On dealing.

While teaching poetry in the county jail, I’ve chatted with lots of people who landed there for dealing.

Allegedly dealing. Everything that I’m about to write is a work of fiction. The product of my imagination. Or somebody’s imagination, surely. Inadmissible in a court of law.

“My name’s S______, but don’t nobody call me that. Even the cops, they’d say to me, like, ‘Yo, G_____, we know you’re dealing, but you’re only selling marijuana. So that’s okay. Just be cool about it. Don’t sell that shit near campus, a’ight?’ And that’s how I knew, this last time, something was up. Cause it wasn’t ‘Hey G_____,’ this cop car pulled up and they were like, ‘Hey, S______, get your ass over here,’ and that’s when I took off running. Now they’re trying to give me seven years. Over marijuana!”

A lot of the guys have claimed that cops are just trying to keep drugs away from campus.

“There used to be all that housing north of campus, near where they built that informatics shit. But now they’re driving everybody out. Like I know five, six guys, used to live in that place, they’ve all been moved down to the south side. They’re trying to concentrate everybody there. Down at that Crawford [a low-income housing facility], down where they’ve got Shalom [a resource center for people experiencing homelessness]. You might have a place up north, you get busted, by the time you get out, they’re putting you on the south side. Up north, must be cop cars crawling by like every fifteen minutes. Out of everybody I used to know, only D____ is still living there.”

The guys fear being near other people who are experiencing the same struggles as them. It’s easier for the city to provide services in a centralized location. But it’s also easy for the people who need services to cross paths with old friends and slip.

“I go into Crawford, I don’t even ask or nothing, pretty soon people are coming by, offering some of this, some of that, ‘Hey, haven’t seen you in a while, wanna get high?’ My old lady was living there, and on the nights she’d kick me out, I’d just sit there in the hall, right outside her door, like, ‘Please, babe, let me in,’ and everybody walking by would offer me a little something.”

“I seen you in that hall!”

“Yeah, my old lady, I love her to death, but she’s got herself a temper.”

Last week, somebody told me it’d be his last class for a while. He was getting out.

“I don’t know about these cops, man, but I feel like the DA here, the prosecutors and all, they’re not even that upset about it, if you’re selling drugs. Like, it’s okay to move a little, as long as you’re mature about it.”

I asked what he meant, mature.

“You know, mature, like you’re staying away from campus, staying away from college girls, not selling dope near schools or nothing, not cutting it too much, not making people OD. You’re not going out there and trying to push it onto people. Like if somebody comes to you, then you’ll sell, but you’re not out looking for customers. You’re not trying to, I don’t know, you’re not trying to get anybody hooked or nothing. It’s a good system if it’s flawed in the right way.”

“So you think they know sometimes, and they’re letting you do it?”

“I know they know. Cause I got into this drug thing, it was like an experiment. It was psychology. I wanted to see what was up with these people. But then I get the feeling, like on Messenger, the cops know I’m there to watch them, to learn what’s going on, so they all start fucking with me. Like they’re saying … fuck, I don’t even know. Like I write something but then my messages say something else. Or I go and pick something up and then somebody else writes to me asking to buy the exact same amount I just picked up. Like everybody knows what I’m doing. Like they’re watching me.”

“And they’ve got drones everywhere. Like all over Bloomington. One time, this drone was just following me, doing circles right over my head, and I freaked out. I was pretty high at the time. I ducked into the woods. And the drone, it came with me. And pretty soon this jeep pulled up, these guys got out, they were looking around, you know, like they were looking for somebody. Even after they left, that drone was up there, circling. After it flew off, man, I booked it home.”

“If they don’t much mind, though, why’d you end up here?”

“That’s the thing! That’s what I don’t think is right. Cause I came in here on like a nothing – I mean, yeah, they found me with the dope, and there was this night I woke up with like eight cops surrounding my place, they were like come on out and I was like, fuck that, no, and they beat my ass and brought me to jail.”

“And I was only here, like, five days or something. They had me sign this piece of paper. I never should’ve signed it. I mean, who has time to read that shit? But they put me on ‘pre-trial release’ or something, and then I failed this blow-and-go – or, no, I guess I caught another charge.”

“I got high, I stole a lemonade. But that’s like a ticket thing! I was just trying to be a good doctor. And now I been here fifty days, looking at two felonies. I don’t think they should be able to do all that if you haven’t had a trial.”

“A doctor?”

“What?”

“How’s a lemonade make you a good doctor?”

“Shit, man, I don’t know. I just try to take care of these h–s. But now it gets to be that you can’t trust nobody. Snitches everywhere, you know? Like there’s snitches who’ll buy, and they’ll shoot the dope, and then they go and give some fake shit to the cops. Like that’s what he sold me or whatever. I mean, damn. Snitches everywhere. Like on Messenger, like on Facebook, I get the feeling half those people on there must be cops.”

I reminded him – again – that his word wasn’t an acceptable synonym for “women.” And I still couldn’t understand what he was trying to accomplish with the lemonade.

He had an erratic mind. We were reading a set of poems with allusions to Greek mythology – W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying,” A.E. Stallings’s “Art Monster,” Barbara Hamby’s “Penelope’s Lament,” Dan Chelotti’s “Ode to Hephaestus.”

When it was his turn to read – “Art Monster,” featuring the minotaur mired in acedia – he could only make it through a few lines before offering another rejoinder to the text.

The Minotaur by George Frederic Watts,1885.

I was fed

on raw youths and maidens

When all I wanted was the cud of clover.

“So he’s like a cow then, right. Man-a-cow?”

“Yeah, half-bull, and …”

“So he’s got cow thoughts. And I was thinking, they’ve got those things, right, that can reach into your head? Like magnets? I mean, like, fuck with your brain? Read and control your thoughts?”

“Um, I guess with transcranial magnetic stimulation – I mean, the right pulse of a magnet, aimed at the right …”

“No, cause, I got this thing on my phone, right? It’s this little guy in the phone, and he’ll look right into my eyes, he said that all the time, like look into my eyes, and every single thought I had, he’d know before I said it. I swear! It’s this phone thing. I still got it, I can show it to you.”

Another guy – bedecked in tattoos, who apparently has a pack of five chihuahuas who’ll jump into his backpack when he whistles, then ride around town that way, zipped inside the bag – shouted, “You need to smoke less meth.” and we got back to the poem.

The minotaur’s despair at waiting didn’t resonate as well as I’d hoped. But the poem still seemed to work.

“He’s murdering all these people, eating young girls or whatever, but it says, like, I wanted clover. But they thought he was a monster, treated him like a monster. They wanted him to be a monster.”

Dealing sometimes does make monstrous things happen.

There’s the regular problems – dealing means selling drugs, and some people shouldn’t be buying drugs – which I’ve heard many men lament.

“I mean, we read shit like this, somebody shooting up in front of their kids, not taking care of their kids, not getting them fed, and I know. I know. Right? I might’ve sold this. You sell for a while, you’re gonna have somebody OD.”

Drug dealing means moving in a world where lots of people are on edge. The buyer, or the seller, or both, might not have slept in days. Paranoia sets in. People worry about jail time, and undercover cops, and the risk of being cheated. The danger of the drugs being no good, or too good, or simply unpredictable.

“These last few years, man, seems like every month, another buddy dies.”

“Hell, five times, last year, five times I died. Five times I ODed, and somebody brought me back.”

And there’s a lot of money involved. So people plan heists. Sometimes these go spectacularly wrong.

During my second year, I was working with a group of men living in an ostensibly rehabilitative dormitory on the first floor of the jail. That was a hard year – because we worked with the same people every week, and they stayed in that same cell for months or years at a time, we grew particularly close.

