Jeff Mock: “The God of Simple Vision”

Aug30

It’s not easy to write a poem critiquing fundamentalism without falling into the same black-and-white thinking as one’s opponents, only with heroes and villains reversed. Outrage, however righteous, can work at cross-purposes to the subtler techniques that give a good poem its depth. Complexity and ambiguity leave room for the reader to inhabit the poem, and give her a reason to reread it. On the other hand, there are times when a loud, clear voice is the only way to do justice to a serious topic.

This poem by Jeff Mock, a creative writing professor at Southern Connecticut State University, skillfully navigates these pitfalls. Rather than presenting a counter-polemic, he redescribes the Christian conservatives’ triumphalism as a tragedy, where repression of the unfamiliar and inexplicable makes them blind to the very thing they seek. It originally appeared in LocusPoint, in a group of his “god/goddess of…” poems that I encourage you to read, and is reprinted with his permission.

THE GOD OF SIMPLE VISION

Complexity blurs the silhouettes of everything,
Even on a grand scale: you may, from a distance,

Mistake a sassafras leaf for all
Of North America. You may mistake it
For the mashed peas your mother served you

Before you knew right from wrong.
You may mistake it for the guard who all night

Paces the watchtower and scans
The borderlands. One man’s stranger
Is another man’s threat. Some

Unlucky victims, it’s true, are more
Unlucky than others. And while Heaven does not

Belong in the realm of politics, you may mistake
A sunflower for your Lord Jesus Christ
Walking, arms outstretched, toward you through

The Electoral College and perfumed gardens
Of America. It is simple, really: nothing

Outside is inside. You may not be of two
Minds, not when just a modicum
Of grade-school theology will direct

Your every step to the midway where you’ll find
The con artists and carnival tricks

And moral flag-waving, the lurching
Haze. Every stranger is a shadow
On your heart. Subtract charity and you all

Come to your Lord less than equal—
You are separate. Across the gulf of difference,

The grief of other victims is authentic
And utterly strange. Their grief cannot
Touch you, nor their love. So love gives out

And is merely a funeral without a body,
Which you may well mistake for a miracle.

“Julian’s Yearbook” Published in Chapter One Promotions Anthology

Aug21

Back in 2008, I was excited to learn that my short story “Julian’s Yearbook”, featuring the protagonist of my endless novel, had won the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. You can read the first page here. Four years later, the long-awaited prizewinners’ anthology is now available for purchase. Titled Infinite, it features an evocative cover photo that complements my tale of a young man’s yearning for freedom and intimate connection.

Order a copy by mail using this form, or online here (more convenient for readers outside the UK).

Winners of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Program Awards

Aug16

The PEN American Center, a literary organization with a human rights focus, sponsors writing programs in U.S. prisons and gives annual awards for the best submissions of poetry and prose by incarcerated writers. This year’s winners were posted on their website in July. Here are some highlights of my reading so far.

Christopher Myers’s second-prize poem “Tell Me the Story Again About the Frogs and the Seeds” is a poignant and hopeful message from a father to his young son about the future springtime when he will be released.

In Ezekiel Caliguiri’s gorgeously written first-prize memoir “The Last Visit from the Girl in the Willow Tree”, the girl he loved as a teenager remains in his heart as a radiant image, like Dante’s Beatrice–a bittersweet reminder of the life he could have had, if he hadn’t yielded to fatalism and the desire to appear tough.

Atif Rafay’s first-prize scholarly essay “Bleak Housing & Black Americans” indicts American prison policy as a disguised return to segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, and asks why our prison system is more brutal and ugly than either crime-prevention or fair punishment require. Because racism is irrational and covert, rational appeals for reform have a limited impact. In addition, he argues, “The argument from racial disparity ultimately scants the crucial point: present policies are wrong because they are destructively harsh…An argument that invites human beings to regard themselves as part of a ‘race’ and to think of compassion for the Other rather than to think of justice for all will ineluctably break any promise it might seem to hold out.”

