Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

ful but artifice has an ugliness at its core. While art sensitizes its audience, artifice desensitizes its consumers, brutalizing the soul.

Let me tell you a true story of artifice. This morning on the radio (it was a scru=y morning: lapsang souchong tea, watching last night’s dirty dishes for any sign of them becoming a self-organizing system) I heard of an unhappy lad, only seventeen, who climbed up a multistory car park and for some three hours he delayed, agonizing about his life and wondering whether to jump, a strange, sad Hamlet of suicide. A crowd of some seven hundred people gathered, and people in the crowd began jeering, cruelly goading him to jump. “Jump, you ****, jump,” it was reported, the expletives deleted. How could anyone be so unfeeling? The reason—as other onlookers were the first to say—was that people were not reacting to the reality of what they were seeing, but were instead responding as if they were watching a film or computer image; living too much in the artificial worlds of TV and computer games, they were as if “numbed,” said a bystander, so that they were desensitized to the reality of the man’s pain and the possible ending of his life. He jumped to his death. People in the crowd shoved forward to take pictures of his dead and mangled body, and the local chief constable reported that people in the crowd posted pictures of the scene on the Internet after the event.

If I were to suggest one place that encapsulates the cruelty of artifice, I’d say Guantánamo Bay; although it may be closed down in fact, it persists as a vicious icon of our times. It is an apotheosis of artifice. It is geographically artificial: this, the world’s most notorious prison, is surrounded by the openness of oceans on three sides. It is an artifice of law, designed to be “the legal equivalent of outer space,” as State Department lawyer David Bowker was told by a colleague, sited in Cuba—of all places.

Its architecture is artificial. One courthouse is called Camp Justice. A crucial aspect of justice is transparency, transparent as sunshine through glass. This courthouse has been designed without windows.

It is linguistically artificial. The blood and razors, the strappado and torture techniques going back to the Inquisition are called “enhanced interrogation techniques”; suicide attempts are “manipulative self-injurious behavior”; actual suicides are “a good PR move”; and while I was in the Arctic, the line being peddled on the TV news was “Operation Enduring Freedom.” This language is hooded. The word freedom is dressed in an orange jumpsuit and caged, and meaning is on its knees.

Guantánamo is morally artificial; the prisoners are not put on trial, and even where there is evidence of innocence, they are not released. Imprisoning children, a journalist (Sami al-Haj), refugees, victims of human tra;cking, and the odd chef from a London hotel, the guards repeatedly torture innocent men. Why

stop there? The world is full of people innocent enough to be held at Guantánamo. I volunteer myself. I’ve done the odd bit of journalism and have worked in a London hotel and have never been involved in terrorism, so I have all the right qualifications. Aw, please, why not? My friends are also innocent of terrorism. Well, one did tease some golfers by picnicking beneath a banner that said “Transvestites Against Golf Courses” and got his sweet face in the papers, so I guess he is A Bad Man, and there’s a golf course at Guantánamo Bay, so he might be Highly Dangerous, yes, and he was lying about being a transvestite too, tut tut. But me and the rest of us, we’d all fit in, tidy-like.

Meanwhile, at airports across the U.S., the tannoy announces that the Department of Homeland Security threat level is . . . Orange. This system was set up in March 2002, just weeks after those first dramatic pictures of men in orange jumpsuits hit the media, and orange is the second-highest threat level. It seems an artifice even of color, for though it may be simply coincidence, one could read a symbolic narrative into it: the orange of the jumpsuits, being the color of threat, acts to reverse victimhood, because although these men in orange are the ones being threatened, yet they are made to wear the color of the threat level. They are the victims of medieval tortures; they are made to wear the color of medieval devils. It also recalls Agent Orange, used in one of the American state’s most malevolent acts, poisoning both people and nature.

And then the miracle in green. A shy miracle and a fragile one. A seedling, its leaves tender to sun, drinking the water tenderly poured by the prisoners’ hands. A lemon tree, two inches of free-hearted life in a tiny patch of dry earth surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners fought for their right to have a prison garden, saving pips and seeds from their food to plant, and they created more than a garden, it was a metaphysical icon for our age. In all the brutality of Guantánamo—a metallic thought in a metallic cage—they created green and the memory of shade.

The prisoners tried to grow a watermelon but it did not survive. “Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass,” wrote the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell in “The Garden.” So these stumbling and shackled prisoners, ensnared in lies, fall to their knees among melons unthriving.

Green is the color of life and of innocence. In all this deadly artifice and lies, these telling leaves are green with truth; the human spirit knows that nature cannot lie. It represents hope, too, for all seeds are charged with this; somewhere, somewhere is daylight and open sky, and each seed bursts from its husk, like a tiny prisoner, free at last, a symbol of release.