Many of these men had loved ones die during their time inside. They’re who I went to for help after my mother-in-law was murdered.

I wrote a poem about the worst night they shared with me.

VIGILANTE

On the ground floor, carved into a hill,

there is a long-term cell,

a gray-walled concrete space

with bunks for twelve incarcerated men

a shower

toilet

two steel tables bolted to the floor

eleven un-broken plastic chairs

and a heavy metal door.

In that door there is a slot

that cafeteria trays pass through

and a wire-enforced glass pane

through which guards occasionally peer in

and the men inside watch out.

The central desk

& elevator

& exit door

are all the world they see.

For two weeks now

in vigil stands

a vigilant man

staring through that oil-streaked

slab of sand.

His wife is gone,

murdered while he was here.

Two men and a woman came

intending to move bulk H;

their day’s first sale, short money,

proffered an AK;

their next stop, impromptu robbery –

something went awry.

The men were apprehended in a city to the north;

the woman, captured here. Guards placed her

in an interim cell

adjacent to our man’s own,

inches of concrete between.

Then the men were brought here too,

upstairs now, cleaved to

the rhythm of this place.

For legal consultations, questioning, & court dates

each is brought

– escorted –

down the elevator

& processed at the central desk.

Our man sees them

– escorted –

several times a day.

I watch him blink.

His body shakes.

But that first night

he pounded the wall

& shouted,

hoarsening as he cried,

to forgive the woman who took his life.

On white supremacist vegetables and watchful eyes.

Recently, my hometown of Bloomington’s farmers market has been covered Fox News and The New York Times. Not because the vegetables sold here are particularly deserving of national attention. The market was deemed newsworthy because one of the farm stands is run by outspoken white supremacists.

Although Bloomington is a fairly liberal college town, this region has a sordid history of hate. The national Klan headquarters is less than 30 minutes away – when I was in college, the campus diversity coordinators warned students not to stop in that town, not even to buy gas. Even right here in Bloomington, there was a fracas at the local high school recently because some students decided to honor a friend who’d died by using cremation ashes to print bumper stickers – but they printed stickers of the Confederate flag.

Teaching poetry in the local jail has made me much better at recognizing supremacist imagery. Most people know that the Confederate flag is bad news, but I’ve gotten to see a wider range of hateful symbols tattooed onto people’s flesh.

COs bring twelve people to each week’s class – often two to four will be Black (in a town where the total population is approximately 4% Black or African-American), and the rest are usually white guys. It’s pretty common for one or two of the white guys to have visible supremacist tattoos. Which doesn’t even include questionable stuff like the dude who got an poke and stick of the words “White Trash” in elaborate two-in-tall cursive letters during his time there. Tattooing runs afoul of the jail’s “no self mutilation” policy, but most COs studiously overlook the guys’ rashy red skin and burgeoning designs.

When I’m there, we often read poetry that directly addresses racial injustice. I’ve brought stuff by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Adrian Matejka, and Tracy Smith. Sometimes these lead to good discussions. Sometimes our class gets totally derailed.

In one of the poems titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes pulls off a stunning trick. The same line is included twice, but the word “haunted” changes from a verb into an adjective after the language slides into a less formal diction. It’s a beautiful moment. The first time I brought this poem, we talked about the clinginess of the past, the way not only our own histories but also the histories of our forebears can stalk us through time.

The next time I brought this poem, several guys reacted by saying that Black people don’t talk right. Then they went off about sagging pants. All this from southern-accented white guys whose missing-toothed, meth-mouthed mumbles and guffaws I could barely comprehend.

We had to quickly move on.

Or there was the time when we read Betts’ “Elegy with a City in It,” a fantastic poem that uses a spare, stark set of words and sounds to simultaneously evoke both the deprivations of the inner city and the epic grandeur of The Iliad, which uses a similarly constrained lexicon.

Many gone to the grave: men awed

by blood, lost in the black

of all that is awful:

think crack and aluminum. Odd

what time steals,

or steals time: black robes, awful

nights when men offed in the streets awed

us.

If you read the poem aloud, you’re chanting the same phonemes over and over, but their meanings twist and turn as they spill from your tongue. That’s what I wanted to discuss.

Instead, a few guys latched onto lines like

Black,

Mario, Charles, they all blackened

the inside of a coffin …

and this offended them because “white people have it bad, too!” As though Betts could not describe Black pain without trivializing their own. Soon somebody was saying “All lives matter” and that he’d voted for our current president. This guy was in jail because he’d been caught selling heroin to support his own habit. The president he’d voted for had recently recommended executing drug dealers.

Somebody else shook his head and muttered, “y’all are fucking [stupid].”

We moved on.

In my classes, I work with a wide range of ages – sometimes guys as young as seventeen, sometimes men in their sixties. My spouse, as a high school teacher, works with younger people – anywhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But ideology can set in early. My spouse has had students whose families were prominent in the Klan.

At the beginning of the year, she asks each student to fill in the paper silhouette of a head with words and pictures of what inspires them to succeed. She then posts these along the ceiling of her classroom. Several times, she’s had to ask kids to erase supremacist imagery.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that some farmers at our local market have hateful beliefs. Right-wing supremacist movements are major terrorist organizations in this country, and they do a lot of recruiting. As our nation has become slightly less horrible, though, many of these people learned to be circumspect. They maintain a divide between their private and public language.

People who rely upon public, liberal venues like our farmers market can’t be too outspoken with their hate.

Indeed, the white supremacist farmers who were recently outed tried to be circumspect. But they must have felt lonely, and they grew too careless. Under a pseudonym, they posted on the Identity Evropa message board. This is a website devoted to the ideologies that have inspired the vast majority of terrorism in the United States. Theoretically, this is a venue where people get to cultivate their hatred anonymously. But one of their compatriots was caught painting swastikas on a synagogue (see image below) and blew their cover. Sort of. The vandal was interrogated by the FBI, and his remark unveiling the farmers’ pseudonym was buried deep in a 200-page sentencing document.

Through assiduous work, a team of activists was able to prove that these farmers were white supremacists.

The activists who had worked so hard to gather evidence were obviously against hate. They wanted to take action. But the plan they favored wasn’t very flashy. They would organize a boycott of that farm stand. They also proposed that the city use the sellers’ farmers market fees to fund grants for people of color, with the understanding that our nation’s long history of racism has inequitably skewed the demographics of agricultural land holdings.

To stay at the farmers market, the supremacists would have had to support a cause they loathed … and they were making less and less money here. I was told that, during the boycott, the farmers had begun padding their bins, bringing fewer vegetables each week so that they could still appear to be selling out their stock.

Unfortunately, the tropes of social media have changed public discourse in our country. I assume it’s relatively uncontroversial to claim that social media prizes style over substance. Quiet, careful plans are at a disadvantage in the attention economy.

As word spread that these farmers were white supremacists, patrons demanded that they be banned from our market. People of color now felt unsafe in that space, for obvious reasons. There’s a difference between the perceived threat level felt by a pale-skinned activist and by somebody who is recognizably a member of a racial minority.

The mayor, whose spouse is a constitutional law professor, rightly argued that the farmers would be able to sue the city on a First Amendment case.

Still, people felt that we had to do something more visible. Passively allowing outspoken white supremacists to hawk their tomatoes at our market would seem to be tacitly endorsing their political stance.

Everybody has a right to believe whatever garbage they want. Do you sincerely believe that people of northern European descent have a genetic inclination toward greater intelligence? You’re wrong, and you’re a jerk, but you’re allowed to believe that.

