One of my favorite shows ever  featured two prisoners who realized that they could escape from their prison at any time. They hopped in and out of their cage, delighting in being both inside and outside it. They realized that they’d been inside their own prison.

Most of our prisons are like this. We build them ourselves and haven’t realized we’ve done it. In many cases, the confinement is only in the mind. We build the walls with ideas of what has been before or what we believe to be true. Sometimes the walls of the prison are built out of solid evidence and concrete experience but even when this is so, there is almost always a door and we almost never realize that we have the key.

I have the sense that my current prison has several doors but I have no idea where they are. I bump into a lot of walls looking for them.

Zen and the Art of Shakespeare.

This is like that story where the guy gets good news and he says something like, “We’ll see.” And also sigh bad news, like his kid breaks his leg and everyone asks him why he’s not upset and he’s like – well, he’s like, philosophical, like Hamlet here. I don’t recall all the details but basically the kid with the broken leg doesn’t have to go to war when they go around rounding up soldiers because of his leg. And we’re meant to see the kid’s father as wise because he neither wept for his son’s broken leg nor celebrated his reprieve. We’re meant to see it as nothing either good or bad.

I am not a fan of this story, I will confess. It sounds, to me, like a one-noted life in which successes are never celebrated and losses never mourned. It may be true that our thinking creates the world but I think we HAVE to feel it, too.

If only we could accept each other’s realities as we accept each other’s names. Oh, your name is Hamlet? Oh, you think Denmark is a prison? We generally can’t try and change what someone calls themselves but we do periodically try to shift how they see.

If I tell a Londoner how much I love her city, she might point out all the reasons to hate it. When I tell a fellow New Yorker how ridiculous I find the theatre scene here, I often get a litany of all the ways he thinks it’s great.

But it can be as simple as saying, it’s like that for you, and your name is your name.

Thinking about the architecture of a prison makes this line make a good deal more sense to me. The world is a goodly prison, a big one, like Alcatraz or The Tower of London. It’s not just one cell, it’s a whole complex with many places to lock a person up. You got your solitary confinements, your dark dark dungeons, your cell blocks, your minimum security, your maximum security. An old school prison probably has a great deal more lock-up variety than the modern prison or even the pre-fab office buildings which so often remind one of a prison.

I bet there are even some prisons where parts of them don’t even feel like prison. A garden perhaps, or a library. So one could live in a prison of a world and never really feel confined.

You don’t hear much about Denmark in the news here in the States. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Dane. If I have friends who have visited Denmark, I don’t know about it. This might lead one to corroborate Hamlet’s statement that Denmark is as closed up as a prison. But I somehow doubt its prison-like quality. I imagine that it rather keeps itself to itself and doesn’t need to broadcast its identity all over the world (unlike some other countries I could name, like the one I’m sitting writing this in.) If it were truly a prison, word would get out, people would talk about it – because the harder a nation tries to suppress its people, the more their secrets spill out. It’s the sort of thing people talk about. Happy healthy people who don’t bother anyone, they’re just not that compelling a story for the rest of the world.

My high school felt like a prison to me. The architecture (designed by someone who designed prisons, I was told) reminded me of a prison (no windows, blocks of cells/classrooms, two yards surrounded by the building,) the air, the bells, the shouting in the hallways, all of it added up to Prisonville. But more than anything, I felt trapped in it. I was constantly straining at its bounds. I searched out loop holes and I found them. In retrospect, that sense of confinement may have served me well. If I hadn’t been searching for ways to escape, I wouldn’t have found a way to take a class at the University during the school day. I wouldn’t have found all those outside activities and communities and cultures. Being confined, I learned how to fly.

I wonder now if the tight restrictions of a prison-like high school experience had the effect of Temple Grandin’s hugging machine. I wonder if being tightly squeezed like that, made me feel freer to expand whenever I was released. Now – while I often feel trapped or stuck or limited in my life choices -I am never really confined. I wheel around like a pinball in a machine, hitting walls and falling into holes, but always on the move. I suppose even a free wheelin’ pinball is still confined in its game.

 

Sometimes, when dealing with particularly difficult people, I have to remember the power of a well-placed, well-phrased question. I get caught up trying to respond to what’s thrown at me, answering their concerns or taking the bait. But a question, a question, can accomplish so much more than the rant or the defense or the speech that rises up first. A question can challenge, can clarify, can pause a person in his tracks. A question is like a martial arts move that accepts the attack and diverts it.

Rosencrantz’s news is not only not true, I’m not sure that it is possible. Nor am I convinced that it would be desirable. As much as I admire the truth and long for it sometimes, I am grateful for the fiction of fiction. Theatre, while best when built on the foundation of some kind of truth, be it emotional or mythical or factual, requires a dose of the untrue to give it distance and shape.

Art gets made with the bending of truths into new forms, it takes the honest and makes it slightly less so. I am also grateful for the little dishonesties that grease the wheels of social interactions. The “You look greats and the “I really enjoyed your novel.” I would not want everyone to tell me how tired I look or how much work there still is to do on that book.

Twice I have been in schools on the day before a Doomsday prediction. The first one, a few years ago, was an elementary school. All of my friends were joking about the forthcoming end of the world that weekend. It was hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously. Then, in the hallway, between my 5th grade classes, a student asked a very serious question about what he felt sure was the end of the world. I did my best to both take his concerns seriously and to reassure him that that Friday would most likely not be the last we would see of each other. As it turned out, I was right (as I suspected) and I was furious at the Doomsdayers who created such tremendous anxiety in a little kid.

Then this past December, I met a middle school kid for the first time. I was there to get him (and his classmates) ready to go to the theatre to see a show the following day. He, very morosely, said he would not be there. I asked him why. He said none of us would be, as Doomsday was scheduled for that evening. I suggested he enjoy the workshop, just in case we all survived, which, as it turned out, we did. But the day of the show, the Doomsday kid wasn’t there. I worried about him. I wondered if, in the absence of a worldwide Doomsday, he might have created one of his own.

The new in news is really what it’s all about. The news is what is new. I read a book about the differences between the UK and the US. The author pointed to how obsessed the US is with new-ness, how we named our cities new this or that, how we ask each other what’s new, how our advertising skews toward the New and Improved, how we strive ever onward toward the NEW thing, the NEW idea, the NEW horizon.