Tag: teaching poetry in jail

On Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ and video games as art.

On Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ and video games as art.

All art is designed to alter the audience’s minds.

Even more accurately: all art is designed to alter the physical structure of the audience’s brains.

Art reshapes the biological world. And from that foundation, perchance, art can change the world at large as well.

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At the simplest level, the changes wrought by art are memories. Each new memory is created through physical changes in the composition of our brains – freshly pruned connections between neurons, or new synapses that begin reaching out from one cell to another. The pair become more or less likely to fire in concert.

If ever an artwork doesn’t change the physical structure of your brain, then you won’t recall having experienced it. If you happen to see that painting, read that book, or hear that song again, it’ll be as though it were the first time.

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Most artists hope to create works that will make more significant changes in their audience. Not just that the artwork will remembered, but that the audience might think of the world differently, perhaps even act upon newfound philosophical priorities.

I played a lot of video games while growing up, including first-person shooters like Wolfenstein, Doom II, and Golden Eye. But despite the plethora of violence that I immersed myself in – artworks that constantly suggested I could murder my problems – I’ve never wanted to hold a gun. Luckily, video games didn’t change my brain that way.

But a peculiar commonality between all the video games I played did fundamentally alter my view of the world.

By the time I started playing, most computer games had save functions. A player could create a backup copy of their game’s progress just before a tricky section, and then the player could repeat the ensuing challenge again and again, loading the saved copy after each new mistake while attempting to complete that section of the game perfectly. (A mid-nineties rock album – I believe by the band Ben Folds Five – toyed with this idea of computerized perfection by claiming in the liner notes that each measure of every song was recorded in a separate take, all to give listeners an experience absolutely free of musical mistakes.)

Over many years playing video games, I grew so accustomed to this opportunity to save my progress and repeat sections again and again – whether in openly violent games like Doom and Diablo, in games where the violence was partially abstracted like Civilization 2, or even in peaceable games like Sim City and Sierra’s pinball simulator – that I felt confident whenever I played. I was absolutely certain that I’d eventually get things right.

In video games, a player could always try again.

And so an awful feeling gnawed at me when things went wrong in my day-to-day life, outside the world of games. Whether it was asking someone to prom, running poorly in a track meet, going through a bad collegiate break-up, or a depressed semester that culminated with my research advisor asking for a progress report about the work I (hadn’t) done in his laboratory: I wanted to reload my save file. If I were playing a game, then I’d be prepared. I could zip back and attempt the previous few hours – or months – again.

With repetition, I’d get it right.

Which isn’t a desire to re-live the past, exactly. Instead, video games cultivate a desire to bring all our present knowledge with us. The past, but blessed with portents from an unrealized future. If I’d gotten to try again, I would’ve been a different person – wiser, more experienced – who could make different choices from my prior self and thereby reap a more glorious present.

In his game Braid, Jonathan Blow describes this dream:

Tim and the princess lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds. Their mistakes are hidden from each other, tucked away between the folds of time, safe.

While playing Braid, players don’t even have to save their game. There are six buttons: left, right, up, down, jump, & “rewind time.” With any mistake – the game’s protagonist tumbling aflame toward the bottom of the screen – a player simply presses “rewind time” and tries again.

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Even midway through my life, I still experience this misguided desire. Perhaps it’s worse in people predisposed toward rumination. I find myself thinking about how phenomenally well I could re-live my youth, if I were able to keep my knowledge from all this practice that I’ve had living but was somehow given the chance to try again.

And that, to me, is the most horrible fallout from playing video games. They inculcated such a strong expectation that there would always be identical second chances. Not just the potential for forgiveness or redemption, but an opportunity for repetition until perfection.

I assume this sensation was experienced by people even before anyone played video games. I also assume it’s stronger now. And commoner.

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Still, there are certain types of artistic messages that video games convey more adroitly than any other media. When we play a game, we control what happens. Our impulses are reflected in movements on a screen. This is a powerful way to engender empathy.

First-person narration in books does something similar. At times I cringed, but I still thrilled at the protagonist’s misbehavior in Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! because I’d felt welcomed into her experiences. (A bold novel, since our culture considers Bukowskian misbehavior to be much less acceptable if described from a woman’s perspective – Anna Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka was never granted the same cachet as William Burrough’s Naked Lunch.)

Even with the mind-control fungus in Hiron Ennes’s Leech, the first-person narration swayed me to root for the fungus’s destructively selfish pursuits.

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Nearly all the games made by the designers at the heart of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow have narratives that are rigidly circumscribed. A game’s protagonist might jump only when the player presses “jump,” but in this sort of game – heavily scripted, with a pre-programmed “correct” way to win – players have only the illusion of choice and freedom. The artwork’s audience is forced to follow a single structured path (much like how Mario can’t even turn back to revisit areas that have passed off the left side of the screen) if they want to experience the story.

The designers in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow don’t allow emergent behaviors into their games (which are generally the most interesting and / or bizarre aspects of artificial intelligence, all the strange interactions that occur when a sufficient quantity of simple systems concurrently pursue mathematically-designated goals. A few years ago, researchers O. Peleg & colleagues found that a very basic algorithm could replicate the gravity- and wind-defying stability of honeybee clusters. And a simple word prediction model – albeit trained on a huge trove of data – creates the lifelike creepiness of chat algorithms.)

In the games described in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a player’s choice is generally to either do the “right” thing, which will allow the game to progress, or to stop playing and never reach its ending.

Which does carry an inherent drawback. Artists want for an audience to be able to experience their creations. But when that artwork is a game, many people find themselves excluded.

Recently, my youngest child started drawing video game levels on paper (despite living in a house without a television and having never played that type of game), so over spring break I invited them to sit in front of my 17-year-old laptop computer and play Braid. I thought this would be a good introduction to gaming because there’s no risk – with the “rewind time” button, the game’s protagonist can’t die.

But my kids couldn’t coordinate the button pressing required for jumping between platforms. Neither can my spouse. I think Braid is a fantastic piece of artwork, but without me sitting with them, ready to press the buttons at the tricky parts, they wouldn’t get to experience it.

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The game Limbo, like Mario, is a left to right sidescroller, and the player begins by moving through a forest world where other children have set murderous traps or will attack you when you approach. Limbo is replete with puzzles that can’t be solved without multiple attempts – often the signs of danger won’t be noticed until you’ve succumbed to them several times – forcing the player to watch their protagonist die again and again.

