I
wouldn't have been surprised if John Cheever had described Justice as
'some broad' in his tale of Falconer Jail; he doesn't however, though
the phrase is used later, on the last page, in reference to a coat,
when, and I quote, looking as if about 'to meet some broad in a very
expensive restaurant and buy her lunch.' But he does describe her, at
the beginning, as 'blinded, vaguely erotic in her clinging robes and
armed with a headsman's sword.'
He's
right of course. That's the conventional image most of us recognise
and usually see positioned outside or above judicial places where
hearings and trials are held, where sentences are served. And yet I
find her figure far from assuring and more troubling, though I'm not
sure I could tell you why. Not because I'm holding back, worried I'll
offend, but because I don't really know myself. Something about her,
depicted as she commonly is, pricks my conscience.
No,
this is not going to be a case of revision (you breathe a sigh. I
hear it before it's even reached its end) because I don't agree with
all this tearing down and redesign, though she does smack of 'Olde'
whenever she's found. Not that there's anything wrong with
mythological symbols, assuming that's what she is? because I've
deliberately chosen not to research her but have instead presumed
from my small amount of knowledge she was either a Greek or Roman
goddess, though I'd rather she was just 'some broad.' Some broad
picked up somewhere: on a street corner, working the counter in a
shop or diner, sitting in a hotel lobby or a train carriage like in a
Hopper painting yet even those images, that slang dates itself to the
thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, to detective novels
and to America, where the streets are laid like girds and, to a Brit,
confusedly numbered.
An
ordinary dame. A housewife. A secretary. Dated. Dated. Dated. I know,
but nowhere near as old and more familiar than Justice.
Do
I offend you with this view? with this slang? of the hard drinking
(and hard smoking) era, of the (still) more masculine world where
people dressed more sharp than they do now and spoke either in
clipped or soft tones, of the sort you don't hear now. I know, I'm
romanticising a time I didn't live in or even get to experience for
one brief moment, when actually being in it wouldn't have been like
that at all. I'm looking back, or through, a window that can never
for me be recreated exactly and so it will always be some place I'd
like to be but can never go.
And
that's just one; there are others: even earlier moments in time,
which if mentioned progressive peoples of today would say I was mad.
We've come so far...and yet too far. Some of our struggles now are
more sensitive than worthy. These attitudes are even clouding my
view, in spite of separating myself (as best I can) from them.
Maybe
I'm being a prude. As couldn't it be the eroticism, some people see
(in her), that disturbs me? That somehow it's undignified for Justice
to be perceived in that way, though I quite understand why. Is it my
modern eyes? which instead of seeing an impartial figure sees a
seductress (oops shouldn't say seductress but seducer) like a praying
mantis who entices, then, once the deed is done, eats her lover or
in this case beheads them.
But
is that not a fitting token if they're guilty? Her sword straight and
unbending; its swing unimpeded by the silk scarf blinding her eyes,
the blow delivered swiftly to the neck. The head rolls. Justice
served.
In
those bygone gladiatorial and unmerciful days that was justice,
whereas today, as more usually happens, those found guilty are carted
off and locked up. Their punishment served in months or years with
time off for good behaviour alongside a regime which is too
comfortable; in the States where the death penalty is still enforced,
they swell in size, and appear freakish, like those that used to be
exhibited in a circus show. What
do they do to them in there?
Or does incarceration inflate a man's ego? Prisoners should, if they
return to the civilian population, come out clean, and lean as in
sinewy, not starved, and hungry to continue their reformation and not
go back inside.
Justice
now, even wielding a sword, is too blinded.
Picture credit: Office at Night, 1940, Edward Hopper (Source: WikiArt)
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
