On drugs and drug laws.

Humans have been ingesting dimethyltryptamine, a potent psychedelic, for over a thousand years. We’ve been using cocaine even longer. Marijuana was used medicinally in China thousands of years ago; soon after, celebrants in India began to ingest it as a psychedelic to potentiate religious experience. Mind-altering experiences were so prized in ancient Greece that prophets huffed narcotic vapors.

Our ancestors began intentionally brewing alcohol nearly 10,000 years ago. We’ve been using opium as a sacrament – not just a painkiller – for perhaps 3,000 years.

Drugs are very important to our species.

Not all drug use is good, obviously. Narcotics like opium, heroin, oxycontin, et al., can latch onto a person’s mind and compel continued use at any cost. Somebody told me recently, “I knew I was gonna get caught. I’m on probation, they drug test me all the time. I mean, I was thinking about it while I was cutting it up: if I do this, they’re gonna catch me. I was thinking about it while I was loading the syringe: if I do this, they’re gonna catch me. I thought I’d only have to do a week, though, and that seemed okay. Which is insane! I know it’s insane, but that’s what I was thinking. I guess I was wrong. I’ve been here three weeks and I still haven’t had my court date.”

Even fish, if they get hooked, will risk their lives for another dose. When human parents are snared by addiction, they endanger their children. The man whom I quoted above? He’d managed to stay sober for almost seven months, but relapsed the night of his son’s second birthday. His wife had to break down the bathroom door. After the ER, they brought him straight to jail.

In class together, we read Josh Rathkamp’s “Single Father,” in which the narrator fears that his diabetes will cause him to fall out and be unable to help his daughter. Several parents recognized their own dread. Then we read “Daddy Wake Up” by local poet Travis Combs. Combs loves his son, but, like a diabetic, a person suffering from opiate addiction might find himself paralyzed, “a mass of mess.”

DADDY WAKE UP

– Travis Combs

I hear the sound of his little feet running

down the hall, I look to make sure the door

is locked, I pull the plunger back, I hear

his joy as he yells, I’m superman.

I do the shot

thinking What if?

What if I fall out, what if he finds

me here, what if his little fingers have to

press 911, something we all teach them to do.

The fear in his voice when he says Daddy

won’t get up. The pain in his heart when

he shakes me, yelling daddy wake up, daddy

wake up.

Then I do wake, the needle

still in my arm, I feel his tears on my chest

as he lays there hugging me, crying, daddy

wake up.

Psychedelic drugs are safer. They tend to be non-addictive. Most are relatively non-toxic. And a single dose can initiate self-discovery that buoys a person’s spirits for six months or more.

But psychedelic drugs are tightly controlled. Despite thousands of research findings to the contrary, they’re classified by the U.S. government as having no accepted medical treatment use. Possession is a felony.

Perhaps this shouldn’t seem surprising. Spiritual drug use has been prized by our ancestors for thousands of years, but most cultures closely regulated which people would be privileged with access to those sacraments. Depending on the time and place, only wealthy people would be allowed to use drugs, or only people born to a certain caste, or only men.

In the United States, cocaine was rightfully recognized as a wonder drug for decades, but then a cadre of white supremacist politicians claimed that cocaine would turn black men into monsters. Prohibition was mediated through racism.

It’s true that cocaine is dangerous – both psychologically and physiologically – if you’re ingesting the purified compound. But coca tea is no more dangerous than earl grey. Indeed, if you decided to purify caffeine from tea leaves and snort it, you might die.

Marijuana was also legal in the United States until the racist propaganda machine started spinning stories about what would happen when people from Mexico smoked it.

And even now, wealthy people throughout the Bay Area blithely use psychedelic drugs. Authors like Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan openly publicize their experiences flaunting the law.

Yet when people in Denver supported a ballot initiative that reduces the legal risk of possessing psilocybin-containing mushrooms, Pollan wrote an editorial denouncing the initiative. Yes, there is some nuance; Pollan states that

No one should ever be arrested or go to jail for the possession or cultivation of any kind of mushroom – it would be disingenuous for me to say otherwise, since I have possessed, used and grown psilocybin myself.

And he claims, oddly, that the ballot initiative would be merely symbolic, citing as evidence the fact that only 11 psilocybin cases have been prosecuted in the last three years, out of approximately 150 arrests. I personally have never been prosecuted for a crime, nor even arrested, but I’ve been told that it’s a very traumatic experience. I’ve heard this from very reliable sources, men who have been through all sorts of horrific trauma in addition to their arrests.

For all the people subject to this trauma – not to mention everyone more deterred than Pollan himself by the current legal status of this medicine – the initiative would have very meaningful consequences.

Michael Pollan. Photograph by Sage Ross on Wikipedia.

Instead, Pollan centers his cautionary argument on the idea that psilocybin “is not for everyone.”

That idea is true enough, as far as things go. Some people probably shouldn’t use psilocybin. Some people feel traumatized by the bad experiences they go through while under its influence. But I would argue that arrest is more traumatizing, and that the very illegality of the substance increases the likelihood that someone will go through a bad trip.

And the regulations seem absurd compared to how we treat other drugs. For instance, someone with a predisposition to develop schizophrenia could be pushed closer to this condition by ingesting psilocybin. The drug can hurt someone who uses it. But alcohol, which is totally legal for most U.S. citizens over 21 years of age to purchase and consume, causes a huge amount of harm even to people who abstain. Alcohol is the psychoactive drug that causes the most harm to others.

It’s unlikely that our sitting Supreme Court justices would have sexually assaulted anyone while using psilocybin for a meditative journey of self-discovery. Indeed, that sort of experience might have led someone to develop much more empathetic political views.

Because alcohol consumption is so likely to lead to poor decision-making and violence, it’s illegal for people on probation to drink. Many have to check in at “blow & go” breathalyzer stations once or twice a day, which is really tough for people whose drivers’ licenses are suspended. But, still, we passed this law to keep other people safe.

Or consider antibiotics. Every time you use antibiotics, you make the world a little worse. With every dose, there’s a risk that the bacteria you’re hoping to kill off will instead evolve to resist them.

