The Great Escape

Building bars around ourselves to eulogise freedom

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

1.

The midsummer night sky was a light blue bubble holding back infinity as I walked about the zoo peering through the bars and thick glass and over fences and into the moated enclosures that held the animals hostage while I was outside braving the wild solstice.

Some say being sheltered from the mayhem like pampered prisoners protected from the consequences of a collapsing world is the best option. But I know the animals would rather take their chances and make a run for it, even if there’s so few places left to run. Even the ones born in captivity yearn for wildness like domesticated poets lost in a dreamworld of feral poems. Some may be tamed and trained but their hearts beat to a wild rhythm. Mine too. I know because I’m forever trying to outrun fate and return it to the original source of love before it’s too late.

As I walked from cage to pen to aviary I thought of my parents and the great enclosure of history in which they were sealed like insects in amber. I got to thinking about the how periods of time allow for different expressions of love. In the era when my parents divorced they, like so many others, buried whatever love they once shared so deep it was impossible to find. We children spent a lifetime digging at the earth and scraping at the walls and searching through the dark in the unfaltering belief that their hearts had been broken by a once powerful love. We thought if we could uncover this mythical El Dorado we’d be saved. But we never came close. It was so deeply entombed that even after my mother died my father could barely bring himself to mutter, “She brought it on herself.”

Love it seemed was a dangerous game where you could grow wings and fly up to heaven or be caught in a hurricane and spun down to hell. I realised there was no turning back once you’d be lifted by the winds of love across the wilds and the beauty until you finally understood that, in fact, you are the wilds and the beauty.

As I made my way about the zoo I was struck by the atmosphere of boredom and despondency. Most of these forlorn animals wouldn’t need much persuading to escape. The elephants would be the easiest, their captivity was really a state of mind. They were strong enough to ford the shallow moat and wrangle the low fence if they could just get over their simmering depression and come at the world afresh.

The gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, with so much sadness streaming from their eyes had a gentle longing too, as if the wilds still coursed through their veins if they could only escape their bonds.

The big cats would be the least problem. They’d need no encouragement to resume their brazen boldness. Carnivores have such an audacious confidence that assumes the world is their playground, always calculating the odds and taking their chances. I knew they’d come sauntering through a gap in the fence without any hesitation.

And my ride, the buffalo, had a cockiness born of a thousand kilos of muscle and a righteous indignation at having been confined in the first place, their migratory hearts always ready to carry them toward the horizon. Which was perfect because that’s where I was heading, all I needed to do was mount a stampeding buffalo though the early dawning sun.

2.

By the time my parents were teenagers social conventions were blurring as people imagined themselves increasingly liberated, forging ahead classless on the cusp of time. They were born into a world where the burgeoning space age and fledgling hippie culture encouraged everyone to express themselves in new and extraordinary ways. They threw off their hats and let their hair grow. No longer were they tied to the tedium of the parental blood line, now they could be gloriously atomised mini-emperors mastering their own destinies. They idea they’d stay working class was as laughable as their obsolete parents and their archaic ideas.

But escaping the human zoo wasn’t so easy, especially when the zoo stealthily morphed into a new configuration around you. People cast off the so-called old and embraced the so-called new, but as they escaped one form of oppression they happily collaborated in building themselves a whole new prison.

Formica kitchen fittings and German camper vans, colour TV’s and sex manuals, fondue sets and package holidays all piled up around them until they lost sight of the tribe and their shared resources and collaborative power. Class struggle turned corny and individuals turned inward waving their own flags. But as any good social animal knows, you’re better off in a clan or a flock or a tribe than out there on your own getting picked off by every passing predator. People were lured to vulnerability with a handful of marbles and gorgeously whispered lie.

I made my way to the zoo’s central operations centre. Like most zoo’s this one was preoccupied with escape and not overly concerned with access so it wasn’t too difficult. The real time security monitoring was concentrated on perimeter surveillance and the entire system was scanned by AI. This made everything simpler. The AI had been sold on the promise of having state of the art accuracy able to detect shape and movement using existing camera networks. But algorithms are only as good as their programming and the AI company had built in false detection and false positive override systems to minimise alarm calls. By swinging plastic animals in front off the cameras the system detected the anomaly but overrode it’s own detection by assuming the frequency of swing to be a background noise detection error. Besides, the AI system had already done it’s real job which was to make a staggering profit for the AI company whilst exterminating human salaries. The men in power weren’t complaining. Not yet.