I felt like the experience of playing was changing me, making me inured to the game’s incessant horror and tragedy as I continued. If the final levels of the game had included puzzles in which the player had to move from right to left and construct traps to thwart the next “generation” of characters attempting to escape the forest, I think the game would’ve been more compelling. It would have had a closed circle of meaning and conveyed a powerful message about trauma and its aftereffects.

My youngest child is in a multi-age classroom where several students are lashing out in pretty terrible, disruptive ways – my kid has often sobbed at bedtime while describing things that happened. But the outbursts are coming from kindergartners and first-graders. No child that age wants to be terrible! No child wants to rage and scream and invite punishment. It takes problematic occurrences earlier in life, and not enough support in the moment, for a child to devolve to that.

A game like Limbo (with a more compelling ending) could readily teach this, because players could reflect upon the changes that had occurred in their own behavior from the beginning to the end of the game.

Video games, by putting us in “control” of characters in desperate situations, can demonstrate how close we are to ethical slips. Video games are the art form best suited to inspire their audience to reckon with their own behavior. (Admittedly, players don’t always undertake this reckoning.)

For instance, the game Grand Theft Auto 5 asks players to torture a character in order to continue the story. I don’t think that kids should have been exposed to that game, but for adult audiences, I believe there’s real value in demonstrating what regular people will do when they feel trapped or bullied into unethical behavior. In demonstrating what you might do.

There was no way to experience the rest of the game without committing torture, but then again, GTA was just a game – not getting to experience the rest of the plot isn’t a huge punishment, is it? And even so, most players chose to torture. How much more severe do you think the pressure would be if you’d devoted your life to a certain career and then felt like all your progress – your income, your identity – would be wrenched away from you if you failed to conform with a culture of unethical behavior?

Occasionally, when other volunteers visit the county jail to help with my classes, they’ve expressed disappointment afterward that I’m always friendly and polite with the correctional officers who work there. I ask about the COs plans for their weekends (at the jail, staff are typically assigned a 9-day work week, with three weekend days and a back-to-back pair of “Wednesdays” mid-week, so you never know how close somebody is to their own personal Friday). Everyone who volunteers at the jail is, like me, extremely liberal, and sometimes the other volunteers say that it feels disquieting to be chummy with the people administering state-sponsored violence and incarceration.

But it’s not the fault of anyone who work in jail. Honestly, the jail staff is in jail every day they go to work, and we live in a country where most people have to work in order to have enough to eat. (I’m very privileged, but much of my extended family has been on food stamps at some time or other, and the money always ran out before the end of the month.)

Even at jails or prisons where the staff are openly abuse toward inmates – or police departments that cultivate a culture of brutality – it’s worth considering what pressures caused people to break and behave that way.

Video games – with their twitchy dexterity challenges that cause our hearts to race – can demonstrate the ways that we, too, might break.

Playing Minecraft at the local YMCA, I watched my gentle vegan child swing a pickax at a sheep.

If I were playing, I’d probably do it, too. Just to see what happens.

The moving pixels stopped moving. The sheep became a resource.

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I haven’t learned to program yet, but the first game I make will probably be called Psalmist, where players write poems to conjure forth a deity. The deity would become the player’s character, with its controls made intentionally buggy in ways that reflected the player’s style of worship. If a player wrote something like Psalm 137 (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”) they might reap a god wrathful enough to lunge and squash the player’s own people even as the player attempted to navigate toward an enemy city.

Automated text analysis isn’t good enough to understand poetry yet, but a simple statistical model could register the emotional tenor of the words, whether there was frantic or lugubrious pacing, tight or loose syntax.

The main problem, in making a game like that, would be a question of artistic intent: it’s easy to imagine incorporating deities into strategy games like Starcraft or Civilization, but do we need another work of art that reinforces players’ assumptions that it’s good to conquer the world? To extract every resource and crush enemies?

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Near the end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a protagonist says,

“Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

And while it’s true that all art aims to change the world, I think it’s possible to simultaneously experience both happiness and a recognition that the world has many flaws.

When my spouse and I moved into our home, I remarked that our bedroom ceiling looked wrong. “The round light fixture, the square walls, they don’t look right. There ought to be a maze.” Every time I looked at that ceiling, something felt off to me.

Then, two years later, I painted the maze that I thought should have been there all along. (I painted while standing precariously on a folding chair, and at one point slipped and dumped half a can of black paint on my face and dreadlocked hair. The next day I was telling this story to a local poet, and he said, “Oh, and it’s not like you even needed to paint it, which probably makes it worse.” Except that I did need to paint that ceiling – it hadn’t looked right to me!)

It’s not that I was unhappy then, or am blissfully happy now – we make art to make the world that we think ought to be.

Whether from a place of happiness or unhappiness, artists want the world to change.

On perspective and Zoom.

On perspective and Zoom.

In Unique, neuroscientist David Linden describes the cultural associations between smell and taste.

Most people from the United States will say that vanilla, strawberry, or mint odors smell sweet.

On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. Sweet is a taste, not a smell. A substance cannot smell sweet any more than something can sound red.

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There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about these odors – we’ve just learned to associate them with sweet taste.

As a counterexample, in Vietnam, where caramel and mint are used primarily in savory dishes, their odors are not typically described as sweet.

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This association is sufficiently powerful that its effect can be measured in the lab.

For people whose past cultural experiences have led them to associate mint smells with sweet tastes, pairing the scent of mint with a sip of sucrose solution makes them believe that the drink is more sugary than it really is. When mint scent is paired with a sip of mildly acidic water, the drink seems less sour than it really is.

This experiment didn’t assess people’s perception of alcoholic drinks, but people in the United States probably make the same mistake about the bourbon in a mint julep.

photo by Grizdave at flickr

Our assumptions – particular to our own cultural experience of the world – can powerfully deceive us.

A mint julep mixed perfectly for someone from the United States would taste bitter to someone from Vietnam.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of The Sympathizer, which I’ve written about previously – strives to draw attention to our cultural blindness. The way our minds’ innate self-deceptions allow us to overlook or misinterpret the experiences of others.

My spouse and I have often felt grateful for Nguyen’s work. His essay about the sinking sensation he felt after teaching his child to read was particularly beautiful. (I linked to it in my own essay about teaching a child to read.)

Which is why we felt so dismayed by Nguyen’s most recent New York Times editorial.

