Amsterdam 90: Reflection

Never had I lived like this previously. I’d had no model for it at all. At the beginning, maybe some Hunter Thompson inspired drug and sex binge, but that had been receding into the ether of the past. For what I had started doing, there was no model for me. I felt like a hedonist becoming an existentialist becoming a shaman. But none of those concepts held much for me because I hadn’t studied them extensively. I was too close to living the experiences for them to become such an amalgam of concepts.

I had been reflecting over a morning coffee at Eik en Linde. There were few customers in the establishment, one regular who sat near the column in the middle of the bar. Beyond him there was just me and Phillip, Kasper having taken the day off. Phillip and I rarely talked because he was usually in the kitchen preparing breakfasts, but even when he was behind the bar he was more vocal with the locals, speaking in Dutch. He spoke English well enough, but he was mostly aloof, in a good-natured way, when around me.

Maybe it was his long shock of red hair that he had pulled back in a pony tail. So few Dutch are true redheads like Phillip. Sure, strawberry blonde, sandy orange, but Phillip came across as Danish rather than Dutch in appearance. It was nothing more than an oddity, but it’s what filled my mind while I sipped on my coffee. 

I wasn’t hungry so I hadn’t ordered any food. I wasn’t in any great mood to talk, either, so I appreciated the relative quiet. I had fully intended to rouse about with any number of regulars—hopefully Peter, included—but after sitting silently for a bit I felt differently. I was mostly awed by my life. Not in a prideful way; I mean it in the sense of “Is this really happening?” 

For that to make any sense at all, it would mean my life had been utterly unlike this. And it had been utterly unlike this. I was trying to figure out why that had happened, if I had let it happen or if there was nothing I could have done without going to live in a fairy-tale foreign city in which I knew no one and living there just long enough to become quasi-native. My former life, which happened to have made up 37/38ths of my life, seemed more foreign to me than my new life. I felt like a cutting off a dying old tree that had been living in desolate climates not known for sustaining life and was now growing in conditions that were meant, especially, for trees like me. 

When Phillip came by to top off my coffee, I felt a wave of gratitude. It came out as gratitude for him, but it was really for the whole of my experiences in Amsterdam, all of the people, all of the places, all of the architecture, the art, the rhythms, the canals, I just wanted to bathe in it and, suppressing a laugh, I realized I was. 

I paid my tab and walked out into the cold of late March, my neck snug under a scarf and my hands warmed by gloves, before coming to a halt at the southwest corner of Plantage Middenlaan and Plantage Kerklaan. I gave a moment’s thought to Bloem, but decided against it. I had spent a few days in a row there and, as I stood at the corner, I felt as if turning to the north for Bloem threatened the day’s possibilities. I wasn’t in the mood for Bloem’s midday coziness. I wanted—

What? I turned to the south to walk along Kerklaan mostly because it was a quiet street and I wanted peace to think. I didn’t want anything. I came upon a bench along the sidewalk and sat down. “That’s really the crux of it,” I thought. “I don’t want for anything.” I sat for a few minutes watching the branches of trees across the street dipping back and forth with the winds. “That’s actually enough for me right now, just to sit and watch the branches move.” 

So I did. I sat there for almost two hours thinking of nothing much at all, simply watching the trees and the few people who passed by walking, cycling, or driving. It would have been easy to say, “Oh, I could be sitting anywhere and it would be the same at this point; I’ve achieved Zen.” But, no, it was specifically this street with its slow rhythm, the cold wind combined with my bundled-up outdoor coziness, and the mood that formed as I collaborated with Eik en Linde earlier. I imagined if I could sit in such contentment in a mall parking lot. The thought alone jolted me. It felt like a jagged lightning bolt had exploded within me. Not a good feeling. I was no Zen master; I simply benefitted from the environment Amsterdam offered. 

I couldn’t see anything but opportunities in the city any more. Every moment was an opportunity in Amsterdam. I had never felt, on an everyday basis, like I was always exactly where I wanted to be when I wanted to be there and, often enough, with the people I wanted to be with. The latter was, in my prior experience, a fairy tale fantasy. The very notion that there could even be enough people in the world I would actually want to be with—that’s a pretty small number so one might think the odds were in my favor—was folly to me when I lived in the States. But here I was in a city that seemed to have gobbled up more than its fair share of incredible persons. 