The problem is that white supremacist organizations like Identity Evropa use terrorism to back their asinine beliefs. Implicit threats of violence, delivered by people known to stockpile military-grade weaponry, are different from “mere” hate.

If these farmers couldn’t be banned, then we’d hold signs in front of their booth. Eventually, a protester was arrested – the police had asked her to stand in a designated “announcements” area instead of in the middle of the market – and, as always happens following an arrest, her home address was published online.

She was soon inundated with death threats.

As coverage of the dispute increased, right-wing militia types were also drawn to our town. Three percenters, unaffiliated gun nuts, other supremacists – they began to support that farm, undermining the boycott. And these radical Protestant faux-constitutional terrorists made sufficiently credible threats of mass violence that our mayor had to shut down the entire market for two weeks at the height of the growing season. Other farmers were suffering.

Calm, careful behavior from the original activists – assiduously combing through those lengthy, dull documents, not to mention their efforts to infiltrate local supremacists’ in-person social circles – had undoubtably helped. Hateful ideologies were exposed, and efforts were made to impose consequences.

But then our visible protests made matters worse. We’ve helped the proponents of hate to make more money.

And, now that we’ve drawn attention to them, we’ve inadvertently connected these white supremacists with their allies. They will no longer need to post on public forums, which was the only reason that activists were able to prove that they supported these ideologies in the first place. Now these supremacist farmers are invited speakers at right-wing events.

As this whole struggle was unfolding, my spouse and I participated in a poetry reading. We shared poems written by people in our local jail. We were joined by one of the authors, a man who had just been released after five months inside. He described what it was like to write while he was there – breathing fresh air in the outdoor rec courtyard only nine times in five months, having access to a pencil sharpener only once each week, and feeling forced to confess to a crime that he swears he hadn’t committed because they promised to release him for time served.

Our audience clapped for the poems and stared aghast during our banter, which is probably as it should be.

We closed our set with a piece from M.G. This poem was written in February, before the public turmoil regarding our farmers market began. At a moment when so many of us were warily watching that space, it seemed important to remind people that there have always been watchful eyes gazing at the market.

The farmers market is just down the street from our five-story county jail.

MARKET

– M.G.

As I look out this window of bars

There’s a farmer’s market.

People coming and going.

I wonder if I have any friends over there.

The sun is warm and bright.

One day soon I will be at

That farmer’s market.

I hope to see my friends again.

On Brett Wagner’s “Apocalypse Blaze.”

A friend of mine, whom I first met when he was a student in my poetry class, was writing a post-apocalyptic novel. There’s nuclear fallout; civilization crumbled. A few people who haven’t yet caught the sickness are traveling together, fantasizing that they could restart the world.

When the bombs fell, governments collapsed. Not immediately, but within the year. The idea of government is predicated on people getting things done: fire fighters who might rescue you, police officers who might protect you, agencies who maintain the roads and ensure the water is safe to drink. All of which requires money, which the government can print, but those slips of paper don’t mean much if no one will accept them in exchange for food or a safe place to sleep.

“Hangrith,” that’s a beautiful word. It’s archaic, means a realm in which you can expect security and peace. Literally, “within the grasp of the king’s hand.” While you are here, the government will protect you.

Within the grasp. Image by Enrico Strocchi on Flickr.

My friend was skeptical of the concept. The king’s hand wasn’t cradling him, nor wielding a protective sword to keep orcs at bay; instead, my friend felt the gauntlet at his throat. We’d met in jail, where he’d landed for addiction. We volleyed emails after he left, while he was working on his novel. And then he was in my class again. Failed check-in. Once you’re on probation, you’re given numerous extra laws to follow – people on probation don’t have the rights of other citizens, and minor transgressions, like missing a meeting or late payment for a fine, can land you back in jail.

And so it wasn’t difficult for my friend to imagine a world in which there was no government to rely upon. To reach their destination, his heroes have to barter. Which meant that, suddenly, my friend’s skills might be treated with respect.

After all, what would people be most willing to trade their food for in a world where waking life was a ravaged nightmare?

“I took a patch with me underground when shit hit the fan. Grew it hydroponically. Cared for that shit like a baby. Gave me something to do while I was in that shelter. Weed is my money.”

Rampant economic inequality, fractured communities, and the spread of attention-grabbing toys that prevent us from making eye contact with one another – these have all contributed to the increase in drug use and addiction in contemporary America. But the world could be worse. After the blast, everyone would share the stress and trauma that people in poverty currently weather.

Methamphetamine lets people keep going despite crushing hopelessness and despair. Meth use is widespread in many hollowed-out towns of the Midwest. It’s a problematic drug. At first, people feel good enough to get out of bed again. But methamphetamine is metabolized so slowly that users don’t sleep. Amphetamines themselves are not so toxic, but lack of sleep will kill you. After five, ten, or twenty days awake, vicious hallucinations set in. The drug is no longer keeping you alert and chipper enough to work – static crackles through your mind, crustacea skitter beneath your skin, shadows flit through the air.

They walked on, their path lit by the moon, among the wreckage of cars and piles of trash and useless electronics that were heaped up until they came to a concrete slab with a manhole in it.

“This is my crib, where I sat out that day.”

After the fall, experience in the drug trade lets people carve out a living. And experience on the streets lets them survive. All the ornate mansions, people’s fine wood and brick homes, have fallen into disarray. Their inhabitants caught the sickness, or else died in the initial blast.

The survivors were people who slept outdoors, protected by thick concrete. Not in bunkers; the blast came too suddenly for that. Beneath bridges, tucked into safe alcoves, or down on dry ledges of the sewers.

My friend understood what it meant to make shelter where you could find it.

“After Pops gave me the boot, I had to find a way to support myself; that’s when I learned my hustle. And Penny here was one of my biggest customers.”

“You used to be her dealer?”

“Damn, dude, you make it sound dirty. Weed ain’t no drug, it’s medicine.”

The heroes plan to go west, aiming for San Francisco. When I was growing up, I had that dream too – I’d read a little about the Merry Pranksters and failed to realize how much the world might have changed. People living around the Bay Area are still interested in polyamory and psychedelic drugs, but that doesn’t mean they’re nice. It was heartbreaking to see how racist and ruthless the people there were, especially since I’d expected to find a hippie paradise.

And so my spouse and I moved back to the Midwest.

But I understand the dream – we’re surrounded by a lot of retrograde cudgleheads, here. The only problem is that people are pretty similar everywhere else.

“An agrarian based society. Where everyone works to grow what they eat. The soil might be okay. We won’t know all the affects of the radiation until later.”

“Well, I know for sure it’s mutated animals near the hit zone. I’ve seen all kindsa freaky shit. People too. It’s like the wild west again, where we’re going.”

The actual “wild west,” in U.S. history, was horrible. Racism, genocide, misogyny. But the ideal – a lawless land beyond the hangrith where a person’s ingenuity reaps fortune instead of jail time – might be enough to keep someone going.

And it worked, for a while. My friend carved out months of sobriety. He was volunteering at the community food kitchen. In the late afternoons, he’d type using a computer at the public library. He was always a very hopeful person; while he was in jail, he asked me to bring physics textbooks so he could use the time productively. You can get a sense of his enthusiasm from his poetry:

“BIRD TOWN, TN”

by Brett Wagner

Picture this young boy

whose favorite color was the blank white

of a fresh page. We went running once

on the spring green grass.

As I’ve heard it said,

“There’s nowhere to go but everywhere”

so we ran anywhere in this

jungle gym world.

Somewhere the clouds didn’t smother us

and the hills didn’t exhaust us,

where robins, blue jays, and cardinals sing

like boddhisattvas that have taken wing.

