Neat rows, dotted i’s, crossed t’s. Precision, balance. You need these things to keep off the dark, clustering shadows of a life out of control, don’t you? Wake up at 7, work out three times a week. Yoga’s an important way to stay steady. Trim your beard. Never let anything get hairy. Order, stability. All things as concrete as possible; all things as exact as you can manage. Without all this - without routine, without objectivity, without symmetry - you just can’t know what you’ll have left, who you’ll be, where you’ll end up (but it likely has something to do with a creek and no paddle).
On the way home from Austin, I was pulled to the side of the road by a police officer. He was concerned because one of our taillights was out. I was grateful to him (though mostly grateful that I hadn’t been speeding and wasn’t about to be fined and otherwise embarrassed), and happily handed over my license when he requested it. Routine, of course, no reason to worry. When he came back to the car, though, he said, “Do you know your license has been canceled?”
The long and short of it is that a payment I mailed in for a ticket I received last year must have gone astray. Between this fact and the fact that I moved something like four times in about 18 months, landed me in a position of not realizing something was very wrong, and that my right to drive was in peril. Notices from the DMV couldn’t reach me; warnings about my errant payment never arrived. I went blissfully on, driving illegally for almost 10 months.
The officer said words to me that came in the window like blows to my sensibility: “misdemeanor,” “warrant,” “jail,” “arrest.” Each of these like telling me my dog had taken a crap on the wrong lawn, or that I shouldn’t be late to pick up my daughter from kindergarten, or that my credit card has been denied. My dog wouldn’t do that, I wanted to say. I’m very conscientious about always being on time. I make my payments, I keep an eye on my balances, and I know my credit score.
“You’re joking,” I said to him. He wasn’t, and I have the summons to prove it. I’m due in court on January 30, 2008. I’ll start the 40th year of my life with no driver’s license and a court date. Later in the car, with Matt driving again, I said over and over, “I don’t understand. I do everything I can to make sure things are taken care of.” This wasn’t just an inconvenience, you see. Having my license canceled and taken from me by a police officer in Lamar, Colorado, was an estimation - and evaluation, maybe an attack - of my moral character.
They don’t let you into heaven without a driver’s license, do they? Isn’t this about my worth as a person and not about a ticket that seemed to go unpaid (even though it was paid)?
Michel Foucault, in his treatise Discipline and Punish, compares human society and the function/structure of power, to the panopticon. The panopticon is a type of prison built to allow prison guards and wardens to observe any and all prisoners without those prisoners ever being aware they are being observed. For Foucault, this prison was a metaphor for government (though the metaphor can also be used at different strata of human society, from law enforcement to education to the family). Under the metaphor, we are all watched, or at least potentially watched, and this guides our behaviors and our sense of self-esteem or self-worth. Because we never know if someone’s watching (GPS surveillance, anyone?), we never know if we’ll be caught doing something wrong; so, we tend not to do anything wrong. God serves as a great panopticon for most people; the police serve the same role for others; for kids, well, it’s Santa.
The problem is, sometimes the guard who’s watching descends from the tower and lets us know he disapproves of something we’ve done. Like the very friendly officer in Lamar. I’d done something wrong - without even knowing it - and the punishment was swift and irrefutable. I have no license; I cannot drive; I burden the people around me by becoming dependent on them for transportation.
My biggest fear right now is going to court. I have not been charged with anything; nor have I been fined. I have been told I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and now I need to show up in court and let them decide what happens next. This is another level of power entirely from the power exercised by the panopticon. This is the power of the unchallengeable authority. The car mechanic, if you will, of the law. I’m the car, though, the faulty engine that spits out smoke or makes that ka-chunka-chunk sound. The judge will determine how severe the problem is and how to fix me. I only have to hope that the procedure won’t require the draining of fluids, the twisting of caps.
I do my best to keep things in order. I write the day’s lesson on the chalkboard, I schedule payments through my bank well in advance, I plan the days I’ll shave by what I’ll be doing that day, who I’ll be seeing. Consistency, consistency. Yet even though I have my trail around the yard traced out ahead of time, I guess I’ve never had any idea if it was a trail the guards would approve of. It’s risky, this working at being in control under unknown watchful eyes.