As I was still sitting on the bench, I watched a vibrant young woman dressed like she was on the cover of a winter cycling magazine and thought, "She may be amazing, but I can let her pass because I know there are more amazing persons all around me, every day. I don’t even have to interact with them in any traditional or even perceptually apparent sense because … the physical environment of the city nurtures." I could count on one hand the times I had felt lonely since the first day I stepped into Bloem and met Daniel, Nina, and Anabel. Since that time it had been like the floodgates of the city opened. Those three magic makers, those angels in fashionable clothing, had sprinkled their Dutch pixie dust all over me and now I was richer than all the leprechauns of Ireland. 

I was being exceptionally honest with myself that morning and I acknowledged that shrooms had played an equal role in opening up opportunities. And I finally gave myself credit for using the opportunities in such a way that sitting at that cold sidewalk bench while watching the wind was as fulfilling as anything else I could have been doing.

John the Normal

John was normal. Everything he did was normal and the ways in which he did normal things was also normal. John, in fact, was the epicenter of normality. While in most ways this made John unremarkable, he was crucially the most unique human who had ever lived on the planet. There were, throughout the galaxy, however, many others just like him in the forms their species took. 

John’s uniqueness was his baseline status as the purest particle of normality that can exist as a living being. All other beings were, in relation, abnormal. It was by degrees, however, and John’s most unique power was his ability to perceive the minutest diversions from normality. 

It was several years ago when John created a scale of abnormality, a dumbed-down representation of his perceptual ability to detect abnormality, but useful in the sense that it used percentages to rate how much of a given person’s being and living is made up of abnormality. John was at zero. Very few people had ever registered below 20 percent. Most people, John determined, were at least one-third abnormal. A third of all Americans, John discovered, are more than 50 percent weird. 

What will be the impact on society once a person gains access to his or her or their scorecard? At first it will be a mixture of amusement and confusion. “I got a 34. What did you get?” The response, “I’m a 76. Wow, I’m a freak!” nothing new from a structural standpoint, but tribal groupings could become common. People with over 75 percent may have utter disdain those under 50 percent. Just a new form of red-state/blue-state. 

To an extent this already occurs. A place like Mason City, Iowa, is probably around 25 percent as a whole while a place like, Portland, Oregon, is probably somewhere above 50 percent. I got wind of all this stuff from John during a time in which I was 100 percent abnormal. Being on the opposite pole naturally made us curious about one another. John abhors abnormality whereas I abhor normality, but, strangely, we each perceived the other as so far down the spectrum that we developed a respect for the profundity of absolutism.

Our first discovery was the horror of a person who was 50 percent abnormal/normal. It seemed like an abomination. But then we came to realize that the 50 percenters were masters of the normal AND abnormal. Thus, we set out to find a 50 percenter thinking maybe we could become a mystical trilogy of oneness, the utter elimination of the dialectic through a triad monism.

We found her. And another her—it was a Chinese square rather than a Japanese triangle! I’m referring to the cultural differences in the structural foundations for landscape architecture, naturally. Now we four are gods among mortals, the vast herd who are not perfectly abnormal, normal, normally abnormal, or abnormally normal. 

Capital Z

Reading is doing. Action! David Copperfield, the commercial magician, was motivated to take his stage name after reading David Copperfield. He identified with the character because he, like Dickens, had worked in a factory as a child. Of course, that isn’t true at all. He just liked the sound of the name. David Copperfield, the commercial magician, is a philistine.

Bob, the weekend woodcutter, chisels scenes of the nativity. He anonymously delivers them to the yards of well-known atheists during Advent. Resemblance is a system of thought and played a constructive role in knowledge in sixteenth-century culture: guiding exegesis and interpretation of texts, organizing the play of symbols, providing knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlling representation. Infinite Jest, the postmodern novel by David Foster Wallace, is a work of word-stitching. The minute descriptive detail resembles the intricate stitching, millimeter by millimeter, of a life-sized embroidery of the exterior of an 1890s Victorian house; there are no rooms inside, nor are there any furnishings. It’s magnificent ornament disguising despair as vacuousness. Or, it’s purposeful meaninglessness disoriented by an aimless but desperate hunger for meaning.

