The first crime was the most defining moment in the history of the human. It was not Cain’s murder. That was defining too. But the first crime began in the realm of the numinous. It could only be deemed an act of spirit. Philosophers and religionists and mystics struggle to define it. The closest anyone came is the suggestion that it was a moment that was a break in the eternal axis of harmony. There doesn’t necessarily have to be established and defined laws for there to be a crime. There has to be a realm of order, a system of order, a spiritual aesthetic. For crime to exist there has to be a moral universe, whose morality need not be stated in words but in the law of harmony.
The first crime was a breach of harmony which split the spheres. It compelled a new reality. It precipitated the fall. The fall was dimensional, not directional. The fall was the creation, by the deed of spirit, of a new realm. The realm of the material was not there before the fall. It came after the fall. It is necessary that a meditation on crime begins with the numinous.
For how else can we account for the sense of evil that somehow entered the human consciousness in the million or so years of its evolution. There can be no crime without a sense of evil. It must be said quickly however that not all crime has to do with the sense of evil. From a certain point onwards crime ceases to be notional. It becomes a construct.
As a concept crime is most powerful as a construct. The concept of crime creates, automatically, a new realm in the world. The law makers create one realm which they insert into the vast phantasmagoria of the real. Everything we do is an insertion into the phantasmagoria of the real. One could say that the idea of crime is an indirect attempt to create, by force of suggestion and threat of punishment, the notion of an inferno, of hell, in the consciousness of the human. It is to replicate, in dim terms of the material sensorium, the conditions of the fall. Remember the fall is keenly felt by all in a subconscious subliminal state as a condition of unbearable breakage from the realm of the great fathers and mothers. It is a rip and tear away from the primal harmony. Maybe the baby senses it in its first howl of mortal distress. Maybe every orgasm which is also a howl of immeasurable pleasure is also a distortion of the original howl of metaphysical despair. In this realm of ours all the vectors of being are connected.
But crime pulls at the fabric of society. It is perceived as a moral tear at the flesh of society. The relativity of crime makes the concept sometimes baffling. In one era to steal a loaf of bread could lead to transportation to Australia from England. In another era, in another world, the same thing could lead to your arm being cut off. Under apartheid in south Africa, to cross a geographical boundary without the requisite papers was a crime. In the America south, during the era of slavery, to be black was on the verge of being a crime. In many countries in the world now to be gay is criminal. In many places in the world being poor boarders on being a criminal condition. Ideas of crime reveal the society and the times. To not pay your taxes becomes a crime, but if you are rich enough, if the corporation is powerful enough, there is a vast amount of tax evasion that is possible.
Crime defines itself in relation to society but not to the universe. Our ideas of crime rarely extends to the natural world, to the planets, the stars, the world beyond the clouds. It ought to be a crime to pollute our seas. It ought to be a crime to pollute the atmosphere. There are currently more discarded flying bodies in space than at any time in history. We now suffer from the pollution of the stratosphere with satellites and all manner of junk circulating in perpetual orbit.
Crime is still pre-copernican. It still treats human beings as the centre of the universe. The first crime was a thou shalt not. It was stated negatively. Thou shalt not. It is curious that crime lives in a place of negation. We see crime as a negative deed, a doing of a thou shalt not. But crime is rarely a negative act. It is rarely an act of not-doing. It is more often an act of doing. Or it is a non-doing that has a doing effect. Crime is what you are not to do. But crime must also be a deed. The paradox of crime bedevils it from the beginning of mythical or real history. Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the crime big enough to get us sent out of the garden forever. Fancy the idea of a crime being that of eating a fruit from a tree. The first crime was in effect poaching. Adam and Eve poached God’s private terrain, poached God’s secret. Crime was always notional. Crime is always metaphysical. Beyond morality crime connects the earth and the cosmic, the beginning of things and the end of things. Crime kick started the human myth, the human story. It could be said that history began with a crime. This is fitting. Humans have always felt about the human condition that all is not right, and has never been right, except in some dim mythical memory. Crime is mixed into the mortal condition. According to the legend of the fall, we are all criminals in our mysterious patrimony. This is perhaps why we all seek redemption, without knowing what we seek redemption about.
In a certain aspect of gnostic thought the universe was created by an evil daemon. The problem of evil, which is at the root of crime, has been a challenge to philosophers and metaphysicians for centuries. But crime seems to me not the reflection of some primal sin, but a reflection of our free will. The fact that crime is there to be committed tells me how fundamentally free we are. It means we live in a universe where we have choice. Even the choice to go against the universe itself, in the highest crime, or against the laws of the human, which is a constructed crime.
