natural element follows its own internal logic fitted within the frame of its external constraints. Therein, he is aware, lies a difference for the constraints surrounding him are inhibiting his ability to define and live out his own logic, denying a freedom that has evolved to become as intrinsic to human life as migratory patterns are to geese.
Authority relies on that distortion in order to better deflect challenge, always disguising what is; deception employed even when unnecessary to sustain existing imbalances between those with power and those without. Adopting a disguise is one way some choose to combat that rule though it is a method that poses its own danger – a chameleon-like ability to change shape may help render one invisible to authorities, but if a person adapts too well, sense of self may be lost, so too understanding that the goal is more than survival alone.
Freedom in this circumscribed world, he believes, begins with recognition that the search for his own authenticity means making connections beyond himself, transcending an existence of action-reaction- action. It requires taking a step away from the paralysis of fear, a step he cannot wait too long to make for he has ever fewer resources with which to pay the cost of traveling from here to there.
Fear is not always destructive. Like its cousin pain, it can be a healthy form of self-protection and a stimulus to self-awareness – a needed stimulus in this world of deadened nerves. There are, after all, hurts and then there are hurts. There is the pain felt when hit by a fist or cut by a knife – sharp but transitory, like an illness. And just as a person can take medicine, so a person can swing back. Perhaps ineffective, but it is at least a sign of doing something, of resisting, of being alive. The pain of broken trust is different; a dull ache that lingers and builds with no response imaginable. Feeling akin to being tangled up in thorn-covered vines: imprisoned when standing still, bloodied when moving.
He tries to contain such pain, to keep the pressure of outside walls and those of his own design from completely driving him away from others. Dividing outside from inside in thought can lead to spending enormous emotional energy on trivialities that would otherwise hardly be noticed. A state of mind follows that inhibits his ability to dis- cover or create an outside that can serve as an anchor in the shifting waves of uncertainty. Mindful that love’s strength lies in its fragility, he thinks of a toothpick sculpture, painstakingly put together work that can be shattered in an instant of blindness; a misstep easy to make when life is lived in doubt. He holds onto the conviction that letting walls down will allow what they’ve built withstand pushes and pulls from unknown directions.
An inner-struggle ensues. Whether or not he will be able to grasp love’s content, the desire to do so gives the lie to the aura of distrust that reinforces razor wire fences – for by definition, love stands as a selfless proof that life can be something more than a war of each against the other. Every link from person to person is a measure of how far one can reach beyond the private self, what can be created with friends, built with children, realized in a lover‘s intimacy. Intimacy that becomes a baring of self that allows no falsehood, that creates a truth able to weather storms of circumstance.
A consequence of the introspection his tightly wrapped existence impels is awareness of how easily all that is of meaning can be lost. What will remain for him when allowed to step into the world beyond the one he now inhabits is the question he asks himself. Unsure of who he will be, where he will fit in, what he might have left to give, he dwells on that last as cruelest, for one is nothing when unable to contribute. Taken away, what is left but emptiness that makes life a walking death; in its wake a possible future that would be no change, going from a place not desired to a place not wanted, exchanging narrow circle for narrow circle, staying unfree.
Trapped as he is, going through the motions of a life, obeying the waiting in endless lines for items not worth a pause, daily counted, often searched, looked through without being seen, he tries to keep his eyes on the future, whatever it holds in store. His goal is to move resistance into a life that is free, free from, free to; and if his self-confidence hasn’t eroded to the vanishing point in the interim, then he is determined to live such that each word spoken, task performed, hand shaken, kiss given and received will be meant, will be felt. Resist- ance within himself today, he hopes against hope, will allow the possibility of such a life tomorrow, to rediscover strength that can lie in a soft whisper.
That is the future, this is the now when all about him is pressure to preclude not this choice or that, but any possibility of choice. Fleeting moments of anguish or happiness may interrupt the pattern of life, yet these too, too often, become part of the circle. Like a junkie’s high, the search for relief may be temporarily successful until the escaped-from everyday inevitably returns. Only capturing authenticity can enable a path to be uncovered that might lead somewhere that not only looks different, but is.