Leonard Scovens’s honorable mention memoir “How I Became My Father” takes us inside the struggles of a fatherless young black man seeking male role models. “You grow up without a dad and you dream his ghost into a god. When Luke [Skywalker]’s phantom god was smashed and broken across Vader’s confession, he lost his grip. If Vader was his father, what did it mean for his fate? The sins of the father, after all, are visited upon the son.”

To Dream the Ecclesial Dream: Making Demands on the Liberal Church

Aug7

We yearn to have companions
who travel by our side,
strong friends to call and answer
with whom we are allied…

These words from Dosia Carlson’s contemporary hymn “We yearn, O Christ, for wholeness” (sung to the tune of “O Sacred Head”) keep running through my mind as I contemplate my feelings of alienation within the church. We’ve had a good debate on this blog about the shortcomings I perceive in the conservative Christian approach to religious knowledge. But I felt exhausted and alone after this discussion, and so many others like it, whenever I’ve tried to widen the lens beyond the usual proof-text battles over homosexuality. Are Christian progressives and postmodernists failing to step up to the challenge of advancing religious philosophy of knowledge beyond the tired old rationalist/supernaturalist debates of the 19th century? What would make the liberal church a radical church?

Beyond “Inclusion”

The liberal churches’ pastoral response to marginalized groups has been stronger than their theological response. The Episcopal Church, for instance, has shown leadership in appointing women clergy at all levels of authority, and in rolling back discrimination against GLBT clergy and laypeople. But apart from rebutting traditionalists’ interpretation of certain Bible verses to the contrary (“women keep silent in churches” and the like), we haven’t developed a positive Scripture-based ethic to replace conservative sexual mores.

To begin with, the concept of “inclusion” can’t bear all the weight we place on it. Postmodernist gadfly Stanley Fish, a professor of law and literature, has written many books urging progressives to flesh out their substantive values and proclaim them fearlessly, rather than hiding behind procedural values that give the false appearance of neutrality. “Inclusion” is one of his favorite targets. Every community has boundaries, implicit or explicit, to exclude those values and behaviors that the community simply cannot tolerate without jeopardizing its reason for existence. When we dodge conflict by pretending that there are no boundaries, we are also evading the accountability of a communal discussion about where those boundaries should be.

With respect to the status of GLBT Christians, the liberal church would welcome them unconditionally, while the conservative church would say that they have to acknowledge and work on correcting their sinful tendencies in order to be members in good standing. But why do we disagree?

Is it because we can explain why gender nonconformity and same-sex intercourse are not sinful according to Scripture? If so, have we articulated principles of responsible interpretation, so that our departure from the apparent meaning of other Biblical proscriptions does not degenerate into a free-for-all?

Is it because we don’t consider Scripture authoritative, or at least not more authoritative than reason and experience? The same question applies, as well as the question of whether we have made our religion irrelevant.

Or do we take the lazy way out and invoke “inclusion”? Here is where it gets knotty. Because there must be–there should be–some instances where the liberal church would put moral conditions on inclusion. Pedophiles, sexual harassers, “johns” who purchase exploited and trafficked women, perpetrators of domestic violence, maybe even adulterers. Economic exploitation could also come in for criticism if the rights and wrongs of the situation are clear enough (e.g. sweatshop labor, human trafficking).

I don’t mean that these people would always be banned from church or denied communion, though that might also be necessary. But at the very least, the church would publicly deem those behaviors unacceptable, and press sinners to repent and reform. (When was the last time you heard the word “sin” in your liberal church? Just asking.)

As it is, we flip back and forth between the rationales that “Jesus welcomed everybody” and “Jesus didn’t condemn homosexuality” as if they were the same. They aren’t. Jesus didn’t actually welcome everybody. He called some behaviors sinful, and he said that some sins were serious enough to be incompatible with the kingdom of Heaven. Whether we understand that as a statement about the afterlife, or about the kind of society he wants us to create here and now, the point is that our concepts of inclusion and tolerance owe more to Enlightenment philosophy than to the Bible.

Another, theologically more important, pitfall of the inclusion paradigm is that it keeps the church’s power in the hands of the human heterosexual majority rather than conceding it to God. It shouldn’t be about whether we are convinced to let gays into “our” church. It’s about universal access to the Holy Spirit. It’s about humbling ourselves and problematizing our privileges so that we learn to view any type of group-based domination as a historical accident rather than a divine right.