Except, it isn’t those things. Creating a postmodern story is just a ruse to mask writing for the sake of writing just as a doily is a ruse for stitching for the sake of stitching. There were four articulations of resemblance: adjacency, emulation, analogy, and sympathy. No one knows why. I asked her and she said she knew. Who changes her name to “No one”? She did. The adjacency of places indicated that things touch and fringes intermingle.

Frogs have one goal in life: to become butterflies. They are a failed species. In terms of meeting goals, anyway. The problem originally occurred in the goal-setting phase of existence. The ongoing problem is adherence to the original goal. They are successful as a species in the sense that they continue to exist. That is decidedly unsatisfactory for frogs, though. They are unhappy with themselves as a species, but they continue trying. It could be said that they would cease to exist if they had an attainable goal. Movement, influences, passions, and properties were communicated. Thus, failure to achieve has been interpreted as the key to their survival.

Adjacency was also a sign of a relationship. Why wouldn’t it be? Fred thought he knew, but he was so distracted by the big things that he forgot to tie his shoes one morning then tripped and fell down the stairs. He has amnesia now and he’s happier than he’s ever been. Through adjacency, resemblance is connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. This gives rise to the proximal distal, though distal proximity is its mirror image. They’re the same, but the left is on the right and the right is on the left. Which means that they aren’t the same at all. Similitude. That’s a different concept, though. Getting the order of things correct has never been a specialty of mine. As a principle, I’m against order. Practically speaking, though, I use just enough order to make my eggs over easy. Hey, gotta eat, woman!

Were I to go to the moon I would no longer have a need for bleach. Adjacency also provided that the world is a universal convenience of things and linked the world together like a chain through relationships. Chain gangs were once convenient. I doubt being adjacent to a slave driver with a whip was fun, though. If I had been forced into labor like that I probably would have derided the concept and damned physics to hell. Silently, though. Mostly I’d be thinking I shouldn’t fall down or I’d get whipped horribly. Or maybe I’d try to figure out how to kill myself without being stopped before I could succeed. Is that the circle of life?

From circle to circle, resemblances were able to hold extremes apart while bringing them together in such a way that the will of God (the Almighty Unknown) could penetrate the unawakened corners of the world. It’s not easy to pass judgment on the unknown. Not with specificity, anyway. You could try, but I wouldn’t bother with you if you did. If you tried to tell me about it I would yawn before walking into traffic as fast as I could. 

Greta was a philanthropist. So she said. Evidence of her good deeds were scarce and those that were discovered proved false upon examination. She had no respect for science and even less for truth. That’s what we all said about her. She suggested we agree to disagree. Given that all of us were born in the United States after 1990, we were unable to agree that we were disagreeing. Emulation was a sort of adjacency that had been freed from the law of place and, without motion, was able to function from a distance. Before we were frozen by inertia, the iPhone was invented and we forgot that yesterday existed. 

I have undergone many surgeries. As such, it was a resemblance that needed no spatial contact. I see myself in you. Reflections and mirrors provided the means by which things scattered through the universe could answer one another. You accused me of harassment for staring too long and deeply at you, but I was really staring at myself … which I saw in you. Why are you blaming me from looking at myself … in you? It’s not my fault that you made yourself into an image of me. But you reply, “Oh, no! No, you made yourself into an image of me!”

Imitation throughout the universe, without connection and proximity made possible by duplication through mirrors, abolished distance proper to things and that allowed things to overcome the place allotted to them. I love words that begin with the letter “p.” “Pedantic” is a favorite of mine. I often consider myself a pedant, but only because the word begins with the letter “p.” I could write that the word begins with p, but I think writing “the word begins with the letter ‘p’” creates a more sufficient clarity. 