And yet, even though using antibiotics hurts everybody else, they’re regulated much less than other drugs. If you take psilocybin, it’s not going to hurt me at all. But if you take an antibiotic – or, worse, if you decide to manufacture huge quantities of antibiotics and them inject 80% of them into cows, pigs, and chickens, all of whom are being raised in fetid conditions – you’re making it much more likely that I will die.

In the past, somebody might get scratched by a cat … and die. Any infection could turn septic and kill you.

In the future, a currently-treatable infection might kill me. Or kill my children.

Because we’ve allowed people to be so cavalier with antibiotics, medical professionals expect that within a generation, more people will die from bacterial infections than from cancer.

Obviously, this terrifies me.

But we’re not stopping the meat industry from using them. We’re not using our legal system to protect all of humanity from their misuse. Instead we’ve outlawed psilocybin, a compound that could usher you through a spiritual experience that helps you become a kinder, happier person.

Is that reasonable?

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 nature.

The modern world is a stressful place – some medical doctors advocate “therapeutic” nature walks. Surround yourself with trees, wildlife, a babbling stream or waterfall, and your body will remember what it means to be alive.

30433327222_880f66d0e2_o — Image by Steven Depolo on Flickr.

For millions of years, our ancestors needed specific environments in order to survive. Almost every animal species experiences instinctual urges toward healthful habitats – it would be surprising if our own minds didn’t have a residual response toward landscapes that provide what our forebears needed. Running water, trees for shelter, grassy meadows to hunt, fecund animal life suggesting a thriving ecosystem.

But people who need to heal are cut off from these environs.

When somebody doesn’t fit in our world, they wind up in jail. Maybe this person has trouble holding down a job and so forged checks, or counterfeited money, or robbed a store. Maybe somebody is plagued by nightmares and takes methamphetamine to forgo sleep. Or shoots opiates to stave off the pain of withdrawal. Maybe somebody has so much tension and anger that he threw a television at his girlfriend.

These are people who’d probably benefit from a de-stressing stroll through the woods.

Instead, they’re surrounded by concrete, in a clanging, reverberating room with 25-foot-high ceilings, locked doors stacked atop each other, steel tables, boaters crowding the floor (with two tiers of 8 double-occupancy cells, the jail could hold 32 per block … but most have wobbled between 35 and 40 people all year, with the excess sleeping on plastic “boats” on the common area floor. Things were worst in July, when they were so many inmates that the jail ran out of boats – then people slept on a blanket spread directly over the concrete), toilets overflowing with the excreta of many men shitting their way through withdrawal.

In the classroom where I teach poetry, there’s a picture of a redwood forest. It’s shot from the ground, the trunks soaring up to the canopy overhead, and at the bottom of the poster there’s the word “GROW” above a corny quote from Ronald Reagan.

Stephen “Greazy” Sapp wrote the following poem at the end of class one day; he’d spent almost the whole hour staring at the picture of those trees:

GROW

– Greazy

I want to live to see things grow –

From the fury of a great storm, started from

A single drop –

To the ten foot tree from one tiny seed, one sheet

Of paper as from any other tree

Knocked down by a great storm –

The child who grew from a seed in the spouse

Of the man who held paper from the tree –

Maybe the seed buried in his mind could become

Greater in life than the tree that withstood

The storm, now given opportunity to transform

Into stories – of future, generations who dwell

In the single rain drop in

The forest of days to come –

Greazy told me that he loves plants.

(My inclination is to use people’s first names as a sign of respect, but he told me not to – “nobody calls me ‘Stephen’ unless they’re mad about something. You know, like, my grandma, if she was pissed, I might hear her yell, like, Stephen! Even the cops. They pulled up one day, they were like, ‘Greazy, come here, we want to talk to you,’ I knew everything was fine. They were like, ‘look, man, we know you’re selling pot … but stay up near 17^th street or something. We don’t want you downtown, selling it to college kids.’ But then, another day, they came down, spotted me, said ‘Stephen, get over here!’ I was like, ‘man, I know they’re gonna haul me in.’ ”)

Greazy was in the jail all through autumn, waiting on his trial, and he told me that one day he was sitting in his cell on the fourth floor, watching a leaf blowing around on the sidewalk down below, and he found himself thinking, “Man, I’d sign whatever, I’d take whatever plea they wanted, if they’d just let me out there, get to look up close at that little leaf.”

Another man told me that he felt so starved for the world that he started gardening inside the jail. He didn’t want for me to include his name but graciously allowed me to share his story. Here’s a poem I wrote:

OUR MAN GROWS AN ORANGE TREE

by sprouting seeds in a paper towel,

planting one in dust & dirt

he collected scraping his fingers along

each corner of the concrete walls,

& using an Irish Spring soap box as a shelf

to lift his sapling to the light.

Our man only wanted to

oxygenate his air

but soon the whole block shuffles by

checking on the tree each day.

They’re surprised that it survived,

but proud to see it grow

until the warden declares it contraband.

On asymmetry and ‘The Hatred of Poetry.’

In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner posits that many people dislike poems for falling short of an ideal. We hold a vision of the glory that poetry could be: we want crackling verses that would, per Rilke, inspire us to change our lives; we want phrases that speak to all without resorting to postcard platitudes; we want poems to be universal, yet firmly rooted in a particular writer’s lived experience.

But the particular is never universal. The catacombs of memory ensure that words convey slightly different meanings to us all; the best poems revel in this private language. And we, the readers, are stubborn, inertial creatures. It is unlikely that any page’s worth of written words will change us, no matter how magnificent.

And so actual poems fail. The ones we read seem little different from any other set of words. As do those we write – if you are one of the few people who reached adulthood yet still writes poems. All children do, just as all children draw, but the world trains us to slough off artistic expression as we age. What’s worse, many of us are taught in elementary school that poetry – the ideal again – is the deepest possible expression of self. Language is the medium of thought, and poetry is the art of language. Lerner suggests that, in giving up on poems, there comes a nagging sensation that we are giving up on ourselves.

Why wouldn’t we hate an art that hurts us this way?

In Lerner’s words,

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. … one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defenses, too.

I can understand why a published poet like Lerner would put forward these arguments. But I don’t agree, in large part because most people I’ve talked to sincerely enjoy poetry – ever since graduating from high school, that is, when poems were hated for being foisted upon us. Among adults, I’ve found a dislike of poetry to be exceedingly rare.

