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Standing Still
By D.P. O’Keefe
No Exit is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre whose characters are stuck in a room with no exit (hence the name) after they’ve died. The room, you discover, is Hell.
So is reading Sartre.
There. I hope I didn’t spoil the ending for those masochists who were about to go out and buy a copy. Have mine. It’s only been thrown twice.
I did find some interesting plot lines and themes in the play. One thing that stood out was that the characters (all miserable) could still see what was happening on Earth. Unfortunately for them, there was a marked difference between perception of passing time in their "universe" as opposed to that of the living people of Earth. They were, comparatively, standing still while the real world whizzed by. And sadly, it was only a matter of minutes before the world forgot about them and their lives.
Prison plays out like that. We are, for the most part, a bunch of miserable characters, stuck in the same place as we stand still. And as we’re standing still, we are observed constantly. But we are still free enough to observe the world as the characters did in No Exit.
Time, especially my time, is very real to the point of being almost tangible in here. And because we’ve all perfected the art of killing time in here, it is as if the time perceived by people on the outside of jail merely touches our time line inside of jail. The world’s time line is serpentine and zigzagged, and ours is a straight line that knifes through it. So every day we spend in here is like three or four days to people passing time on the outside’s calendar. And in that, I can see things change. My observations have become heightened; my vision has been cleared and I can see the minute hand on your watch move.
Things like fashion, politics and foreign policy—instead of being tiresome and unobservable (like the minute hand of the watch), I can see the progression more fluidly because I don’t observe it constantly. It’s like the filming of cloudbursts forming at very slow speed—and then played back to show the quick formation of a violent storm.
To a lesser degree, the 2000 presidential election comes to mind. The news media had a field day with it. It seemed garbled and unnecessarily covered. There was another in a long string of recounts and there was the same pair of talking heads vying for position to enter the White House. I forgot how many days were involved. To me it seemed like three. One day for the election, another day for the nine million recounts, and the final day for perpetual argument and conspiracy theorizing.
A few months ago I wrote about the passing of time in prison. It goes by faster than you imagine. And after a while you become a hardened criminal—guilty of murdering time in the first degree. The downside is that when I look in the mirror, the guy who looks back is getting eye wrinkles and is losing his hair.
I drank alcoholicly for years. (Now that’s a lifestyle that kills time. And talk about a scary reflection in the mirror.) I barely remember the ten years from age 25 to 35. My brother just sent a picture of my nieces and nephew—and I almost lost control of my emotions. My time line skipped over entire parts of their time line. And the photograph is also the downside to slaughtering time.
As for the time I’m doing in here, I’ve decided to make the best of it. I can whine and complain about prison, or I can pick up a book, write prose or poetry or meditate. There are positives to being in here if you look hard enough.
As the world and its time pass by at breakneck speed, I have a choice: I can live with and make the time stretch out by filling it with good things, or I can cast myself in a role in No Exit and spend the rest of my life in hell.
D.P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut Maximum Security correctional facility.
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