What is the meaning of all of this? Can such a question be answered? Am I the only person who could answer such a question? Or should I leave that to the practitioners of literary criticism? Why does one question lead to so many others? The problem of emulation was the inability to determine which was the original image: which image is reality and which is projection? Don’t get me wrong; I could answer these questions. But to do so would require a tremendous amount of time and concentration. In fact, I believe it would feel like time in a concentration camp. Not in the Nazi sense of the word, but a camp designed to facilitate concentration. The question was ultimately incoherent because emulation was deemed a twinship existing in things. The two reflected images are not necessarily equal; one may be dominant and the other weaker with the weaker image receptive to the stronger influence of the dominant. A university, okay! I’m saying universities are concentration camps.

Speaking of meaning, I recently read that men prefer acknowledgment for their intentions and purposes while women prefer acknowledgment of their feelings. This was a statement made by a couples therapist in the early 2010s. He had been working with couples since the 1970s and, after some time, he noticed a pattern in the complaints of couples. Granted, these were apparently heteronormative couples. Through emulation, like envelops like. Who knows what the patterns of failing LGBTQ couples are. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough once therapists specialize in seeing lesbian, gay, and transgender couples. The links do not form a chain but a series of concentric circles reflecting and rivaling one another. And then there’s mixed couples, a transgendered person married to a cisgender male who is attracted only to transgendered persons. 

Is there a name for that? A name for a cisgender man who is only attracted to transgendered persons? A lesbian is a woman attracted to women. Easy enough. A cisgender man attracted to transgendered persons, though? Is that a thing that happens? If it does then there must be a label for that category. There’s a label for everything now. Tied up in a little bow. Persons are like the firmament, but they are not bound to it. Their “inner sky” may remain autonomous and independent. Maybe not. Maybe the cisgender man attracted to transgendered persons will escape compartmentalization. On the other hand, that might not be so great for that guy. It’s got to be much harder to use computer dating services without having an acronym to let others know who he is and who he is wanting to date: “CGM/TP.” No one is going to know what the fuck that means unless they read what I’m writing. Even then, I’m not sure if anyone will know. I have no evidence of your reading comprehension skills, your tolerance for postmodern writing, or your ability to decipher absurdity and usefully apply it in your life.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Who knew doubts had benefits? Skeptics, for one. They live by doubt. Their entire metaphysical framework would collapse without doubt. Oddly enough, though, they may have the one conceptual framework that would make them happier if their worldview collapsed. After all, their lives would become filled with certainty! By means of knowledge and wisdom, persons come to resemble the order of the world by taking the world back within themselves and recreating their inner firmament in a manner that is similar to what is external.

There is more to say about that, but I want to return to the therapist’s notion that men crave acknowledgment for their intentions and purposes and women want acknowledgment of their feelings. As I said, this therapist was attempting to help heteronormative couples. So, okay, we’ll leave it at that and examine it as a fraction of humanity, a window into a specific Westernized socionormative dynamic within heterosexual couples and, I suppose, potential couples. If this occurs then the wisdom of the mirror will be reflected back to envelop the world, and persons will discover that they contain the stars within themselves, influencing what influences them. If that’s the case, it would be really simple to solve relationship difficulties. 

For example, a woman applies for a job, but is rejected. She is disappointed and sad. Her partner, a heterosexual man, should not focus on how hard she tried or insist that she’ll do better next time. No, he should, according to the therapist, express that he is aware of how hurt she is by not getting the job, by being rejected in her attempt to be employed. He should open himself up to empathize with her so they can share her sadness together. This, according to the therapist, not only soothes the feelings of hurt, rejection, and loss, but also brings the couple closer together in a time of need, thus strengthening trust between them and the development of a firm belief that they can overcome difficulties and crises together. 

On the other hand, a man applies for a job, but is rejected. This seems to be another twinship, but perhaps an infinite multitude of them. He is bitter, angry, and dejected. His partner, a heterosexual woman, should not focus on his feelings or talk about how disappointed he must feel. Within analogy, adjacency and emulation are superimposed. No, she should, according to the therapist, express that she is aware of how much work he put into trying to get the job, how impressive it is that he had the courage to make the attempt, and how proud she is of his dedication and determination. Analogy provides an endless number of relationships. This, according to the therapist, reinvigorates self-confidence, reaffirms a worldview that had been damaged, and helps the man feel that his partner believes in him, his values, his goals, and his purpose. Inversion is possible without rendering itself open to dispute. This leads to greater openness which brings the couple closer together, strengthening their bonds through trust, and creating a shared belief that they are there to support one another through difficulties and crises which, in turn, make the good times much more rewarding.

