March 19, 2004
365 Days of Solitude
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. I submit that the same goes for confinement. In fact, the solitude of jail, the mountain cave, an isolated little island in the middle of the ocean, all of these oppressive places are the source of much inspiration.
I remember that, as a rotten child, I was frequently sent to my room to contemplate my crimes. It was, in theory, a fitting punishment; I craved the companionship of friends, the excitement of television, the wide expanses and myriad adventures of the great outdoors. My room, a 20x25 foot cell, offered none of these amenities. The solitude of this limited space, my mother thought, would force me to come to terms with my behavior and strive to become a better person.
She was wrong. This confinement merely nurtured my already-rich fantasy life. Forget rehabilitation! At my disposal, safely ensconced in drawers, hidden on the top shelf, and closeted away behind the hung shirts, was a mountain of hoarded materials that fed my grotesque imagination: sketch pads and charcoal; masses of collected stamps, coins and fossils; second-hand science fiction; reams of note paper; an AM radio; a magnifying glass; pocket knives of varying size and shape; and a length of rubber tubing collected for no specific purpose in mind. One can’t even begin to imagine what I cooked up in that room, all by my lonesome.
Indeed, people faced with confinement have, throughout history, created the most amazing things.
Consider, for example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, preeminent Cossack writer and the first to explore, through his own direct experience, the horrors of the Soviet gulag.
With First Circle, Cancer Ward, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he provided the most shocking glimpses of life under the heavy boot of Stalin. Indeed, we would never have known this genius if Solzhenitsyn had spent his adult life loafing around on the beaches in Australia.
As a teenager, I counted as one of my heroes the iron-willed General Choi Hong Hi, who came of age in Korea in the 1930s while the peninsula remained under control of the Japanese. Forced to enlist in the Japenese army, Choi repeatedly agitated for Korean independence while serving his imperialist invaders. Eventually imprisoned for his activities, Choi began practicing a unique form of martial art in the solitude of his cell. In a short time, his cellmate and jailer became his students. The art of Tae Kwon Do was born.
Just think, without the confinement of this man so long ago, I never would have gotten the chance to be pummeled by my black-belt-wearing soon-to-be ex-girlfriend in the 10th grade. General Choi, we thank you (wincingly) for time well served.
And let us not forget the most amazing Stephen Hawking. Wheelchair-bound for decades, the Professor has made some of the most profound advances in cosmological theory.
Many people feel sorry for this man, a source of light trapped inside a decaying husk of a body. But of his confining illness, Hawking has said that it has given him the freedom to think about physics and the Universe. Thank God for crippling motorneuron disease, I guess.
By no means do I compare myself with these illuminati. In fact, I’m rather dull. But I find value in confinement as well.
You see, every day, I sit in the Lake County Administration Building, a spare, featureless relic of the most wretched architectural period in US History, the 1950's to 1970's, when builders were still held in thrall of Mies van der Rohe's dictum "Less is More". No, you bastard - less is less. My office is cell-like, though perhaps not so gloomy as General Choi’s. As Guy has recently pointed out, throughout my day I move from interior space to interior space with virtually no hope of stepping foot on sun-lit, sandy beaches. How thoughtful of him to mention it. As he writes me mail from a harbor café in Sydney, I pray I don’t have to put on my snow boots in the morning.
And yet my confinement is also the source of my inspiration. In this tight space, devoid of natural light, empty of cheer, I imagine the ways and means to take down my opponent. His tan and obvious enjoyment of the south seas both make it all the easier to concoct the most grandiose (and, as it will soon be apparent, sadistic) plans to overtake him. His pleasure and my misery are both the wellspring of my machinations. Without his comfort, and equally without my winter prison here in Chicago, I never would have stumbled upon the seeds of his destruction.
Indeed, by year’s end, Guy will have wished for a little jail time himself. Pretty soon, he'll have nowhere else to hide.
Posted by eric at March 19, 2004 10:38 PM