Not many people gravitate specifically toward lyric poetry, though, especially not the sort that is featured alongside Lerner’s bio for the Poetry Foundation website. But I believe the unpopularity of this type of poetry, with lines like “Emulsions with / Then circled the lake like / This is it.” (from Lerner’s “[By any measure]”) or “jumpsuits, they have changed / painting, I / behind the concertina wire / can’t look at it anymore …” (from Lerner’s “[jumpsuits]”), is not caused primarily by dissonance between actual poems and a reader’s pedestaled ideal. I’d add an asymmetry of trust to the litany of offenses of which poetry stands accused in Lerner’s monograph.

I do not mean to impugn asymmetry in general. For instance, consider this beautiful passage from Jana Prikryl’s “Thirty Thousand Islands”:

Because the moon’s mass is a considerable fraction

of the earth’s, it exerts a gravitational force

on oceans as it orbits overhead, producing the

tides, or put another way, you can stand

on the shore twice daily and witness the very

water flinging itself upwards.

This verse is secretly a paean to asymmetry. Water has an electric dipole moment – it is asymmetric – with oppositely-charged ends attracting each other like so many microscopic magnets. This allows water to move and flow cohesively, one molecule tugging the next along their shared path. But the physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Warren Anderson, who made great advances in our understanding of asymmetry, writes that, as a graduate student, “this seemed very strange to me, because I was just being taught that nothing has an electric dipole moment.”

Anderson elaborates:

“The professor was really proving that no nucleus has a dipole moment, because he was teaching nuclear physics, but as his arguments were based on the symmetry of space and time they should have been correct in general.

“I soon learned that, in fact, they were correct (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say not incorrect) because he had been careful to say that no stationary state of a system (that is, one which does not change in time) has an electric dipole moment.

…

“In quantum mechanics there is always a way, unless symmetry forbids, to get from one state to another. Thus, if we start from any one unsymmetrical state, the system will make transitions to others, so only by adding up all the possible unsymmetrical states in a symmetrical way can we get a stationary state.”

According to the laws of physics, the world should be symmetric. And in the long run – on time scales that leave us dead and the Earth barren and the sun cold, impossibly far from any other source of light – the world is. At any moment, however, objects may exhibit a temporary asymmetry (with this temporary state sustained perhaps for billions of years). This asymmetry gives us our world. Water that flows. Water capable of “flinging itself upward” with the tides.

The very stars in the sky depend upon asymmetry. According to the laws of physics, the Big Bang should’ve birthed equal amounts matter and antimatter, rapidly coalescing into nothing. And yet, in our universe, matter predominates. We live.

But asymmetry in human relations can be harder to bear than the (world-enabling) asymmetries of nature. At first blush, we thought the internet would be a great equalizer, giving a voice to all. Instead, the increasing quantity of stuff out there has served to concentrate attention further on a dwindling number of foci. So many in the modern world flail, shouting into the void, aspiring to fame. The Orlando shooter checked Facebook during his crime, verifying that his humanity (at its worst) had finally been recognized. For a moment – gun in his hand, eyes on his phone – he was as important as Beyonce.

This asymmetry is stark in poetry. The greatest poets use language in idiosyncratic ways: they bend the rules of grammar, they use words as though their definitions were somewhat skew to those organized dissections found in dictionaries. And readers of these poems work to understand why. Readers at times treat great poems as puzzles: told that this combination of words is beautiful, a reader might dust and scrape with the care of an archaeologist, searching for the wellspring of that beauty.

Consider the lines I quoted from Lerner’s own work above, with constructions like “emulsions with then circled the lake” and “they have changed painting, I behind the concertina wire can’t look at it anymore.” This is not the grammar of high school English teachers.

Lerner, of course, has reasons for employing these constructions. Just as Jack Gilbert had reasons for his choice of the adverb “commonly” in the line, “commonly I prepare for death” (from “In Between Poems”). Just as William Shakespeare had reasons for inventing language when no existing words fit his needs.

But if average people – the uncredentialed readers of poetry – were to use words in these ways, their choices would be considered mistakes. They are taught to trust established poets, to presume positive intent and tease out why a published poem sounds the way it does, but their own idiosyncrasies would not receive the same presumption.

This seems especially true for the people with whom I read poems most often. Twice a week, some dozen inmates at the county jail join a co-teacher and me for poetry class. Not every poem we bring has immediate, intuitive appeal. But even when discussing difficult material, the men work to understand why a piece might have been written the way it was. Then, when given paper and pencils, these men pour themselves into their own writing, for reasons Lerner well understands:

I also received multiple letters from prisoners who felt poetry publication was their best available method for asserting they were human beings, not merely criminals. I’m not mocking these poets; I’m offering them as examples of the strength of the implicit connection between poetry and the social recognition of the poet’s humanity. It’s an association so strong that the writers in question observe no contradiction in the fact that they are attempting to secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see.

Incarcerated writers do dream that their words could allow someone to see them as human. During one of our recent classes, TC told me that he’d seen a commercial on the jail television showing caged dogs in the pound with a voiceover saying “No animal deserves to be treated this way.” He looked left, looked right, and started wondering: where is our commercial?

And I’m by no means arguing that the poems written by men in jail are all great, or even good. Drug addiction in southern Indiana has swept up all sorts, but people with money can bond out, lawyer up, and fight their cases from the outside. They tend to win, landing treatment instead of time. Our pay-to-play criminal justice system reserves jail for the poor. Given the paucity of services our nation offers to impoverished children, and the underfunded state of our public schools, shunting un-aided kids straight from uncomfortable desk to uncomfortable cell, jails are full of luckless individuals who never had much scholastic success.

When inmates write, many of their poems are utter clunkmonsters, vague and sloppy and misspelled. The men force rhymes, having conflated the concepts “poem” and “children’s book.” Sometimes they’ll pour out saccharine repentance as though my co-teacher and I were allied with the state, rather than volunteering our time simply because this country inflicts mass incarceration on our behalf and has made us feel ashamed. And it can be a battle convincing dudes who’ve been told over and over again “You’re bad!” that when we suggest they revise a poem, it means we liked it.

But sometimes their work is lovely.

On a Friday afternoon last August, the men were in a particularly rotten mood. Technological doodads break in the jail just like anywhere else, and a security camera on the fritz meant they’d been on lockdown all week. Usually they have access to a common area and can play cards or pace back and forth, but “lockdown” means being confined to those little cells twenty-four hours a day.