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Nguyen explains why he enjoys teaching over Zoom. He’s prompted with students’ names; he can see their reactions up close; student voices contribute to the lecture from the same up-front position of power as his own; typed remarks can overlap without distracting; lectures are recorded for students to review later.

All well and good. Nguyen is quite intelligent. If he thinks Zoom is good for lectures, I’m inclined to believe him.

But lectures aren’t the best way to learn.

For many subjects, project-based learning is a more effective way to educate students. Many of my spouse’s resources – designed primarily for teaching college-level biology and introductory Earth & space science with a social justice bent – are available on her website, here.

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For the better part of a decade, I’ve hosted a poetry class in the county jail. We read poems and discuss how they make us feel. Our discussions touch upon contemporary scientific research, mythology, economics – all safe enough topics, for most folks – but also religion, addiction, trauma, violence, relationships, loss – which can be tough for anyone to talk about, let alone a room full of men who won’t get to see their families for months.

Because people cycle through the county jail, I never know who will be coming to class each week until I get there. For a few months, I might be with mostly the same group of men. Other weeks, I won’t have met any of the dozen or so people previously.

And there’s a huge difference between what we can accomplish – between what sorts of things feel safe to discuss – when the people in class haven’t met me before, and haven’t been in a class like that with each other. If we haven’t built the necessary emotional connection, we can do less. The class is worse for all of us.

Recently, the jail has allowed a small number of classes over Zoom. But Zoom doesn’t let you make the same emotional connection.

People sometimes complain about the supposed invasiveness of Zoom – the camera snatches up your personal surroundings, the pictures on your wall, the books on your shelves, your family in the background – but it’s by no means the intimacy of being there.

screenshot from a video by Rose Bythrow

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My spouse says, “Over Zoom you can’t tell who’s hungry.”

It would be nice if she meant this metaphorically – that it’s hard to tell who’s eager to learn. But, no. Many students aren’t eating enough. They are hungry.

Worse, we read Nguyen’s paean to Zoom on a snow day.

Streets near my spouse’s high school school were well-salted and plowed, but we live in a sprawling, semi-rural area – the school district serves families from a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds. There are hills and valleys – not everyone can get a satellite signal at home. And the for-profit cable companies certainly haven’t connected those families to the modern world with wires.

Still, the pandemic has made “e-learning days” seem like a reliable alternative. If it snows, kids learn from home.

“What’s Zoom supposed to do,” my spouse asked, “for my students with no heat?”

This isn’t (only) a concern for fluke events like the avarice-fueled power outages and heat losses in Texas. My spouse grew up in Albany, New York. Every winter was cold. The infrastructure to heat homes there was secure – for children whose families had money.

My spouse’s family didn’t. Her father failed to pay the electric bill. The power was shut off. And then the district called a snow day.

If my spouse and her sibling had gone to school, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Warm classrooms, a hot meal.

Instead they were stuck at home, shivering. Wanting so badly to go to a neighbor’s house. But then the neighbors would know.

In the United States, where poverty is often stigmatized as a moral failing, people hide the ache of want.

Which is why Zoom is so horrible. Zoom makes it easy. When you only have to disguise a small corner of your life, you can convey the illusion that things are okay.

Even when they’re not.

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header image from Zoom corporation’s “About” page

On hostage situations and jail.

On hostage situations and jail.

My family recently visited a state park for some hiking. I know that we are quite privileged to be able to do it, but visiting nature is really restorative right now.

At the end of the day, we sat near a firepit and roasted vegan marshmallows.

After a few minutes, a woman and her partner asked if they could join us. They sat on the other side of the fire, and we got to talking.

The woman used to work in special education, but now she teaches geography and world religions. She loves her work, because she helps students in her small Midwestern town realize how much possibility there is in our world.

Her partner works for the Department of Corrections as a hostage negotiator.

“In training, you feel like you’re doing the same things over and over. Like, hasn’t there been enough of this already? But then, when you have to use it, you hardly have to think about it, you know just what to do. All that repetition really pays off.”

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A few months earlier, several of the guys in our jail poetry class were talking about the drills they’ve been in.

“It was the scariest thing of my entire life. I knew it was just a drill, too. It was fucking terrifying. All these SWAT guys running in, screaming, they’ve got paintball guns, Get on the ground!, yelling, If you fucking move your ass is grass!”

“You’re lying there, face on the ground, can’t move, they might ziptie your hands behind your back, you can’t move for hours. I mean, I was lying there, just watching this puddle of piss spreading from the guy next to me. I fucking hated that guy right then. But he tried to hold it, I know he did. They had us lying there so long.”

“You tell a guard, I have to piss, he’s going to say, too fucking bad.”

“You’re lying there smelling shit, because you know some guy shit himself.”

“You’re smelling shit like right away. They come in yelling like that, some guys shit themselves from fear.”

“I know! I’m that guy. I was so fucking scared.”

“Your on the ground, lying on your stomach on the ground, I mean, the ground is gross, right? You’re lying there with your face on the floor and your neck hurts and you want to like turn your neck, but you got this guy yelling, You so much as fucking move, your ass is grass. Like, it’s pathetic, but it hurts.”

“Walked through this indoor rec later, paintball splatters all over the place. Like, fuck, what happened in here? Some guy in there, they must’ve lit him up.”

“I been through some rough shit in prison, but this one time, it was a piss-ant county jail, I was in the drill there. That was the worst. Like, there were only fifty guys in that place, what’s the big deal? But they came in there, boom, they fucking pepper sprayed us. For a drill.”

“I’ve watched guys die. But that shit, that’s the most scared I’ve ever been.”

I asked one of the guys, Jason, if he’d write about it.

“That’s something people should read,” I told him.

He shook his head.

“I’m trying to write, like, uplifting stuff. Help guys get on a better track, do better than what I done. This stuff … I don’t know. I don’t even really like talking about it. I don’t want to think about it enough to write it down.”

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Header image: cropped photograph of a Val Verde county (Texas) drill from the Laughlin Airforce Base. Most of the time, cameras aren’t allowed inside jails or prisons.

On bias.

On bias.

At the beginning of our poetry class, back when the county jail was still admitting volunteers, two men read some poems they’d written together. 

The first was a love poem – the gist was that any relationship that could survive a partner’s incarceration could probably survive anything. 

The second was a poem about living in a trailer park:

If you’re looking for drugs – not just grass –

Depends where you look, you’ll pro’lly find glass

Pitbulls in the back

Nine times outta ten you’re already in a trap

As it happens, I already knew that one of the authors had a pack of five chihuahuas that road around town in his backpack.  After they finished reading, I mentioned the dogs.