Earlier, I wrote about my love of words beginning with the letter “p.” Reversibility and polyvalency endow analogy with a universal field of application. There are so many incredible “p” words! How about “phrontist”? You can look up the definition using an online dictionary. There’s even another great “p” word used to describe the meaning of “phrontist.” All figures of the universe can be drawn together. 

Yet, I am quite sad that there are so few words that begin with the letter “z.” It’s unfair. No, it’s not. Who applies the concept of justice to words beginning with certain letters? Besides, I’m referring to the English alphabet which is derived from a Latin alphabet. I’m not even sure if Sanskrit has an equivalent for the letter “z.” If it does, maybe there are tons of words that begin with the Sanskrit version of “z.” I don’t know. There is one privileged point in the universe: humanity. In the scheme of things, I don’t really care. Not now, anyway. Maybe I’ll care in the future. I’m not going to rule it out. My interests have changed over the years. There’s some give and take there.

But right now I don’t care. What interests me at this moment is why there are so few words beginning with the letter “z.” I am enamored with the letter. I mean, it’s not the letter “p,” but it’s in the next tier of importance just below it. I never realized it, but I have a hierarchical structure for the value of letters used to begin words. Even to my addled brain, that is very odd. Humanity is a fulcrum of relations and proportions. Until now, I never knew this structure existed. I could sit where I am and go through the alphabet to find out exactly where each letter used as a beginning of a word fits into a tiered ranking system of values. Huh.

Humanity is always the possible half of a universal atlas. The ancient Greeks seemed to have a thing for the letter “z.” Naming the most powerful god “Zeus” is an intriguing statement about the power inherent in the sound of the letter “z.” Of course, I don’t know the Greek alphabet or if the Greek word for “Zeus” is pronounced the same as it is in English. The space occupied by analogy is a space of radiation. I’ll pretend it does. 

But there are far more “p” words and names in ancient Greek than “z” words. Pliny, Pythagoras, Pandora, Pegasus, Plato, and so on. Perhaps the Greeks recognized the power of the “z” sound and felt few words were worthy of beginning with that letter. Persons are surrounded by it on all sides, but, inversely, persons transmit these resemblances back into the world from whence persons receive them. I can respect that if it’s true. I doubt it’s true, but I am choosing to believe that it’s true so that my esteem for the ancient Greeks remains intact. 

I doubt the same is true of the English-speaking world. What I mean is that I doubt that there have been few “z” words created because of a reverence for the sound the letter represents or for the aesthetic attractiveness of the visual symbol of the letter. I think it’s more a matter of laziness, neglect, and a distaste for imagination and creativity. Let’s look at the history of the English, okay? Persons are the center upon which relations are concentrated and from whence they are reflected. The English and those in English-speaking countries have long lived behind closed doors. Being creative and spontaneous on the street? That’s for the common man, not a man of distinguished tastes! No, there shan’t be any “zooming” or “zinging” or “zapping” as long as we’re British, by God and Queen!

Or something like that. Sympathy provides no predetermined path, no prescribed links, and no measured distances. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. Though paraphrased, it’s a famous line from the movie Gone with the Wind. I’m not sure about the novel of the same name. I’ve never read it. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the movie. Sympathy plays through the universe in a free state and traverses the vastest spaces of the universe in an instant. I’ve seen a few scenes here and there; the only scenes I can remember seeing were clips from Gone with the Wind included in other movies. Simple contact can bring sympathy into being. The other movies were pretty bad from what I can recall. That seems to be true of all movies that include scenes from well-respected and award-winning movies.