We need this level of spiritual formation in the liberal church. Jesus calls us to rethink the worldly understanding of power. We don’t foreground this issue enough, except in generalized anti-war sermons and charitable appeals. It should be brought into our personal lives as well.

Inclusion is an important concept, but it’s not the whole of our faith, and it doesn’t solve every problem.

Sex After Patriarchy

Monogamous love matches between consenting adults represent our modern ideal of marriage, but this norm doesn’t come from the Bible, and in fact you have to look hard to find examples. In addition, the diverse marriage patterns approved or uncritically represented in the Bible include several that we’d recognize as oppressive today: e.g. a woman forced to marry her rapist, a widow forced to marry her brother-in-law, or a male and female slave paired off by their owners. Reports from survivors of polygamous sects suggest that this arrangement also carries an unacceptable risk of exploitation and neglect of women and children.

Apart from opening up modern marriage to same-sex couples, does the liberal church have anything to say about gospel norms for sexuality? As St. Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 10:23, “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.” (See parallel translations here.) The liberal church hasn’t given us any resources for discerning what is helpful. In today’s chaotic and hypersexualized culture, that’s serious neglect of the flock.

For instance, why is monogamy the only Christian option? Would Jesus disapprove of the honestly negotiated open relationships that quite a few married gay male couples enjoy? I really don’t know, and I’ve never been in a church that took the initiative to shape this conversation.

Conservative Christianity focuses on lists of acceptable and forbidden acts, with too little regard for the quality of the relationship within which they occur. Husband’s penis in wife’s vagina is presumptively God-approved. Anything else needs a special permit. Once we reject this legalism, though, how do we assess that relationship? Does sex have to be tender and egalitarian? What about role-playing and BDSM? Married, LTR, or one-night stand?

We are long overdue for a discussion about the qualities of character that Jesus wants us to cultivate, and how our sexual habits can build up or damage that character. The late Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” uses specificially Christian concepts like Incarnation and Trinity to depict an ideal sexuality that integrates body, mind, and spirit. Despite th
e Catholic Church’s problematic assumptions about gender and sexual orientation, we can learn a lot from this project.

The liberal church is still reacting so hard against sexist and homophobic stigma that we are afraid to suggest any limits on sexual self-expression. This lapse is not cost-free. It imposes collateral damage on the children of casually formed and dissolved sexual pairings, and on adults who need guidance to recognize that they’re reenacting traumatic patterns.

From Liberal to Liberators

“Why don’t they just leave?”

Outsiders often ask this question about victims of intimate partner violence and adult survivors of child abuse who remain in contact with the abuser. These interrogators need to be educated about the brainwashing, learned helplessness, and fear of losing one’s entire social world when the relationship is terminated. Go now and read a complete explanation on the survivor website Pandora’s Project. I’ll wait.

Liberal Christians are prone to the same insensitivity toward our conservative brothers and sisters. We get angry at women and gays in patriarchal churches for apparently colluding in their own oppression, or we dismiss them as stupid. We flatter ourselves that rape culture and abuse-enabling myths are confined to right-wing institutions, whereas the average Baptist wife and mother looks at the sexual brutality and relationship chaos of modern America and decides, not irrationally, that she is safer in a community where at least some men recognize a duty to protect her and her children. The preachers of patriarchy encourage these fear-based compromises by implying that women who are not modest and submissive are asking to be raped, as last month’s dust-up over Douglas Wilson and Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrated.

Feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans, linked above, and Grace at Are Women Human? wrote thorough refutations of this abuse-enabling theology. But the liberal church, as a whole, hasn’t devoted nearly enough resources to identifying this heresy wherever it appears, and providing compassionate support to conservative Christian women whose own religious leaders are covering up abuse.

When we say “Why don’t you leave?” we are basically asking hundreds of thousands of Christians to join the Witness Protection Program — to turn their backs on their family and friends, the music they love, the culture they know best, the beliefs that carried them through tough times — and become New England Unitarians. There’s a lot of nourishment that conservative churches provide, which we don’t consistently offer.

