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Invalid appeal
Every morning, there is a horrible hot reek of urine so beastly that I try to breathe in small, shallow puffs, not filling my lungs to the bottom. The streets are slick, and the air is saturated. People arrive, steamed and dishevelled, marked by the weather, shaped by the conditions. They attempt to perform their prescribed roles, each sweating through a space that is not theirs. Ask a question with an unknown answer and prepare to speak the language of someone slipping into something sheer.
In a hearing, it is always the body that is the issue—assessed in terms of its threat to society, its susceptibility to punishment, and its potential for rehabilitation. Its forces, its utility and its docility, its distribution and its submission. The focus is the penalty's administration and it ends with a decision. There is nothing extraordinary in this. It is the destiny of the law to absorb, little by little, elements that are alien to it. The confrontation is almost nothing—so light it could be mistaken for absence. But absence does not crack like that. Absence does not entail ceremonies of submission.
The venue holds steady. The verdict is a matter of time. The sentences thin out and become nerve endings. Stripping something down to become sharper to its demands and its interests. Some bodies belong. Some do not. Some deserve print. Some do not. The body receives and, in obtaining, recalculates. I’m listening, I’m learning, I’m studying. There is punishment, but as a way to say there is a desire to obtain a cure.
The reduction of freedom is measured from years to mileage; all bent on defining what remains, perfecting the ideal at the cost of everything else. Treatment is stripped of complexity and reduced to an almost transparent vocabulary, ensuring the continuation of its processes and quiet persistence.
The irony is that initiation into the court system is a first form of socialisation. The body begins its alignment with power, and the mind, newly introduced to the spaces of law, becomes marked by a logic not of choice but of necessity. This is the element in which a certain type of knowledge gives rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. Ex officio, that which by position functions similarly. The person who is in that space does not choose to hold that power but instead becomes shaped by it.
The twin burdens of courtroom allegiance and the icy certainty of uneven commitment defy lucidity. Its finding asserts that there is no need to address the issue. There is no need to discuss the persecution because the problem is decided. In this space, the body is not the subject but the object—the thing that exists only in the system. Criminal detention, new devotions.
Not to answer, but to continue—guilt, place, the quiet submission to an order both visible and invisible at once. The street corners that treat me to the lurkers of the past are enough to exculpate the Judge, to know punishment is not simply dealt but woven, diffused, inevitable.
All day, the tiny suited lawyers wheel their cases, a steady procession of order in motion. I buy my groceries without slipping myself something extra. Restraint, not virtue. The rain did not come heavily at the time. I want someone with an agenda, and I think you’re it.