Nightmare of a clerk

Nightmare:

The natural world as habitat having been abolished, I live in a small cubicle which I am never allowed, or able (it hardly matters which) to leave. The physical things in the room are the things I need to live in a physical sense, to stay alive: a small refrigerator and hot plate, clothing, medications I have been assigned to take. There is a shower, toilet, and sink down the hall, which I share with other people I never meet. They may or may not speak one of my languages; it scarcely matters which. No books, no art. My life consists of a set of tasks that I perform on a keyboard linked to a screen. A writer by profession, I work as a clerk, and my 'thinking' is limited to correcting grammar and spelling mistakes of the documents fed me. Most important is the control system. There appears to be a higher power surveilling me, though it is impersonal and I have no information about it other than its interventions with me. When I am writing in my spare time, as well as when I am proofreading, the system appears to have its own set of correctional procedures, that automatically enter on the screen what the ghost in the machine 'wants' me to say. If I write something particularly unexpected, and this includes thoughts that are quite well articulated and supplied with supporting arguments, then it may actually electrically zap me with a painful electric shock meant as a deterrent. It does this in my case through the bracelet of my wrist watch, which is the piece that keeps for me the system time. I have friends, or did have them, but it has been so long since I was able to spend time with any of them, that now I don't know if I have any friends or not. I flatter myself sometimes that the question of any and all of my friendships is, who can you trust, 'politically'. Maybe those who do not think what happened to me is merely a spot on my character.

I have worries. Mainly they are the police and other people. We have learned that strangers bear threats, which may be connected to a foreign origin or an infectious pathogen.

I wake up frightened. In the dream, I am living in what seems like a system of control and confinement. In this isolation, I am terrified. In variant forms of the same dream I have had for weeks, I never get beyond this situation of fearful entrapment, of virtual imprisonment and terror.

Once, they took me in. The police came, they said they were concerned about some risk or danger. They took me to a hospital. I said some things, stupid things, which they used as evidence to say I am crazy. I feared them doing this, and yet: I was already a prisoner.

Repeatedly, I awoke with this image still in mind: I am alone in a small room that I cannot leave, my tasks are to make sure that the use of the language in documents is normal and thus correct or tolerable, and my fear is the electric shocks. Sometimes too I dream of a chimpanzee in a cage, not unlike my room, in that all he has to do is inhabit his space, be there, and worry that he will be zapped if he makes a wrong move.

I had become habituated to a world of wrong moves in a society that imagines itself a business, worked at by captives, working under constant threat of sanctions, and thinks of this activity as like a game. I may need a theory of the game, a game consisting only of moves in the general environment of the wrong, the false, the totally observed and managed, the immobilized, operating under an imminent death sentence set at no specific time. And with all possibilities of existence 'assigned' or regarded as such. The deity of this machine, the invisible sun around which all orbit, is an abstraction, an algorithm, an apparatus. No one loves it, because the system has long ago betrayed all possible legitimating ideas, but thinking has dried up for so many, who merely fear the zap of the sanctions regime. We flatter ourselves that we know more facts than the chimpanzee, and are better at manipulating them. The smartest creatures want to work in the management office upstairs, where they think up the formulae and rules of the games. Their work is more interesting, with more power and it exercises the mind. Periodically one of them hurls himself out a window, but in general things go on manageably well. 'Science' is a name of God in this world, as is 'health'. It is a world of business. Politics is a set of forbidden topics, and art is poor now at best as artists have mostly disappeared. Most people want to succeed and get a bigger cubicle that they can decorate in pleasant ways. Like the chimp and the mice, they go for the reward and fear the punishment. There are theories that justify this, too. It seems rather sad, but only if you think about it. That is often not rewarded.