But then he slipped. A first drink led to more. He’d been in sober housing; he was kicked out, back onto the streets. A friend, another New Leaf volunteer, gave him enough money for a few days in a hotel.

We had several cold snaps this winter. Two nights after his hotel money ran out, temperatures dropped.

We’d made plans for my friend to join us for a panel with Dave Eggers, where we’d discuss storytelling and incarceration.

Instead, at 29 years old, Brett Wagner froze to death. His novel is unfinished; his heroes will not build a new agrarian society.

They had grim odds. Nuclear fallout is a killer. But my friend was felled by the apocalypse that’s already upon us.

Header image for this post by akahawkeyefan on Flickr.

On storytelling and social justice.

Recently, Dave Eggers joined four local panelists (Lindsey Badger, Michelle Brekke, Max Smith, and me) to discuss writing and incarceration, especially the role of storytelling as a force for social justice.

When I discuss poetry with people in jail, we often get sidetracked into conversations about outer space, pharmacology, neuroscience … as it happens, the latter is particularly relevant to any discussion of storytelling. Because your consciousness has evolved to create stories.

When you choose to do something, like picking up a pen, the first thing that happens is that, unconsciously, your brain will send signals toward your muscles. You will begin to act. Then, once you are already in motion, your consciousness will be informed of your decision. Thats when your brain generates a story to explain why you chose to pick up the pen.

First, we act, then we concoct a narrative.

A human consciousness will typically create a story explaining why we chose to do something even if it wasn’t really our choice. If a researcher sways someone’s action through the use of transcranial magnetic or direct current stimulation, most people will still offer up a coherent explanation explaining why they chose to act that way.

Personally, I think this sort of research into free will and mind control is fascinating. I could continue rattling off more facts. By reading this essay, you might learn something. But it probably wouldn’t change how you act. Knowledge doesn’t spur behavior, emotions do.

In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal writes that:

The Portuguese-American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reported on a patient, Elliot, with ventromedial frontal lobe damage. While Elliott was articulate and intellectually sound, witty even, he had become emotionally flat, showing no hint of affect in many hours of conversation.

Elliott was never sad, impatient, angry, or frustrated. This lack of emotion seemed to paralyze his decision making. It might take him all afternoon to make up his mind about where and what to eat, or half an hour to decide on an appointment or the color of his pen.

Damasio and his team tested Elliott in all sorts of ways. Even though his reasoning capacities seemed perfectly fine, he had trouble sticking with a task and especially reaching a conclusion. As Damasio summarized: “The defect appeared to set in at the late stages of reasoning, close to or at the point at which choice making or response selection must occur.”

Elliott himself, after a session in which he had carefully reviewed all options, said “And after all this, I still wouldn’t know what to do!”

After all, there is no way to prove, mathematically, how to be good. Your intellect will invariably fall short. Only by trusting your emotions can you decide that one course of action is better than another.

And that is the value of stories.

Eggers, who devotes much of his time to teaching young people, says that you could provide them with huge quantities of information – about mass incarceration in the U.S., or how we mistreat undocumented workers, or Muslim Americans after 9 / 11 – and it wouldn’t change anything. “But,” Eggers said, “if you give them even a 15-page first-person narrative, they become activists.”

By way of example, my co-panelists discussed several local stories that could be presented in a variety of ways. For instance, the kid who recently died in our local jail because the jailors stopped providing his medication after his eighteenth birthday. I’ve written about his ordeal previously; Max Smith had become close friends with him while they were confined in a small cell together; Lindsey Badger met with his mother after he died to preserve stories about his life that depict him more accurately than the terse denunciation he received from our local newspaper.

Michelle Brekke added that, although she hadn’t read the article about this young man, she knows that when she was sentenced, “If you were to look me up online, on a database or whatever, you would see that I’m a drug addict, you would see that I’m an intravenous drug user, you would see that I’m a drug dealer, but today, and even then, that’s not who I am. I’m actually a very kind, loving, caring person, who has had a really crappy way of life shoved onto me, so that’s the way of life I chose to take. I’m an overcomer, and I’ve been able to overcome that.”

“Luckily I was on the inside when I got arrested because I’m sure that the things that were said on social media, there couldn’t have been anything good.”

During her time in prison, Brekke began to write, which allowed her to tell the whole truth. She refused to let other people dictate the narrative of her life. “To be able to tell your story, or to hear somebody else’s story, you get the beginning, the middle, and the now.”

The last prompt from the audience was, “I’m curious about each of the panelists’ perspectives on how writers can hurt readers in a way that’s inspiring for people to act.”

Smith and Brekke answered for the panel (perhaps you could argue that Eggers has already provided an answer in his books – by intermixing levity with pain you can create stories that are sufficiently fun that they’ll reach an audience, but still convey a spark of indignation that compels people to work to change the world. After two hundred pages of comic antics in The Parade, Eggers concludes with an incandescent flash of horror).

Smith said, “Unfortunately for many of the people who are incarcerated, just being true to their experience hurts readers. It’s a horrible, horrible experience that is hard to imagine if you haven’t been exposed to it.”

And Brekke added, “I would want a reader to feel my own hurt, through the writing. To not feel sorry for me, but to be able to feel the truth and the pain that I once felt.”

The written word does not accomplish much if a tale is too unpalatable to reach its audience, but when the sorrows come from a place a deep integrity, or when the hurt is leavened with a touch of humor, readers might trust an author enough to continue.

And I am grateful that so many deeply committed people are willing to share hard stories in a way we can appreciate. Because we’ll need the emotional wallop of powerful stories to compel us to change the world.

Featured image: Max ribbing me. From a recording of the panel created by Jeremy Hogan.

On clarity, Matthew Zapruder’s “Why Poetry,” and reading Bruce Weigl.

Some people approach poems as though they are puzzles. My high school English teachers implied that poems are full of symbols that we must decode. Which simply isn’t true.

In Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” he exhorts his students to enjoy the experience of reading a poem, of feeling each sound leave the mouth and spill outward into the world. His students balk. That’s not how they were taught to read poetry! Instead, Collins writes,

… all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Matthew Zapruder began writing Why Poetry to explain the difference between the idea of symbolism taught in high school – a one-to-one mapping between words on the page and the author’s veiled intent, a parlor trick like the parallels between James Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey – and actual symbolism employed by regular ol’ human poets. In Zapruder’s words:

If what we mean by “symbol” is a word or phrase that has some specific, hidden, secret meaning, then we don’t really find those very often in poetry. The idea that we do is inimical to a true experience of reading it.

…

When language in poetry becomes resonant, and charged with meaning, it achieves a symbolic status.

Zapruder is saddened that readers think writers would intentionally hide the meaning of their words. Let alone that writers might actually do it.

Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. To give the impression that something important is happening but that the mere reader cannot, without some kind of special, esoteric knowledge, have access to it strikes me as deeply ungenerous, even cruel.

Our poetry classes in the jail have had high turnover recently. New Leaf New Life previously ran a “recovery dorm” inside the jail. The dorm was a miserable little space – an underground concrete room with a shower, a toilet, twelve bunks, and two tables for eating, no exterior windows, just a view of central booking and the elevator – but people chose to live in there, sometimes for years, to have a modicum of autonomy and access to volunteer programming. Things like our poetry class, AA meetings, a weekly game night.

We were able to work with the same group of people for long stretches of time. We could provide a full curriculum and work on revising our own writing. Everyone who wrote for the recent Monster House Press publication was incarcerated in this dorm.

