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For Samara
All my mind is filled with a single thought: to get free!
Get free! And the intoxication of that freedom,
that success, is sublime.
– Houdini
Every time I write a piece advocating escape from corporate servitude, I receive a few emails that contain a particular kind of scolding. They tell me that only an entitled brat could be dissatisfied with a stable job and a roof when so many pine for only these things.
If that’s the case, then we live in a world built of, and for, legions of such entitled brats, whether they choose to actually implement their escape plan, or only think about it all day. For all the financial prosperity of the modern world, there’s a certain poverty in our willingness to take pay to perform activities that have, typically, almost nothing to do with our personal values. As if there were no better ideas out there, we take up this yoke by the thousand, slotting ourselves into grids of grey squares, stacked 50 to a 100 high, sealed with a shiny glass exterior.
Even while the internet and its emerging cultures continue to hint at new modes of working and living, you may still be told it’s vain to insist on a station more fulfilling than a permanent stall in a well-reputed grid. According to my critics, even if you find your standard weekday boring, painful or unfulfilling, you ought to embrace it, simply because a third-world coal miner would kill for your benefits package. When so many have so little, attempting to escape a situation in which you can reliably feed yourself and fund a retirement, could only be an act of the utmost ingratitude.
A minority of us believe the opposite is true: that escaping from an unfulfilling mainstream lifestyle isn’t a moral failing, but rather a moral imperative. It’s precisely because we have the necessary freedoms at our fingertips (and because others don’t) that spending our lives in the stable isn’t just foolish, but wrong. To remain, voluntarily, in a life where your talents are wasted and your weekdays are obstacles, is to be humble in all the wrong ways.
Robert Wringham, along with New Escapologist’s readers and contributors, has come to represent to me this sensible minority. If you’re reading this book, it’s nearly certain that you’re living with levels of potential freedom that nearly all of history’s humans would envy, and that alone is reason enough to feel uneasy if you haven’t yet made good on this gift.
The desire to escape corporate policy, consumer debt, meaningless work, or any other life-draining first-world cultural norm is not a symptom of greed. Rather, it’s a reaction to a truth we don’t like to talk about in the office: that, given our options, we’re probably not using our lives very well. There may be, in any given tract of cubicles, that rare round peg, whose values exactly match those outlined in his company’s policy manual and mission statement, and for whom his years truly are best spent doing what his underboss would like him to do. But the truth is that most of us – simply by following the path prescribed by our schools, bosses and peers – end up entrenched in a set of roles that do not serve our deepest values and which, in the early hours of any given Monday, we do not especially look forward to fulfilling.
Still, we’re liable to feel ambivalence whenever we think about deviating from norms of any kind. This affliction, which we might call ‘rebel’s doubt’, may put us in danger of taking seriously the charges of selfishness and insularity we get from those who embrace the mainstream. ‘Check your privilege!’ they sneer, with latte in hand.
But with a bit of thought we can see that the failure of empathy is on their side. As our impoverished coal miner knows, only a fool would submit to living a single day as a peon when he has the means to escape in his back pocket. Limiting your freedom in some kind of token solidarity with the truly oppressed is like avoiding exceptional health simply because the chronically ill can’t have it. I’m convinced now that a calculated escape from the status quo is an aspiration to a particular kind of health, which is only now beginning to catch on: a thoughtful, prosperous alignment of your values and your lifestyle.
In a world where such a thing is possible, you might think we’d all be trying on lifestyles until we found one that fitted. But relatively few do. As it stands, the norm is to pick a popular one, perhaps fully aware that The Man himself is at the helm, and run with it for several decades, even well after its ultimate irrelevance and emptiness begin to show. Meanwhile, we complain fondly about it, make knowing jokes with our colleagues about it, steal pens and toner to reclaim some of our lost self-esteem, and if we’re lucky, become at least numb to the work itself. What makes it seem worthwhile is that the proceeds allow us to build, in our evenings and on weekends, a fraction of the life we wanted all along.
Why is this kind of needless languishing still such a dominant tradition? At least partly, it’s because we’re told from childhood the celebrated lie that quitters never win. Again, only a little thought is necessary in order to see the holes here: condemning egress in general implies that nothing should ever be abandoned once it’s entered, whether it’s a deadening career, a dead relationship, or for that matter, a burning building.
