Uncaged

Uncaged

Samuel Bird

I loved her. I had found in her a place to heap all my love that I couldn’t offer myself. She was the rising sun and crested moon. There was nothing to me without her, and yet here I was, losing her. There she was, I looked in my mind to see her walking away. I thought to her last words. “Say something. Come on Samuel, just talk to me.” I couldn’t, no matter my desire, which was all I was for her. All she wanted to hear was a word, and she would stay, but I felt trapped, locked, caged. Any fact beyond comprehension is aided by its historicity. What of my tale led me to be unable to open my mouth as she walked away? Far from the hot August day, a vision of a time merciful memory had helped me forget until now. Frozen. Not just my moist breath as it met the cold air. Not just the tip of my nose that stuck up out of the cover. Not just the cup of urine sitting there on the window sill. I was frozen. Not in terms of temperature, but state. I couldn’t move. Time felt off to me. How long was I locked in here? I could technically know the amount of nights and days that had sequenced, but perhaps they dragged on longer. At least now I was fed. Stale snacks slipped under the door from someone who didn’t wish me to die, and kept me going. I hated this. I hated how powerless and weak I felt. I hated that I was trapped and every part of me knew it. Why not make my escape? I could run again. Maybe this time I could get further than he could catch me. Somehow out in that scary and evil world, I could carve out a place for myself to be. No, someone would hurt me, get to me, and destroy me. It was happening now in the safety of my early home, why would strangers treat me any better? That was if he didn’t catch me, but he likely would. I would be caught, inflicted upon, and back in this dingy room. My brain raced as it further disassociated itself from the world around me. What could it do to feel this thing I had only felt in an a priori sense? No, there was no safety. Each thought’s weaving and forking ended in a new dead end for me to start over and find a new pathway, which had the same fate. I was trapped. There was no action on my part, even in theory, that could remedy this. Something within, my psyche began to break in a way that it could never be otherwise again. Not only was I suffering, but I was powerless against it. Perhaps I could get up and spend another few hours looking out the window like I did as a small child. Maybe I could find some piece of trash with a label to read. If only I could find a new path to think in. No, I was damned and doomed. All the attention of my mind could muster up was to go through this cycle of “what if I could be free,” wondering how I would do so, and finding it impossible. I was not just trapped in this filthy room but in my mind. I was stuck in this cognitive loop that I spiraled through over and over again until the speed picked up and the violence intensified. This spiraling then found its direction and it was down. He won. My first foe beat me not only in the world around me but in my mind. He had trapped me in this pattern of thought. I couldn’t escape to some story, beautiful picture, or dream. He held me hostage in that one place I had reasoned he couldn’t touch me. I was trapped. 

For the decades since those years, I have kept finding myself trapped. I will feel a weariness press on me and seek to join my bed for rest. However, when I lie down, my blood begins to race, my mind runs rampant, and I am back to feeling paralyzed. Where is my prison cell? Where are those dingy walls? Where is that cage? Nowhere around me, but within me. I am once again trapped, but this time with no door that is barricaded closed. I am stuck in a pattern of thought. I love animals and have the privilege of working with them. Some years ago, I worked with bears. I loved their behavior and distinct personalities as I saw them. While the institution that held them was not one I saw as taking care of them very well, I saw it as my task to do so. There was one particular bear that I called Cookie. While I would go out to mend the fences, build an exhibit, or cut the grass, he would come right down to where I was and plop his thousand-pound body down next to me. He would then sit there and smile at me while I worked. While his daughter was a menace that nearly took off my face, Cookie was my baby. Well, as much as a grizzly can be. While he was certainly in no cage, it pained me to see his naturally massive territory traded for a small field. This beast’s honor and kingship were traded for gawking strangers and stable meals. He seemed to resign himself to the comfortable horrors of modernity better than I did and managed to always have a good attitude about life. We didn’t have a linguistic medium, but I have learned to read large animals like cows and horses quite well. How could he be so at peace? Did he not know that the beasts we were, were trapped? Modernity told us that we could have that frequent meal and safety from the elements. It would only cost us being what we were. The pain of striving to survive was traded for the emptiness of meaning. He had a cheerful demeanor, but I could tell it was in spite of all we were living against. I would remark how the grass was thick and tall everywhere but where I cut it, and right up against the fence. This is where Cookie would wander up and down. Not content with the small field he was in, he wanted to be out and past all this. The mountains that surrounded us in the valley called for him, and it called for me as well. The worn-down path was him pressing against that barrier modernity placed in front of him. The field next to him became vacant with the passing of another bear. The company did not have another grizzly at that time, and I was tasked with making a new enclosure to allow Cookie to roam. I was thrilled by the project and enjoyed his company with the dig of each fence post and the placing of the wire. The good I was doing for my friend was a consolation for the heat beating down on me. I finally finished the fencing and opened up a spot for him to be free and explore the new mounds, trees, and dirt. I was so happy to see him hop and sort of skip through the field. He loped along the middle before inevitably finding his new barrier, which he then paced. I was honored to expand his freedom, though with a contrasting bitterness at its limits. I left him that day with a smile on my face for the small good done in a horrid world. Upon coming back, I saw a sight that haunts me to this day. I will never forget it and its implications for my life. I saw him pacing that old trail again. 