Since this program was canceled (replaced with court-mandated rehab), we’ve been teaching poetry classes only for general population, for people in one of the rowdier cell blocks. One week, our class was totally derailed by a group of roughnecks extolling the gang control they’d imposed on the block. Other weeks people come just to grab a pencil and a few sheets of paper, then promptly ask if the guards can come and take them back. Or, when their block was on lockdown every day for weeks, pushy dudes who didn’t want to read or write would fill the sign-up sheet just for the chance to stretch their legs on the walk down the hallway to our classroom.

Some weeks class falls flat.

I don’t blame them for signing up. I’ve never lived inside a jail, but it sounds like the pits. I’d sign up for programs I didn’t care about, too, just to break up the monotony of days.

Still, some weeks we get lucky and have a room full of (unlucky) dudes who really want to read and write.

Since we’ve been seeing so many new people, we’ve been reading poetry by Bruce Weigl several times each year. Weigl writes powerful narrative poems that deal with trauma and violence. We begin with “The Impossible,” which opens:

Winter’s last rain and a light I don’t recognize

through the trees and I come back in my mind

to the man who made me suck his cock

when I was seven, in sunlight, between boxcars.

I thought I could leave him standing there

in the years, half smile on his lips …

This is a hard poem for guys in jail to read. It’s a hard poem for anybody to read, but in our classes, particularly, whomever is reading it out loud first might stop at the third line.

The opening is perfect, though. As with Proust’s mind flooding when he stumbles over a pair of uneven paving stones, or hears a long-forgotten tone, or smells tea and cake exactly like his aunt used to eat, Weigl’s memories swell unbidden when he glimpses light shining through tree leaves in a particular way. Once, when I was seven, there was just this light … and … and …

He thought he could forget his trauma. Thought he could “leave him standing there / in the years.” He was wrong.

Many people who have survived abuse try to forget and move on. But the memories can fester. After class one week, a man lingered, asking a guard “Can I … can I talk for him a minute …” and, when the guard nodded, said to me, “Like, something happened to me … kinda like that poem we were talking about … do you … do you think there’s a way I could get some help with that?”

In Tom McCarthy’s film Spotlight, a character finally agrees to be interviewed about the priest who raped him. He is asked how he coped. He turns out an arm riddled with needle tracks.

Most men in jail suffered disproportionately before they were locked up. Many began taking drugs in lieu of the psychiatric care they needed but couldn’t afford; now they are addicted. And behind bars. Beneath fluorescent lights for nineteen hours a day. Somehow they are expected to heal there, inside the jail, with even fewer resources before.

“The world needs to know,” we tell them. “Write about that.”

They balk. “I can’t write about this shit.” It cuts too deep, the pain’s too raw … and they feel ashamed. Our society has a tendency to blame victims. In an interview with Blast Furnace, Weigl says that his father “was shocked that it had happened because I didn’t tell him at that time. He said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said, ‘Because you would’ve beaten my ass for letting it happen,’ and he knows he would have, too. That would’ve been his response, Why did you let someone do this to you?”

But Weigl wrote openly of his trauma, and his words help others come to terms with abuse. It must feel nauseating to re-live certain experiences in order to write them down – but that act of generosity could save someone else. And in “The Impossible,” Weigl teaches us how to write about the things that seem impossible to write about. The poem ends,

Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

On prosecution.

Most people know the standard story why mass incarceration spiraled out of control in this country. In response to the civil rights movement, we accelerated the War on Drugs and started locking up a lot of low-level, non-violent drug offenders. We also passed laws making sentences outlandishly long – people might go to prison for a decade for minor slips. After the three-strikes laws, people might be shut away for life.

In Locked In, economist & law professor John Pfaff presents data suggesting that the story everyone knows is incorrect. According to the data he found, “Although the share of the prison population serving time for drugs rose during the 1980s, the share was 22 percent at its peak in 1990. By 2013 it had fallen to under 16 percent.” Instead, most people in prison are incarcerated for violent crimes.

Of course, it is still possible that the War on Drugs led to mass incarceration. If someone is locked up for 10 years for drugs, and then, after getting out of prison, does something violent and is locked up for an additional 40 years, you’d find that only 20% of the prison population was due to drugs. But the first incarceration might’ve caused the second, by fraying the person’s social network and exposing him to violence inside. This might explain what happened to my mother-in-law.

And a War on Drugs can make entire communities more violent. The main benefit of state violence is that it suppressed violence from individuals. Police officers reduce theft and assault because they represent the threat of violent reprisal from the state. But the War on Drugs causes entire communities of supposed “criminals” to lose police protection – without the help of the state, they have to rely on individual violence to enforce property rights.

These alternative narratives do not contradict Pfaff’s central message: the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States did not originate the way many people assume. Instead, Pfaff’s data suggest one major cause: prosecutors.

After someone is arrested, prosecutors decide what charges to file. Even if the police have collected a lot of evidence, the prosecutor may choose to go easy on someone, perhaps even dropping the case entirely. Alternatively, the prosecutor may file many extra charges that aren’t supported by the police report at all. No explanation needs to be given, and there won’t be any official record documenting the prosecutor’s decisions.

Myriad county-level prosecutors across the U.S. decided to get tough on crime, and that caused mass incarceration to spiral out of control. According to Pfaff:

The crime decline since 1991 has been dramatic. Nationwide, between 1991 and 2008 violent crime fell by 36 percent and property crime by 31 percent.

…

While crime rates fell, police “clearance” rates – the percentage of each type of crime that results in an arrest by the police – remained relatively flat, and in some cases declined. As a result, as violent and property crimes fell, so too did arrests for those offenses.

…

Yet while arrests fell, the number of felony cases rose, and steeply. Fewer and fewer people were entering the criminal justice system, but more and more were facing the risk of felony conviction – and thus prison.

…

In short, between 1994 and 2008, the number of people admitted to prison rose by about 40 percent, from 360,000 to 505,000, and almost all of that increase was due to prosecutors bringing more and more felony cases against a diminishing pool of arrestees.

Decisions made by a prosecutor typically receive no oversight. Because the vast majority of cases end with a plea, the prosecutor is effectively judge and jury as well. Using the threat of an egregiously long sentence if someone is found guilty in a jury trial (someone in our writing class was recently facing 32 years for burglary), a prosecutor can easily coerce people into signing away five or ten years. Even innocent people plead guilty – if you’re told that you will have to sit in jail another six months waiting for a trial, or you could enter a plea and be released today for time served, would you stick it out? What if you had young kids who needed you home?

Because prosecutors have so much power, Pfaff argues that in many ways there is not a criminal justice system in the U.S., but rather 3,000 idiosyncratic county-level criminal justice systems. Equivalent actions reap very different consequences depending on which county they are prosecuted in.

This discretion has the unfortunate consequence of letting one county drive another into bankruptcy … especially in a state like Indiana, which tried to combat the perverse economic incentives of mass incarceration (cities have to pay for crime deterrence by hiring police officers, but they foist the cost of crime punishment onto the state, which hires the COs who staff prisons) by forcing counties to hold low-level offenders in their own jails instead of shipping people off to state prisons. This benefits counties that can displace crime to their neighbors, instead of preventing it.

Education is both cheaper and more effective than punishment … but deciding not to educate children and then convincing the troublemakers to move to a new county is cheaper still.

The city council of Bloomington is struggling with this now. A friend of mine has been riding with police officers for a writing project – he was told that, for drug busts, the police surreptitiously track suspects until they cross county lines. Bloomington is in Monroe County, where prosecutors are viewed as “soft” on drug crimes, offering treatment, therapy, and second chances (note that this supposedly “kinder & gentler” approach is still brutal, with huge numbers of people lolling in jail for months or years on end). The police would rather make arrests in neighboring counties, where the prosecutors seek steep sentences for drug offenders.