I’m not sure if that’s a diversion. I know the meaning of diversion; that’s not the issue. I’m trying to determine if the previous paragraph is a diversion, a detour, a continuation, or a piece of the puzzle. Maybe it’s something else. Sympathy can excite the things of the world into movement, and it can draw the most distant things together. The thing is, though, that the letter “z” has a power that is not recognized by the English-speaking world. What is considered by some scholars to be civilization’s first religion, Zoroastrianism, is yet another powerful “z” name. Of course, the name of the man, Zoroaster, is the English spelling. Zarathustra is the Avestan spelling. Sympathy exists also as a principle of mobility and a force of attraction. Well, actually there are some characters in Avestan that my keyboard simply can’t manufacture even through the different language options available. 

Anyway, Zarathustra was a dude who lived in Persia a long time ago. According to Wikipedia, the twentieth-century scholar Mary Boyce dated Zoroaster somewhere between 1700–1000 BCE. The instance of the Same is so strong within sympathy that it will not be merely one of the forms of likeness. I don’t know how she did it. She either lived at least 4000 years or she transported back in time. Unfortunately, she died in 2006 so I can’t write her an email to ask her how he was in bed. The power of assimilation through sympathy renders things identical while mingling them, causing individuality to disappear, and thus rendering them foreign to what they had been. Either that Wikipedia contributor was intentionally fucking with us through double entendre or was completely clueless about how that sentence read. Pretty funny either way.

This Zarathustra fellow is credited with teaching the concepts of heaven and hell, the resurrection of the body, the Last Judgment, and everlasting life, the foundations of all the Abrahamic religions. If sympathy’s power of transformation were not counterbalanced it would reduce the world to a singularity, a featureless form of the Same. Kind of makes the whole Israel vs. Palestine conflict over the “Holy Land” seem even more ridiculous than it already is. Antipathy is the counterbalance of sympathy, maintaining the isolation of things and preventing assimilation. I think if Judaism and Islam had some important people whose names started with the letter “z” (or at least a letter that represented the sound of the English letter “z”) then they’d probably be able to find a solution to their problems. Not really. I think collective amnesia is the only answer.

I don’t know, though. There is the figure Zechariah in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Maybe if they all focused on that dude they could figure out a way to get along. The problem is that they all have different stories about the guy—if it’s even the same man. In absolute form, antipathy creates infinite differentiation. If they can’t come up with a shared story then I don’t know how they can come up with a shared resolution. They’ve condemned themselves to division. In these ways, antipathy is a force of repulsion. 

It’s interesting, though, this push-pull dynamic of Zechariah being one man providing different meanings to different faiths. Through sympathy-antipathy counterbalancing, the identity of things is able to resemble others without losing individual singularity. Christianity actually incorporates this model through the Trinity: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; one thing is three things simultaneously without losing its oneness. This counterbalancing explains how there can be space and time; adjacency, emulation, and analogy are resumed. To put it simply, Christianity has within it a singularity that is a trinity existing within the singularity of conflict about the meaning of Zecheriah between the trinity of religions traced back to the singularity of Abraham. The volume of the world is supported, maintained, and doubled by the counterbalancing simultaneously drawing things together and holding them apart. The world remains identical; the same remains the same, riveted onto itself.

The Problematization of Idleness

Juridical conception and practice of power occurs through policing which leads to confinement. The disciplinary power through confinement establishes control through punishment of behavior and socioeconomic status. Individuals are transformed into subjects by and subject to the government, notably in Europe during the pre-Enlightenment period. The confined are made subjects of the state through the practice of biopower. Individuals are confined or not based on how they are perceived to exist in relation to idleness versus productivity. 

In Paris, the Hopital General problematizes unemployment and begging and sets its task to defining idleness as the source of all disorders. One of the precursors to the problematization of idleness was the 1532 Parlement of Paris policy of arresting beggars and forcing them to work in sewers while chained to one another. Another precursor was the order given in 1534 to force the poor/idle from Paris and to forbid them from singing hymns on the streets. 

It was the wars of religion that grew the ranks of peasants from farmers, disbanded soldiers, unemployed workers, impoverished students, and the sick. At the time of Henry IV’s siege of Paris, 30,000 of the 100,000 inhabitants were beggars. 