For instance, members facing serious illness can be comforted by a robust public affirmation of the power of prayer to work miracles. Spouses struggling with temptation to cheat, and teenagers confused by their overpowering new urges, benefit from collective reinforcement of moral standards and the wider time horizon that their faith suggests. Conservatives say that Jesus is alive and actively caring for us, not just a good moral example from history. He bears us up in our weakness and forgives our sins; he doesn’t only command us to share our abundance. Let me tell you, when I’m drowning in anxiety and grief, I need the Lord of the Storm, not a Nobel Peace Prize winner. People in crisis will be loyal to the religion that brings order out of chaos, even at the cost of some personal freedom.

The liberal church’s avoidance of the topic of personal, relational sins (as opposed to economic and collective political ones) can actually make victims feel less safe. “And such a one was I…” The replacement of “Truth” with “true for you” removes the standard against which we can begin to judge our abuser’s behavior. Didn’t she already try to make us believe that reality was whatever she wanted it to be? We survivors need communally agreed-upon facts and moral values, in order to name our secret trauma, hand back the shame, and dethrone the god-like accuser in our head.

We liberal Christians can’t coast forever on the sins we don’t commit. We should become active allies of Christians who are entrapped by a distorted version of our shared faith.

And let it begin with me.

Beyond “Liberal” and “Conservative”: What Kind of Christian Am I?

Jul22

The blogosphere has responded vigorously to Ross Douthat’s recent NY Times editorial, Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved? In the piece, Douthat repeats a familiar conservative argument that mainline church membership is declining because what we offer is too indistinguishable from secular liberal politics. Now, I’m skeptical that doctrine should be put to a popularity contest in this fashion. There are just as many evangelical mega-churches that pander to their congregation with prosperity-gospel preaching and American jingoism, as there are liberal churches that massage the ears of the aging Democrats in the pews. But I have long shared Douthat’s concern that churches lose their unique “value-add” when they downplay the actual living presence of God in human affairs.

An interesting gloss on this editorial comes from Fare Forward, a new journal of arts and religion started by a group of young Dartmouth grads. Taking its title from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Fare Forward appears to have a conservative/orthodox but interdenominational perspective. Andrew Schuman’s sympathetic response to Douthat’s argument includes a definition of liberal Christianity that got me thinking that I don’t fit well in either camp:

…In his response to Douthat’s column, theologian Steve Holmes helpfully clarifies the root of liberal Christianity. His characterization of liberal Christianity, and much of the discussion below, is particularity apt as a description of European liberal theologians, but it does not, perhaps, fully capture the nuances of on-the-ground American liberal Christianity in, say, the civil rights era. Nevertheless, Holmes’ response serves as a useful starting point for discussion. He puts forward two core commitments for liberal Christianity. The first is a dedication to take seriously the challenges coming from modern philosophy, namely Kant’s rejection of knowledge of the noumenal world and the hermeneutical skepticism of Biblical higher criticism – both of which cast serious, if not fatal, doubt upon traditional accounts of God’s revelation in Scripture. The second is a commitment to a new grounding for religion (in the place of revelation) based on Schleiermacher’s “shared human religious experience.”

But here’s the problem: a religious reason founded in human experience, instead of revelation from God, will always struggle to retain its primacy over social identities and agendas. By virtue of its epistemology, such grounding is first concerned with human realities (i.e. social realities), and then divine realities. It is firstly anthropological, then theological. In other words, liberal Christianity will struggle to keep its religious reason for existence central because the core of its approach to faith is based first in self-examination and inference, not examination of the eternal realities of revealed truth.

In his work The Priority of Christ, theologian Fr. Robert Barron places at the center of liberal theology the concern with some “grounding experience deemed to be transcultural” instead of “the stubbornly particular Christ.” This move, for Fr. Barron, necessarily resulted in a lower Christology, in which Jesus is no more than “a symbol for, or exemplification of, a universal religious sensibility.” This low Christology had the ironic effect of reducing theology’s ability to engage with the world. As Fr. Barron puts it:

“It is precisely the epistemic priority of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, that warrants the use of philosophical and cultural tools in the explication and propagation of the faith, since these means come from and lead to that very Word. Because Jesus Christ is the Logos incarnate–and not simply another interesting religious figure among may–signs of his presence and style are to be found everywhere, and he can relate non-conpetitively to them. The paradox is this: the lower the Christology, the more problematic the dialogue with philosophy and other cultural forms becomes; the higher the Christology, the more that conversation is facilitated.”

