John Swinburn

Life is not a cathedral; it is a cauldron. Despite promises that staying ‘in the moment’ brings tranquility, that pacific state carries emotional risks unmatched in their fury. Desire is a bastard with sharp teeth and claws.

Disappointments are inevitable, but not necessarily damaging. Failure to attain one’s goals or otherwise stumbling when an objective is in reach tends to build one’s humility. Humility is a characteristic that speaks volumes of a person’s experience in the world; it suggests one has confronted tough times and moved on stronger and less arrogant.

Our misguided youth becomes misaligned adulthood. Our early flaws and foibles come to define who we are. We’re on a pathway that was destined, from the start, to reveal the mistakes that made us who we are. Old age is the penance for youthful indiscretion.

Hidden beneath tangled layers of memories modified by time and experience are clear, true recollections that remain pristine and unaltered. I believe those recollections, those brilliant reminiscences etched so deeply into the brain that neither time nor experience can change them, hold the keys to our true selves. Those crystal clear memories are few; they are disconnected from one another. They suggest we consist of delicate armatures to which the balance of our lives adhere. The strength of the bond between our experiences and the underlying armature determines the degree to which we weather the vagaries of life. If we do not withstand the forces against which we battle, we surrender control to something outside ourselves; that is the definition of tragedy.

Honesty is a dangerous trait when it accompanies primal passion and raw lust. Those might be the words of a character I write, or they could be mine. Where does one end and the other begin? Or, is it possible, they are one and the same? Writing may be the only safe way to explore one’s sordid side. Then, again, that may not be it at all. It’s all about risk and reward.

If we had no television, no electric lights, no natural gas, no books, no internet, and no battery-powered devices awash in music, night-time would be a radically different experience from the way it is now. We’d watch the stars and, perhaps, imagine giant beings scampering across the night sky. Our minds would have more space for ideas. We’d spend our time thinking. Entertainment would be something we do for ourselves, rather than someone else doing it to us.

The answer probably resides somewhere on the internet, but I have never looked for it there. Instead, I’ve just wondered—for quite some time, actually—when razors were invented. Before razors, people with beards like mine would have been pitied; they would have looked a little like dogs with a bad case of mange. The advent of razors, though, has spared us the humiliation. Yet some of us with sparse and spotty whiskers continue to try to see if a mustache or a beard might be cajoled from our faces. Vanity, thy name is [insert name here].

The forecast for tomorrow, finally, corresponds to my definition of ideal weather: a high of seventy-five and a low in the upper forties, with clear skies. Saturday, the day I will read a short piece on stage at our local Showcase of the Arts, promises an almost identical reprise of that perfection. That’s the sort of weather, though, that makes being indoors a bit like being sentenced to time in jail.

Not long ago, I wrote what was to be a short vignette introducing the town of Struggles, Arkansas. There is no such place, except in my head. But I keep returning to Struggles and to my dissatisfaction with my description of the town. There’s more to the place than the failure reflected in the weeds growing in the cracks in its streets. Behind the boarded windows of failed businesses, stories of heartache and disappointment reside in close company with misplaced dreams and dashed hopes. Ten thousand writers have written about a hundred thousand desolate places like Struggles; but no one has written the story of Struggles the way it deserves to be told. One day, I will polish my vignette and do justice to the town that never was, but should be.

How many things do you take for granted every day? No, not just a number; a list. Might the list include the coffee you drink, your ability to be ambulatory, the roof over your head? How about food on the table, the relationship with your family, your health? Could it be that you take for granted a coup d’etat is unlikely to ruin your dependence on a government you loathe?  Water flowing from the tap? Gasoline for the car? Your eyesight? Plastics? Metal?

If you were to take time every day to acknowledge everything you have grown to take for granted, you would have time for nothing else. But an occasional acknowledgement of the scope and breadth of your good fortune is simply the decent thing to do, don’t you think?

Early this morning, while I was trying to decide whether to get out of bed or stay there, imprisoned by the warmth, I had weird conversation with myself. I questioned whether anthropologists and their allies make too many assumptions while explaining what life was like in pre-history. My answers morphed into a scene in my head, involving an odd conversation, a dialog I felt I was hearing and watching unfold. Here is my attempt to replicate in words, that experience:

The early human thawed quickly under the infrared heat. When, after he thawed, he began to move, my jaw dropped. My surprise exploded into astonishment when he turned to me and spoke coherently, albeit haltingly and with an odd chemical-flavored accent. “Thanking for you. Colder is not for good feeling. Ingested your language asleep but aware; us together are talking now, accept?”

I understood what he was saying, I just didn’t believe what I was experiencing. It took only twenty minutes, though, for him to explain things to me that, when I share them later, will change the way we view ancient humans.  For example, very few early humans lived in caves; only the ones we would now call “commercial artists” lived in caves; the rest, like my new unfrozen friend, lived in make-shift shelters. The cave-dwellers’ cave art survives to the present day, while the more advanced people, whose art would rival Da Vinci, burned theirs at the end of their lives.  We think we know more than we do.

I think it’s possible I dreamed up an answer to a question I haven’t heard anyone asking. Then, again, I might be hallucinating. But so, too, might you.

The concept, or rather the practical application of the concept, of prison is bizarre. I’ve never thought of it quite the same way before, but this morning it hit me: society decides the behavior of an individual is sufficiently deviant from the range of behaviors we deem acceptable to warrant forcibly locking the person away.

Now, I have no argument that people who pose a physical danger to others should be restrained. But non-violent offenses are more problematic.  It’s not that I disagree that certain people who repeatedly steal or damage property should be prevented from engaging in those behaviors, it’s that the degree of deviance from the ‘norm’ is a moving target. That’s not just from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but from time to time and from judge to judge and from jury to jury within the same jurisdiction.

Prisons seem to be arbitrarily assigned corrective measures of last resort.

And there’s something else. A person can be put in prison for engaging in a behavior that, today, is judged sufficiently deviant to warrant incarceration. Yet, if the rules change tomorrow to permit that same behavior, the person is not freed; he or she is forced to serve his or her sentence based on the rules that were in play at the time of the infraction. If a person can be punished for breaking rules that are later relaxed, why shouldn’t society punish a person for engaging in behaviors that, today, are legal but become illegal tomorrow? For example, if a person is observed taking a pill that’s legal today, but becomes illegal tomorrow, should we not punish him for retroactive bad behavior?

Yes, I understand the arguments against the latter suggestion, but still I think the concept of prison is odd. We lock people away. We, the independence-loving people who fervently celebrate freedom, snatch it away because someone engages in behaviors we deem inappropriate.  Would we feel the same way we do today if the rules changed, making people who engage in behaviors in which we regularly engage subject to imprisonment? For example, if the “right” people came to power and decided coffee is an evil stimulant and its use should be punishable by five year stints in a state pen, would we be as vehement about insisting that people follow the rule of law or risk loss of their freedom?

Just thinking. That’s what I’m doing. Just thinking.