craft

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.)

Thank you for reading! I'm so grateful for your attention. If you're the kind of person who likes to help out writers, would you consider forwarding this essay to a thoughtful friend or two? It always makes a difference. 🙃