Using New Escapologist as a lens, Robert has shown us the enormous misuse of human energy that is this status quo, as well as what can flourish in ordinary people when that energy is reclaimed and repurposed. Human beings, it turns out, are most prone to creating original and valuable things when they haven’t auctioned off their prime daylight hours to rich speculators. New Escapologist gives us the community – and vocabulary – with which to explore that notion and start to recover some of that long-lost value.
It’s a discussion that is by its nature irreverent, and often hilarious. If we’re talking about how to escape the tyranny of The Man, we eventually encounter other pressing questions. How can I carry both my office and wardrobe in a 28-litre backpack? Is a beard a worthwhile project for a young man in the twenty-first century? Is putting both lemon and sweetener into your tea a ghastly lapse of decency, or is it moral progress? Escaping the bonds of conventional living frees one to focus on such topics with impunity.
Zooming out, Escapology is a witty but ultimately serious examination of that ancient philosophical question – how should we live? – but applied this time to the modern world, where it’s normal to be already living out someone else’s answer by the time the question even occurs to you.
You’re about to begin, if you haven’t already, a one-way trip into The Good Life – this kind of wisdom is irreversible, after all – and Mr Wringham is the perfect guide.
David Cain
Escapee
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.
– Richard Lovelace
I’ve seen behind the curtain. It was horrible. But it was all right too.
I was a bored twenty-something when I got my glimpse. I’d taken an interest in the history of conjuring. That is, stage magic. This didn’t come entirely out of nowhere – I wanted to be a comedian and found myself thinking about stagecraft and the more unusual flavours of it – but it was still unlike anything I’d read before. Magic history was fusty, mischievous, Victorian, sequinned, inconsistent. It felt like privileged information, even though the books I’d read were simply from the public library. For a while, the Indian rope trick, ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, and mysterious characters like ‘Long Tack Sam’ and ‘The Great Wizard of the North’ really did it for me. I had reproduction posters of Houdini and Kellar on the walls of my rented apartment, the stains left by the Blu-Tac eventually claiming 50 quid of my security deposit.
Concerning myself with the history of conjuring – at a time I was supposed to be starting a career of some sort or, at least, coming to terms with the street value of a 2:1 psychology degree from the University of Wolverhampton – probably wasn’t what is commonly considered useful. Magic makes you think in a logical but also mischievous way: exactly the way you’re not supposed to think when you’ve a long career of network administration and photocopier unjamming ahead of you. It makes you want to know what lies hidden behind certain curtains.
Ultimately, it was Houdini who tipped me off. Or perhaps it was somehow the effect of returning to a day job on Monday mornings after a weekend with century-old magic. Like the bends, it was a sudden and severe change in pressure. Perhaps this clanging together of atmospheres – the white-collar and the sensational – caused something to shatter and momentarily reveal an exciting and terrible truth. However it happened, I saw it, and some things – a dog’s bollocks, a fat man trying to pick up a watermelon seed – can never be unseen.
The truth is: we’re caught in a trap. All of us. We’re a society of largely decent but completely unknowing Wind in the Willows types, cast asunder in a gigantic juicing mechanism. Elements of modern life we’ve come to see as normal – going to work, going shopping, farting about on Twitter, feeling inexplicably but consistently blue – are all parts of The Trap. The Trap keeps us comfortable enough and may even extend our lifespans, but only for as long as we’re content to stay inside it, all the while being juiced and digested. You might have known about this already – there are clues everywhere – and perhaps you’re happy to go along with it, in which case carry on. On the other hand, this could be news to you and you might like to join me in an act of escape.
‘Welcome aboard,’ said the young recruitment officer. He theatrically opened a door to reveal the bank of warmly humming computers for which I was now responsible, as if to say ‘all of this is yours’. But I didn’t want it to be mine. I didn’t care about computers, warmly humming or otherwise. I wanted to do something titillating and in line with my new-found mystical interests. I lacked the patience to be a magician, but if I applied myself I could be a witty writer like Myles na gCopaleen, or a great comedian like Simon Munnery, or a transvestite potter like Grayson Perry.
Egotistical perhaps. Dreamy certainly. But Jesus Christ, look at the alternatives. Network Administrator. Outreach Officer. Teaching Assistant. Forever? With my remarkable mind and half-decent singing voice? Not bloody likely. I didn’t want to eat machine-vended sandwiches for lunch in the staff canteen of a concrete carbuncle, listening to co-workers bicker about who used up the milk. I wanted a rider in my sumptuous dressing room, overflowing with exotic fruit and the undies of groupies. What’s wrong with that?