This gives drug users, and many others who need services, an incentive to move to Bloomington. If you need opiates to stave off withdrawal, you are better off living in an area with a needle exchange, proposed methadone clinic, and treatment options.

By establishing a reputation for excessive punishment, prosecutors can pressure the most expensive citizens to move away … the same way charter schools force out the most expensive students to fraudulently boost their success ratings compared to public schools. The poor saps who think we have a moral duty to help everyone will have to spend more for outcomes that appear worse (since they’re working with a different population).

Mayhaps it’s not that the U.S. has a mass incarceration problem … rather, the majority of our 3,000 counties have mass incarceration problems. Each operates independently, and, often, antagonistically. We won’t fix it until we realize that we’re all in this together.

On Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul” and our dying towns

In Jason Shiga’s Empire State, the protagonist decides he will “see America” by traveling from Oakland, CA to New York City on a bus. Everyone derides the plan as foolish – he’ll see only the great big slab of I-80 and some gas stations – but, because he’d kept his plan secret to surprise a friend, nobody warns him until it’s too late.

Professional movers, however, take occasional breaks from the highway to navigate their trucks down treacherous suburban streets. It’s those excursions into the world where people actually live that lets movers understand America. Crisp descriptions of those excursions make Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road a charming read.

Murphy’s experience criss-crossing the United States has also give him a sharp perspective on our economy. His political analysis is both more accurate and more concise than what’s been written by most academic researchers:

The next day I picked up I-94 west and stopped for the night in Ann Arbor. In college towns – like Chapel Hill, Boulder, Iowa City, Missoula, Austin, Madison, and Oxford, Mississippi, to name a few – all of a sudden, instead of unemployment, meth labs, and poverty, there are real jobs. … As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere. You’ve got the new CVS, the Walmart, the Home Depot on the fringes, while the old downtown is either empty or the buildings have a Goodwill store, an immigration law office, and an “antiques” store, meaning junk. The chains on the outskirts provide the nine-dollar-an-hour jobs and wire the day’s receipts to Bentonville or New York every night.

I hate it personally, but we deserved what we got. We wanted the eight-dollar sneakers and the forty-five-cent tube socks. … We didn’t consider that maybe it’d be a better bargain to pay twenty dollars for sneakers and buy them from the neighbor who owns the shoe store downtown and stocks sneakers made in Maine.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent underclass.

…

If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.

Most of The Long Haul is more chipper than the passage I’ve excerpted above – Murphy discusses how he chose his career, the basic principles of long-haul driving and packing other people’s belongings, the zen of hard manual labor, and what it meant to finally let go of his own anger and enjoy his time on this planet. Both K and I loved the book.

But I wanted to share the passage above. I’ve written previously about common misconceptions regarding “free-market capitalism” – a quick summary being that although the phrase “free-market capitalism” is used so commonly that most people sense intuitively what it means, it doesn’t actually mean anything. To have a market, it cannot be free. (This idea is explained succinctly in the beginning of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism – you can read an excerpt in the essay linked above.)

As a handful of business owners and CEO destroy the social fabric of the United States, they depend upon government intervention to help them do it. They need the government to enforce payment on certain types of contracts, but not others. They need the government to prevent certain actions that lower others’ property values – I’ll be punished if I set fire to your building – but not others – I won’t be punished if I dump so much poison that your neighboring property becomes un-usable.

Our country’s particular set of rules & regulations have allowed a small number of people to accomplish what used to be the work of many. Instead of a factory with 100 human workers, a foreman oversees 10 robots. The foreman gets paid more than the prior workers, but most of their salary now goes to the factory owner. And those 100 people who would have worked in the factory are mired in despair. Some get service jobs. Others take drugs. We get the “unemployment, meth labs, and poverty” that Murphy described.

And even the relative prosperity of the main street in college towns is fragile. In Bloomington we have several blocks with bookstores, comic shops, restaurants, bars, a public library, banks, clothing boutiques and smokeshops and the like. But in the past few weeks, an escalating conflict between the police and people without houses has kept shoppers away from the downtown.

Herald Times front page — A recent front page from the local newspaper.

Indiana is in many ways a heartless state, so our little town is one of the few places where people in need can receive services. Bloomington always has more poverty than you might expect for a city of just 100,000. Of late, Bloomington is also a destination city for drug use: between the heroin cut with fentanyl and the wide variety of supposed THC analogs sold as “spice,” the ambulances have been responding to upwards of ten overdoses per day.

In jail the other day, T. told me,

“It’s getting to the point where heroin and meth are easier to find than pot. When I got out of prison, I was three years clean, and I thought I was gonna make it … but I was walking by the Taco Bell and somebody handed me a rig, all loaded up and ready to go.”

G. said,

“It’s really hard to avoid it now. It’s spread to places you really wouldn’t expect. Like I remember ten years ago, the whole middle class crowd was doing the usual, some pot, some psychedelics, you know. But now people from those circles, they’re shooting meth, they’re using H.”

T. said,

“You talk to somebody, they’re like, yeah, I got it all, what you need, what you need. But you ask for pot, they’re like, naw, I don’t know where to get that.”

J. said,

“Okay, okay, these overdoses, you know? Trust me, I’m a real spice-head, I smoke a lot of that shit, and these overdoses, they’re all just people, they don’t know how to handle it. You can’t just jump in, you know, and smoke like I smoke.”

I asked him, “If pot were legal, would you smoke it.”

“Hell yeah I’d smoke pot.”

“No no, sorry, I mean, if pot were legal, would you smoke spice?”

The guys all laughed. “Nobody would touch that shit.”

And yet. In our town, now, people with all their belongings line main street. The hospital spends some thirty thousand dollars a day sending the ambulance there for overdoses. The cops hold their roll call several times a day in the public park where unhoused people used to sleep. Occasionally a dozen or so people will be hauled into jail: they lose all their possessions.

And people who had been spending money at the little shops feel afraid to go downtown. The places are all losing money … and when the money goes, compassion starts fading too.

It doesn’t take much for even a college town to become the post-apocalyptic husk that Murphy has seen spread all over our country. Which is sad, especially since it wouldn’t take that much to help people – our most dire need is a guaranteed basic income, probably coupled to a public works program. Instead we’ve settled for rampant inequality. But harms that start elsewhere won’t stay elsewhere.

*******

post-script: in the time between when this essay was written & when it was posted, the crowds of unhoused people have disappeared from Bloomington’s main street. And, two blocks away, the 280-bed county jail has had over 320 people locked inside for weeks. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a long-term solution.

On keeping someone alive.

A friend’s father recently suffered a stroke and spent a mostly unconscious week in the hospital. On the third day, he had a brief spell of lucidity. My friend was visiting. The father – who’d reverted to his native language – said, “Keep me alive, son.”

Then rapidly deteriorated. He was intubated. The functions of his inoperative organs were replaced by pumping, thumping, wheezing machines.

But it was much more difficult for my friend to finally tell the doctors, “You’re right, it’s time,” than if he hadn’t had that final conversation. He knew his father wasn’t coming back. But keep me alive, son sure changes the way it feels.

Twice in the past year or so, my spouse has had to decide when it was time to ease off on her parents’ care. Her mother could speak (incoherently) when first taken to the hospital, but then the swelling set in. Her father, after a stroke, was speechless in the hospital, but during his moments of lucidity was able to wink at our daughter. He played peek-a-boo by rotating his head.

That night, the bleeding started again. With aggressive treatment, he could’ve been kept sufficiently alive for a vegetative, ventilated existence in the hospital. It was up to K to decide. “Make it easy for him.”