And so liberal theology, in grounding itself in experience, anthropology, and a symbolic Jesus, empties itself, over time, of the theological resources necessary to dialogue with culture and philosophy, and sustain social reform…

Much to unpack here! “The eternal realities of revealed truth” is the kind of phrase I used to wield until, say, 2008, and that now makes my oppression-detector go “ping”. How humbling. More about that momentarily.

My second reaction was, I guess I’m not a liberal Christian, because I don’t define my difference from the conservatives along the natural/supernatural axis, but rather the diversity/unity axis. The rationalism of liberal Christians has pained me because it invalidates my experiences of God’s revealed presence. At several key moments in my life, I have felt love and wisdom coming to me from outside, in a way that the liberal philosophies summarized in this quote simply cannot accommodate. I also worry that liberal intellectual skeptics in the pulpit discourage needy people from seeking out this life-changing power, and make them ashamed to talk about and believe their experiences of it.

At the same time, the “eternal verities” rhetoric is too often code for a privileged subgroup’s resistance to hearing revelations from the margins. It allows the current priestly class to pretend that the Bible is not a human document produced and interpreted by societies where only certain types of people were allowed to speak.

In theory, as Schuman seems to be saying, the particularity of Christ’s revelation should make Christians more sensitive to cultural diversity, as opposed to an imperialistic liberalism that homogenizes by pretending to be transcultural. (Stanley Fish’s version of this critique of liberalism paved the way for my conversion in the late 1990s…full story coming in the next post in my “40 Years of Book Love” series.) However, at least in America, conservative Christians are not exactly known for their cross-cultural sensitivity. Either the doctrine doesn’t have the effects he’s claiming, or Christians are failing to act on its implications.

Moreover, what is the goal of this dialogue? Is it simply to translate our own “eternal verities” into language that will be more palatable to nonbelievers, so that eventually they believe exactly like us? Or are we also open to changing our beliefs in response to their testimony about what the Spirit has shown them?

I think I must be a postmodernist Christian, neither liberal nor conservative, skeptical of the ahistorical universalizing claims of both “reason” and “Scripture/tradition”. Belief in revelation is what distinguishes me from liberals. Where I part with the conservatives is in my belief that revelation comes from plural sources and evolves over time, and that we must be sensitive to the real-world inequalities embedded in and reinforced by interpreters’ authority.

One last question: is it even coherent, psychologically, to say that a religious belief is “founded in human experience, instead of revelation from God”? How does revelation get into our brains except through someone’s experience? How is this not simply code for “trust the experience of people who lived 2,000 years ago, but not your own”?

This is not a rhetorical question. I really would like to find a non-cynical answer. Readers, your thoughts?

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Prose

Jul19

Continuing my tour through the formative books of my youth, today I’ll talk about the prose writers who guided my middle school and high school years.

Some of these choices may raise some hackles. They certainly did for my teachers. I won’t defend, as an ideal, the horror of weakness that characterizes both Rand and Nietzsche. I didn’t take it uncritically even then. But I also didn’t feel that adults had a lot of credibility to criticize my attempt at psychological survival, if they weren’t going to protect me from the bullying and ostracism that I endured pretty much non-stop from 1st through 10th grade. Smart, lonely, funny-looking teenage girls love Ayn Rand for the same reason that small children are obsessed with superheroes and dinosaurs. Adults who are gratified by innocence, but don’t want to bear the burden of having it themselves, sentimentalize the helplessness of children. But we just want to get out.