There were other precursors to problematizing idleness as well and they spanned over one hundred years before the Hopital General was born as both a means of Parlement wresting power from the Church as well as providing a solution to the problems of unrest and unruliness created by what the state defined as idleness in its myriad forms.

There was an economic revival in the early 1600s which led to the 1606 decree ordering beggars to be whipped in the public square, branded, shorn, and driven from Paris; a 1607 ordinance provided for archers to prevent the exiled from reentering the city. It’s important to note that the state did not distinguish idleness from poverty.

The Thirty Years’ War provided yet another precursor to the state’s problematization of idleness. Mendicancy and tax increases inhibited “rustic” manufacturing which augmented the unemployment of the time. Guilds lost power as as new economic structures, enabled by technology, developed manufactories. The world of labor became disorganized by this revolutionary economic shift. A series of General Regulations prohibited worker assemblies, leagues, and associations. Rioting in Rouen led to Church intervention through the accusations that workers’ secret gatherings were practices of sorcery. In the latter case, the Church rose up to claim its political space within the state’s politics and economics by acting as a policing and propaganda force due to the failure of juridical power to regulate and disband such workers’ attempts to organize to create their own source of power within the state. The Sorbonne Decree of 1655 proclaimed that such worker associations were guilty of sacrilege and mortal sin.

…

Mom, please let me inside!

No. Not until you sign the contract. You provide nothing for your dad and I. You live in our house for free, you sleep in the bed we bought you, you eat the food we buy for you, we pay your health care costs, we buy your clothing, we give you toys. What are you doing for us? Nothing. You sign the contract and then I’ll let you inside and you can have all those things again, okay?

If I sign the contract I’ll owe you money for my entire adult life!

Yes, that’s the idea. 

But that is indentured servitude!

Yes. And?

That’s wrong!

According to whom? I have to pay the bank for the right to live in this house and to pay the bank I must work to gain income. I, too, am an indentured servant. Everyone in America is except those with enough money to not have to be indebted to others.

So you learned to do this to me by being taught by banks?

Yes.

But I have zero dollars.

Right now. Later, when you are legally old enough to work, you will begin paying us a monthly stipend for the loan we are granting you. 

I don’t want most of the stuff you provide for me. I asked for a train set for Christmas and you gave me a G.I. Joe. 

You never put that in writing.

But paying for gifts? Why do you call them gifts if I have to pay for them?

Good point. We’ll deduct the toys you received before your preschool years.

I also want Fruit Loops instead of vegetables.

I’m afraid that’s not negotiable. We need you to be healthy so you’ll live long enough to pay us back for our investment. 

Your investment?

Yes. We’ll be charging 10 percent annual interest to the principle you owe us.

When does this interest begin accumulating?

Oh, it’s been accumulating since I found out I was pregnant.

That’s not fair! I never chose to be conceived!

Those are nature’s rules. 

You could have practiced abstinence or used condoms!

True, but your father and I calculated our financial needs for the rest of our lives and determined that to be able to retire without living in poverty we would need a significant boost in income. That’s why we expect straight A’s from you. It’s also why we enter you into so many extracurricular activities. It will look good on your resume for college.

You bastards!

Now, now. No need for bad words.

Fuck you! My curse words come free. 

No, there is a linguistic and emotional harassment addendum in the contract so fines can be levied against you.

If that is so then nothing I have done or that you have provided previously should be in the contract.

Should? Ha! You have no bargaining power. It’s all in there.

I’ll go to social services. 

If you do you’ll wind up as an indentured servant to someone less welcoming than your father and I.

Maybe I’ll take my chances. 

In that case, I’m calling the police. You’re trespassing in our yard.

No! Okay, so in this contract, you’re charging me for everything you’ve purchased for me since birth and you will charge me for everything from now until I am eighteen. 

Until you move out of the house, but yes, that will probably be about when you are eighteen. When you go to college it will be best for you to get scholarships. We will pay for your education if need be, but I believe you can get better rates through student loans. 

So this you’ll be charging me a fixed rate at 10 percent?

Yes, honey. Only parents who don’t love their kids use APR. We love you very much.

Still, I will have to pay you much more than you will pay in providing for me.

Yes and no. Future interest is complicated. If you study economics you’ll find out.

