Abstract
This piece was written, memorized, ripped-up, forgotten, improvised, and rewritten in collaboration with returning citizens, police officers, actors, faculty, students, and other chosen family in the Spring semester of 2021. The work was undertaken within an iteration of Roger Guenveur Smith’s Phi Beta Kappa course Performing History/Biography in Progress, co-facilitated by Susan Stein, that had been blended with a version of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program originally designed for police recruits and incarcerated citizens. Running in a pandemic, during the trial of the former police officer who murdered George Floyd and in the wake of the January 6th insurrection the course became a dialogic exchange in autoethnography where people separated by severe social boundaries could meet in the Zoom platform’s electronic box and overcome social distance.
George Orwell
He wore poverty like a crown.
Another way to reject the lower upper middle-class caste status of his parents.
They sent him to boarding school when he was eight years old.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onward.
It was a cold and evil smelling place.
While sleeping, his bladder would empty.
Involuntarily.
Pissing himself, but folks call it wetting the bed.
The bed more than the little boy away from home in damp pajamas was the concern.
Like the boy, the bed was property of the academy.
Unlike the bed, the boy was raw material to be shaped and set back on a conveyance.
Unlike the boy, the bed would live out the entirety of its existence in service to the school. It was pedagogically more noble than the stained child.
Each night he’d lay in bed praying, Please God, please do not let me wet the bed.
Jesus FUCKING Christ please do not allow me to further pollute this wretched hell with my bodily filth. The warm release, perhaps subconsciously comforting.
In the morning he’d be taken to the headmaster’s office and beaten with a bone-handled riding crop, but first a word from our sponsors: Body betraying scholastic ambitions? Try physical punishment for moral failure. I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully accomplished without corporal punishment. Corporal Punishment, from the good folks who brought you: Private Property . . . big towns Captains Action, Atom and America . . . noise Major Disparities . . . the automobile Coronel Mustard in the Library with a candle stick . . . the radio General Malaise . . . central heating Commander and Chief . . . modern furniture
Back in bed, he kept praying until he could imagine nothing beyond the darkness, just a headmaster waiting in his office.
Such, such were the joys.
Wrote poverty like a crown, something he could wear.
Eventually named himself after a king and a river in order to protect his parent’s lower upper middle-class caste status.
Joined the English Imperial Police in India.
Woop woop, that’s the sound of the police and Eric Arthur is a cop. Sergeant Blair, 5-0! Hooty Whoooo!
The first time in his life where he was important enough to be hated.
Watching them toil, he despised the brown-skinned natives, but to be fair you have to remember they didn’t much care for him either.
He was lucky enough to see a man hanged. Noticed him step around a puddle on the way to the gallows. Alive, fully conscious and in the prime of his life, condemned, destroyed.
State killing worse than a thousand murders, at least symbolically.
A lifeguard, promoted to pool manager heard the radio interruption of the radio announcer interrupting and announcing, “Timothy McVeigh is dead. Timothy McVeigh is dead.” Summer job on the way to a different life, an imaginary freedom, felt Sergeant Blair’s calculus echo in his limbs.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Dick Gregory told Killer Mike: All of us serve the same master. All of us nothing but slaves. Never forgetting in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.
But to be fair, that’s neither the beginning or the end of anything.
Freedom Is Slavery
Old Major the prize boar hog, because of his years considered to be the wisest of all the animals. They claim his mother said, “Karl wrote a lot about capital, if only he would have accumulated some.” Maybe there’s another dialectic? Could he have been poor because of his thoughts? An Anti-Carnegie, power of negative thinking, he who negates, Uncle Screwtape, how to lose friends and alienate people. You know, like The Secret or Oprah. There could have been a secret masochism at play, taking perverse pleasure in proving himself correct in economic practice and theory. Reveling in the failure to provide for his children. As an atheist, he was likely his own Christ figure.