I’m not an employee by nature. Nobody is. On the other hand, if I was unable to cover the rent this month I’d be out on my arse. Hence this job. I was trapped. Trapped, potentially, for the next 40 years, which at the age of 23 really does look like forever. The jail time for bank robbery is nowhere near that long. I know because I checked. Welcome aboard. . .
I heard the hum of the computers. I smelled the static electricity coming off them. A rarely used LED on the control desk in my brain suddenly lit up. It was the one marked ‘escape’. Grayson Perry and the others couldn’t help me now. Of all my heroes, only Houdini could get out of this one.
It really was Harry Houdini who showed me the truth behind the curtain. Could we, like he from his boxes, escape the biggest trap of all? Houdini – himself no stranger to exotic fruit and the undies of groupies – was ‘the handcuff king’, able to free himself from the cuffs of any challenger as well as jail cells, packing crates, mail sacks, and straitjackets. On a particularly beguiling evening, he even escaped the rotting carcass of a whale. ‘Nothing on Earth can hold Houdini a prisoner,’ boasted his posters. To this day, we best know him as the Master Escapologist. Chances are, you once named a hamster after him.
Some of Houdini’s most bewitching feats, though, weren’t escape-based at all. As a magician he made coins dance enchantingly between his fingers, caught bullets between his teeth, and made an elephant called Lulu vanish into thin air. Making Lulu disappear remains one of the greatest magical accomplishments ever, perhaps one of the most impressive theatrical performances if judged by sheer spectacle. To this day, nobody quite knows how Houdini did it. He was a prominent and controversy-courting sceptic, the Richard Dawkins of his day – but less embarrassing to bring up at parties. He was a movie star, an author, a pioneer aviator, an agent of the US Secret Service, the star of his own Broadway show. He was, as his most recent biographers call him, the first American superhero. But he was most famous – and still is – for picking locks.
When you stop to think about it, an escape act is a very odd piece of theatre. What could be entertaining about watching someone spend painstaking minutes – even hours – picking a lock or wrestling his way out of a box? It’s even odder when you learn the audience didn’t actually see those things at all. If Houdini were to escape a packing crate, the very nature of the performance rendered both him and his process completely obscured from view: the audience who paid to see Houdini escape spent much of their time in the theatre gawping at a wooden box. String quartets were hired to keep the audience interested while he struggled inside the crate. To escape a set of handcuffs, Houdini would retreat mysteriously behind his ‘ghost box’, a canvas screen designed to obscure his process. Even if you’d been able see the performer there would not have been much to see. There was no sensational ‘trick’ and certainly no real magic. Houdini picked locks. That’s what happened behind the screen. A vanishing elephant or a bullet caught between the teeth is a clearly witnessed feat with a tantalisingly mysterious technique. But this? This was a man in a box. A hundred urbanites in a poorly ventilated room, eyes fixed upon a slightly wobbling crate sounds like a very odd piece of fringe theatre, but it was in fact an international sensation.
Escapology – above other forms of magical entertainment – must have struck a chord in the collective consciousness. He must have tapped something deeper than the desire to be entertained. Houdini’s work, writes the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, ‘was essentially the devising of ever more unusual, exacting, and marketable tricks that would, in an unwitting way, exploit and expose the habits of the country’. Could it be that Houdini’s act transcended mere spectacle and stepped into the world of metaphor? Through a popular entertainment and the engineering of absurd situations, he ‘exposed the habits of the country’ and so, in his way, was a satirist. ‘It wasn’t really conjuring at all,’ writes magic historian Jim Steinmeyer, ‘even if his novel act had been derived from the world of magicians. . .The drama. . .was the sight of the little man challenged, playing David to society’s endless Goliaths, the archetypal victim who, within the strict confines of the vaudeville turn, rose to be the victor.’
The 1900s, when Houdini was at the height of his popularity, provided many such Goliaths. It was a time of profound social and technological change. Edison’s phonograph made a cheap and portable commodity of music; Ransom Eli Olds began producing the first ever marketable cars; it was a time of colonial expansion; nations of erstwhile farmhands were coming to terms with bureaucracies and corporations; advertising had begun to reframe conveniences as essentials. It was the start of what we currently know as the consumer economy.