An authenticity that challenges the chain of authority that claims no mistakes are possible, thus condemning those in the system’s embrace to judge themselves as guilty, in error, mistaken. Needed is a realism that rejects what is in favor of what could be. A risky proposition for it relies on trust constantly tested, it means reawakening emotions with wounds that still bleed. Failure now could only further lacerate what’s left of his sense of self. He sees a firefly, cups his hand around it, captures the glow, then let’s go to watch freedom in flight.
Yes, holding on, letting go, feeling warmth, seeing light, all are worth risk. Chancing the loss of what little security he has in accepting what’s been, where he is, becomes the opening to possibility. To act by asserting a connection with another is to discover freedom as existence not illusion. Trust, to be with not simply alongside others, necessitates confronting loss and the terror that comes from being alone in spirit. The temptation to look for freedom in isolation is surrender to authority, to the remorselessness of the circle which has no road open other than despair. Only discovery of choice that is genuine can point toward an exit that is an entrance, the will to find such a path he must summon in every act taken, every thought entertained.
Failure otherwise becomes the alternative, a freedom of aloneness, of resignation, the only freedoms the world he now inhabits allows. The air he breathes is thick with the weight of denial of individuality, burdened further by the divides of exclusion – the freedom of hopelessness precluding freedom from fear, to love. All that is left would become the freedom to be unfree.
Interlude C3
“… and when, after finishing his work in the shed, the coachman went across the courtyard in his slow, rolling walk, closed the huge gate, and then returned, all very slowly, while he literally looked at nothing but his own foot- prints in the snow – and finally shut himself into the shed; and now as all the electric lights went out too – for whom should they remain on? – and only up above the slit in the wooden gallery still remained bright, holding one’s wandering gaze for a little, it seemed to K. as if at last those people had broken off all relations with him, and as if now in reality he were freer than he had ever been, and at liberty to wait here in this place, usually forbidden to him as long as he desired, and had won a freedom such as hardly anybody else had ever succeeded in winning, and as if nobody could dare to touch him or drive him away, or even to speak to him; but – this conviction was at least equally strong – as if at the same time there was nothing more senseless, nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability.”
Thoughts he visits over and over again; the distinction between living and only existing can’t be avoided. He rejects the easy confusion of freedom and unfreedom, keeps alive his search for answers, for the touch of another within himself, even when his whole being craves nothing more than the comfort of hiding away into nothingness.
Or perhaps craved would be the proper tense; strolling along the circle of his path he finds pleasure in autumn’s chilly breeze, the sudden drop in temperature allowing a rare instance of solitude. He watches a bird flying low, carefully avoiding sharp edges, coming to rest on a nearby ledge, looking about, looking lost. A sea gull far from the sea, out of place and time, soon seems to tire of doing nothing and takes off, returning to search for a more habitable and hospitable spot.
A search not far distant from the man’s though he cannot spread his wings and take flight nor look for what he seeks in any place other than the one now circled. Without need to hurry, his steps are slow, deliberate. Looking closely at the surrounding landscape, he observes marks of difference with the smaller worlds comprising the larger one; clues to resolving questions he canine more easily escape than escape this track he’s rounded countless times. All about him are worlds of living and dying, of growth and change recurring continually without reference or awareness of barriers that limit movement. The wind picks up, the temperature dips further but he cares little, slowing his steps to a snail’s pace while trying to savor the immensity of every bit of life seen, felt.
Other autumn days are recalled, other winds that have blown, other leaves that have floated by – the same and ever-different carrying promises of what may be. If the first step toward survival is resistance, holding on within, the next is affirmation, opening up and letting go. Only thusly can the circle spiral, living becoming something beyond endless repetition.
A morning arrives, anticipation written all over him. He takes a half-step to the outside, a full step toward rethinking that outside and his inside. Entering the room, he looks at her, a bond present that has become more real than any part of the reality that comprises his daily life. What he discovers in her: a challenging thoughtfulness and tenderness he thought could no longer form part of his world. What she sees in him: he couldn’t begin to guess. Neither can he under- stand the how of what happened; all he knows is that a spark of life has been kindled out of the depths of embers he thought had been burned out long before.
