Heaven and Hell

We’re sitting on a bench in a garden in the heart of Devon, England. We’re overlooking a pond that is flanked by giant, gnarled Oaks. The trees are made hazy by a green flush, the first leaves pushing forth into the spring warmth. A hill rises up just beyond the pond. On its slope is a circle of trees that just perfectly frames a patch of meadow in the sunshine. It’s a stage upon which half a dozen rabbits are playing. They are, indeed, playing, not browsing or performing some unrelated function that I am anthropomorphizing. They’re flinging themselves into the air, kicking out their hind legs, in joyous abandon. ‘Binking’ it’s called by rabbit cognoscenti. There’s a robin in the bushes singing its head off; there are doves cooing somewhere behind us; there are ducks escorting ducklings across the pond; there are lambs-just a few weeks old-bleating in the meadows around us; daffodils practically explode from the grass before our eyes. It’s achingly, absurdly, pretty. It’s like Walt Disney sat down with the Telly Tubbies over cream tea to conjure this up.

Like Disneyland, Theme-Park Gaia here commands an exorbitant entrance fee, one that you pay at The Stables.

The Stables are inside an immense concrete warehouse divided into twelve cells, each of which is fitted with iron bars that slide shut with a maximum-security clang. The Stables haven’t been used in a couple of years, so every horizontal surface is caked with pigeon shit. The walls, where they are visible through the cobwebs, are yellow with animal grime. There are thousands of feet of this. Thousands of feet of shit-covered floors and grimy walls. Our job--the fee that is exacted for our hour in paradise--is to wash all of it and then paint it brilliant white.

We scrubbed for four days, and now we’ve been applying white paint for five. Endless stretches of white. Like Nelson Mandela in the white limestone quarries of Robben Island, we are going blind from all the white. Our bodies are contorting to the shape of the brush and roller; Cara can no longer make a fist to shake behind our oppressors’ backs.

Two things make our labours harder to bear. The first is that our hosts--the owners of our idyllic pond, and these Hellish Stables--are rich. They own a Porsche that our hostess parks overnight in the stables, moving it in the morning so that the yokels won’t get paint on it. Our hosts own 91 hectares of some of the finest grazing land in Britain. Our hosts own three thoroughbred horses (from ‘proper pedigrees’ we’re told) that have their own stables adjacent to those we are now painting. Our hosts built our stables, the ones we’re now painting, for their daughter so she could run a commercial “equicentre.” Our hosts, then, don’t need free labour; they could pay someone to paint these stables; they could pay us to paint these stable. Hell, they could pay Mark Rothko to paint these stables. Instead, we’re painting them for groceries and a room at the back of their 17th century house. That’s the second thing that is hard to bear: we don’t need groceries and a room. There is nothing in our material circumstances that obliges us to submit to this Depression-era arrangement. We’re professionals, dammit! If we wanted to, we could leave this place, book a B&B down the road, and pay someone to cook our breakfasts for us.

And yet, here we are. Washing shit-covered floors and painting grimy walls. And that, really, is the third thing that makes this hard to bear: we are the masters of our own misery; we are our own tormentors, our own oppressors. Our wealthy hosts have provided the means for our incarceration, but we ourselves are own judge and jury, and ultimately, our own jailers.