1996
On writing the same word over and over again
Notes from a prison workshop on numbness, wakefulness, and the refusal to retreat from reality.
These days, I am interested not so much in writing but in the state of being awake. Not the kind of awake that is merely the opposite of physical sleep—nor “woke” which seems to be mostly about filtering people in and out of a political identity—but the positioning of being alive, receptive, and responsive to the world. Of being willing to see what is actually there, of refusing to drift through life at a distance. Of feeling oneself to be inextricably a part of everything.
This is a state I have been striving for all my life. I suspect it is most of what I write about.
*
It seems to be a lot of what other writers talk about, too.
As in William Stafford’s poem “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”:
It is important that awake people be awake
Or John S. Dunne’s paraphrase of Wordsworth:
What is required for a loving that is knowing, for a knowing that is loving, is the quiet eye.
Or how Joan Didion described the artist Georgia O’Keeffe as someone who was “open to what she sees.”
She meant that Georgia was someone with an awakened eye—an eye that looked honestly, prepared and willing to see what was actually present. From which eye Georgia saw so many things, bloomed so many bruised flowers, painted a sky—startlingly blue—through an old hip bone. The bones and the sky had been there all along; mundane, startling, decomposing in silence—but only Georgia was willing to receive them.
I am talking of a positioning that is utterly necessary for writers and artists—one that can only happen when, as T.S. Eliot says, “the ears of my ears awake,” and “the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
*
This has all come up recently because I spend my Tuesday mornings in prison, with a group of writers who are not allowed to leave the 1,803 acres they inhabit in the watershed of the Lower Big Darby Creek. It’s a strange position for any kind of artist—being entrenched in one place while being profoundly alienated from it. These writers are not allowed to walk down to the waterway, or to sit by the new oaks growing across the street. Once, when I mentioned a nearby small town, one of the writers snorted and said, “There’s a town out there?” Everyone laughed. They’d been brought in via transport, in official vehicles with bars and darkened windows. They’ve never walked through the town they live beside. These writers do not move; instead, they are the moved.
A topic we have been probing is the question of how this situation makes them different than that of other writers. Or, as one writer, Kitab, put it, “What are we missing in here?”
In terms of writing, the answer should be nothing. Great work can happen anywhere—in the midst of war and heartbreak, deprivation and despair, and, yes, in incarcerated spaces. Writers on the outside, in fact, spend a lot of money and professional energy at writing residencies, trying to replicate at least a few of the conditions of prison. In writing residences, writers confine themselves mostly to a small room where, removed from the horrors and impositions of daily life, they will finally be able to birth their great work. The implicit idea being that it is actually everyday life and its limitations that keeps writers from their work, and that you can do better writing when you remove yourself from all of it, strip away outside distractions, sit in an empty-ish room, and flagellate yourself on the page.
That Tuesday, I said as much. “In theory,” I said, “You’re not missing anything.”
But this is, of course, very easy to say.
*
Earlier that same day, another writer, Wes, had given me a few poems to read. He was sheepish about turning them in because when he reread them that morning he’d realized something.
“They’re all the same poem,” he said, “When I get out of here, I can write different things, but whenever I’m in here”—he shrugged—“It’s all the same thing, over and over. Might as well be the same word.”
It is this that has stuck in my head for weeks. Might as well be the same word. The same word. The same word. It has the cadence of a dream; or, if you live in a prison, something more of a nightmare.
*
So here is what I’m thinking now: It is not so much the loss of liberty that is the problem for writers in prison. It is the sandblasting of the senses. The walls in the Programs Room are blue-gray, have been blue-gray, will always be blue-gray—world without end. The pipes rattle above your head, and the lightbulbs buzz, and the fans turn their slow revolutions, and they all say the same thing:
You will always be here; You will always be here.
That tree is the same tree; that door is the same door; this sky is the same sky. Same commissary, same people. Day in. Day out. Faces morphing slowly, slow enough that even different faces begin to feel the same.