The other guy answered: “Well, yeah, he has those chihuahuas, but I’ve got two pitpulls.”

After we finished talking about their poems, they had a question for me:

“Hey, so you’re a scientist, right?  Cause I heard there’s like this planet where diamonds rain from the sky.  Do you know anything about that?”

I said it sounded ridiculous.  I was imagining walking through a field and suddenly getting hit on the head by a diamond.  Like a really hard hailstone.

Whenever hail falls, my children dart outside to eat ice.  But a fallen diamond would break your teeth.  Doesn’t melt in your mouth or your hand!

During class, we spent a while talking about how diamonds form.  Under extremely high pressure, the hydrogen atoms in an organic molecule can be displaced by carbon-carbon bonds.  There are a few different shapes that work for a molecule made entirely of carbon.  You can have all the atoms in a flat sheet, which we call graphite.  The atoms can form spheres, which we can buckeyballs.  A length of graphite can wrap between the two round caps of a buckeyball.  Or you can have the atoms in a tetrahedral lattice – a diamond.

If you squeeze carbon atoms under really high pressure, you can turn any of the other shapes into diamonds.  Diamonds are the most stable form.  You can make diamonds just by compressing natural gas.

“This pencil, the part it writes with is graphite,” I said.  “If you were strong enough, you could squeeze it until it was a diamond.  But I don’t think they’d fall like rain.”

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I was wrong.  I was biased about what planets should look like – I live on a small, rocky ball with a thin atmosphere, very different from the gas giants that broil like miniature stars – and biased, unfortunately, against the people who wind up in jail.  I study chemistry, I big expert!

Obviously, there are many occasions when the other people in class know things that I do not.  About poetry, chemistry, and physics.

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Since 1981, computer models have shown that the extreme heat and pressure deep inside Neptune was likely to create diamonds.  If I’d ever taken an astronomy course – or had borrowed library books about our solar system when I was growing up, instead of reading the same book about Godzilla movies over and over – I could have known this, too.

The sky on Neptune is very different from the sky on Earth.  Our air hugs us with a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch.  Deep inside the clouds of Neptune, though, the air would squeeze you six million times tighter.  Needless to say, you’d be crushed.  Parts of you might compress into diamond. 

Temperature is a measure of how fast molecules are moving.  Hot air bumps into you more often than cold air, and each collision is a little harder.

Deep in the clouds of Neptune, the gravity is so strong that air molecules accelerate dangerously fast between every collision.  This means the air is really, really hot – thousands of degrees.  Any parts of you that weren’t being compressed into diamond would melt, or wisp away into the broiling clouds.

The high temperature means there’s plenty of energy available for chemical reactions, so molecules can adopt their most stable configurations even if there is a high “activation barrier.” 

An activation barrier is like a wall that separates a thing from what it wants.  Maybe you’d like to eat breakfast but dread the thought of leaving your warm bed – that’s an activation barrier, too.  We could make the activation barrier lower by yanking your blankets off, which makes your current circumstance worse.  Or we could increase your odds of overcoming the activation barrier by pumping you full of caffeine.  With more jittery energy, maybe you’d get up on your own. 

The second strategy – caffeine! – is roughly what happens when you raise the temperature of a chemical reaction.  Carbon is very stable once it becomes a diamond, but it’s difficult for methane to slough off the warm security of all those bonds to hydrogen atoms.

After methane on Neptune is compressed to form a diamond, the diamond will fall.  A diamond is more dense than the air around it.  But the diamond won’t hit the ground like hail, because there’s no ground beneath the hot dense sky of Neptune.  Instead the rocky core seems to be covered by a superheated ocean – well above its boiling point, but still not evaporating because the liquid is kept in place by dense clouds.  Roughly the same way an Instant Pot uses high pressure to cook food in superheated water.

When the diamonds splash into this ocean, they melt.

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In class that day, I hadn’t yet researched Neptune’s atmosphere. I was mostly scribbling crude schematics of crystal structures. I explained how to read a phase diagram.  We talked about diamond mining and the technology used to create synthetics.

I claimed, incorrectly, that diamonds weren’t likely to fall from the sky.

One of the guys shook his head.

“I mean, yeah, that sounds all smart and all, but I swear I heard this thing about diamond rain.  Can you look it up before next week?”

The guys in jail can pay to use iPads – at a rate of five or ten cents per minute – but they have very limited access to the Internet.  There’s one un-blocked application with some scientific lectures, but that’s very different from being allowed to learn what you want.

So I agreed.  It sounded ridiculous to me, but I jotted “SKY DIAMONDS?” and promised to do some research.

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The next week, I was ready to deliver my big mea culpa.  But when I got there, we were missing one of the guys who’d been invested in our discussion.  I asked about him.

“Yeah, he’s not coming back,” said the guy sitting next to me.  “Somebody said he was a cho-mo.”

“Oh,” I said, grimacing.  “He went to seg?”

“Yeah,” said the guy, nodding. We left unsaid that this man probably got the shit kicked out of him first.  If somebody convincingly claims that you’re locked up on a child molestation case, bad things happen.  In prison, you might get murdered by a gang looking to bolster their reputation – because child molesters have such a toxic reputation, there are less likely to be reprisals.  And even a county jail can be a violent place.

After the first fight, the guy who got beaten up will usually choose to go to seg.  Segregation, or solitary confinement, is known to cause permanent brain damage – people suffer from depression, anxiety, and hallucinations.  But staying in a cell block with thirty people who want to kick the shit out of you is likely to lead to brain damage, too.

Solitary confinement might be the less bad of two terrible options.

Despite his bias, the guy I was talking to offered a little sympathy.

“It’s rough,” he said.  “But them’s the politics of the place.”

On currency

On currency

The value of money is a useful fiction.

As with most fictions, the story that we tell about money helps some people more than others. 

Money, in and of itself, is useless.  Gold, cowry shells, slips of paper with pictures of dead presidents.  The story makes us want these things.  We tell ourselves that these items can “hold value.”  Instead of lumbering about with all the goods we want to barter, we can carry a small purse of coins.  As long as everyone believes the same fiction, we can trade our apples for some coins, then later use those coins to pay someone to help us dig a well.

The story that money has value is most helpful for the people who already have money.

