The Other Side of the Glass
Unemployed, fallen from work, from the chance of work, the day leads nowhere, the dole is the bridge across the days and the weeks; you are the object of crackdowns and tightening-ups, you receive home visits from the housing officer. Then your payments are delayed and you travel on the bus you cannot afford to town to wait in line, but what a line, to see the civil servants about your housing claim. You are on the other side of the glass, you can barely make yourself understood, you speak loudly to be heard and asked to be spoken to loudly so that you can hear, but the separating window prevented you from understanding and from being understood.
They know you, in the dole office. They know you, at the council. They know, and that’s why they separate themselves from you by a window. They know, they are prepared, they’ve taken measures, you are made to take a ticket from the machine and wait in the foyer, wait at the margins, wait in the corridors between rooms, wait in those spaces that are not quite rooms, wait in the chairs each set aside the other, wait and shift seats when others ahead of you are called, they are ready for you, they don’t want to be touched by you, they don’t want physical contact, or to breathe the same air as you.
Violence will not be tolerated. Attacks on staff will lead to prosecution. Yes, it’s understandable, some of us are violent, some too impatient, I’m frightened of them sitting beside me with WHITE written each letter across the knuckles of one hand and POWER on the knuckles of the other, I don’t want to sit near them with the tattoos that curl up from their teeshirts and around their necks, I wouldn’t want to be as close to them as I am, I wouldn’t trust them, I wouldn’t want to deal with them – listen to them talk, they can barely talk, they threaten and they growl, they brood and they resent, and you, civil servant, I know you want to be pleasant and patient and kind, you are sympathetic and empathetic, you want to help us, those who are called your clients, you want to help the job seekers find jobs and make the payments to those who want housing benefit, you want to run through the long forms they have fill out, you want to make sure everything is okay, even as you want, at the same time, to be separate from us, your clients, from those who are on the other side of the glass.
Ah, civil servant, for all your good will and attentiveness, for all your training and people management, you sense our stagnancy, you sense in us what has not begun, you sense what cannot begin, what is deficient or excessive, you know in us what you must not know. You know we are stagnant, and that our stagnancy threatens to run into the streaming of your life, the cool water of your life, its cool streaming. You know with what we might infect you, that our disgusting lives might run into yours, might pollute your days and your nights. You know our stagnancy is close to running into the clear stream of your life, you know if you came closer, you would say to your partner when you came home from work, it’s all too much, you would say it because you had come too close to us, not like Icarus with the sun, the opposite in fact, not like one who tried to rise, but one, rather, who was compelled to sink, who could do nothing but sink, who fell without wanting to fall, who was infested and invaded, befouled and besmirched, whose clear stream of life was flooded with our stagnant waters. Oh I know you, civil servant, I know and understand what is happening on the other side of the glass.
Lars Iyer's Blog 