De-ontology
Murder sonnets (with interruptions).
I’ll be speaking at the ASAP/17 conference on Friday, October 16 in Madison, Wisconsin as part of a roundtable titled “Dance Dance Revolution: Media, Technologies, and Politics of Togetherness,” chaired by Shiqi Lin and Julia Alekseyeva. More info on the ASAP conference can be found here.
Someone decided that this place should be
built from headache colors. Pale green floors
(linoleum), nauseous yellow walls.
Tabletops, scrubbed gray from dirty skin.
Sunlight, what little gets through, feels fake. Glazed windows
are television screens. Everything here reminds of sickness.
Your days are spent seeing and hearing through gauze
(just as well considering what it’s like to feel).
You pick a corner, sit in it, and fool
yourself into the past. Plays like a tape
reel, degrading more each time you rewatch.
Home. The remarkable time you can’t return.
A place you learned to hide both in and from.
Treatment report, Dr. [name redacted]
[month] [day], 195X
Patient has responded well to procedure. Four months after arrival, she is finally a manageable ward for the facility.
Though effectively mute since arrival, patient nonetheless showed herself to be at best disagreeable, frequently disruptive, and at worst outright destructive. Not a single day went by when she would refuse acknowledgement of instructions.
Most times she wouldn’t so much as make eye contact, and often would incoherently scream, sometimes going so far as to attack and injure staff (most notably not long after arrival when her notebooks, determined contraband, were confiscated. Luckily the orderly in question has recovered and, when last I heard, is adapting well to therapies.)
More mild forms of treatment – including ECT – had yielded little in the way of long term results. Since leucotomy was performed ten days ago, patient has rejoined general population. Though still uninterested in eye contact and vocalizing in little more than grunts, she obeys directions pertaining to hygiene, meal times, and lights out.
Orderlies report no disciplinary issues, and that they are glad to have their attentions freed to attend elsewhere. Normally sits quietly during common room hours. Usually ignores other patients entirely, even (especially?) when they engage with her.
You held each other somewhere liminal.
Fennel grasses in your ear. Laughter planting
seeds, growing when you look in her eyes,
the skies so bright you forget the ground exists.
Up the wild hills, the distance:
the house. White, faded, but warm. Unassuming
but proud. A house with good bones; brick and mortar
and life and history built around them.
The place where you were born. The place he raised you
(almost) by himself. Without an inkling
of resentment for having to look into
a child’s face that looked so much like your mother.
A place he needed help with. So he sent for her.
And she would introduce yourself to you.
Order of commitment
[month] [day], 195X
Having been found by this court presently insane and dangerous, it is hereby ordered that the above-named defendant, [name redacted], serve her jail commitment of an indeterminate time at the [name redacted] facility.
Defendant may receive good behavior/work time credits, dependent upon adherence to and progress in a determined treatment program, and on judge’s agreement to sentence’s end date.
This commitment is to commence on [date redacted]. If said defendant violates any of the rules or regulations of the facility, she is to be transported to the custody of the county sheriff forthwith.
The glances into looks, the looks into
brushes of the hand. Innocent words
that carry with them first lust, then promise,
these secret communications, breathed and sighed.
From there, every book and newly turned
page was an earthshaking, untouched wonder.
She wasn’t much older, but still she showed
you a marvellous side of who you are.
Shame and isolation dissolved in
a blend of poetry, history,
philosophy and crackling intimacy.
Love like you had always thought was wrong.
Ideas and passions simply should have been
arithmetic. But dreams are not unlearned.
From the diary of Judge [name]
[month] [day], 195X
Troublesome day. It is not typical that I encounter someone with such a cold and frankly unsettling absence of mercy, with such a void of moral center, with such a sickening disregard for basic standards of human decency – most notably as [name redacted].
It’s likely to keep me up nights that I had to accept an insanity plea, but the law left me no choice, particularly with no actual plea coming from the defendant’s mouth. Defense had no choice, and neither did prosecution.
We nonetheless were by law obligated to review the details of the case. Sickening. To kill one’s own father? The stuff of Greek tragedy. I suppose I should not have been surprised given the kinds of perversion we now know she was willing to indulge in with her tutor, the woman her own father had hired no less. Would that I could have sentenced her to death. Both of them. I’m told that the tutor’s whereabouts are not known.
[name redacted] made pot roast for dinner tonight. Always a satisfying meal. Though I am particularly looking forward to the aspic she is planning to make when [name redacted] comes to visit next week…
All events and sequences, now reduced
to symbols, struggling for the gaps to be
filled in. The images just stand and stare,
refusing to let you rest or forget.
The room where she should have been, now instead
filled with him, and all of wrath’s possessions.
Accusations spoken through gritted teeth:
(words you now know better than to believe).
But she? She’s gone. Away. To parts unknown.
He’s seen to it. She’s now, to you, a ghost.
The threats turn to reality, windows slam shut;
no high-minded ethics will prevent it.
It’s how you learned that love was never enough,
how your voice became unstuck from your throat.
Immanuel Kant’s first three propositions – as illustrated in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals – posit that most moral actions aren’t performed out of duty, though they may coincide with that duty. Desire, inclination, or the pursuit of happiness may provide the framework for someone to act in a moral way, but they do not fully reach the criteria of a universal morality[...]
To Kant, humans are ends in themselves. To murder, therefore, is to commit the gravest transgression against the categorical imperative, an absolute violation of agency and autonomy. Therefore, a person is as morally obligated to defend themselves with lethal force should their life be threatened. As morally obligated as they would be to not lie to a murderer who comes to your home in search of a person you have given safe refuge[...]
It would seem that the only true moral actions come from those with nothing left to lose. One must allow that there are other ways to rob a human being of their autonomy[...]
The last scenes play the same way every time.
No letters, no notes, no new promises
that might prove your future is still yours.
Just sights and sensations leading the same place.
The stifling midnight summer air. The feel
of your sweat rolling down onto the pillow
as against his thrashes you reach down.
The muffled yelp, the moment he relents.
The brief moment of amazement that a blade
can so easily pass through layers of skin
and muscle and artery, and with enough force,
down to the good bones. The life. The stories.
The stillness whispers, knowing. Then it dies.
Has died. Died. He has died. He is dead…
“Father-murderer declared insane”
[name redacted] was deemed criminally insane on Wednesday. Judge [redacted] remanded her to [redacted] facility for an indefinite period.
[redacted] was found to have murdered her father [redacted], in what police officials have called one of the most heartless and harrowing crimes this town has seen in decades.
Motive for the crime remains unclear. Evidence was apparently presented during proceedings, though Judge [redacted] informed reporters that said evidence shall remain sealed for the time being, “in the interest of public decency.”
– Daily Herald of [town name], [month] [day], 195X
In the hours before dawn, you’ll walk in a daze
returning to a world that once opened
its arms to you, now filled with ashen faces.
You’ll never get back to what she showed you.
He took it with him. You will never see
it again. It vanished in his choking breath.
The rest of your days are spent kicking against
the tightest nets, reaching for the wild hills.
But nothing rips. No light will peek through these
restraints. Even with every nerve ending on fire.
Nothing so heavy should float. But he does,
swaddled in bedsheets, in the cold, black river.
He rushes out to sea where he’ll dissolve
like soot into the backstop of your memory…
Header image is Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948).