Tag: wage slavery

Torture

I want so much to begin my Ohio series, but I can’t due to other responsibilities relating to wage earning taking up all of my time. The constant need to earn a living is a major source of frustration for me. There is no market for the kind of material I am suited to produce (readership of this blog hovers right around 20 views a day, for example), and so I have to do wage toil to get capital to live on. Most days I resign myself to the way the world is and how the people are who live in it, and I do what is asked of me (web programming and low-level graphic design). Today my mind revolts at the work I’m trying to make it do. I am sitting at my desk in my windowless office trying to concentrate, and my thinking is just very fitful and continually escaping into daydream. This struggle to harness and control myself is agonizing because it requires me to apply immense effort to enact the suppression but then I must also be the victim of my own suppressing. The misery of it puts me in the mind of what torture is—I mean what it really is, which is more than just the experience of pain. The term torture comes from the Latin root “tort”, which denotes twisting or bending. The term describes how the body writhes and contorts under infliction, which is an instinctual reaction compelling the body away from the thing causing the injury. Under torture, the body frantically struggles to escape, but since it is restrained, the escape is thwarted. Herein lies the true anguish and trauma of the torturous ordeal: it is not the pain, but the inability to escape the pain that so impossible to endure. Pain, after all, is imaginary and can be displaced with mental discipline. Mutilation or injury, of which the pain is a signal, is real; it is the substantive event and cannot be ignored without surrendering oneself to delusion. So torture really has more to do with the context that surrounds the pain, the fear and uncertainty and distress and isolation and loss of hope. Pain is merely an intensifier to the emotional torment of being trapped.

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Thus, my current state can be understood as follows: I feel no pain, but I feel a compulsion to escape as if I were undergoing some painful trial. Because I cannot satisfy this compulsion, I am in fact subject to what could legitimately be called a torture. I think this could be said of anyone who is trapped. It is always torture, the very worst thing that a human being can suffer; sensing the urgent need to escape and being kept from doing so.

Failure of Imagination

The first plant I ever owned was a single ivy vine. I bought it from a tiny shop on Rogers Park, Chicago that was stuffed with plants in various stages of life and decay. I asked the clerk if he had laurel or myrtle. He told me that these were trees and that they would not grow well in doors. So I chose ivy, sacred to the god Dionysus.

My ivy was just a thin, wispy tendril back then, growing out of a little divot of soil. I took it back to my apartment, nourished it and managed to keep it from dying. I believed the ivy to possess special magic. To me it signified the gift of imagination. It stood for spontaneity and raw passion. I came to think of this particular ivy plant as an embodiment of my own faculty of imagination. This was a time when having an imagination might have been useful to me. I was young and looking for something to do with myself. Also, I was vain and selfish, and thought I might want to be an artist.

The ivy never really thrived in my care. It always just held on. At best I think I got it to grow four separate vines, each a couple feet long. Then it would get mishandled during a move to a new apartment, or its pot would get knocked over at a party. I didn’t know anything about what it needed to grow. I never repotted it. I gave it water whenever I remembered to. I don’t believe it every really had a chance. The best it was destined to do was stagnate.

Later on, after I finished more school and became more employable, I took a job in downtown Denver working for a big corporation. I commuted more than two hours each day, and when I got there I’d do web development work in a mental doldrum for 9 or 10 hours. I found it to be utterly stultifying. It felt like I was traveling great distances every day, just to arrive at a place where I could trade my vitality and human potential for a modest amount of money. Nothing that I accomplished at this job meant anything to me, but I was very broke and had no other option. So I just kept showing up each day.
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I brought the ivy with me to the job. I kept it in my cubicle for half the day, and the other half I would leave it next to a window where it could get sun. I wanted to see if being in the office would cause the ivy plant to die. A corporate office of the kind I was in is to the imagination as what an oil refinery is to that part of oil that just gets burnt off or extracted and thrown away. The plant did not grow, but for a long time it survived. I watered it and tended to it regularly. Then finally, as I was about to enter my second winter with the company, parts of the ivy began to fail. I pruned away the dead vines until all that remained was the one stem from which the plant had started.

It died at the end of my last day in the office.

I had found another job and was cleaning out my desk. The ivy was packed into a box with a lot of other things. I carried everything home on the bus. The weather was bitter cold outside. I walked a mile from the bus stop to my apartment with the ivy exposed to the winter air. The few leaves it had left fell off the next few days and the stem became brittle. The death of the ivy plant was a cause for dismay like I had always thought it would be, at least not consciously. I think I have stopped believing that it had magical significance. Or rather, I’ve come to acknowledge that it could be magical, but not in any sort of way that I would be capable of comprehending.