He was at least still pacing. The next phase of this crushing phenomenon is to quit all movement knowing it won’t yield anything. Many dogs that were locked up, birds that were caged, and children not able to move, have a model of the world in their minds that was nothing more than their cage. While they know there are other options available to them, this primitive and animalistic part of their brain does not know such and is stuck in that loop. If that cage was enforced by violent striking, it becomes all the more that boundary our minds won’t let us go passed. Tell us we can venture past it, and we will tell you we know. It is rather that scale of knowing in heart to the soul that we fail to fully realize. We then become stuck. What if we were able to find a reprieve? Outside of powerful stimulants, many troubled people find small and innocent ways to deal with their being trapped. I recall how I would escape my body when it was under assault and be in my mind. However, this trail along the fence was being set, and I now look down to see my hand pouring blood and not feeling a thing. Perhaps the bottle or the lit cigarette could be salvific. If they saved us once, perhaps a thousand times. Or, until the lungs and liver seek to burst from our chest. That thing that we use to escape pain becomes the new primal creator of it. My escaping into my mind has made a psychosis that borders on the pathological. We are then once again pulled back in our minds to that moment it is seeking to protect our bodies from, by never letting the mind look away. We are back with that vicious loop. The input of suffering will seemingly necessarily lead to the outcome of our preferred vice or escape. 

I have before said, “Whatever you do, don’t be weak.” In such an article, I explored the idea of exerting power against the world around you for no sake but to do so. I have had some people critique me as they equivocated social power for power over our world. Others have made fun of me for this being an unnecessary celebration of masculinity, but even if it was, I wouldn’t find such so bad. No, what I am trying to do with this method of exertion is to demonstrate to all the other aspects of ourselves who are listening, that we are mighty. We are not some scared little child who is cold and afraid. We can affect the world with the ability to intercede how it affects us. The habits and addictions that beset our kind so heavily in this age are contenders for the sheerness of human will. I will climb that mountain. I will build that artifice. I will labor with love. All of such are my signifying that I am in the world, and I take up space. We can remedy loops in part by placing ourselves in an environment anew that allows us to build new paths to think along. However, the only way out of the cage is through the gate. My powerlessness can only be destroyed by the antithesis. I feel the strength I have built up in my body. I feel the power of my thinking mind. Try to cage me now, dingy walls. Try to hold me back, violence. I am past you and beyond you and away from you. 

Last year I turned twenty-five years of age. That is the alleged age that the frontal lobe of the brain is fully “online.” While the brain-mind connection is not something I desire to tackle today, it is at the very least some sort of antennae or the medium to the physical. With this part of my brain’s development, much of the plasticity of my character and thought has been set. I will largely approximate the person that I have become for the rest of my life. This fatalism could either be an assuring that I would be secure in this person I had built myself to be or be a curse that I was trapped to be this new person. I hadn’t made up my mind on which when I went on a camping trip with a close friend of mine. Sometime well after midnight on the coastline of an alpine lake, I sat there looking into nothing, and feeling its glance back. What was this thing that I had made? My biology gave me an apparatus to work with and my experience gave me patterns, but what did I value this thing that I had become? My fighting fate as it stood in the future was traded for loving it once it had passed me. All that had been, had been. It was done and I found great honor in it. What of how it affected me? I was somewhat wild and crazy. I had grown to enjoy it. What of this, that, and something else? Let it all be, and my love for it will envelop it. Then there it came. What about that feeling? The cold air reminded me of that early room with dirty walls. In that moment I was caught back to that place I tried so hard to escape from. How could I love fate if it included this? I didn’t mind that it was, but going forward, I would fight fate as it attempted to trap me in my mind. As this was more than logical, I needed something more. Then it came. The antonym vision came to me. Cookie. I saw him, or perhaps I was him. We ran through a field that had no end where fences could not be seen. I felt the might of my body, the freedom, the defiance, the rebellion. I was a monster that had no bars sufficient for it. I dwarfed cages and stood as a behemoth untouchable. I was free, and so much it would scare others and probably should scare me. I could find myself again trapped in a dungeon someday, but what I found myself to be in my mind that meditation, was an uncageable beast in a cageless world. Better minds express this, much better than I can. “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.”