Nothing here is special; nothing here is worth noticing. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see. Nothing to see. Save yourself. Retreat. Retreat. Retreat.
The sameness is systematized, weaponized, altogether too much. It is designed to dull your senses; it is designed to put you to sleep. The obvious choice, I think, would be to succumb, to let yourself be turned into an object, moved about; to withdraw your senses from a world that is too utterly boring to bear.
*
But the men in the prison cannot retreat. They are writers, and the job of a writer is to endure reality, to remain open to things. Not things as they might be, but things as they are, in their subtle nuances and differentiations.
The job of the writer is to remain awake. This is also the job of a human.
*
Tony Hoagland, in the poem “Gorgon,” speaks of an onslaught of a different kind of boredom, one that sets in—
“Where the corporations run the government / And move over the land like giant cloud formations.”
One where “the information winds howl.”
In other words, he is speaking of a general numbing, of a managed retreat from human senses into a system which turns everything into a number or a dollar sign. He is speaking of the kind of prison in which everything you see or think or understand is managed for you; where you never read anything a corporation doesn’t want you to read; you never feel anything a corporation doesn’t want you to feel.
He is speaking of the kind of prison where you are not supposed to know you are in prison. He is speaking of Right Now.
At the end of the poem, Hoagland tells us what he thinks we ought to do about this situation.
Your job—he says—is to watch and take notes, / To go on looking.
Your job is to not be turned into stone.
*
How is it possible to live right now and not be turned to stone? This is an open question that I don’t know how to answer.
How often have I myself dwelt in malaise, unwilling to let my senses engage with the world? How often have I dulled myself out to escape the pain of being alive, surrendering to my phone, or to Netflix, or to my own nihilism? How often have I retreated from my responsibilities to my neighbor, saying to myself, I just can’t think about this now. I just can’t look.
How often, as a writer, have I been so encased by my own fear, my own self-doubt, that I retreated from the truth, numbed myself out, wrote sentences so safe that they may as well have been the same word over and over again?
All of these are capitulations to the part of me that does not want to see, or sense, or respond. It is the part of me that is exhausted—utterly exhausted—by the world. It’s the part of me that would rather be turned into an object than to look at what is.
*
How is it possible to live right now?
I have no answers—for you, for the writers in prison, or for myself. Instead, I ask questions, over and over again.
I ask: Are you willing to open your senses again—right now—in this moment? Are you willing to have your heart broken by the world? Are you willing to be broken by what you have made of the world? Are you willing to be brokenhearted by what you have made of yourself?
Are you willing to open your eyes, to see what is present, to feel grief and despair? Are you willing to be alive?
Are you willing to be amazed?
(This essay has been read and approved for publication by the incarcerated writers who are mentioned in it. All names have been used by permission.)
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I refuse to submit to the spirit of fear
As a child, I was taught to fight dark forces. Only now am I starting to understand what that really means.
I have been thinking about demons again.
During my evangelical Christian childhood, the little dudes were everywhere, somehow managing to be both agents of supreme evil and mangy little jumpers. Get too close to a demon-host without a protective prayer and—schroop!—it’d be in you, just like that! Like a virus or a hopping, predatory leech. A friend told me that once he walked into a house and saw demons in a child’s stuffed octopus. They were watching him, waiting to pounce. Terrifying! Those little critters were always looking.
Having reached adulthood, I thought I’d successfully banished such entities from my consciousness. Now, I am less certain. Perhaps it is the off-smell in the air, the tumbling news cycle, the weird, greedy men posturing and ripping the flesh off the poor. The world feels charged, crackling at its uttermost edges. Meanwhile we stare at each other through digital lenses, unspoken questions lodged in the throat: Where do we go? Who is evil? Who is well? Where is safety? I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like. Some nights, I wonder if we are all possessed by something with a million eyes and heavy breath.
