Into the Words

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” Henry David Thoreau

I am standing in “no man’s land,” the space between two walls of razor wire fifteen feet high. I am waiting for the electric lock to snap open the latch that will free the locked gate leading to the guard house. Winter wind bites through my jacket and prison pants. They are prison pants because I wear them only for this task. The Arizona Department of Corrections does not allow blue jeans. I have to dress up in khakis. My costume is part of the ritual, of setting aside this time to do my work, my real work.  

Rare fresh snow shines on the mountains around the Tucson valley. That brilliant white comes all the way down to the foothills, about 4,000 feet I estimate. The day is astonishingly clear, the desert air having been rinsed by the winter storm. I can see the mountains through the screen of concertina wire in the space between gray block buildings. One of the many ravens rides the wind above me, the rasp of his wings audible as he adjusts his glide toward the roosting murder already in the yard. They look like ornaments in the bare cottonwood, a kind of gallows Christmas tree. They will be my company when I get into the yard and walk to the Programs Room.

I carry a plastic tub full of books, pens, pads of paper, and folders. This stuff is golden to the guys I am going to work with today. We will convene the writing workshop and go over poems, essays, and short stories in the Programs Room. We don’t have any high tech screens, Elmos, teaching stations, DVDs, YouTube, or other media. We are lucky to have decrepit desks, cracked plastic chairs, a chalkboard, the few lights that have working bulbs in them, and a few hours to talk about writing.

I am going into the words, and I will soon be listening more intently than I do at any other time in my week. Inmates will read. We will talk about the work, the words, and we will consider choices. If they are willing to listen, to consider options, and to do the work, their writing may be published. Many have gone before them. Some have won national awards for their writing, been featured on interviews on radio and national news television. Some have gone on to teach. Most just pay more attention to how it is they speak to others, whether guards or family.

The words can be a scary place to go and I do not underestimate the fear of going there. We are “made of words” as Scott Momaday says, and some of those words, which form the basis of beliefs, assumption, values – nothing less that a framework for viewing the world, are held under guard, behind barbed wires of defense. Words form stories which can serve as a guide through life or be a kind of poison that leads to self-destruction or places like prison. I know that I have to tread carefully here. Words, like the woods, can be a dangerous place to wander. It helps to be awake and careful, full of care, alert, ready to respond.

Our conversations are not unlike those I have in university classes. In some ways, these two settings are connected. The decrease in state funding for the university has closely paralleled the increase in funding for prisons, and numbers of prison beds are predicted using numbers of students not reading at grade level in elementary school. Literacy and incarceration are two sides of the same coin.

Here is a funny thing about writing. It is best when the writer seems to care about the subject and to take the time to craft the presentation so that readers can care about it too. I would go so far as to say a writer has to cultivate powers of observation, of self-awareness, of – and here is a big one – of feeling.  Men in prison learn not to feel. It is part of a survival strategy. In the workshops, to write well, they have to learn to feel again, even if it is in limited doses of two hours at a time.

They also have to learn to listen to other points of view. The workshops are likely the only place inside the fences where men of different races can sit down and talk to one another. Those walls do not come down easily.

One of the guys, let’s call him James, tested me for months. If I said yes he said no. If I liked a piece, he dissed it. He looked at me hard through his rimmed reading glasses, a tear tattooed to his right cheek, below his blazing blue eyes. Like most of the inmates, his arms wore “sleeves,” the ink of tattoos from wrist to shoulder. 

“I like to use the word ‘love’ in my poem,” he says one time while we discuss the merits of concrete telling detail.

Every man in the workshop has his eyes on me, waiting.

“ ‘Love’ is fine,” I say, “as long as you show what you mean by it. Right now it’s too loose. Readers won’t see what love likes like to you unless you help them out. What are some of the words, specific words – things, places, people, actions – that define that for you?”

He looks at me again, this time, with some recognition.

“One time, I noticed this bird. It was a different kind of bird than we usually see around here. It wasn’t a pigeon or a raven. It was blue, and it flew into and out of the yard. It was just as happy here as it was outside. It did not have to change when it went through the razor wire. It was free. It made me mad and jealous.”

