The Prisoner
(Originally published pseudonymously, 19 May 2019)
A windowless, soundproof cell block building stands at the center of a small town. Inside there is a prisoner, who has been inside since the day he was born. Once a day a kind writer slips a message under the door. Although the prisoner has no way of knowing this, the writer always tells the truth in this letter: the weather is as it was in the small town, whether sunny or grey; the news of the town, the births, the deaths, the marriages and conflicts, are all exactly as they happened. Though of course the writer cannot know everything and writing never quite captures everything, we can assume the letter is a fair summary of the news of the day. This letter is the prisoner’s received truth of the world, though as he reads it he often wonders if any of it really happened, if the writer is being fully honest with him. But it’s true; it’s all true: yesterday it poured down rain, and despite that a planned wedding at the town’s church still went ahead, the joy unhindered by the mud. This difference, between what is objectively true and what you experience, is the difference between the mind and the world outside; the prisoner might form post-modern, relativistic theories about everything being subjective and that he creates the small town outside through his interpretation of the messages, but he would be wrong. The small town is real. But as the kind writer ages, he is no longer able to make the walk from his home at the edge of town, he asks a young neighbor to bring the letters to the prisoner. This unreliable messenger sometimes does not bother, crumples it in his pocket, smudges the words, and more and more does not even bother to pick up the letter: he writes his own, and fills it with his cynicism and bitterness. The prisoner’s understanding of the small town’s events becomes darker and darker. This is depression: the small town goes on as before, and the kind writer has not stopped telling its stories about the town, but the prisoner’s received truth has changed, and he still has no way of knowing that the change is a lie about the world, or that the yellowed stack of messages from years ago in the corner of his cell are closer to the truth: they all look the same to him. Does it really matter if that bitter neighbor is a chemical imbalance, or maladjusted cognitive structures, or just a reflection of the accumulated loneliness of the prisoner? One of those things may be the objective truth, but it’s equally unreachable to the prisoner. He will die in that cell, and when he dies the whole cell will be demolished and plowed under the earth. So how do we help him, knowing he will never get out? Do we send him more messages, and if so, what do we say?
To start, I would suggest we make sure we know the difference between sadness and the prisoner’s dilemma: the prisoner was sad to hear the news when the kind writer’s wife died: that actually happened, and it was right to feel that way. That is not the same as the month where it rained every day in the small town, because the messenger could not be bothered to change the weather report: the prisoner was also sad about that, and if you told him to cheer up, it’s been a lovely spring so far, the prisoner, shuffling through the pages of the last 30 days to check he got his facts straight, would likely conclude you are the crazy one. So maybe we tell the prisoner, look, I know you think everything is terrible right now, but that’s not real, the reality is some days in the small town were good and some were bad, exactly as before. The prisoner would reply: how am I to know the messages from before are any more or less true than the ones now? And God forbid the day our kind writer passes away, and for years the prisoner’s only news comes through that messenger. At last the prisoner decides to stop eating, and slowly gets thinner and thinner. You send him more messages: you fool! nothing has changed! And if you get truly frustrated, you may even turn on the prisoner, and say, you weak, selfish coward, why are you starving yourself when everyone else in the small town is getting on with the ups and downs of their lives? But our prisoner has never been to the town, and his now foot-high pile of papers speaks of an apocalypse outside. Tell me: if you were in the same place, would you have lasted longer? Or have you confused the fact that your kind writer has kept up her daily reports of the town with being stronger than our prisoner? We are all prisoners of our bodies, reading letters from our eyes, ears, hands, accumulating them in our memories: we walk knee-deep in truth we can never entirely trust. Look in my eyes, take my hand, and talk about the weather.
