Circles and Prison Cells

My wife and I recently watched an ironically titled show, All Her Fault. In stunning displays of setting expectations and then dashing them to pieces, the show goes through several characters' backstories that could explain the kidnapping of the main character's son. Every woman from the mother to her friend who hired a nanny for her own child becomes suspicious, and then is quickly absolved as more information comes in.

There's one more character that ruptures stereotype and expectations: the disabled brother of the main character's husband. Brian, the brother-in-law, is clearly in pain for most of the show as he hobbles on crutches. At one point, the show reveals that Brian could absolutely be using a wheelchair, but because of the shame and pressure he experiences from his siblings, he instead opts for pain killers that make him ill, and continues on using the crutches that make the pain killers necessary.

Brian suffers in the background for most of show until the truth starts to come out to clarify the real guilty party. This person evades suspicion by masterfully blaming and manipulating everyone else. Brian had been told by the malignant character that he was unqualified for a surgery that would significantly improve his quality of life. Luckily for Brian, his neurologist calls him personally at one point and gives him the news that he actually is a perfect candidate for the surgery. After realizing he had been lied to by someone he had always trusted, Brian takes to his wheelchair and abandons the vicious cycle of crutches and painkillers.

"What...are you doing in your chair?" Brian's sister asks.

"Newsflash to everyone here: I like my chair...Most disabled people actually kind of dig their wheelchairs. To all of you, this chair is a trap, but to me, it's freedom. I can actually get places," he answers firmly.

Brian's family projected their own feelings about the wheelchair onto his experience with the chair. Instead of letting him choose what was best for him, they pressured him to fake being more able than he was and to actively abandon the one thing that could have helped him the most, which led to further, needless suffering.

It's important to check our assumptions about other people's lives, preferences, needs, and adaptations. Instead of looking at a disabled person and feeling sad or going up to them to tell them they're an inspiration (please don't ever do that, almost everyone hates that), we need to stop and honor the space that they are in, and who they are as a person. Don't let discomfort interrupt your ability to see them as a human being.

There's also a tension here that lurks in the shadows of our discomfort. It has something to do with circles, cages, and apparently wheelchairs. I'll pass it to Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, who wrote in their book, The Medium Is the Massage, the following observation about perception and detention (and, yes, it's supposed to be "massage" as a pun, not a typo!):

The fact that a wheelchair looks like prison—a punishment—to some, but for others (usually the people who actually need the chair) it looks like freedom, makes me wonder if there's a connection between this idea of closed spatial perception and punishment that is even more pervasive than we may be aware. If McLuhan and Fiore are right, then we may also be unknowingly influenced by ideas and perceptions that formed a few centuries ago, which can only be reformed if noticed and understood.

Circles

Shapes don't necessarily mean anything, but they can cause intuitive feelings in us. For example, a shape with precise, sharp corners doesn't feel as friendly as the same shape does with rounded corners. Many web-design sessions I've watched have expressed this "friendliness" of rounded corners, such as when designing buttons on a site, or putting rectangular images on the page. It just feels nicer to round those off, as though having the squared corners might cut you.

From my group art therapy experience as well as listening to others describe their feelings about visuals, I've noticed that circles tend to be associated with positive things: completeness/wholeness, balance, peace, eternity. Paradoxically, however, circles can also bring up bad feelings, like being stuck. In English, we even have a phrase, "I feel like I'm going in circles," to describe the sensation of being unable to change something—maybe even feeling powerless and without freedom.

Adam Walker released a fascinating video, The Age of Closed Circles, in which he argues that we are currently in a society with a desperate need of a new "renaissance." Taking inspiration from Valentin Tomberg and somewhat from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, The Panther, Walker explains that there are "closed circles" by which we are ultimately enslaved.

Here we can see our paradox forming: we have these enclosed spaces (circles), that can be both imprisonment and freedom at the same time. Technology, for example, helps us to lead better, healthier lives, and it can also trap us in infinite loops of anxiety or entertainment. We are simultaneously more connected and more isolated.

"...a life will run its unconscious course around a fixed point until it expires," immediately reminded me of Speedy, the robot, found in Isaac Asimov's, I, Robot. In all of the stories in that book, Asimov puts a robot in conflict with his defined, "Three Laws of Robotics," which are the logical rules that each bot must follow. Speedy was sent to gather information about a selenium pool to help with a mining station on Mercury. However, Speedy ends up going in continuous circles around the pool, because the rules are incompatible in the situation: it must follow the orders it was given, but it must not endanger itself. In my mind, I see a robot zooming along the terrain, unable to get closer to complete the assignment due to the dangerous environment, and unable to abandon the area (again, because it can't disobey the orders given). Without intervention, the bot would have indeed run its unconscious course until it expired.

In Rilke's poem, The Panther, we see an animal behaving in a similar way. The panther makes the rounds in its cage. Maybe you've seen this yourself at a zoo: a magnificent animal, pacing, retracing steps until a track is defined on the enclosure's floor. It's hard not to see it as imprisonment.

Walker suggests the "shape" we actually want is still circular, but it isn't closed—it's an ascending spiral. Instead of being trapped in the perpetual "Merry Go 'Round" ride, we are ideally scaling a mountain with our curling path. To move from the closed loop to the spiral, we need something to cause or permit a break; a renaissance.

Prison Break

I included this weird quote earlier from The Medium is the Massage:

"A cell for citters to cit in."

It's at the top of the page and has no other explanation (or citation) aside from the context. Admittedly, I was worried that "cit" might be a crude word, but the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it's more of a term for a person from the city. Some of my family members may use the more common term, "city slickers," which I think could be considered a modern synonym since "cit" doesn't seem to have a very positive connotation.

This quote, then, is very much a pun and even plays with the English sounds. To my ear, I hear "a cell for sitters to sit in," and it makes me think of someone sitting cross-legged on the ground in prison. So if we're talking about a prison cell for "citters" (city folk) to "cit in" (be about their city business?), then maybe this phrase is pointing out another paradoxical situation of simultaneous freedom and imprisonment.

I think it's important to take a look at the symbols we have in front of us and to question our assumptions about them. Maybe we look at a wheelchair and all we see is restriction. That doesn't mean that a wheelchair means "trap" for everyone—it does mean "freedom" for many, many people. Living in the city, having a 9-5 job, participating on social media, and so many more choices, circumstances, and privileges all have positive and negative consequences.

The point here isn't to try and identify things or ideas that are "good" or "bad," because when we abstract and moralize, we tend to stay in our closed circle. Just changing your mind about a wheelchair does not break us out of the pattern of judging every item as we encounter it, despite having seen that our judgments hold no power beyond our own experience (except in cases where we exert our judgment to knowingly or unknowingly take agency from someone else). I think the way we break this path is to realize the dual nature of everything. There are few things at the true ends of the spectrum of "good" and "bad," and most things are somewhere in the middle.

Wisdom is not about defining good and bad in isolation (the wheelchair means prison), wisdom takes context (the wheelchair can mean freedom).

I do want to offer a final space for reflection on the real prisons and circumstances of detainment, arrest, and captivity. Many of us have the privilege of imagining imprisonment without any likelihood of experiencing it. Far too many people are wrongfully detained and imprisoned in the U.S. prison system (see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander for an excellent look at this gut-wrenching issue). The horrors of ICE terrorism currently being perpetrated are far beyond any metaphorical idea of imprisonment I'm discussing here. If you want to take action for those who are being brutalized, terrorized, and unlawfully harassed, take a moment today to call your reps.