Tensions were high. And when we decided to take a few minutes for a writing prompt, they snapped.

“Nobody’s gonna read anything I write! This won’t change shit!”

Grim. And arguably untrue. But…

“They’re not gonna do anything till we pull some ISIS shit, start taking off people’s heads!”

At which point my co-teacher flipped: “Fuck you, man, no. You say shit like that, they’re gonna cancel this class. And it’s not even fucking true. I mean, look at this… we’re here, right? And Frank and I are here because of shit we read. You write it well, people will read, it will change things.”

I was nodding, although I have to admit: there’s a lot out there to read. It’s hard for any writer to be noticed, let alone somebody pegged as an uneducated fuck-up – a criminal from southern Indiana – right off the bat. The battle for attention can be nightmarish, giving rise to phenomena like that Orlando shooting… or the election of Donald Trump.

I have to admit: even if people do read the poems written by incarcerated men from our classes, nobody will work to understand. These men are forced to write with one hand behind their backs, so to say. Linguistic flourishes that would seem striking from another would be considered mistakes.

A reader must extend trust to be willing to work. But if we trusted these men, they wouldn’t live like they do: mired in cages not fit for dogs. Then booted out broke, job-less, home-less, med-less, into a probationary existence with far more rules than other citizens must abide by.

And yet these men dig poems.

Lerner is correct: they’re not always keen on the abstruse lyrical sort. That distaste seems fair. I pray that they can one day write compelling narratives that will help change the world. But if these uncredentialed, MFA-less men wrote tricksy lyrics, flaunting rules like Lerner does? Then they’d be right. Nobody would read their shit.

In their shoes (lace-less orange crocs, hosed down and issued to some new sap straight from the off-putting feet of the recently released), I too might hate lyric poetry.

On Tara Westover’s “Educated.”

A man in my poetry class recently told me, “Ugh, cocaine is awful. You use some, you’ll want some more, but I hate it. It makes me such a jerk. I mean, I’m not like this, I’m never like this, but if I’m on coke, I’m like, bitch, you best make yourself useful around here.”

Cocaine has a reputation as a fun party drug, but nobody in jail has anything nice to say about it. And it’s not that they’re down on drugs in general – that same man told me:

“Meth? Meth is great – you should never try it.”

And then he explained the social niceties of trying to shoot up in the home of a friend who was recently diagnosed with HIV. This friend was apparently cavalierly sloppy with needles:

“Like, blood was spurting, and I was scooting back thinking, like, god, I wish I was anywhere but here … “

European eels are endangered. They swim huge distances to complete their life cycles – hatching at sea, undertaking a voracious (oft cannibalistic) quest up rivers, then returning to their birthplaces to spawn – and have been thwarted by hydroelectric dams blocking their migration, and the tendency of an insatiable terrestrial ape to catch and consume huge numbers of their kind.

Now these eels face another obstacle: they must complete their voyages while blitzed on cocaine. European governments dump drugs into the sea to “destroy” them, but that’s not how water works. The drugs are still there. The eels get high.

According to popular legend, Robert Louis Stevenson was very sick before he wrote his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Stevenson had tried many cures; all had failed. Then his spouse bought cocaine. This worked. Suddenly Stevenson could write again. In three days, he composed his novel.

When he read the first draft to his spouse, she said it didn’t seem sufficiently allegorical. So Stevenson flung the pages into the fire and began again. In three more days, he’d composed the version of the story that we know today.

Dr. Jekyll was a fine man. On drugs, he became a monster.

When our first child was just shy of two years old, she liked to wear a green long-sleeve with a picture of The Incredible Hulk rampaging. She’d pull it from her drawer; I’d say, “Oh, you want to wear your Hulk Smash shirt today?”

One day, I asked her, “N., why does Hulk want to smash?”

She looked down at the picture, then back up to me. First she signed the word hungry.

“Oh, Hulk wants something to eat?”

She shook her head. No, that didn’t sound quite right. She looked down again, then made another sign, banging her hands together for the word shoes.

“Hulk is upset because he has no shoes?”

She bobbed her head yes. No shoes. That would make her rage, too.

Once, some runners on the local high school cross country team asked me who would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk. They’d reached a detente after one claimed that the Hulk was unstoppable when enraged (“… and nothing calms him down except his girlfriend.”), and the other argued that Superman could turn back time until the moment before Hulk had gotten angry, then smash him.

Superman vs. Hulk by JD Hancock on Flickr.

I demurred. I don’t think Superman is a very interesting hero, and the Hulk is interesting only in campaigns, not battles. I like the idea of a hero who might go berserk and accidentally thwart his own plans, but a single bout of wrestling isn’t like that. I think it’s more compelling to consider his constant risk of hurting the people that he loves.

In Educated, Tara Westover writes beautifully about the horrors of living with the Hulk. Her early years were controlled by a father in the throes of extreme paranoia and delusions of grandeur:

Fourteen years after the incident with the Weavers, I would sit in a university classroom and listen to a professor of psychology describe something called bipolar disorder. Until that moment I had never heard of mental illness. I knew people could go crazy – they’d wear dead cats on their heads or fall in love with a turnip – but the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred to me.

The professor recited facts in a dull, earthy voice: the average age of onset is twenty-five; there may be no symptoms before then.

The irony was that if Dad was bipolar – or had any of a dozen disorders that might explain his behavior – the same paranoia that was a symptom of the illness would prevent its ever being diagnosed and treated. No one would ever know.

Because her father was at war with the federal government, Westover never went to school. Her birth went undocumented – she didn’t have a certificate that would’ve allowed her to enroll until years later, and even then wound up with a hodgepodge of documents that listed slightly differing names and birthdates.

And her father needed money, because he was frantically stockpiling food and ammunition. He needed solar panels (back when they were much more expensive than today) because the power grid was going to cut out after Y2K.

As one of God’s soldiers, he needed to build an ark. Or tank. Arsenal. Whatever.