The average person was fairly helpless in the face of this relentless progress, and so Houdini acted on his behalf – symbolically – by picking the locks of handcuffs, bursting from wooden crates, and even finding his way out of a police van designed to transport criminals. ‘The little man challenged,’ Steinmeyer said. If it were possible to escape such physical shackles, would it not also be possible to escape the socially constructed ones that bound millions of normal people to modern lives of alternating consumption and toil? After all, social shackles aren’t even really there. They’re not forged from iron in the fires of Birmingham like the ones Houdini mocked. I believe it was this flirtation with possibility that made Escapology so appealing.
Houdini’s performances were metaphors, pantomimes of the cultural escape fantasy. He represented emancipation: liberation from traps being set by the unseen architects of the new economy. His devout scepticism – his public reputation for debunking spiritualists, many of whom were powerful politicians and celebrities – suggested that not every institutionalised commandment need be obeyed. And if magic could be held in the benign hands of a formerly poor rabbi’s son and one-time locksmith’s apprentice, maybe it could be held by anyone. Houdini, without an overt agenda, drew attention to the new predicament of industrialised nations: that it’s a trap and that traps can be escaped.
Whizz forward a hundred years to the early twenty-first century. Look out of the window, look into your hearts. We still identify with ‘the little man challenged’. We’re still in The Trap. It’s the self-same trap set in Houdini’s day but it’s now more effective than ever before. Most people born in The Trap are unaware of its existence let alone that they’re in it. The consumer economy and a nominal democracy have led to improvements in quality of life but also to new affronts to liberty. Meaningless jobs and massive debts, for example.
As many as 80 per cent of us are dissatisfied with our jobs. We spend an intolerable number of hours working and further unpaid hours in trains and buses and traffic jams getting to and from work. Despite these sacrifices, most of us are in debt because we’re so desperate to reclaim our dignity as consumers. In Canada – one of the most efficient industrialised nations of them all – the average citizen ended 2013 in with a non-mortgage debt of $28,853. Already we can see The Trap in action. We work to pay debts, we accrue debts because of the indignities of work.
Once you subtract work, shopping and sleep, there isn’t much time left for freedom. When are we to have real fun? When are we to better ourselves? When are we to read and oversleep and cook and make love? Why must these activities be pushed into ‘spare time’, into the margins of life when they could be the substance of it? Marginalising fun and fretting over debt can’t have been what people had in mind when they set out to build a civilisation. Escaping this situation, as individuals and as societies, is the subject of this book.
We should apply Houdini’s magic to real life. The modern world needs Escapology. We need the lock picks, the patience, the knowledge and humour to escape the manacles and jail cells. We need to know how to leave jobs we don’t like, to ignore the siren song of consumption, to escape debt, stress, bureaucracy, and marketing. We need to know how to escape the imprisoning mindsets that come with the consumer economy: miserliness, background unhappiness, passive-aggression, mauvaise foi, competitiveness, and submission.
Seeing the solution as Escapology leads us to think about it in a particular way: not only that any trap can be escaped, but also that it can be escaped with a kind of aplomb, a sense of fun, playfulness and challenge. Just as Houdini accepted a public challenge each time he performed and gradually picked the lock so that he might find freedom, we can do the same. I challenge you, dear reader, to escape whatever manacle restrains you. Bad relationship? Escapology! Horrible job? Escapology! Ingrowing toenails? Escapology! But also a chiropodist.
Why not become a modern-day Escapologist? Study each trap carefully with Houdini’s scientific eye, and break free. In 2007, a year or so after my initial interest in the history of magic and a year after taking that rubbish office job, I set up a magazine called New Escapologist. It asked whether the magic of Escapology could be brought down to the rest of us. Is escape from The Trap possible? If so, how might we arrange it? Can we all escape or do we need someone to stay inside The Trap to keep pulling the levers and turning the cranks? Just as I’d hoped, New Escapologist acted as a beacon and I was soon talking to and working with hundreds of other people enthusiastic about the arts of everyday escape. It gave me a vantage point from which I could see even further behind that curtain. Now I can tell you that escape is possible. Quickly and radically or slowly and carefully, escape is possible. Treat with suspicion the people who tell you it’s not.
Here follows a long description of a machine.
– Houdini