I don’t know if there is Something among us, but it’s hard not to feel that, if there were, this is very much what it would feel like.
But I have felt something like this feeling before. In my twenties, I took two ill-advised trips around the country. On the first I was 26, with a brand new Honda I’d decided to drive away from Florida, just to see what happened. What happened was that I hit the I-10 intersection, turned toward California, and didn’t return home for a month.
On that trip, I learned to love the west and to trust my gut. I spent very little money, mostly on gasoline and Trader Joe’s runs. I ate room temperature brie and baby carrots straight from the bag. I slept in my car, then on stranger’s couches, then in a dusty tent I bought on Craigslist for $8 and began pitching anywhere that looked uninhabited, sleeping wherever I liked and feeling utterly safe, upheld by mountains or the great swaths of rock beneath me. A neuroscientist might say that my prefrontal cortex hadn’t fully developed, and so my security was an illusion, a fluke of an immature brain. And, yes, it may be true that I did not believe that anything could happen to me. It’s also true that nothing happened to me, and I was utterly happy, eager to return.
And so, two summers later, I started another roadtrip, which I began by visiting my brother in Wyoming, where he was working on a dude ranch. He was 18, a brand-new grown up, and our philosophical paths were already diverging, but we shared a sense of humor and a love of the west and were happy together, careening around red cliffs on a four wheeler and spinning up plumes of dust in the path of the sun.
On one of our final nights, I told him of my plan to repeat my adventure and return to the wilderness, that I had brought my tent and would once again go it alone. I was eager to tell him my plans, thinking he would understand. But he did not share my enthusiasm. Instead, he was visibly concerned. He began telling me everything that could happen to me. Animals. Accidents. People. Strangers who could rape me, hurt me, steal from me. I did not have means to defend myself. I should really have a gun! He wanted to get me one, and would teach me how to shoot it. It might be necessary soon, anyway, given where the country was going. He even offered to sponsor my admission to a program where I would learn how to win a gunfight—some kind of survival camp taught by ex-Marines.
Yeah, no, I thought, I’m not going to shootout camp—over my literal dead body. The thought alone was absurd. Those who know me well know that, while I’m enthusiastic about urban berry foraging and have been known to raise the occasional pea plant, I’m not well-suited for a dystopian apocalypse. I don’t want to learn knife-throwing or how to heal a wound with saliva and maple leaves. I have zero desire to bury pinto beans in the backyard. If the situation ever comes to gunfighting in the streets, I’m dead! I accept that.
I told him as much, or at least demurred in some way, thanked him for his concern, told him I would definitely not be needing a weapon. Then I changed the subject, tried to shake it off, got ready for bed. I thought I was okay. Then I fell asleep.
All night I dreamed of annihilation. Fires howled in my ears. Strangers surrounded my car, screaming, beating the windows with obscene pink fists—someone horrible walked toward the tent—tall and with hovering, long shadows— My dream-brain fragmented into a thousand questions: Who would protect me? Where could I go? The shards attacked and attacked until everything turned into a recoiling, until I became the recoil, retreating until I could not retreat any more. I knew I should defend myself, that I had to kill!—but I could only lash out, could only flail with my wavery, watery dream-fingers, while I choked in the smell of my own terror—
A sudden blur of light. A cough in another room. Something looped me under my rib, yanked, and—the fever broke. I was heaved up and out of the hot, fetid sea in which I was drowning and into my own bed, where I was reassembled as a real and breathing body.
That body sat up, blinked, and there I was: myself, and safe again. Then I thought: Well! I think I just met the spirit of fear.
As a child, I’d learned that Bible verse— “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.” I’d taken it absolutely literally. The spirit of fear was a demon sent from the devil, that could capture you and…do what exactly? I wasn’t sure, but it was best to steer clear.