Most doctors forgo aggressive treatment. Those who’ve seen the fallout know it isn’t worthwhile.

Instead, my father-in-law’s life ended on a high note. The week before, he’d had a romantic fling with a 22-year-old. In the hospital, he played games with his granddaughter one last time. I told him we’d take good care of his rabbit and his dog. And the stroke itself occurred during a dinner party with his neighbors – thankfully they emptied out his weed grinder before he was loaded into the ambulance. (Although, why did they return the empty – but still redolent – grinder to his pocket? Do such accouterments hold sentimental value to potheads? As far as I could tell, this was a cheap wooden one, no more than a decade old.)

He didn’t ask that we keep him alive. And yet, in many ways, I am.

Mike Milks was a firm believer in community, and he spent his time caring for people less fortunate than himself… this despite the fact that he was often broke, homeless, and hungry. Each month when his SNAP benefits came through, he’d ride the bus to the discount grocery store, buy a bunch of whole wheat flour, and bake loaves of sourdough bread for his neighbors. $200 a month isn’t much, and yet his benefits helped a lot of people eat.

Before K and I moved him to Bloomington and started paying for him to have an apartment, he was squatting in his deceased former roommate’s house. No electricity, no water, no heat, in a mostly-abandoned neighborhood where thieves had stripped most homes of their copper pipes. Folks broke into his house twice; he was pistol-whipped in the face.

Before he fed himself, he fed the dog. And, when he could, left out scraps for the stray cats.

In Bloomington, he cared for addicts – his friends here struggled with opiates and amphetamines. He’d talk to them, and, when they blew their own meager salaries on drugs – or lost their jobs for arriving blinkered at work again – he’d feed them.

He cycled through many bedraggled roommates in his time here. One stiffed us for a thousand dollars, having never paid rent for seven months (yes, rent in Bloomington is very cheap. But that left K & me to scrape together the money on the salaries of a public school teacher and a full-time writer). Another has since been murdered in a bungled drug deal. The alcoholic librarian fancied himself the best of the lot, slurring to me one day, “Yer father sure knows a lotta low-level criminals.”

And yet even he, the alcoholic librarian, vanished… at which point cops came by to ask some questions because the dude’s car had been found abandoned in a field in the run-down nowhere between a town known for meth and a town known for pills. It was two weeks before the librarian turned up again, and every time Mike asked where he’d been the dude pretended not to hear the question.

Mike Milks gave what he had to those people. Nobody else cared for them.

And then, after he died, I began teaching in the local jail.

Against all odds – because I should admit that Mike infuriated me sometimes – I am carrying on his work. When Mike gave a banquet – with those scraps he cobbled together from SNAP benefits – he would invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind … and addicts, lepers of the modern world. He did so unthinkingly. All he had was love, and he gave where it was needed.

I am less kind than he was. But I am learning.

So, thank you, Mike. I am grateful to be keeping a small part of your work alive.

On deer, wolves, and Sean Carroll’s ‘The Serengeti Rules.’

I’m a mediocre gardener. I like plants okay. And I do know the basics about what they need: water, air, sunlight, affection. But I dole out too little of that last ingredient. I’ll plant some tomatoes or lettuce or swiss chard, then just let ‘em be unless I notice something I want to eat.

“Shouldn’t you water them?” K will ask after several days without rain. Or, “Shouldn’t you weed? They look cramped.”

“Naw,” I say. “I want ‘em to grow up tough. I don’t wanna coddle ‘em.”

Besides, it’s never long before a half-starved deer sneaks into our yard and gnaws everything to the ground. Strips our saplings bare. Masticates flowers that were a day or two from bloom.

We’ve been trying to grow fruit trees, with the idea that our yard could be a happier place for critters of all sorts. There’d be more shelter, more shade, more to eat…

… and those are just the local benefits. There’d also be more oxygen for everyone to breathe: in Lab Girl, Hope Jahren writes, “Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: if you own any private land at all, plant one tree on it this year. If you are renting a place with a yard, plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices. If he does, insist to him that it was always there.”

Every time our twiggy little tree-lets put out new shoots, though, a deer will munch them away.

Deer are like us that way. Sacrificing the future — which would benefit everyone — for a bit of ease today. Nobody wants to pay an extra couple bucks in tax for gasoline, so we might all get wrecked by climate change.

This can be frustrating. Stepping into the yard to appraise the wreckage yet again. But I’m not interested in deer kills. I want to bring back wolves.

From Carl Safina’s Beyond Words:

“There is no peace for prey in a land without predators,” Doug Smith tells me. “There are only alternate sufferings.” Either predation makes them die or starvation makes them die. Predation is dramatic and awful, but starvation causes more widespread suffering, is more prolonged.

As the Yellowstone elk populations irrupted in the absence of wolves, wildlife managers started killing elk or shipping them to places as far-flung as Arizona and Alberta, whose elk had been completely shot out. From about 1930 to 1970, Yellowstone National Park shipped and killed thousands of elk. When that stopped, the elk again surged.

Famished elk and deer so thoroughly scrounged Yellowstone’s willows and aspen seedlings that everything from fish to birds had their lives reordered. No wolves meant too many elk; too many elk meant almost no food for beavers, which meant almost no beaver ponds for fish, which meant…

As elk fear wolves, one might say that trees and rivers fear elk. In this classic essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Aldo Leopold observed, “I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen… every edible bush and seedling browsed… to death… every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn… Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run… Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.” He offered, with memorable resonance, “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Environments, just like animals, can be sick. An environment in which humans have murdered all the large predators? Where prey species flourish, overbreeding & overeating (as a population) till they stumble around rib-jutting and delirious from hunger? Where there’s little food left over for less voracious herbivores, who soon starve in turn…?

That environment is ill.

In The Serengeti Rules, Sean Carroll explains the similarities between environmental illness and the cellular or physiological disruptions that cause human disease. For instance, if your body starts cranking out too much of one thing — like Bloomington’s deer or Yellowstone’s elk — you should have that checked out. You’ve got cancer.

Our local deer probably wouldn’t be happy if they knew I’d compared them to cancer cells. But the analogy (used in Carroll’s book) works pretty well. For instance, nearly all of us have cancerous cells in our body. We rely on our immune systems to find these and snuff them out. It’s when our immune system fails that a burgeoning mass of cells will form a tumor, and that is when doctors recommend knives and poison.

Nobody wants chemotherapy. It’s not fun. Doctors only use it because, if cancer cells evade your immune system and go berserk, there’s no other cure.

Similarly, I’d prefer we not have human hunters creeping through the night & putting down deer with guns. I want wolves.

A zoologist named Robert Paine designed the first experiment to measure the harms caused by the absence of a key predator — just like humans are more likely to develop cancer while immunocompromised, environments without predators more often get sick. Carroll provides a charmingly accessible description of this experiment:

Twice a month every spring and summer, and once a month in the winter, Paine kept returning to Mukkaw to repeat his starfish-throwing ritual. On one twenty-five-foot-long by six-foot-tall stretch of rock, he removed all the starfish. On an adjacent stretch, he let nature take its course. On each plot, he counted the number and calculated the density of the inhabitants, tracking fifteen species in all.

. . .

The results of this simple experiment were astonishing. They showed that one predator could control the composition of species in a community through its prey — affecting both animals it ate as well as animals and plants that it did not eat.