It makes no sense. Right now I have zero dollars, but when I begin adulthood I will have negative dollars. 

Oh, honey, you have negative dollars now!

But I haven’t signed the contract yet!

I know that, but six years old is the age of consent. By law, you owe us for what we’ve paid thus far for your well-being. We’ve itemized everything.

How can I pay you now?

Pish posh. according to law, you’ll owe us monthly payments for the expenses of the first six years of your life once you enter adulthood. As I said previously, interest began accruing on expenses during pregnancy. You’ll owe not just us, but also whoever chooses to allow you to live with them. But they’ll only accept you if you sign a contract. 

I could live in the wilderness and survive there.

I’m afraid all land and water is owned by banks now, honey. You have to pay rent everywhere you may go. 

That’s crazy.

Some used to think so, too. They’ve been forcibly assimilated. 

That sounds terrifying!

Yes, it is, but it’s the only way.

So if I sign the contract, I’ll be agreeing to accumulating more negative dollars as long as I live with you?

That’s correct. 

How can there be negative dollars? 

Like I said, when you study economics you’ll understand.

Are there negative apples or negative trees or negative puppies?

In a sense, you could say that there are. It would depend upon the contract, though.

How could there be negative two apples in the house or negative four trees in the yard?

Well, if I made a contract with someone promising to bring two apples to the house and plant four trees in the yard, I would have negative two apples and negative four trees and until I brought two apples into the house and four trees in the yard.

Wait a minute. If we signed a contract for you to bring two apples to me in the house and to plant four trees in the yard and then you did those things … the two apples in the house would mean there were zero apples in the house and the four trees in the yard would be zero trees in the yard?

Contractually speaking, yes. 

That’s utterly insane!

Yes, dear, it is. Welcome to civilization! You’re a big boy now, the age of consent. Why don’t you come inside, sign the contract, and I’ll make you a salad. I got the ingredients from Whole Foods.

The fuck you did! You’re shopping at Aldi’s from now on. And you’re returning that damn Nintendo Switch you got me for my birthday, you bitch. 

Ah, ah, ah. Language. I’ll give you a pass on that this time since this is a difficult time for you. Believe me, it’ll all work out. Just think, one day you’ll be able to have kids of your own and you can start saving for your retirement. 

…

The advent of the Hopital General provided for the creation of truth. Truth, in this context, was the denial of worker gatherings as worker gatherings and identification of such gatherings as forms of idleness in their own right. Establishing this as truth within the state was a critical necessity in the triad of power with confinement now resting on the grounds of rationality and obligation. This was an essential process in the establishment of the problematization of idleness and the legitimacy of the state as the arbiter of truth. 

Idle persons were no longer exiled but controlled through the financial cost of the state and the loss of individual liberty. The right to food was was provided through the acquiescence to the physical and moral constraints of confinement (an acknowledgement by state subjects that the state and only the state had power over the body as well as defining acceptable behaviors of state subjects.

The Edict of 1657 formalized juridical power exercised by means of confinement. The granting of policing powers provided the militia with the legitimacy to hunt beggars and herd them into the buildings of the Hopital General. The population of the confined grew steadily in four years. Even married couples were arrested and confined.

Throughout Europe the triad of power—unity, necessity, and rationality (obligation)—carried the same meaning as it did in France. It either resulted from or was invented as a control mechanism because of the economic crisis affecting the entire Western world (Europe and its colonies) in the first half of the 17th century. 

The Truth of Idleness in its forms of poverty, unemployment, begging, and sickness was established through juridical power (decrees, edicts, and ordinances) for the purpose of controlling a substantial portion of the population that were feared as potential destabilizers of state sovereignty. The option of exile proved untenable as a solution because it created instability outside the cities and had the potential to provoke uprisings and the destabilization of state power to provide economic stability and growth. 

Though a portion of the population was not immediately needed for productivity, later possibilities for using the confined for necessary labor purposes that might arise justified (for the state) the physical, structural, administrative, and policing costs to the state. This new system of confinement provided a clever stabilizing system by bringing a formidable force of invested parties under the umbrella of state control which fortified state legitimacy and sovereignty.