While my parents world shrugged off its parochial past and tried consuming its way to paradise, love was being washed right outta town. The new emphasis was self-actualisation and as the rise of individualism penetrated peoples psyches the pendulum swung away from the collective imagination. People found themselves in a barren landscape of increasingly competitive individuals wallowing in their own appetites and a world of predators is a world out of balance. But of course the outright majority of people were prey. They just didn’t want to believe it.

When my parents marriage finally broke down my mother discovered that class and power had never gone away, they’d just been waiting in the wings to pounce on stragglers. For all her supposed new found freedoms she lacked old found enablers of wealth, or bloodline, and her education was informal not academic. The sturdy safety nets of her childhood were now tatty and filled with mother and child sized holes through which we tumbled as her love wings broke and the hurricane spun us all down, down, down.

The midsummer night zoo orchestrated a symphony of animal babble that called to me from the ancient past. I could feel my heart responding as my brain tried ferociously to quell its deepest nature. Howling and growling and hooting and grunting filled the air as I entered the central operations centre and headed toward main security override system.

All these best laid plans to guarantee security are always hilariously short-sighted. Every new configuration in the great pattern of life weaves a new set of dangers which are never understood until its too late. The surest way to ensure one’s own well being is to ensure the well being of everything else. And even then a capricious uncertainty will weave its own unpredictable pattern through the strongest of foundations.

Funny how similar a zoo and society can be in their character. There’s nothing loving about incarcerating complex creatures for the entertainment of a single species. Or for that matter incarcerating humans in a great power machine for the benefit of a tiny minority. But hey, what do expect from an ape that builds bars around itself and then eulogises freedom.

3.

My plan was to open all the enclosures at once. All I had to do was make sure I made it to the buffalo enclosure ready to leap upon a buffalo as they stampeded through the gates so that together we could storm through all the mayhem and make our escape.

I had considered giving the herbivores a head start but I knew I was just projecting my own fears. Who really knows what will happen? Whatever the consequences it surely wouldn’t be as bad as incarceration, despondency and death. Time to open the gates and run I say because we are truly incarcerated when we project our own fears and police ourselves until we’re paralysed and can do nothing. Besides, who knows in what direction the world will tilt from seemingly nudges? Had my parents stopped for a moment and paid attention and looked, truly looked at one another, might they have recognised the truth that we are all merely asking to be seen?

It was 3 am and the morning songbirds had begun blasting the dawn chorus as the planet rolled toward the sun and sweet morning air carried their love songs across the land. A perfect soundtrack for the Great Escape.

The swinging plastic animals had kept the AI algorithms occupied so I took a deep breath and pressed the security override and opened every single enclosure wide open. No more being held hostage in this strange mode of existence, time to open a new chapter of unpredictable possibilities in the name of love.

I wonder whether we’d always been searching for love’s mythical El Dorado in all the wrong places. Society had long since turned love, like everything else, into an instrumental commodity. But isn’t love a radical engagement that breaks down barriers and walls and enclosures and pours us all into one great lake of mutual being? Isn’t love the greatest destabilising force that drags you kicking and screaming out of your safety zone and into the wilds and the beauty? Isn’t love the ultimate surrender? Isn’t love the weather in which relational qualities experience the world? Isn’t it up to us how beautiful that weather can be?

It was all of these deadly powerful loves that had me pressing the security override button, deadly powerful loves rejecting everything that’s locked us into our destination coordinates, locked us into our closed minds, locked us into our trivial identities, locked us into our tragic stories of domination and ego and self.

As the cage gates opened I began running toward the buffalo enclosure. Two giraffes loped past as a troop of mandrills, like a group of excited tourists at a new resort, lolloped by on their way to the main exit. I threw off my jacket and ran through a flamboyance of flamingos that hopped aside like the parting of the waves as I unbuttoned my shirt and cast it toward a Siberian tiger laying majestically on the ticket office roof, casually surveying the pandemonium. I threw off a shoe and then the other as I leapt over a scuttling alligator and around a sounder of wild boar following their matriarch toward the perimeter. My trousers landed on the back of a zebra that had stopped to watch me run toward the buffalo that were streaming out of their gate.

I ran like the wind and reached up and grabbed the great chestnut mane of the biggest buffalo and pulled myself upon its back and now, as naked as an ape, I held on for dear, dear life as the great beasts ran in unison toward a new horizon and songbirds sang songs of love into the world.

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