This initial experiment has been repeated many times. In each case, whether the apex predators are starfish, or sea otters, or fish, or ants, or wolves, when the predator is removed, ecological diversity plummets. Carroll includes some revealing numbers:

While on sabbatical in New Zealand, Paine investigated another intertidal community at the north end of a beach near Auckland. There, he found a different starfish species called Stichaster australis that preyed on the New Zealand green-lipped mussel, the same species exported to restaurants around the world. Over a period of nine months Paine removed all starfish from one 400-square-foot area and left an adjacent, similar plot alone. He saw immediate and striking effects. The treated area quickly began to be dominated by mussels, which extended their range by about 40 percent down toward the low tide mark. Six of twenty other species initially present vanished in just eight months; within fifteen months the majority of space was occupied solely by the mussels. Interestingly, this expansion occurred despite the abundance of another large mussel predator (a sea snail).

I don’t think anyone is counting plant & animal species in my home town — suburbs aren’t known for their ecological diversity even in the best of times, and there are constant small-scale perturbations as people sculpt their lawns and gardens — but our deer population has almost certainly caused a variety of harm.

My tomatoes get eaten, sure, but so what? After all, I can buy more at the grocery store. But groundhogs and beavers don’t have that option. The diversity of plants in our parks must be falling, too. We’ll accumulate more and more of those few trees that deer don’t like to eat.

And our deer population changes the way people think about nature. This worries me most, and is something that I’ve watched happen for high school students over the course of a year. Our zombie-like hordes of stumbling, emaciated, voracious deer give people the idea that nature is something that should be conquered. Why not trammel the whole world into a manicured English garden?

Wolves would fix that.

The distribution of plant and animal life in our town would grow healthier. When people chanced to see the now-more-fearful deer, they’d behold more majestic specimens — human hunters cull the biggest, baddest bucks, but wolves go for the weakest. And the deer themselves would not be subject to such a miserable existence, aching and delirious from incipient starvation until suddenly stung by the bullet of a silenced gun.

Of course, wolves are scary. I get that. I have two small children. But the very dangerousness of wolves could bring other beneficial changes. My town, home to a major state university, has more than its fair share of alcohol-fueled misadventure.

After the first few drunken frat dudes get eaten by wolves, I have to imagine the others would show more restraint.

On bistability.

Over the course of ten days in March, our weather in Bloomington careened from the mid-seventies down to the teens with a few inches of blustery snow. Twice! Two sudden spells of unexpected summer, two of icy winter.

I do a lot of walking on evenings and weekends, and during that month I was often inappropriately dressed. Shivering or sweating.

Bloomington is located at the midpoint between two major air currents, one from the south that carries warm wet gulf weather, one from the north that brings dry polar air. We skip a lot of the mild in-between temperatures that people associate with spring or fall. Instead, our weather flops back and forth between mirroring balmy Kentucky or blustery upper Michigan.

We’re always breathing somebody else’s air.

Jetcrosssection — Our town is at 40 degrees North, right where the air currents get all tug-o-war-y.

In science, this sort of phenomenon is called “bistability.” Something like temperature, which seems like it could slide around gradually, instead lurches from one state to the next.

Like alcoholism, in a way. Many people can drink a glass or two of wine with dinner. For an alcoholic, that would be dangerous. With alcoholism, the choices narrow to either staying sober or slipping into a binge. The glass or two of wine at dinner becomes empty bottles and an unremembered night.

A buddy of mine explained why he never touched the stuff this way: “I realized that every time I’d drink, I’d end up with a needle sticking out of my arm.”

6339939875_918dc4d071_b — Image by Imagens Evangélicas on Flickr.

Or there’s the more common example of a light switch. Unless you install a dimmer, the room suddenly flips from dim to bright when the wall switch crosses its midpoint.

Capture — Image by Martin Cathrae on Flickr.

The input — the position of the switch — moves fluidly through space when you flick it. Its height takes on all the intermediate values. The output — brightness of the room — does not. One moment, the room is dark. The next, there is light.

Bistability is cool. Also: hugely important. And also: devilishly tricky to understand.

First, the importance. In addition to weather systems and alcoholic binges and the working of common electronics, bistability rules our brains. Your brain contains some hundred billion spidery cells called neurons, and your thoughts happen when these neurons begin “firing” in a particular pattern. Each neuron is like a machine that collects information at one end and sends a message at the other. The messages are bland, though. Each message is either sent or not. That message is called “firing.”

(To a rough approximation, at least — imagine interacting with a dog that only knows one word, “woof.” It can still convey slightly different information by saying “woof” at different rates. You might respond differently if you heard your dog say “woof” once versus saying “woof” every three seconds for a minute. Similarly, neurons can convey different messages with different rates of firing.)

Each neuron is bistable. Pulse. No pulse. Just like a light. The room is dark. The room is light. If you were fifteen & at boarding school, maybe you’d have a lightswitch rave. “B., you stand there and toggle it, we’ll dance.” With no intermediate brightness, the flickering makes everyone disoriented. You’d hardly need drugs! Except, if you were fifteen & at boarding school, you’d probably have little trouble finding drugs.

Neurons are similarly switchlike because the act of firing also causes firing. Once a threshold is crossed, the behavior feeds itself. Having a drink makes our beleaguered alcoholic want to have a drink.

And bistability pops up in many other fields. In economics, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Having money makes it easier to get money. In astronomy, lonely matter becomes more thoroughly alone. Empty space expands faster than regions with mass, creating isolated pockets of stuff. In either case, we end with rampant inequality. You’ll have a lot of money, or none; you’ll have many neighbors, or none. Bistability carves out the middle.

I think it’s important for all of us to learn a little about bistability because the knowledge engenders a much-needed skepticism when reading about climate change. Although when many others write sentences that include both “climate change” and “skepticism” they mean that we should not be afraid. My point is that we should be more afraid.

At the Paris meeting, many countries agreed that we should try to prevent temperatures from climbing more than 2 degrees. The assumption being that a 2 degree change will leave us safe.

It might.

The problem is that our world’s climate is in many ways like a light switch. Sans dimmer. As our weather changes, plant growth will be affected, which will change the rate at which plants hoover gases out of the atmosphere. A crude guess is: hot weather, fewer plants, less carbon pulled from the air by plants, even hotter weather in the future.

Or hot weather might melt arctic ice, and that new influx of water could change the pattern of underwater currents. This would leave many people upset. If western Europe weren’t in the path of a steady flow of northbound tropic water, it’d be much colder. “Global warming” can cause local temperatures to plummet.

640px-Golfstream — Without that big red arrow having that particular shape (and *yes*, it could change), living in Western Europe would be a lot less fun.

And the melting ice would cause Miami to disappear. Maybe parts of New York City.

The devilish thing about bistability? Tiny misunderstandings lead to huge mistakes in our predictions. If someone holds a dimmer switch midway up, you can probably guess how bright the room will be. “Medium bright!” With a standard switch, you would have much less confidence in your prediction. Let’s say you’re cooking dinner. If a toddler climbs up on a chair and starts fiddling with the light switch, claiming she’ll only move it “a little bit,” do you expect the room to stay lit?

Global climate has such nonlinear inputs that it should be no easier to predict. It’s hard to put much confidence in anyone’s claiming to know what will happen if temperatures change 2 degrees, or 1.5 degrees, or 4 degrees…

That said, there’s plenty we can do. Us regular people can make a difference without involving any politicians, just by thinking about what we eat. The “big dream” goal is to cut emissions by 60% to 80%. But animal agriculture accounts for somewhere between 10% to 50% of global emissions. (The low end of that range was estimated using outdated numbers for farm animals and assuming that cows don’t breath — the high end is equally unrealistic because it assumes all our farm animals would instantly disappear with their grazing land reverting to natural forests.) Eat more vegetables for dinner and you’re already making a big change.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: Bloomington