Yes, I was mad, and so was my hair.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
My mother read this to me, and I think I’d read it again on my own by the time I was 11 or 12, and at least twice thereafter, most recently this year. Everything I believe about the dignity of the human soul, the importance of speaking truth to power, and the equality of all people before God, is all in there. Jane is the anti-Dickens heroine. Chaste and modest, but fiercely self-possessed, she doesn’t suffer in silence in hopes of melting the abuser’s heart. She survives because she knows she deserves to, and she would rather brave the world on her own than be dependent on someone who doesn’t respect her. Hooray, Jane!
****

The Collected Dorothy Parker
I remember two things that terrified me in the summer of 1983: the sudden appearance of cellulite on my thighs, signaling my transformation from a pretty little girl to a flabby, awkward adolescent, and Parker’s story “Big Blonde”. The protagonist plays the role of the pretty, lively, “good sport” girl who never imposes her feelings on others, because that’s how she needs to be to catch a husband. Once she gets one, she feels she can relax and have her true feelings, and so she cries all the time. This alienates her lumpish spouse, who leaves her. By then she is no longer young and pretty, so she cries some more and becomes an alcoholic, unsuccessfully attempts suicide and has to pretend to the nurses (once again playing the good sport) that she feels lucky to be alive. I have always lived in dread of becoming this woman. Though drink holds no appeal, I come from a long line of women who drowned in their own tears. I’m only now beginning to unravel the false beliefs that make me afraid of my emotions.
****

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
You know who else was afraid of emotions and hated being a girl? Ayn Rand! But through rational introspection and artistic excellence, you too can grow up to have hot sex with the guy who fixes your fireplace! Actually that part of the book did nothing for me. The two lessons I took away from Rand’s novel, which were the beginning of my adult strength, were these: (1) It is possible to live mindfully and responsibly, by knowing your values and comparing them to your actions, rather than being at the mercy of unexamined emotions and heedlessly hurting yourself and others. (Since none of the real adults in my life modeled this for me, I had to learn it from a book.) (2) Sometimes people hate you for your strengths, not your weaknesses. You don’t have to internalize their contempt.
****

The Valley of Horses, by Jean M. Auel
Conversation, when I was 11, went something like this:
“Mom, I just read this book and I have a weird tingly feeling.”
“That’s sexual arousal.”
“Oh, so that’s what that feels like! What do I do about it?”
“You can masturbate.”
Seriously, my mom was that cool.
****

Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Again, I didn’t have much interest in the “Ubermenschen” aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that became disreputable because the Nazis claimed him as an influence. Like Rand, he championed the prophetic, creative, innovative individual against the jealousy of the herd. I also valued his critique of asceticism as a psychological splitting mechanism, where a person denied certain aspects of his life force (e.g. sexuality, aggression, unconscious wishes) and pushed them off onto a scapegoat. My favorite quote from him went something like this: “In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as God and demonizes the rest.”
****

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
And just to counter-program all the others, this Christian allegory of Jesus as a goofy, despised barnyard dog! Wangerin’s storytelling gave me my first personal experience of God’s love in a Christian context.

Poem by Ruth Hill: “She (Ode to a Roadside Weed)”

Jul18

I love the wordplay and sound patterns in this charming poem by Winning Writers subscriber Ruth Hill. Listen to it on YouTube in this video from Writers Rising Up, a nonprofit that encourages environmental stewardship through the literary arts.

She
by Ruth Hill

She is hot pink,
so I say, “She..she…”
Come along with me, burgundy…organdy.
Flaring like a flame, flamenco flamingo.
Daring like a dame, demonic durango.
She is feather soft, plumes aplenty, boas flowing.
She daft on dunes, and bending,
she, leaning and gleaming.
Oh, how you catch the light!
you shimmering cocktail, Zinfandel infidel,
nubile Nubian, ruby Reuben.
Sunrise has kissed your silk-strung necklace
with dewdrops of amethyst mist.
Sunset bathed you, bronze and brazen in the breeze,
pivoting pirouette.
Blonde hair bouncing, sumptuous, voluptuous,
parking like an arcing rose, all bramble-scramble.
Side of the road hitchhiker, biker, femme fatale,
wish I could defer you
from preferring the disturbed at the curb.
Roping wild lopers, you, with your wild lasso.
Sowing your wild oats, barely barley,
wheedling your way in, under someone’s skin.
Look how you set the hook…
how you make the hound dogs howl!
They are afraid of you, so afraid,
into a braid or earwig surprise, demise;
but I have eyes for you, tenderize.
They mace you,
but you brace a trace they can’t erase,
then face the race, all vivid and livid.
I will miss you,
when nothing but your descendants remain.
No one can replace your lost grace.
She, Sheila, Sheba: Shalom, Salome, vamp by the ramp.
Silicon desiccant for butterflies, and others, when you fade:
flash o’ flesh, dreamy cream puff, fluff!
Wind lifts your sisters’ blue flax skirts: flirts!
Little ladyslippers loan you their yellow stilettos.
Ripening next to freckled bromegrass,
scarlet hairs on paintbrush,
carmen pistils on fuchsia fireweed,
little girl in bloomers: vixen,
foxtail fixin’.