This constant hustle for money led Westover’s father to subject his children to incredible dangers. There might be a safe way to do a job, but if the risky way could save two minutes, the man put his kids’ lives on the line. Westover was forced to ride up to a trailer inside a bin filled with two thousand pounds of scrap iron. When her leg got caught and she couldn’t jump out, her father still dumped the bucket. Westover tumbled nearly twenty feet to the ground. And this was lucky. If she’d fallen a few inches to the other side, she would’ve been crushed by all that iron.

Her brothers were injured even more grievously at her father’s hands.

For instance, a brother’s clothes caught fire while he was working with his father. In Westover’s recollection, the father then lifted his burnt son into the cab of a truck and made him drive home alone. Only the ten-year-old Westover was there to help him, so she put her brother’s burnt leg inside a garbage can full of ice water.

She thought:

If Dad had been with Luke on the mountain, he would have brought him to the house, would have treated the burn. Dad was away on a job somewhere, that’s why Luke had had to get himself down the mountain. Why his leg had been treated by a ten-year-old. Why it had ended up in a garbage can.

Except that she then realizes that her father must have been with her brother. He must have been there in order to put out the fire; otherwise the whole mountainside would’ve burned.

In a footnote, Westover adds:

Since the writing of this story, I have spoken to Luke about the incident. His account differs from both mine and Richard’s. In Luke’s memory, Dad took Luke to the house, administered a homeopathic for shock, then put him in a tub of cold water, where he left him to go fight the fire. This goes against my memory, and against Richard’s. Still, perhaps our memories are in error. Perhaps I found Luke in a tub, alone, rather than on the grass. What everyone agrees upon, strangely, is that somehow Luke ended up on the front lawn, his leg in a garbage can.

Westover’s father was abusive, and he routinely convinced his children that their memories were in error, instead substituting his own (oft-illogical) versions of events, but he isn’t the Hulk in this story. Yup, things get worse. One of Westover’s brothers might suddenly snap and become Hyde.

Westover loved her older brother Shawn, but during an over-hasty job with their father, Shawn fell twelve feet, striking a concrete wall headfirst, and sustained a severe brain injury. Instead of taking the kid to the hospital, their father propped him against a pickup truck and left him to sit in the hot sun.

His pupils were unevenly dilated. His brain was bleeding.

Fifteen minutes later, Shawn wandered back to the worksite and started acting wild. He screamed, flung his father, ran around leaping and howling. The others tackled him – at which point his head again struck the concrete, hard – and called 911 for a helicopter to airlift him to the hospital.

It took some time for me to realize that although Shawn looked the same, he wasn’t. He seemed lucid, but if you listened carefully his stories didn’t make sense. They weren’t really stories at all, just one tangent after another.

Worse, he was violent. But unpredictably so. At one moment, he and Westover might be laughing together. At another moment, he’d twist her arm behind her back so brutally that she worried her wrist would break, call her a slut, and cram her face into a toilet bowl. He hacked at the throat of his son’s pet dog with a five-inch knife blade while the animal howled, dying. He called his sister and placidly explained his plans to visit her university and murder her.

In a lucid moment, he helped Westover install a massive deadbolt in her bedroom door, despite knowing that he was the only person she needed protection from.

And yet, Westover escaped. Although she’d never set foot inside a classroom, she was accepted to Brigham Young University, where the consensus view of reality was much closer to her own.

Of course, she made a few stumbles. Because she didn’t understand what course numbers signified, she enrolled as a freshman in an upper-level art history class. Worse, she raised her hand to ask after the meaning of a word she didn’t recognize: Holocaust.

During one of my own classes, we were discussing poems from Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony when I mentioned that Reznikoff had also written about the Holocaust.

“Holocaust, what’s that?” a man asked.

Unlike Westover, this man had grown up in an urban area. But he’d stopped attending school when he was pretty young, and there’s a lot of cultural knowledge that we tend to take for granted.

I’d like to think that I handled the situation better than Westover’s professor. Westover was shamed. In our poetry class, we instead talked about how the word “holocaust” could be seen as offensive when used to describe the years during which members of the Nazi party murdered at least 6 million people, typically because their victims believed in Judaism. The word “holocaust” originally meant a burnt offering for God, so Jewish leaders instead referred to this period of history with the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.” Although even that phrasing seems off, because “catastrophe” generally evokes natural disaster, whereas the Holocaust was mass murder and torture on a scale comparable only to American slavery. A purely human evil.

Westover became a historian. After experiencing firsthand the nightmare of having her own account of reality constantly replaced by someone else’s version, she understood how powerful storytelling can be. Educated is a beautiful book. And, to my mind, a much more sensible depiction of unequal opportunity in the United States than J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Westover recognizes how lucky she was to escape, and how narrowly she avoided the fate of her sister-in-law. And Westover gives a powerful endorsement of government aid:

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens. My textbooks began to make sense, and I found myself doing more than the required reading.

On drinking.

In our poetry classes, we’ve had a lot of guys doing time or awaiting trial for domestic. As you might expect, their troubles are often wrapped up with alcohol. Nobody wants to think of himself as the kind of dude who’d hit his partner, but booze saps self-control. Sober, we feel angry; drunk, we lash out.

We began a recent class with Dave Johnson’s “Dave Gibson Makes His Way Down.” Johnson teaches poetry in probation office waiting rooms, and he cares deeply about the ways so many of us struggle to be good. His poem opens with the line,

Seven Sundays in a row he fell

on his knees at the altar

of Rocky Creek Presbyterian.

Each week, the protagonist of Johnson’s poem slips again. He drinks then he repents. At church, he’s “shaking his head / crying for forgiveness.” But everyone knows that it won’t last, until one day his wife has had enough. He staggered home drunk; she sewed him up inside a rug.

And she beat him blue. He swore he’d never

drink anymore, and she beat him.

And then he swore he’d go to church every Sunday.

And she still beat him.

He told her he’d love her forever.

She kept on.

And he said he’d repent. She beat him harder.

And he said he wanted to die.

She beat him.

And he said he’d never repent again.

She stopped.

A man in class – back inside after only nine days out because he drank the night before a visit with his parole officer – hung his head. “I should send this to my wife,” he said. “I’m always telling her, I’ll stop, I’ll stop. But then I hit that bottle.”

Apologizing isn’t enough. We have to make sure we won’t apologize again. “Sorry” doesn’t mean much if you have to say it again and again.

