Crime, Antonyms
(‘I mean that, thanks to her, my cell will be enchanted.’)
A criminal cannot complain of injustice if he is treated harshly and inhumanely. His crime was an entrance to the realm of violence and tyranny. There is no measure and proportion in this world—hence he should not be surprised by the excessiveness of the countermeasures.
—Novalis
I live among these pits. They watch over the little things I do, which, along with them, are all the family I have and my only friends.
—Genet, ‘The Gutter in the Sky’
I.
Everything can be traced back to crime. Original sin, original crime. It’s why the Abrahamic religions can’t be faulted (accused) of wanting to humiliate or mutilate their believers by casting them as pitiful wretches utterly powerless to combat the crime manifest in the rhythm of the blood. It’s just real. True.
To deny it—to say, no, we are born clean, pure; blank tablets upon which anything can be written—to that I would reply: the perfect blue silence you’re thinking of is a crime, punishable by death. The tablet, too, is nothing but the wall of a prison cell; whatever tool you’re using to inscribe a life on it, is stolen; the crepuscular rays of pale light guiding your hand are stolen; what little time you have that isn’t prescribed or circumscribed is—stolen.
I think this is the answer to the riddle Dazai Osamu poses in No Longer Qualified as Being Human. In the book, Ōba Yōzō & his friend Horiki are drinking & playing ‘a guessing game of antonyms’ invented by Ōba (how to play: “the antonym of black is white. But the antonym of white is red. The antonym of red is black.”)
Eventually, following cruel remarks by Horiki (who, considering Ōba only as ‘the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost’, is no “friend” of Ōba’s), Ōba asks what the antonym for crime is.
The law, God, virtue— all of these are brought up, discarded: crime doesn’t occur only where there are no policemen; God is of a different category; vice is the antonym of virtue, not crime. In fact, all three are closer to synonyms than antonyms.
Ōba begins to mutter to himself:
‘Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God…salvation…love…light. But for God there is the antonym of Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and … no, they’re all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?’
Then:
‘Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged “crime” and “punishment” side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—no, I still didn’t quite see…Such thoughts were flashing through my head like a revolving lantern when I heard a voice—’
The voice, coming through an open window, is the cry of Ōba’s wife getting fucked by another man. The sound of lovers, so much like the sound of the dying.
II.
I believe in the absolute wisdom of the justice system. Mercy is cruelty. I have never blamed anyone but myself for the things I’ve done, for being the way I am. Guilty as charged, Your Honor. When they’ve hauled me in front of a judge to answer for my crimes, I never tried to ‘beat the case’. You are never closer to God than when you are being punished to the fullest extent of the law. I have never sought to defend my actions; defending the indefensible is lying, lying in the stupid, ugliest way—crimes have their right to truth just as much as virtue does. I have submitted without resistance to every fine, every probationary requirement, every hospital commitment, every jail sentence deemed fit by the court. My back, docile & impressionable, is the color & texture of red clay, shaped by the whip.
But for all my contrition, all my willingness—I never learned anything. I played along. I was crooked, in-corrigible—but in a kind of autistic, pathetic, surreal way. My ignorance (i.e., my alcoholism, since I’m the type to only end up in handcuffs following a terrific binge) loved more than anything to experience itself. I drank myself to death in the spirit of perfect innocence. Consequences weren’t moral imperatives; they were complexities added to the enjoyment of my escape-game.
To look in the mirror is only to affirm my love of losing.
That said: I am trying to fix things. My license, restored in the state of Maine after I had fulfilled all the obligations set forth following my conviction for a DUI (which itself followed a catastrophic bender in Europe at the end of 2023, a bender which returned me to the US heartbroken & out of my fucking mind. But there’s no excuse. I could have killed someone), was suspended again by Massachusetts as soon as I switched my license over.
What Massachusetts wants me to do to get it back is less a punishment than it is a blunt message that the state not only doesn’t want me driving again, but wants me out entirely: $8000+ for a car, $3000 for a 10-day long class in Tewksbury, $500 for an in-car breathalyzer which has to be ‘calibrated’ each month at an autoshop off-island which altogether would be a recurring cost of ~$250 a month for no less than two years…all of this not counting car insurance, associated rmv fines & paperwork, gas, the possibility the state will have me retake my driving exam, the $10000 I already paid out in legal fees to my lawyer/the state of Maine to get right with them….
In short—what am I saying?—it’s never going to happen. I have to leave Massachusetts & never come back, at the very moment my affection & identification with the state is at its height. Or maybe it’s only the other addicts, the other alcoholics, I identify with here…the isolation. The ocean. The necessity of leaving, the impossibility of ever leaving.
I hate having to run. Fleeing under the cover of darkness. I hate that the coward’s way out is, often, my only way out. Synonymous with drinking yourself to insanity in the first place: running is relapse, admitting that all you’re capable of is relapse, all you’re meant for. Relapse as the mark of Cain or—more simply & directly—an iron heel to the nape of the neck.
What did I say last week? That God has condemned me to Hell until I can write my way out? But the danger isn’t that I’ll end up trapped in a never-ending cycle of suffering, punishment, & agonizing torture. It’s that, like Lowry’s consul, I’ll yell through the cantina window to my friends “I LOVE HELL. I’M GOING BACK THERE RIGHT NOW. THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP ME. I BELONG HERE.”
Because I get confused. Because I get lost easily. I give up, I lose myself, I fall down to the bottom of the well & it’s at that point, only at that point (since no real courage is required at the bottom of the well, only submission) I shout out to no one in particular: I won’t ABANDON HIM here.
Main source of confusion: tasting the blood of murderers, brigands, rogues, rapists, pedophiles: I never found it any more or less bitter than my own.
III.
Redditors—i.e., virtuous citizens—generally call for the death, castration, infinite imprisonment of those guilty of the same crimes I’m guilty of. All I can say is that today I walk around bareheaded & free. Sober, I can go anywhere. I can even go to places you cannot go.
For the vigilante or the assassin, I am not hard to find: my license, suspended, is my profile picture on twitter, because I have a sick sense of humor & am, generally speaking, a sick man…an address I lived at until very recently (a halfway house, let it be said) is only partially obscured in the photograph. I don’t live far from there today; you can even try asking one of the guys living there where I stay now.
I don’t know if they’ll be very forthcoming, however. Those criminals are my friends.
IV.
If I don’t run when it comes to writing, I do something much worse, much more unpardonable: I break in.
I’m fully conscious of it…where you might be invited in through the front door, I break in through the back door…while you’re looking for favor, straightening your tie & powdering your wig, the way a Goethe might greet a Napoleon, I’m lying in wait, beneath the trees, waiting for the general & his retinue to settle in, relax, lower their guard…where you have references & a pedigree, I have jobelin & a blueprint…where you might be surprised, I can’t afford to be surprised.
All enchantment falls from me. All I know is patience, & the wait for my chance—which is endless.
It’s not authenticity, sincerity, edginess, or redemption that I want. I don’t want to dissimulate myself into the game, even though I’m here, even though I don’t belong here, don’t belong anywhere. I just don’t want to betray the silence. Which, to me, is as good as keeping my word. Is the same as keeping my word, which, my dreams tell me, or a voice, or dead writers, or the unspoken vow(tradition) that’s really all of it put together—is all that I’ve got.
Everything I do I do as if forbidden.
V.
‘However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair. When there is everything to fear, be unafraid. When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them. When without resources, depend on resourcefulness. When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise…’ Sun Tzu, The Art of War