Excerpt From Charles Shaw’s “Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality”

Jul18

This week, the excellent online literary journal The Nervous Breakdown features a chapter from Charles Shaw’s prison memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality, recently released by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. I will be ordering copies for myself and my prison pen pals. The book examines what the surveillance state and the prison-industrial complex are doing to the soul of America. Here’s a sample:

All cultures have their own particular concept of “limbo,” purgatory, or some other form of antechamber to paradise. The word “limbo” itself comes from the Latin limbus, meaning an “edge or boundary.” Used as proper nouns, Limbus describes the edge of Hell, and Limbo is a place for the souls of unbaptized infants and patriarchs who died before the coming of Christ, to wait for Christ to be born and pardon them. Once pardoned, they are in effect “saved” and become de facto Christians, and are ﬁnally granted access to eternal paradise. But the Messiah doesn’t seem to come around very often, so they sit around like millions of undocumented immigrants, waiting for the next mass amnesty.

Purgatory, by comparison, is like the express line at the US-Mexican Border, the one for people with spotless backgrounds, or diplomatic cover. It’s the waiting room for the already-saved, a kind of hazmat decontamination unit that scrubs off the last few sins and moral entanglements of the true believers, before they can cross the border into freedom and eternal, unencumbered bliss. What all of these places have in common is the theme of detention. Prison is all of these things constrained within the temporal, corporeal plane. The lives of inmates exist in stasis until that time when they are released back into the world. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the outside world, or about the life you may have been living, while you are incarcerated. Everything that you are doing in life stops in its tracks. Vita interrupta. Your rent and bills stop being paid, your mail stops being picked up, your phone is never answered, your email is never downloaded, your refrigerator is never cleaned out, your dog is never walked or fed. Forget about your dreams and ambitions, your plans and goals, because those get put on hold too. If you are lucky to reemerge, you are forever altered by the reality of a conviction record.

Nine times out of ten, no one but your family and closest friends, if you have them, know where you are or what happened to you. Those few people are your lifelines to the outside world, and generally are the only people to do anything for you. You ﬁnd out very quickly whom you can trust and who will really be there for you. Many inmates ﬁnd themselves with no one.

Prisons are situated on the fringes of civilization, isolated from most population centers and the general public, hidden away from sight in a gulag network of thousands of municipal, county, state, and federal facilities stretching across the land. Americans not only want to feel that their communities are safe, they really don’t want to have to trouble themselves with thinking about the consequences of locking up millions of people, or the abuses, in all forms, that might be taking place under a system of Prohibition funded by fear, apathy, and taxes. In America, it is simply a matter of out of sight, out of mind.

Because of that, and because of the isolation of the prison experience, the full understanding of what it is like to be forcibly dislocated from society becomes, for many inmates, the key struggle and in the end the key transformative experience of their lives. Jazz musicians talk about “sustained intensity.” Prison life is a frantic Coltrane riff that produces no sound and sucks the life right out of you. It’s a negative-sum game for which there is no recuperative period. No . . . Sleep . . . ’til . . . Parole!