So I tried not to be afraid, or, at least, not to appear afraid. I was mostly uninterested in childish activities undertaken with other children, so I picked the scariest, most solitary activities and applied a sheen of bravado to them. Climbing things, going up ladders, picking up snakes. I have a distinct memory of overhearing a childhood friend, who, while watching me climb the backyard apple tree, said to her father, “Nellie will go to the very top! She’s not scared of anything!” Which statement puffed me up, because I knew she was wrong but extremely pleased she’d not seen the truth. Of course I had no fear of the apple tree, which had always been my friend and would not allow me to fall. But I was afraid of many things. I am afraid of many more now.
Still, after that unsettling Wyoming night, I began to suspect that my friend had been more right than either of us knew. Sure, I have my anxieties and worries; like my brother, I am also unsettled by the world, scared by what we have created and what may be coming for us. But through some admixture of nature or nurture—certainly not through my own merit—I have never been someone who dwelt in the hallways of fear, who felt others were out to get me, or that it was imperative I protect myself at any cost.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat. Of retreat, abandonment, isolation. Of I’m in this by myself. Of I’m going to keep what’s mine even if I have to shoot you to do it. It felt real. It was real. It was the spirit of fear, and it was serious business. Driving away from Wyoming, I thought: There are folks who live with this thing. People live that way all the time. And I thought: If that thing was with me all the time, ratcheting a knife in my gullet, yanking me about by my molars…well, I would do anything to be rid of it. I would vote for anyone, betray anything, tear the skin off of any living being.
That night I’d wrestled something new, a different and darker angel: The feeling of desperation and contraction, of something coming after you—a murderer at your heels, a death knife at your throat...
I smell it now, the stench that pervaded that dream. It’s not a demon, exactly—at least, it’s not the kind of grimy, little, voyeuristic being I used to think of as a demonic. Instead, it’s a mindworm, a meme, a virus we catch from each other. It can masquerade as a thousand things, and in a thousand things—common sense, patriotism, resistance—but it degrades the core of our humanity, the vital substrate of who we are and what binds us to each other. It’s being spread, on purpose, by our most powerful digital networks and our most powerful men, and it’s gnawing through the brains of the people I love, gnawing at the foundations of the country I love. I feel the spirit of fear every time someone—a friend, a bot, or a greedy and craven man—tries to tell me that my enemy is my neighbor, or the people across the border, or a stranger on social media. I feel it every time someone tells me I need to hunker down, pick a side, protect what’s mine. I see it. It’s with all of us. It pounds its dream-fists on the tent.
And wherever it walks, it walks with paranoia, retreat and retraction. Social disintegration, broken relationships, rumors of violence and war. Sarah Wilson, who writes about the future we’re all headed into, addressed this recently on a podcast. Sure, she said, if you really want to, you can respond to the events of the world by saving yourself—moving to the middle of nowhere, stockpiling supplies, bunkering against the apocalypse.
But do you realize—she ended, gently—That if you go this route, you will need to defend yourself? Probably with guns?
I burst out laughing! I did realize that! I have been told that so many times, in so many ways, and by so many well-meaning people. That the devil or the libs or the Republicans or the hikers and wildlife of Idaho were after me, or that America wasn’t going to be safe and that the government was out to get me and I should really take pertinent steps, should really find a weapon, trench in, get ready to punch someone who disagrees. Didn’t I want to defend myself? Didn’t I want to prepare?
No. I’m not going to live that way. Do you hear me? I refuse to live that way.
I refuse to live in a defensive posture. If the human community gets out of the precarious position we’ve put ourselves in, it will not be by succumbing to the same mind-patterns that got us here; by defending our little bean patches with our little bean sticks, stealing and hoarding territory, and worshipping those who horde the most resources, but by recognizing and accepting reality—and by building networks on the recognition that we are all in this together and that we all share the same fate. I won’t bow to politicians or influencers or anyone who tries to spread this demon to me or to other people, that screech at me about everything I have to fear, no matter what color they wear. I won’t do it. I get to choose. And with power, love, and a sound mind, I will.
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