If everyone suddenly woke up from the story, and decided that coins were worthless, the people who grow apples would be okay.  In some ways, it’s less practical to pay people with apples – coins don’t bruise or rot – but it can be done.  Similarly, the people who dig wells would be okay. 

But the people who owned coins would be worse off – previously, the things they owned could be traded for other, inherently useful goods.  And people who had made loans would be much worse off – they would have given away money at a time when it could be used to buy things, and when they receive the coins back, they’ll be worthless.  No recompense for past sacrifice – only loss.

So people with current wealth benefit most from the fiction that money has value.

This is, as far as I can tell, the only real virtue of Bitcoins.  This form of currency is not anonymous – indeed, it works through the use of “blockchains,” a permanent ledger that records everyone who has ever owned a particular piece of money.  Bitcoins are a little like dollar bills where you have to sign your name on it in order to spend it.  And they’re excruciatingly bad for the environment – it takes energy to mint a real-world, metal coin, but nothing like the amount of energy that’s constantly wasted in order to verify the ledgers of who owns which Bitcoin.  Ownership is determined by vote, and the system was designed to be intentionally inefficient so that it’s difficult for one person to overwhelm the system and claim ownership of everybody’s coins.  And it’s unstable – it’s difficult for someone to outvote the system and take control, but not impossible.

Those all seem like bad features.  But Bitcoins are now incredibly valuable – in the years since I explained all these flaws to a high school runner who’d begun investing in Bitcoins, his $500 investment has burgeoned to be worth $24,000.

The only “good” feature of Bitcoins is that the system is designed to reward past wealth.  The total money supply approaches an asymptote – new Bitcoins are added to the system more slowly over time.  If the currency is successful, this will impose a deflationary pressure on prices.  Today, a certain amount of heroin might cost 0.1 Bitcoin – in the future, that same amount of heroin might cost 0.01 Bitcoin.

This deflationary pressure would cause the value of current holdings to increase.  By simply buying Bitcoins and hoarding them, you’d gain wealth! 

But this only works for as long as people keep believing the fiction that Bitcoins have value.  And the more people who buy and hold Bitcoins, as opposed to actively using them as currency, the less believable the story will be.  Anyone who “invests” in Bitcoins is wagering that other people will behave in a way that maintains the fiction, even though the person who is making the wager is actively undermining the story.

When we immerse ourselves in stories, we often need to temporarily suspend our disbelieve, but that particular set of mental gymnastics is too twisty for my mind.

Modern money barely exists.  Before, we spun stories about the value of coins – now, the fiction lends value to certain strings of numbers.  In addition to the Federal Reserve, any bank can create money by making a loan and claiming that a certain amount of currency has been added to one account or another.

This has allowed our fictions to become more intricate.  In 2008, the banking crisis threatened to make wealthy people much less wealthy – they had purchased certain financial assets that seemed valuable, and then these assets turned out to be worthless. 

It’s as though there was a certain new Magic card that everyone assumed was great, and a few rich kids bought all the copies of it, but then people finally read the card and realized it was terrible.  Now these rich kids are holding hundreds of copies of a worthless piece of cardboard.

This would be sad for those rich kids.  But, lo and behold, it was fixable!  If everyone can be forced to believe, again, that the item has value, then it will.  The story needs to be chanted more loudly.  If I paid $50 for this card last week, then it’s still worth at least $50!

That’s what “quantitative easing” was – governments around the world agreed to buy worthless items in order to convince everyone that these items had value.  This way, the wealthy people who had initially bought them wouldn’t have to suffer.

In the years since I’ve been teaching in our local county jail, I’ve struggled to comprehend the disparities between the way we treat poor people and wealthy people who made mistakes.

For instance, stock traders stole $60 billion from state governments across Europe – the trick was to have two people both temporarily own the stock around tax time, then they lie to the government and claim that they both had to pay taxes on it.  Only one set of taxes were actually paid, but they lie and claim two rebates.  Money from nothing!

From David Segal’s New York Times article:

A lawyer who worked at the firm Dr. Berger founded in 2010, and who under German law can’t be identified by the news media, described for the Bonn court a memorable meeting at the office.

Sensitive types, Dr. Berger told his underlings that day, should find other jobs.

“Whoever has a problem with the fact that because of our work there are fewer kindergartens being built,” Dr. Berger reportedly said, “here’s the door.”

They stole billions of dollars, and the question at stake isn’t whether they will be punished, but whether they can be forced to return any of the money. 

By way of contrast, many of the guys in jail are there for stealing $10 or so.  A guy did five months for attempting to use my HSA card to buy two sandwiches and a pack of cigarettes.  Another violated probation when he stole a lemonade – “In my defense,” he told me, “I didn’t even mean to steal it, I was just really fucking high at the time.”

Two weeks ago, a dentist visited the jail during my class.  I go in from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 – at about 4:15, a guard came to the door and barked somebody’s name.

“Med call?” somebody asked.

“Shakedown?” asked another.

The guard looked at the sheet of paper in his hand, then said “Dentist.”  And suddenly six guys started clamoring, “You got time for extras?  I gotta get on that list!” 

The man whose name had been called jumped out of his chair and sauntered to the door.

After he’d left, the guys explained the system.  “You can get dental, like real dental, but you have to put your name on the list and they only come like every five, six months.  So there’s no hope unless you’re gonna be here for a while.  And it’s kinda expensive, you pay like fifty for the visit and another ten for each tooth they pull.”

Apparently that’s the only service – pulling teeth.

“They do good work,” said the older man next to me, “I got these bottom two done here.”  And he tilted his head back and opened his mouth.  But I grew up wealthy – it’s hard for me to assess quality by eyeballing the blank gap between somebody’s teeth.

About twenty minutes later, the guy came back.

“Which ones you have them do?” somebody asked him.

“I had ‘em get these bottom three,” he said, although his voice was slurry because they’d loaded his mouth with novacaine.

“You idiot!  You didn’t have them get the top one?”

“No, man, that’s my smile!  Gonna find a way to save that tooth.”

“Man, see, how come I couldn’t be on that list?  I would’ve had ‘em pull a whole bunch of ‘em out.  Wouldn’t give ‘em no that’s my smile bullshit.”

As it happens, I’d gone in for a cleaning at my dentist just the day before.  And I’ve had braces.  Invisalign.  I suddenly felt rather self-conscious about my own perfectly clean, perfectly straight, perfectly intact teeth.

“So who was it, that lady doctor?”

