NWW Issue 9 Spring and Summer 2018

NORTH WEST WORDS
SPRING / SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 9
If pressed, Hugh could have explained how the asylum was designed along the lines of Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon, a template used for many state buildings including goals, schools, hospitals
and universities. Any place, in fact, in which a supervisor seeks to keep an eye on many people at
once. The basic architecture consisted of a semi circle, or circle, the centre of which served as an
observatory. Inmates, students and patients could be held in rooms along thin corridors reaching
out from the superintendent’s central vantage point. While a superintendent could not watch every
one all of the time, he or she was granted an overview of every cell within the structure. Hence the
occupants never knew when they were being observed. This would supposedly persuade them to
behave for fear of being spied upon. Hugh also understood that the asylum had long been replaced
by more modern regulatory arms of the state including a technical college, the unemployment
exchange and the police station, all with new eyes in the form of dozens of CCTV cameras hanging
at all angles from buildings and lamp posts. As he passed their prying gaze, Hugh appeared wholly
inconspicuous. Both on and off line, the state found the librarian unremarkable.
Hugh found it odd that when Bentham wasn’t working out how to control people, he created the
felicific ("happiness-making") calculus. This interested Hugh more, although he questioned
Bentham’s faith in the empirical. The calculus claimed to quantify the intensity, duration, likelihood
and extent of pleasures and pains through an exponential equation. The tidy dream of a reductionist.
Hugh threw this thought aside as he turned right onto Princes Street. The light here was more
optimistic and the road led to a better life in the opulent and wider Clarendon. Here the terraces
were Georgian, chipped red brick, arched doors and French windows. The uneven pains of glass in
these appeared like dark watery pools and contained bubbles of air trapped for over two hundred
years. In spring, planter boxes burst with bright flowers scenting the charmed lives of professionals;
lawyers, accountants, designers and dentists. Masterful women and men whose position and
income rendered them immune to surveillance and madness.
Hugh stepped quickly past the dead slab of architecture that was Tesco’s on the Strand Road and
toward and across the River Foyle via the newly erected Peace Bridge. In the station, his train was
waiting. He read while travelling allowing the journey to relax and lead him from train to bus, and
then to the almost deserted seaside town. Built in Victorian times, Portrush was slowly being eaten
away by the wind and waves. Arriving at the guesthouse he was shown to his room. It was the same
room he had known over the years with its high walls, floral carpet and bay windows. It was
magnificently fitted with an assortment of antique furniture that had been gathered from the once
far reaches of the British Empire. There were Oriental cushions, a rounded brass table from India
into which was etched a beautiful ink blue peacock, an umbrella and hat stand. The windows were
bordered by plush curtains and foreign landscapes hung about the walls. A Turkish divan sat close
46