In that sense every crime bifurcates the universe. It creates a negative moral zone. It replaces the world as it briefly is with a world that is not and it makes the that is not world impregnate, for a moment, the world as it briefly is. Every mugging alters the moral universe. That which ought not to be becomes briefly the norm. It expands the space all around it, like a piano thrown into a calm lake. Every murder shatters the mirror of the invisible law. Its implication reaches to all the spaces where every act links all the things in the world, through unseen routes of time, space, and consequence. Every time a developer throws poor tenants out into the street, every time a bank sends families scurrying from their houses due to foreclosures, every corrupt act involving oil deals that quietly rob people of general funds for decent hospitals or good schools or fine roads upon which the feet of the poor can walk with a modest tranquility shifts the axis of peace in the world, tilts the social universe towards future violence, for every social or spiritual crime not only bifurcates the universe but sends through its connecting grid a zag of energy that comes bouncing back in unforeseen forms. The whole economy of the universe, of energy in the universe, is perhaps founded on a single thing: we may call it the sustaining balance, or the underlying harmony. And nothing can be shifted or broken in the universe that does not send out an energy that seeks to restore that balance, and that balance exists on all spheres visible and invisible. In that sense every crime is ultimately self-harm and self-rape. Every mugging is ultimately a self-mugging, and every murder is a suicide. The world is not only our mirror, it is our double.
When we spit at the world our face, at a future angle, receives that spit. When we violate the world, through unjust laws, we violate ourselves.
In a sense there are two dimensions of crime. There is the constructed crime of society, and there is the crime against the vastly connected links of the moral universe. Constructed crime is constructed by society and may have no validity on the moral sphere. If one society seems it a crime to love, this may land you in prison if you happen to fall in love but it has no adverse effect on the moral universe. In such a society everything it deems a crime that is not a breach of the higher laws of the moral sphere is really only a continual crime that the society inflicts on itself. The whole era of apartheid was therefore not only a crime against the blacks, but a perpetually inflicted crime against the perpetrators of apartheid, the wound and the pain unimaginable in the working out of the wound and the pain it doubly inflicted. The whole set of laws that favour the creation of poverty while favouring that the same poverty create wealth for others is a crime too doubly inflicted: it is inflicted on the poor and on the rich who benefit from it. This is perhaps why crime has figured so powerfully in the metaphysics of the world, in the literature of the world, in the drama of the world. Crime defines a world. We do not know what a world is till we know what are considered crimes there. A world is defined by its absences. A nation is defined by its prisons.
Not the streets, the towers, the skyscrapers, the automobiles, the airports, the beauty of the houses, the recreations and the celebrations, not the sight of happy families, not the concourse of lovers, not the parks twittering with voices and laughter, not the universities, the colleges, nor the rituals of youth, not the presidents, the seats of power, nor the houses of fun reveals the truth of a nation. Only its prisons. For its prisons are the homes of its absences. The prisons reveal what it does not want us to see. And what it does not want us to see is itself. The prisons are a nation’s true self. They are where crime has a face, a narration, a body, a fate, and the face, narration, fate and body are all those of the nation. The prison is not the inversion of society, its shadow side. The prison is the very face of society, its future, its destiny, for what is hidden away in prison is what is howling unseen in the streets. Every murder has a narrative that goes back to the roots of that society, the roots of family. And every crime is proceeded by another crime. Every crime has been sprung into being by another crime, for crime is never Sui generis.
We deal only in the history of the visible. Our narratives are limited only to that which we can see and verify. But our lives are mixed both of visible and invisible things. To tell the true story of a crime requires this double vision, of visible and invisible seeing. Who can tell the roots of the diseasing of a mind? Who can tell what sunders the mind in a life of apparent normality? Our crime stories are stories of cause and effect. Crime is essentially about consequences. They happen in the dark, in the shadows, and the stories take the form of a puzzle being solved in the unpredictable laboratory of the world. For that reasons crime tend us to the philosophical. A terrible crime makes us ask why? It sends us back to time before the crime, to beginnings, to the mysteries of the human psychology or pathology.
Every crime is a breach and a break and a sundering. It splits time. It shatters the ethical axis. But it reveals hidden things in a culture, or a nation. Crimes done in public mirror crimes done in private. There are muggings in the street and there are muggings done to citizens every day, by governments, corporations, multinationals. If the individual doesn’t pay their tax it is a crime; but vast corporations and global multinationals get away with paying taxes so low in relation to their incomes and it is not a crime at all. Crimes mirror visible and invisible breaches in the spiritual and economic fabric of the world. Big crimes vanish from visibility. Small crimes fill the headlines, occupying more space. The world revolves round an axis of invisible crimes perpetrated on the human spirit everywhere. If looked into deeply enough poverty is the end result of these invisible crimes. There are crimes of omission and crimes of commission. If the whole of humanity were one person, grievous and multiple would be its wounds. The American artist Cady Noland said somewhere that psychopaths act out principles latent in a culture.
Crimes mirror us.
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Ben Okri’s original essay, which opens the book of Meditations on Crime, was also the inspiration for the short film by Jonah Freeman and Harper Simon. You can find both editions of the book (the boxed set includes an LP) on Hat & Beard’s website.