“Naw, was the Black guy.”

“What?  Fuck’s it matter that he’s Black?”

“Nobody said it matters, it’s just, there’s three dentists, there’s the lady doctor, the Black guy, and then that other guy.  There’s just three, is all.”

“Oh.”

Our man was out eighty dollars after the visit.  Could’ve spent ninety, but he was holding out hope for that last one.  And they didn’t let him keep the teeth. 

I’m not sure the tooth fairy ever visits the county jail, anyway.

On dealing.

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 the sacred.

On the sacred.

In jail, we were discussing isolation when somebody mentioned the plummeting price of marijuana.  We’d read a quote from quantum physicist Richard Feynman about sensory deprivation:

I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that.  Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.  But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.

The guys asked me when these experiments had happened. 

“Late 1950s, early 60s,” I told them.

“Man, marijuana must have been so expensive then!  Just in the last few years, the prices fell so hard.  Like now you can get five pounds for fifteen hundred bucks.”

I was shaking my head.  “Five pounds?  The most I ever bought at once was half an ounce, back when I lived in California.  Even then, I think I paid two hundred for it.”

“Two hundred dollars?  You got ripped off!”

I laughed.  “Yeah, but I probably deserved it.”

“Let me tell you,” the guy sitting next to me said, “next time you see me on the streets, I could hook you up with some good stuff.”

I demurred.  “I haven’t smoked in so long, you could probably sell me a baggie of oregano, I’d hardly know the difference.”

The guy’s face fell.  The room grew silent.  Until somebody shouted, “Oregano?  He just called you a major asshole!”

I felt pretty bad.  I’d really hurt his feelings.

#

As it happens, this guy – the one whose feelings I’d hurt – is in jail for robbing me.

Unsuccessfully.  Possibly by accident.  But still.

There was a dropped wallet.  His attempt to use my family’s Health Savings Account debit card to buy two sandwiches and a pack of cigarettes.  Some yelling at whomever was working the counter at Village Pantry when the card wouldn’t go through.  Then an arrest.

That whole episode transpired almost three years ago.  But I didn’t learn who it was until last month, when the prosecutor sent a letter to us asking for a victim statement.

The guy has been in my class several times before.  I like him – he reminds me of an old friend of mine, enthusiastically participates in our classes, and always bikes over to say “hi” when I see him on the street.  Apparently they’d put him on probation after the debit card incident, but now, after another slip up, they’re trying to slap him with all his backup time.

#

Everybody in class laughed when I told him he was there for robbing me.  He said he hadn’t known whose card it was.  I shrugged and asked him to write an apology to my spouse.  Then we sent letters to his prosecutor and the judge, asking for leniency.

Money isn’t sacred.

Photo by Todd Huffman on Flickr.

I’ve heard guys tell stories about taking money from each other.  The story might end with somebody getting punched in the face, but there aren’t hard feelings.  Money comes and money goes.  It’s just paper.  Or less: numbers inside a machine.

That HSA account only has money in it through a fiction agreed upon by my family, the pharmacy, and the bank.  We scan a card and the value of our account goes down.  Nothing physically happens.

Financial trickery seems so hollow compared to sandwiches or cigarettes.

#

But passing off drugs as something they’re not?  That violates something sacred.  Inside the jail, people’s possessions are stripped away – all they have left are their reputations.

You don’t have to be honest all the time.  You can embellish stories about cops you’ve evaded, people you’ve slept with, money that’s slipped through your fingers.  That’s all harmless talk.  Passing the time, shooting the shit.

If you’re there for hitting a girlfriend, you can say you failed a drug test.  Or admit you’re in for domestic, but say that you didn’t do it.  For the sake of your future, maybe it’s best you tell an alternate story often to believe it.

When you’re talking about drugs, though, people can get hurt.  If you say it’s dope, it’d better be dope.  Not pot dipped in embalming fluid.  Not heroin spiked with fentanyl.

I won’t tell another joke about oregano.

Indeed, the guy who’s in jail for trying to use our HSA card isn’t too upset about most of his charges.  But one really rankles him:

“Do you remember that time, summer of that ‘Occupy Bloomington’ thing, when all those people kept going to the hospital cause they were ODing on bad spice?  The cops tried to pin that whole thing on me!  They put my picture on Fox News.  I was so fucking pissed!  I’ve done some stuff, but I didn’t do none of that.”

On white supremacist vegetables and watchful eyes.

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.

Image from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

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 writing.

On writing.

At high doses, psilocybin mushrooms trigger transcendent, mystical experiences.  Many researchers are incorporating these into treatments for PTSD, depression, and other maladies that stem from a crisis of meaning or identity.

There are challenges inherent in using medicines that disrupt the workings of a person’s consciousness.  William Richards, who conducts psychedelic therapy at Johns Hopkins, writes in Sacred Knowledge that participants in his studies have felt their sense of self temporarily dissolve after a dose of psilocybin.

Most commonly, the term “death” is employed as the ego (everyday self) feels that it quite literally is dying. 

Though one may have read that others have reported subsequent immersion in the eternal and experiences of being reborn and returning to everyday existence afterward, in the moment imminence of death may feel acutely – and for some terrifyingly – real.

Because this sensation is so frightening, most researchers recommend a trip-sitter – in Richards’s words, “having someone present who one honestly can choose to trust without reservation.  The attitude ‘I can manage on my own and don’t really need anyone else’ clearly can be very counterproductive in some high-dose sessions when the ‘I’ needs to totally relinquish control.”

At times, an arrogant attitude of self-reliance is unhelpful.  It is also, unsurprisingly, the attitude with which I approached nearly all aspects of my life.  I’m an athlete, an academic, usually in full command of my own mind and body.  I mostly work alone (although I’m very grateful that my spouse helps me run this website). 

Why wouldn’t I do my own psychotherapy?

I tried psilocybin mushrooms during graduate school.  Shortly after we met, the person who is now my spouse asked if we could visit her sibling in Portland for her birthday.  We left Stanford at 7 p.m. on a Friday, then drove north through the night.  We arrived at about dawn on Saturday morning, collapsed, and slept until noon. 

We were visiting a punk house, it seemed, where the bulk of the rent was paid by one person’s trust fund, with others occasionally chipping in money from various odd jobs (there was a nearby sporting event during the second day of our visit, and one of the housemates put on an official-looking reflective vest and charged people to illegally park in an abandoned lot down the street).  A dozen misshapen mattresses were strewn about the skunky-smelling attic; I picked the second-least stained to sleep on.