Finding and losing himself in her, the endless possibilities that lie ahead as they make a path that breaks free from limits self-imposed form in his mind. So too does the possibility of breaking free from those limits imposed by the physical barrier of razor wire, of a future that can be made to exist. Gazes meet, a brief touch, a gentle squeeze in passing. Her hand in his, his in hers, all that is allowed though as deeply experienced as anything fuller might be. Fingertip to fingertip, a slow tingling sensation travels from body to body, an intimacy dis- covered where intimacy is denied. Again touching, they press together and remain together when separating – real not imagined, lived not dreamed. His world of freedom denied is unchanged, yet he has changed, eyes wide open his circle splits in the rediscovery of self in another, in her; the life of what could be, can be, is grasped out of the air. No longer afraid, he grasps the strength to not be alone, able to love, able to be free.
That spiral leads him higher and higher; a life in a constant state of mutual discovery found through commitment now enables him to see what he had previously only looked upon. Life remains a struggle to transcend the structures of imposed limitations, the boot is still on his neck, but in the slowness of his being what had been missed has become evident – when imagination links what is to what could be, then the future to be created is glimpsed.
Nature appears to be free; the leaf buffeted about by the winds, however, has a great deal of movement without direction – a different sort of freedom than that to which he aspires. That long absent anchor now found doesn’t make living in a world of elastic authority any easier; nonetheless, a sense of centeredness allows him to affirmatively act instead of being just acted upon.
The degradation of one, the fear of another, can spread, causing each to stand alone and apart. In turn, the power of the few over the many cracks a bit every time two individuals are able to discover of themselves in the other, to transcend what is given. When we live to create a life in which no one tramples upon someone else, it is a prefiguration of how life can be, a resistance and vision that those drenched in unaccountable authority seek to deny. What is this freedom that hangs upon everyone’s lips if it is not indivisible, if society’s walls deny so many the chance to build their own pathway, forcing them into bounded circles. In such a world, loving arms that hold each other fast, breathe in dreams with each breath, in this place where physical intimacy can go no further, becomes its own kind of renewal, its own birth. And just as each child born, though countless have been born before, is uniquely beautiful, filled with unique poten- tial so it is that each love discovered is unlike any other though count- less have loved before.
Back now, walking along the circular path, still guarded by th ever-present, infrequently needed fence, still subject to rules and prohibitions that daily force him to stifle his natural impulses, to swallow his pride, it could seem as if nothing has changed. And so it is: fences, bars, razor wire are in sight wherever he looks, his steps can take him no further today than yesterday, the life desperately missed continues to go on without him. If anything, the pain of separation from all he wishes and wants to be near is greater than ever.
Yet it is just as true that nothing is as it was, what he has found, what he is becoming is just as real as what is denied. The choice remains: give in to that to which he is subject, affirm what can be created in its stead – a choice he has made.
And he walks on.
Allenwood, Pennsylvania 200l
Petersburg, Virginia 2011
And walking still. Ten years have passed since the words above were formed; the door outside, then too distant to visualize, now clearly in view. His emotions are no longer so brittle, adjustments made, conditions eased, people around seen more fully. Good people have been met amongst others so subjected and some few too amongst those with authority. Not all, of course, and the system’s weight is felt as keenly as ever. Yet, all-in-all, it’s been a life lived, dis- torted yes, but also filled with substance, with satisfactions along with dissatisfactions true of any life.
A mellowing, perhaps, though not so mellow that he forgets he is confined, ever subject to those capriciously enforced, always changing rules. There are hurts lurking within him that can never be healed, absences from loved ones that can never be made up. The years, though, have not left him alone or isolated, have not subdued his pas- sions, reduced his yearnings, stopped his growth. Despite the obstacles, so much meaning has been built with friends old and new, with family near and far, with children long grown, the lover still loved – all who have walked this path with him. Seeing beyond the circle he has so often walked, he knows that what happens next will prove to be more than another circle, that new paths that move forward even when winding and curving will be found and furthered. Furthered, beginning when first stepping beyond the Castle’s shadow, carrying the depth of meaning built on and through relationships not torn asunder, to that freedom of what might be.
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Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Muir Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken Books, 1992), p. 84.
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Kafka, The Castle, pp. 228–229.
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Kafka, The Castle, pp. 138–l39.