And, yes, it’s still mind boggling to me that MDMA and psilocybin – two low-risk chemicals that can help turn somebody’s life around – are illegal whereas alcohol, one of the world’s most dangerous drugs, is openly shilled with flashy television ads.

Then we read two poems by Raymond Carver. “Woolworth’s 1954” has long been a favorite of mine – a man slips into reverie while he’s out walking with a buddy and the buddy’s young kids. The man thinks about when he “was sixteen, working / for six bits an hour” as a stockboy in a department store. An older man was training him; Carver writes,

Most important memory

of that whole time: opening

the cartons of women’s lingerie.

Underpants, and soft, clingy things

like that. Taking it out

of cartons by the handful. Something

sweet and mysterious about those

things even then. Sol called it

“linger-ey.” “Linger-ey?”

What did I know? I called it

that for a while, too. “Linger-ey.”

Poets play with the difference between private and public language. Some words mean almost the same thing no matter who hears them. When I write “of,” chances are there are few strong associations in your mind that would cause you to misinterpret my intent.

But many words feel very different from one person to the next. When the New York Times printed poems alongside photographs they inspired last summer, I brought them in to jail. I had no idea that a line from Ada Limon’s “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use” would jolt the men out of reading.

And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets …

But “shard” is slang for methamphetamine, apparently, and once the idea of meth has wormed into their brains, it’s hard to shake away. That’s the whole problem with addiction.

Blue_Crystal_Meth — A shard of crystal (in this case, meth).

For Carver, the private meaning of “lingerie” is safer.

Then I got older. Quit being

a stockboy. Started pronouncing

that frog word right.

I knew what I was talking about!

Went to taking girls out

in hopes of touching that softness,

slipping down those underpants.

And sometimes it happened. God,

they let me. And they were

linger-ey, those underpants.

They tended to linger a little

sometimes, as they slipped down …

Carver thinks back to those bright early years, when everything felt charged with possibility. Dangerous, but navigable. Undergarments “kicked free / onto the floor of the car and / forgotten about. Until you had / to look for them.”

But his past is gone. He’s grown up, made mistakes, worked crummy jobs and started drinking. He has more freedoms now – a house to take dates to, instead of fumbling in the car – and yet fewer possibilities. Those women he knew have grown up too; they have families and responsibilities. Or they’ve died. Some of us find less luck than others.

Carver is left lamenting his mistakes, knowing that some things he’ll never fix.

Then we read Carver’s “Fear.” One man read the first half of the poem, but when he reached the line “Fear of my children’s handwriting on envelopes”, he paused, blinked, started again, and found he had no voice. We sat in silence for about ten seconds, then he said, “Yeah, that one got me. Somebody else is gonna have to read the rest of this.”

He was too broke for bail and had spent almost a year inside (waiting on a case that would wind up dismissed when the witnesses didn’t show), and each week said something to me about his daughter, seven years old, living a state away, whom he hadn’t seen in years. On his good days, he’d tell me, “When I get out, I’m gonna get myself on a bus, go up and see her.”

On his bad days, he’d say, “I don’t know if she’s gonna want to see me. Cause it’s been years, you know?”

After reading the poem, I thought we’d use “Fear” as a writing prompt. “Jot down five things,” I said. “What are you afraid of?”

This was a terrible writing prompt.

Seriously. Only two people wrote anything (“I’m afraid of being killed by an ex / I’m afraid of dying broke / I’m afraid of dying alone”). It can’t feel safe to write about your fears in jail.

Mea culpa.

But some of what the guys said while telling me that they couldn’t write was heartbreaking. Like the guy with the seven-year-old daughter he wanted to visit:

“I’m afraid that when they let me out I’m not gonna want to go, cause I’ll have forgotten how to live any place but here.”

Or another guy, who said that his first grandchild was born while he was stuck there.

“The only thing I’m scared of is that I’m gonna drink again and my daughter won’t let me see my grandkid. Because she says that if I get back to drinking, she won’t let me around. I’m an alcoholic, and I’m a mean alcoholic.”

And yet, the week before he left, he told me, “When I get out, first thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna walk down to that liquor store and buy myself a beer.”

At the end of class I told him, “I don’t have anything against drugs, you know. But some of us, some drugs, we just don’t mix well. So I wish you’d go, maybe buy that grandkid a present, go down to see her instead of buying yourself a drink.”

“I know, I know … but it’s something I told myself, to get me through this time here. That I’d get out, and when I got out, I’d get to have a beer.”

“I mean, if it’s just one …” I said.

“Yeah, but I’m an alcoholic.”

On artificial intelligence and solitary confinement.

In Philosophical Investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe), Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that something strange occurs when we learn a language. As an example, he cites the problems that could arise when you point at something and describe what you see:

The definition of the number two, “That is called ‘two’ “ – pointing to two nuts – is perfectly exact. But how can two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to call “two”; he will suppose that “two” is the name given to this group of nuts!

I laughed aloud when I read this statement. I borrowed Philosophical Investigations a few months after the birth of our second child, and I had spent most of his first day pointing at various objects in the hospital maternity ward and saying to him, “This is red.” “This is red.”

“This is red.”

Of course, the little guy didn’t understand language yet, so he probably just thought, the warm carry-me object is babbling again.

Over time, though, this is how humans learn. Wittgenstein’s mistake here is to compress the experience of learning a language into a single interaction (philosophers have a bad habit of forgetting about the passage of time – a similar fallacy explains Zeno’s paradox). Instead of pointing only at two nuts, a parent will point to two blocks – “This is two!” and two pillows – “See the pillows? There are two!” – and so on.

As a child begins to speak, it becomes even easier to learn – the kid can ask “Is this two?”, which is an incredibly powerful tool for people sufficiently comfortable making mistakes that they can dodge confirmation bias.

(When we read the children’s story “In a Dark Dark Room,” I tried to add levity to the ending by making a silly blulululu sound to accompany the ghost, shown to the left of the door on this cover. Then our youngest began pointing to other ghost-like things and asking, “blulululu?” Is that skeleton a ghost? What about this possum?)

When people first programmed computers, they provided definitions for everything. A ghost is an object with a rounded head that has a face and looks very pale. This was a very arduous process – my definition of a ghost, for instance, is leaving out a lot of important features. A rigorous definition might require pages of text.