On Saturday night, for the birthday celebration, our hosts threw a party.  Several bands played – it was the sort of event where the scrawny white weed dealer’s terrible hip-hop group (bass, drums, and the dealer on the mic) was allowed to play a set.  The others were mostly metal bands.

One of the housemates (the faux-parking attendant, as it happens) brewed a large mason jar of psilocybin tea.  As he was gamboling about the house, we crossed paths and he proffered the nearly empty jar: “Hey, man, you want these dregs?”

I shrugged and drank it.

“Whoa,” he said.

“What?”

“Just, that was a lot of dregs.”

Which, honestly, was not the best moment to be warned. I’d already drank it. I obviously couldn’t do anything about it then.

Richards and other medical professionals involved in psychedelics research would find it unsurprising that the tenor of the evening turned intensely spiritual for me.  Ken Kesey and other psychonauts would find it unsurprising that the goings on seemed exceedingly trippy, as well.  I sat on a couch in front of the bands’ performance area and watched as a singer seemed to smear her face across the microphone; soon I saw her with three mouths, the two in her neck relegated to singing harmony.

I felt intense paranoia; as I waited in line for a bathroom, people nearby seemed to be snickering at me.  Of course, snickers often follow in my wake at parties – my behavior can be outlandish – and I might’ve been making goofy facial expressions.

I understood only snippets of conversation.  A squinty-eyed Thor-looking blonde man named Hyacinth was saying, “I always wanted to get with a Gemini, and then, bam, last winter, I met this older lady with these, like, enormous eyes, and I was like, whoa, and wouldn’t you know it, bam, she’s a Gemini!” 

(I later learned that he worked as an, ahem, “intimate massage therapist,” or “hired companion,” that sort of thing.  He also cornered me and spent thirty minutes explaining his take on quantum mechanics.  His version involved a lot of positive energy radiating from crystals.  The abundance of positive energy in his own life is part of what brought him together with that Gemini, it seems. The waning disorientation from psilocybin left me totally unable to extricate myself from the conversation.)

And, as per Richards’s expectations, I felt myself losing a fundamental component of my identity.  I temporarily forgot how to speak. Then felt as though I was losing all ability to translate my thoughts into external action. 

Perhaps I should’ve noticed that I was still passively influencing my surroundings – nobody else could stand where I was standing, and Hyacinth wouldn’t have stood there simply lecturing the air – but the flickering of my short term memory caused these examples to slip away from me.  I felt like a ghost, and the sensation terrified me.

But I was lucky.  Even at parties (to be perfectly honest, especially at loud parties), I carry a pencil and paper.  That way, I can draw horrible cartoons. Sometimes I try to use these to communicate.

It should come as no surprise that I make few friends at parties.

I found a secluded corner of the party and began to write.  And then, minutes later, when I felt another wave of loss of self pass over me, I was able look at the sheet of paper in my hand and see. I wrote that.  I did change the world.  I am changing it. 

I was able to regain a sense of object permanence, despite the ego-erasing effects of psilocybin. If I were a ghost, my marks would wisp from the page like so much abluvion. But here they are.

Because I can still communicate with the outside world, I still am.

In all, the experience was probably good for me.  Someday I could write about why.  But for now, I’d simply like to stress that, in that moment, writing saved me.  Writing kept me anchored and tamped down the terror sufficiently that I could accept whatever was happening inside my brain.  (Indeed, one of the things I wrote that night was, “Without this paper, I’d wander the streets, wake tomorrow in a gutter with a rat gnawing on my eyeball.”)

And I’ve seen the way that writing has saved other people, too.  When people fear that they’re turning into ghosts – cut off from the outside world, unable to reach their friends and families – even severely dyslexic men will start sending letters.

Being held in jail can dissolve a person’s sense of self just as surely as psilocybin mushrooms.

Each week, I bring in another dozen pencils.  I occasionally wondered what was happening to the pencils, whether they accumulated like Lincoln Logs in the block.  But I kept bringing more because we need a way to write during our class. And I’d let the guys keep them. So much has been taken from these men that I couldn’t bear to ask for the pencils back.

Eventually, somebody told me.  “Oh, yeah, my bunkie, he writes a lot at night, he always sharpens like a dozen pencils before lockdown.”

The men in jail aren’t allowed to have pens.  They can’t have mechanical pencils.  And they don’t have sharpeners in their cells.

At night … or if there’s a disciplinary infraction … or if the jail is understaffed … the men are locked into their little cells.  Unless they sharpen pencils beforehand, they cannot write.  Each broken tip brings an inmate that much closer to enforced silence, unable to communicate with the outside world.

Recently, people have been forming a big line at the pencil sharpener whenever I teach class.  I slowly pass out the poems that we’ll read that week, then pass out pencils, then pass out paper, then sit and wait. The waiting takes a while.  Guys come with twenty or thirty pencils bristling from the shirt pocket of their orange scrubs, then stand and sharpen all of them.  A dozen men, sharpening perhaps twenty pencils each.

At the table, they mention trades they’ve made.  Losses, due to theft: “At the beginning of the week I had fifteen pencils; now I’m down to three.”  They exhort me to bring more.  I say I’ll do my best.

“There’s only one pencil sharpener in the block, and it’s been broken for three months.  It’s like that one, a wall mount.  The gears are all screwed up.  The handle was broken off, but you could sort of still use it then.  But now, anybody who doesn’t get to come to your class can’t sharpen any.”

“I’m sharpening some for my bunkie,” yells the guy currently cranking the handle.  A few of the others nod; they’ll also sharpen some for charity.

Image by emdot on Flickr.

Twenty … thirty … maybe forty sharpened graphite tips.  While those last, the guys will be able to write.  Time will pass, but they’ll be able to prove to themselves, and to the outside world, that they really do exist.

With luck, those sharpened pencils will last all week.

On bowerbirds, process, and happiness.

On bowerbirds, process, and happiness.

We recently read Donika Kelly’s “Bower” in jail. 

I love this poem.  There’s a undercurrent of darkness as the bird constructs his pleasure dome. “Here, the iron smell of blood.”  But he is undeterred.  “And there, the bowerbird.  Watch as he manicures his lawn.”

This bowerbird has themed his edifice around sparkling bits of blue.  Bower birds incorporate all manner of found objects: berries, beetles (which must be repeatedly returned to their places as they attempt to crawl away), plastic scraps.  A bowerbird has a clear vision, a dream of which colors will go where, and scours the forest to find the treasures he needs.