Sergeant Blair could have been like that. Face-to-face with Hitler, he swore that he would kill him and we really need to take the brother at his word. He had after all taken a bullet in the neck fighting fascism. Dude says he’d kill Hitler if he could get close, we gotta give him the benefit of the doubt. Especially when he was good enough to admit that deep down and from a great enough distance he couldn’t help but love that little tramp. The pathetic dog-like face, suffering under intolerable wrongs, another Christ on the cross martyr, but more manly—Mel Gibson style, hooks digging trenches through flesh. Torture porn, taking on the entire world because he is mad at it, ewwwwwww that does get me go-in. Sergeant Blair took a bullet in the neck and said it felt “interesting.” Yes, very interesting indeed.
War Is Peace
He stuck his head up out of the foxhole, a very dangerous thing to do in a time of war, but when else is anyone ever in a foxhole? Had he been hoping to find that bullet above the shoulder? A suicide attempt, trying to kill that Furor inside? Traitor? Eventually he died of tuberculous, a death of poverty.
Wore poverty like a shroud.
Lived his whole life with a wheeze, with the lung infection.
Was it suicide on the installment plan? He recognized the inner despot, adopted the headmaster with his bone-handled riding crop. Adopted, adapted, internalized so deeply. The “t” in tuberculosis a cross to bare, cross canceling out the “t” in totalitarianism that was sucking the oxygen out of him? He knew the fascist fascination, reaching for that riding crop, a bone—not so funny—a skeleton key that opens all of us.
Was there something about that river itself? The flow, what it did to the landscape, something important that happened there? Or, was it just the sound of the word: ORWELL. As in “sickness and in health,” “well or ill,” “sick or well”? Doublespeak, reflecting what is sick in all of us, a clue, a suicide note?
“George,” common name, but also a name for a king. More doublespeak? The opposite of common, the opposite of royal, a liminal man on an animal farm. The animals are the people, the workers are the elite, the man is neither—everyone moving down a notch.
What’s a king to a god, what’s a god to a non-be
Maybe he just couldn’t do it anymore, gave up, let go.
God Is Power
O’Brien, affecting a schoolmasterish manner explained that physical pain was not always enough, but everyone has something they can’t even contemplate, much less endure. That moment, confronted with the rat in a cage, that cage fitted for his head. The release of surrender, a joy in falling, betrayal. Winston Smith saying, Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!
Suffocating, stealing breath wherever he can, drown whoever he must. Betray, betray, and further betray everything that is anything in order to preserve that nothing that was him. The Furor of nothing at the core of everything that none of us are, or are not. Double negative, doublespeak.
“Please god, please do not let me wet the bed.” Prayed until there was nothing left beyond the darkness, eventually embracing that darkness.
English beer. French red wine. Spanish white wine. Indian tea. Coal heat. Candle light. Comfortable chair.
Weary, despite all my rage, embracing the darkness of betrayal.
Never made it to America where there was plenty of medicine.
Choosing to fail, disappointing the lower upper middle-class caste status of his parents.
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats [the wet]. He was still strapped to the chair [the bed], but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the voids between stars—always, away, away, away from the rats [the wet].
In the end, there is only power, no god.
Maybe just let go and surrender to powerlessness.
Ignorance Is Strength
Malakki was teaching a math class up The Wall and there was this C/O who would always want to come in and fuck with him. “Hey Mr. Teacher, what are you teaching about today? How about you teach me something?” This sort of harassment was common, so Malakki was ready.
Today we’re learning that 4 minus 1 is sometimes five.
Incredulous, the C/O said, “That ain’t right. You go ahead and tell me how that’s right Mr. Teacher.”
Okay, but if I can show you how 4 minus 1 is 5 you have to leave and let me teach this class. If I can’t, I’ll give up and you can teach the class.
The C/O agreed, Malakki picked up a piece of paper and asked the C/O how many corners it had. He then materialized a pair of scissors, dull with rounded ends for kids, the kind of scissors that he should not have been able to use as a weapon. Two cuts, intersecting at a ninety-degree angle, the subtraction of one corner.
Now how many corners are there?
The C/O walked out and Malakki went on with the lesson.
Two and Two Are Five
But sometimes 4 – 1 is also 5 and we need to thank god for that.
Big Brother Is Watching You
I call Malakki Big Brother, he’s part of me that I can’t escape and I thank god for that.
Allowing for the book, after all, being a parody, something like 1984 could actually happen. This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. The sex instinct will be eradicated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the Party. But always there will be the intoxication of power. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