Now, programmers are letting computers learn the same way we do. To teach a computer about ghosts, we provide it with many pictures and say, “Each of these pictures has a ghost.” Just like a child, the computer decides for itself what features qualify something for ghost-hood.

In the beginning, this process was inscrutable. A trained algorithm could say “This is a ghost!”, but it couldn’t explain why it thought so.

From Philosophical Investigations:

And what does ‘pointing to the shape’, ‘pointing to the color’ consist in? Point to a piece of paper. – And now point to its shape – now to its color – now to its number (that sounds queer). – How did you do it? – You will say that you ‘meant’ a different thing each time you pointed. And if I ask how that is done, you will say you concentrated your attention on the color, the shape, etc. But I ask again: how is that done?

After this passage, Wittgenstein speculates on what might be going through a person’s head when pointing at different features of an object. A team at Google working on automated image analysis asked the same question of their algorithm, and made an output for the algorithm to show what it did when it “concentrated its attention.”

Here’s a beautiful image from a recent New York Times article about the project, “Google Researchers Are Learning How Machines Learn.” When the algorithm is specifically instructed to “point to its shape,” it generates a bizarre image of an upward-facing fish flanked by human eyes (shown bottom center, just below the purple rectangle). That is what the algorithm is thinking of when it “concentrates its attention” on the vase’s shape.

At this point, we humans could quibble. We might disagree that the fish face really represents the platonic ideal of a vase. But at least we know what the algorithm is basing its decision on.

Usually, that’s not the case. After all, it took a lot of work for Google’s team to make their algorithm spit out images showing what it was thinking about. With most self-trained neural networks, we know only its success rate – even the designers will have no idea why or how it works.

Which can lead to some stunningly bizarre failures.

It’s possible to create images that most humans recognize as one thing, and that an image-analysis algorithm recognizes as something else. This is a rather scary opportunity for terrorism in a world of self-driving cars; street signs could be defaced in such a way that most human onlookers would find the graffiti unremarkable, but an autonomous car would interpret in a totally new way.

In the world of criminal justice, inscrutable algorithms are already used to determine where police officers should patrol. The initial hope was that this system would be less biased – except that the algorithm was trained on data that came from years of racially-motivated enforcement. Minorities are still more likely to be apprehended for equivalent infractions.

And a new artificial intelligence algorithm could be used to determine whether a crime was “gang related.” The consequences of error can be terrible, here: in California, prisoners could be shunted to solitary for decades if they were suspected of gang affiliation. Ambiguous photographs on somebody’s social media site were enough to subject a person to decades of torture.

When an algorithm thinks that the shape of a vase is a fish flanked by human eyes, it’s funny. But it’s a little less comedic when an algorithm’s mistake ruins somebody’s life – if an incident is designated as a “gang-related crime”, prison sentences can be egregiously long, or send someone to solitary for long enough to cause “anxiety, depression, and hallucinations until their personality is completely destroyed.”

Here’s a poem I received in the mail recently:

LOCKDOWN

by Pouncho

For 30 days and 30 nights

I stare at four walls with hate written

over them.

Falling to my knees from the body blows

of words.

It damages the mind.

I haven’t had no sleep.

How can you stop mental blows, torture,

and names –

They spread.

I just wanted to scream:

Why?

For 30 days and 30 nights

My mind was in isolation.

On bread.

In the King James version of Genesis, Adam and Eve began their lives as vegans. They ate nuts and fruit.

Then they ate Yahweh’s special fruit, so he expelled them from Eden. Yahweh said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Adam and Eve would no longer live in a land of such abundance that they could survive on the raw produce of trees – instead, they’d have to cook bread.

And Yahweh rubs it in – even if you work hard, and procure food, and survive a while, still you will die. You humans are mortal.

(To the other deities, Yahweh offers an aside: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.” Yahweh does not mention to the humans that their mortality was curable, His own doing, and His plan all along.)

In the beginning, bread was a curse.

Soon, however, the Western world treated bread as a mark of civilization.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew sail to Laestrygonia. Not knowing that the island is overrun by voracious giants who might slay and eat them, he asks who eats bread there. In Emily Wilson’s new translation, he says:

I picked two men, and one slave as the third,

and sent them to find out what people lived

and ate bread in this land.

Bread is alchemy. Flour and water and a speck of yeast aren’t enough to support a human life, but if you let yeast eat the flour, then bake it, suddenly you have a food that could nourish you for weeks.

In jail, meals are served with flimsy slices of airy white bread. I’ve eaten one meal at our local jail – the guards let us stay for dinner with the men after class one week, just after one man’s partner was murdered.

(The trio charged with murder – a woman and two men – were incarcerated in that same jail. The woman was placed into a holding cell adjacent to the dorm where the murdered woman’s partner lived. He stayed up all night, shouting to her through the wall. He was telling her to forgive herself.)

We received green beans, spaghetti, a slice of white bread, a cookie. To drink, our choice of milk or sweet tea. I’ve been told that our jail has better food than almost any other.

If you fold your spaghetti into the bread, they told me, you get to have a taco.

When we incarcerate people in this country, we force them to find ingenious ways to deal with deprivation. Demetrius Cunningham built a practice piano out of cardboard. In Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, she describes the jerry-rigged water heaters common at Attica Prison.

At the end of our poetry class recently, a man showed me his ear gauge, a round disc of purple and green.

“I’m surprised they let you keep it,” I said.

“They didn’t. It’s bread.”

“What?”

“Bread. I made it here.” He popped it out to show me – it wasn’t quite as shiny as the stuff you’d see on Etsy, but otherwise looked just as nice. “While I been in, I must’ve went from a quarter inch to, what’s this, over an inch?”

“Bread,” I said, shaking my head. I felt hesitant to touch it.

“I been making all sorts of things. You need bread, and some pencil shavings, colored pencil, you know? I been making flowers, little sea turtles. I made a whole lot of flowers. Gifts for people, when I get out. It’s like therapy. While I’m making them, gives me something to think about, you know? It helps. Keeps the mind busy.”

The next week he brought a few of his sculptures to class. The flowers were incredible, each an inch or two tall, with green stem and leaves, petals in blue and purple. His sea turtle was only a quarter inch across and intricately detailed. Like netsuke, except …

“Bread?” I asked him again.