Will high-contrast white in front of the brown bower bedazzle guests? Our artist can only hope. Image by davidfntau on Flickr.

Female bowerbirds raise children alone, so she doesn’t need a helpful partner..  Instead, she’ll choose someone who can show her a good time.  And her pleasure will be enhanced by a beautiful dome, a splendid arch beneath which several seconds of intercourse can transpire.

A mother-to-be typically visits several bowers before choosing her favorite.  During each inspection, the male will hop and flutter during her evaluation … and then slump, dejected, if she flies away.

Kelly closes her poem with the experience of a crestfallen artist: “And then, / how the female finds him, / lacking.  All that blue for nothing.”

I especially love the wry irony of that final sentence.  We create art hoping to be fawned over; it’d feel nice to know that readers enjoyed a poem so much that they responded with a flush of desire for the author. 

But this is rare.  No piece of writing will appeal to all readers; an author is lucky if it appeals to any.  The same holds true for painting, music, and bowers.  A bowerbird hopes that his magnificent edifice will soon be the site of his acrobatic, if brief, bouts of copulation.  But his life will miserable if he can’t also take pleasure in the sheer act of creation. 

Female tropical birds are free to select whichever male they want.  Their flirtations are unlikely to be turned down.  And because each intimate encounter is vanishingly brief, a single male might service every female in an area.  The other males, having assembled less glorious bowers, will die without ever experiencing erotic delights.

And so a bowerbird needs to enjoy his own arch.  To endure, to thole, even if no one wants to fool around with him.  Even if no one looks.  He needs to feel pleasure as he assembles those beautiful hues.  Every visiting female might quickly fly away, but all that blue will have served a purpose.

I love the poem “Bower,” but I also hope that Kelly enjoyed writing her poem enough that my opinion doesn’t matter.

After reading “Bower,” our class got sidetracked into a wide-ranging conversation about birds.  At first, we did talk about bowerbirds.  Most of the guys had no idea that birds like that existed – that an animal might make art – but one guy had seen a television show about them years ago, and the program made such a deep impression on him that he still remembered much of it.  “They really do,” he said.  “I’ve seen it.  And they showed the people nearby, somebody who was eating breakfast cereal with like a plastic spoon, and this bird flew right over and took it.  Later they found bits of it all broken up, in this weird ring around the bird’s nest.”

And then this man started talking about crows.

He gesticulated profusely as he talked, which was rather distracting.  One of his hands had about 1.3 fingers; his ring finger was missing entirely, and the others, including his thumb, ended after the first knuckle.  I wouldn’t have felt so puzzled – stuff happens, after all – except that one of his stories involved chasing somebody with a steak knife, and this was the hand he brandished.

Many of the people in jail have suffered severe physical injuries.  When we were discussing personality manipulation and mind control, someone told me that he’d been hit by a truck and that everything in his life had felt flat and emotionless ever since.  He showed me the thick scar at the top of his head: “When it happened, I guess I was out for almost a week, and it took another month before I really remembered my name.  Even then, for that first year I felt like I was back in eighth grade again.”  He was twenty-something when it happened.

Another time, I asked a man if he wanted to read the next poem and he said he couldn’t, that he was disabled, then thumped his leg onto the table.  He had a rounded stump where most people’s foot would be.  I didn’t quite see the connection between his injury and the poem, and it’s not as though we ever force people to read.  We have a lot of guys with dyslexia, and I go in with the goal of making their Fridays a little more pleasant; no reason for somebody to suffer unnecessarily.

“I was working in a saw mill,” he said.  “Planer caught me and, zzooomp.  Didn’t even feel anything, at first.”

He got a legal settlement – a few guys muttered that they’d trade a foot for that kind of money – but his pain script led to more opiates and eventually the money was gone and he was in jail and the only help he was getting was from a PD.

But, right, back to the man gesticulating wildly as he talked about birds.  “Real smart animals,” he said.  “Especially crows.”

I nodded.  Crows can use tools – they’ll craft hooks out of wire, cut twigs into the length they need for various tasks.  Their brains are structured differently from primates’, which lets them cram just as many neurons into a much smaller volume. 

Photo by Natalie Uomini on Flickr.

The guy went on: “See, I was living in a tent, and cops kept coming by, harassing me.  Cause there’d always be all this trash on the ground.  They’d say, ‘look, we know that you’re sleeping here, but you can’t just leave all this shit everywhere.’  And they’d make me clean it up.  I’d do it, but then a day or two later, there’d be trash scattered everywhere again.  I thought it must be some homeless guys or something that was doing it.”

“But it turned out these crows – they knew I was drinking, that I’d never be up before about noon – and they were raiding the dumpster out behind McDonalds.  I only found out because I actually woke up one morning to piss.  And I looked up and these crows in the tree above me, they carried tied-off garbage bags way up into that tree and were tearing them apart, looking for things to eat.  And that’s how all that trash was getting everywhere.  I’d thought it was homeless guys, and it was crows!”

Male bowerbirds can afford to be such terrible parents because they live in tropical forests where there’s an abundance of food to eat.  Crows, though, need ingenuity to survive.  Sometimes they pick apart the leavings of hairless apes below.

Because crows raise their young in much harsher environs than bowerbirds, males contribute more than just DNA.  While a mother roosts, the father will gather food.  And so he’ll try to impress a potential mate, beforehand, with his gathering prowess.  He won’t build, paint, or compose poetry, but he’ll scour the land below for tasty treats and shiny things, then leave these gifts at his beloved’s feet.

As with bowerbirds, some crows are helpful without reaping the benefits of a dalliance.  When a female crow begins to build a nest, five other crows might bring sticks and twigs.  These five won’t all be rewarded with the chance to sire her young.

With luck, the crows enjoy the sheer act of helping. 

Neither birds nor humans will be lauded for everything we do.  If we measure success based solely upon the rewards we reap, many of our lives will feel bleak.  In a world full of pyramids – bowerbird mating, corporate finance, the attention economy of social media – not everyone can be at the top.

No matter the outcome, we can all feel fulfilled if we focus on the process of what we’re doing. 

Admittedly, it’s hard to find the zen in a lot of the shitty jobs out there in the world.  But I did enjoy typing this essay.  And I will try to enjoy the irritating parts of parenting today.  Someday, my children will learn to ask for cereal politely.