The lack of popular noise produced over our national prison system, and the underlying reasons for the apparent apathy of the public, will keep Americans from ever having a Bastille moment, which was the storming of a Paris prison that sparked the French Revolution. The American public’s pervasive lack of political involvement seems to keep them from storming anything except a Wal-Mart during Christmas shopping season. Plus, since American prisons are so far away from everything else, the proverbial angry mob would have to endure a six-hour bus trip ahead of time before they could commence stormin’.

But prisoners of the drug war aren’t seen by the Mainstream as political prisoners, as victims of tyranny like those held in the Bastille by Louis XVI, even though that’s precisely what they are.

There are reasons for this, and most are attributable to race and class. At its core, the war on drugs is nothing more than the criminalization of lifestyle. In many regards, it is also a war on religious freedom, and on consciousness itself.

The punishment for defying the system and exerting these inherent freedoms (the ones endowed by our Creator and all) is ﬁrst disability, then disenfranchisement, then imprisonment, and ﬁnally, internal exile. Limbo time everybody, how low can you go? When in limbo, one invariably has an entirely new understanding of time.

I would spend 13 days in isolation at the Stateville Northern Reception and Classiﬁcation center in Joliet, Illinois, before being sent on to my prison facility to serve out the remainder of my sentence. Thirteen endless days in a brand-new, state-of-the-art, hyper-sterile, hyper-industrialized detention facility. It was “only” 13 days, I can tell myself now, four years later. But while it was happening, it was a form of torture that leaves an indelible scar on a person’s soul. That is why they call Stateville “Hotel Hell.”

It is a cold and sterilized form of detention, a little taste of a supermax prison for everyone. Once they process you in, and stuff you into that 6 x 10 cement hole, you don’t come out again. You are on 24-hour-a-day lockdown with your cellmate, if you have one, and nothing else. Nothing to read, nothing to see, nothing to do but wait, wait, wait. And once the waiting begins, things start to go all sorts of ways inside your mind.

Thirteen days was interminable while on lockdown, yet right now I think over the last 13 days of my life and can’t remember half of it. Most people wouldn’t think twice about doing anything for two weeks, until it’s put into the proper context. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days. Ask anyone who lived through it to tell you what a hellish eternity it was, teetering, if only brieﬂy, on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Ask anyone on day seven of a two-week master cleanse fast how they feel, or two new lovers separated for two weeks, or the parents of a lost child, or someone waiting two weeks for test results that will tell them whether they live or die.

Likewise, two weeks spent in the cold and dark—half-starved, without anything to occupy your mind, contemplating your past, your life, your crimes literal and spiritual, missing people you love, pondering your future as a convict, stressing about which penitentiary you will be sent to and what you will have to face once you get there, and soon and so forth—is its own particularly menacing brand of torment.

Sexual Visibility and Tolerance

Jul16

I’ve been thinking about the roots of homophobia, especially among people who aren’t conservative Christians, and I have a theory. Before “out” gay people and open discussion of homosexuality became routine in our culture, people could tell themselves that single-gender social environments were spaces where they could be free from the sexual gaze. Of course this was never true, but it was a comforting fiction that maintained a shield of privacy for those who wanted it.

Now that gay desire is no longer invisible, none of us feel quite so invisible, either. In my view, hysteria about male homosexuality is most prevalent in patriarchal subcultures (such as the evangelical church) because they can’t imagine male sexuality without dominance. God forbid some man should do to them what they feel entitled to do to women.

The same anxiety probably underlies radical feminists’ resistance to transgender presence in “female-only” spaces. They have a fear, ill-founded in my opinion, that male-born transwomen will carry over the predatory and dominating aspects of male lust for women, a kind of sexual gaze that’s different from how “true” lesbians would look at each other.

Now, I wonder whether the increasing support for GLBT rights among the younger generation (I can use that phrase now I’m 40) has anything to do with the disappearance of privacy in the era of social networking, reality TV, and camera phones. We are all being looked at, all the time. We break up with our partners via Facebook status reports. We give birth on YouTube. Movements like SlutWalk challenge the idea that limiting our sexual visibility is the proper way to protect ourselves from harassment and rape. The boundaries of our intimacy are undergoing huge shifts, and while not all the consequences are positive, I think sexual minorities have benefited from this trend. Your thoughts, readers?