“Yup,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

I’d previously read about Robert Martinson making a chess set from bread, but I’d assumed the pieces would look gross. In “Solidarity under Close Confinement,” Martinson wrote about his experience being incarcerated for 40 days with the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. He reported that “chess sets and objets d’art could be molded from paste made from chewed bread and dried in the ventilator … I gloated over a tiny nest of buttons, string, chicken bones, and chess pieces – an affection I now find difficult to remember.”

Martinson was appalled by what incarceration does to people: “Of course, the persons we had become in our cells were difficult, boring things.” After his release, he studied prisons, hoping that the way we punish people could be made less awful. He was hired by the state of New York to address recidivism: did any type of programming reduce criminal behavior by ex-felons?

As described in Terry Kupers’s essay “How to Create Madness in Prison” (published in Hell Is a Very Small Place):

A turning point occurred with the publication of Robert Martinson’s 1974 essay, “What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform.” Martinson ran some numbers and announced that rehabilitation programs have no positive effect on recidivism rates. This was the research that conservative pundits and politicians had been waiting for, and they made Martinson famous as they legislated a drastic turn from rehabilitation to harsher punishments.

…

With calls to “stop coddling” prisoners, prison education programs were slashed, weights were removed from the yards, the quality of prison food declined, prisoners were deprived of materials for arts and crafts, and so forth.

Even though Martinson really should have realized that this would be the consequence of his publication (and subsequent speaking tour), he was devastated. After all, he was a firm believer in social justice. He had risked his life to join the Freedom Riders. He began to study incarceration because he hoped to improve prisoners lives. As a result of his research, he’d written that prisons “cannot be reformed and must be gradually torn down.”

That’s not what happened. Instead, we started sending more people to prison, and made the prisons worse.

Which is why Martinson soon recanted his findings. It was true that the education and counseling offered in prisons weren’t very effective at staving off future crime. It was also true that the education and counseling offered in prisons were terrible.

If the available “education” is just a guard and some textbooks, is it surprising that few people are rehabilitated by it? What about counseling – with untrained counselors told to do “whatever they thought best” during five or so short meetings with their patients each year?

Nobody cared about Martinson’s 1979 publication, “A Note of Caution Regarding Sentencing Reform,” in which he apologized for flaws in his earlier work. By then, the punitive reformers had already gotten what they wanted: a lefty intellectual arguing that nothing works and so prisons should be cheap and miserable.

Martinson was horrified by the damage he’d wrought. That same year, he committed suicide – in front of his teenage son, he leapt from the window of their ninth story apartment.

On Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep.’

William Booker’s poem “Communion of the Saints” opens with,

It’s 6 a.m. in the Monroe County Jail,

I’ve been awake since breakfast,

which was served at 4:21 a.m. …

It took 3 minutes 25 seconds

to eat a tray of eggs, sausage, hash brown,

biscuit and jelly. Then I lay back down

on my steel bunk and closed my eyes.

His eyes are closed, the thin jail blanket covers his head, but with bright fluorescent lights shining just a few feet from his face, he can’t fall back asleep. He begins to ruminate: “what have I done?” His mind is tormented by “visions of the outside that I don’t see anymore.” This will be another hard day.

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker describes numerous research studies showing the ways that we’re impaired when our sleep is disrupted. The vast majority of people need at least 7.5 hours of sleep each night. When sleep deprived – either by missing an entire night’s sleep in one go, or sleeping six or fewer hours a night for several days in a row – people have difficulty regulating their emotions, miss social cues, and struggle to learn new information.

Prolonged sleep deprivation is widely recognized as torture. All animals will die if sleep deprived for too long, typically done in by sepsis: otherwise innocuous bacteria proliferate uncontrollably and poison the blood. Less acute forms of sleep loss – consistently getting fewer than 7.5 hours per night – will ravage a person’s immune system and increase the risk of cancer.

When interrogators deprive people of sleep (yup, the United States is a member of the illustrious group of nations that still tortures people this way, alongside regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudia Arabia, and the like) it becomes very easy to elicit false confessions.

In the former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s memoir, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia (which is quoted in Why We Sleep), he writes that when the KGB denied him and his fellow prisoners the opportunity to sleep,

I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what their interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them – if they signed – uninterrupted sleep.

Inside the jail, the overhead fluorescent lights are not turned off until midnight. At that time, it becomes easier – not easy, but easier – to fall asleep. But the inmates will be jarred awake four hours later for breakfast.

Despite their chronic sleep deprivation, people in jail are expected to learn new habits; people who have self-medicated for the entirety of their adult lives with opiates or amphetamines are expected to find all new ways of living. Sometimes their behaviors really were undesirable – robbery, domestic violence, neglecting children while blinkered on drugs.

But people struggle to learn new skills – sober living among them, although this was not directly assessed in the studies Walker cites – if their brains don’t undergo a large number of electroencephalogram-visible waves called “sleep spindles” during the final hours of sleep. If a person sleeps for six or fewer hours each night, the brain never reaches this stage of sleep.

Wake someone up too early day after day, you stifle learning.

Wrest them into fluorescent wakefulness each morning for a four a.m. breakfast, keep them basically sedentary because a dozen people are packed into a small cement room and the facility is too understaffed to give them “rec time,” constantly elevate their stress hormones by surrounding them with angry, potentially dangerous compatriots, and you ensure that they won’t sleep well. In addition, chemical withdrawal wrecks havoc on people’s sleep cycles. They stagger bleary-eyed through months or years inside. They chug “cocoffala” – commissary instant coffee stirred into Coca-cola – hoping to feel some semblance of normalcy. Instead, they get the jitters.

And then, finally, they’re set free – usually to probation, expected to follow more rules than the average citizen.

“I’m gonna be out next week,” a dude told me.

“Congratulations! You’ll get family Christmas after all.”

“Eh, it’s not so great. I’ll be back before New Years.”

“Yeah?”

“They say I gotta do probation two years. I slip, they’re sending me to prison.”

“Can you do it?”

“Two years? I’m not gonna make it two weeks. Way I see it, I get out, I gotta call up Judge Diekhoff, tell her it’s been real and all, but we gotta start seeing other people.”

He would’ve struggled to change his life in the best of circumstances. But he certainly couldn’t do it sleep deprived.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: prison poetry