A couple of the guys nodded approving comments. We went around the circle and spoke in terms other than love, choosing from the repertoire of experience. No generality or cliché or Hallmark card moments.

James still bristles sometimes at criticism, but he takes it in. He begins to do the hard work of choosing. Doing time and doing work. He has begun to move into words as well and his poetry shows it. His work has made it into the Walking Rain Review as published, quality work. This from a man who admits that he never learned to write in school, but faked it. He claimed to have a photographic memory and would listen to what others said or read when reading. He would pretend he couldn’t see the words without glasses and then absorb what others read aloud. I can only imagine the shame he felt.

Of course, there are others: J., the San Francisco heroin addict turned literary scholar, M. the armed robber who writes sonnets and villanelles, and W. the skinhead and spiritual philosopher. All of them have stories, have a voice that rises out of the disasters of their lives. And they are much better writers than my students at the university. My students, sons and daughters of privilege for the most part, can’t find time to read required material, much less expend effort at serious consideration of how best to express a thought. They hesitate at the edge of the words, a little afraid of what they might find if they entered. One has to be a bit desperate or confined or courageous to go into the words. And, for a while, he or she might get lost. Identity has a way of dissolving when examined beneath the bright, unflinching light of critical thought and choice.

***

What I ask of the inmates, students, and myself is hard work. A while back I wanted to give up residence here in the words, to stop thinking about them, to stop actively assembling them into a story that would guide my life,  a story that would make sense of the disparate craziness that life is sometimes. But I went back to the university with all if its contradictions, bureaucracy and webs of abstraction. Yes, the promise of finding better words, the right ones, has pulled me back to the campus. Why should I go to the words?  What lies there that might mean, might serve as some piece of flotsam to cling to?  Is there some way to use words to get here, to get closer to the live wire of sensate and sentient moments?

Sometimes when I collect student papers, I find it hard to engage with them, to pose questions about how choices are made, how communication is most effective. But I have to confess that I find the work a strain. I wonder if it is my fault. Those papers, some of them so tortured that they assault my sensibilities of written language. So many words, so few meaningful stories. Are we writing the wrong things? I love my students, but their writing bothers me and my low grade stress becomes the stress of low grades. It is not their fault. Is it mine? Have I connected my own story with my teaching? Have I found a way to blend patience and care, coming from the patient who has been cared for, with the needs of a large university? Again, I don’t know but keep asking.

Still some of the papers weigh on me. I carry them everywhere and everywhere avoid them.  They hunker down in my book bag, weighty and resentful at them for trying to be something else, someplace other than here. They speak in beefy, self-inflated importance on subjects they know only through distant dreams.  They parrot the voices of their parents, blindly, deliberately undoing themselves in the repetition.  Yet, despite the odds, a voice emerges, occasionally, and it shocks me with its simple honesty.

But in the continual contact I begin again to see the architecture of language.  In the same way that I used to read the pitch of roof, the drainage patterns, the cracks in the tar, the age and quality of the materials, I now read papers for leaks, do triage, provide estimates for repair, recommendations for replacement of conceptual structures.  I read the grids and trusses of text.  But there is more, something ineffable, something intangible in the potential for expression: the choosing.  The choosing and honing and music making of language.  With a moment of deliberation before speaking or writing, I am discovering, anyone can alter his or her perception, creating harmony rather than dissonance, art rather than cliché, wonder rather than ennui.  This heady wine of potential possesses and consumes me.

I know though long contact how to go into the words, into the silence of choice, of suspension  of impulse, into the no-man’s land of reflection and listening for the right sounds, the right surprise. But, like climbing mountains, it is a hard place to live, and no one can stay at those altitudes for long.  Trying on different ways of seeing things, of new words, can feel foreign, uncomfortable.  The change turns me inside out.  What was it James Baldwin had written?  “We look forward to change about as much we look forward to being born.”  He was right.

I need empathy and reason and quiet compassion to woo these words out of myself, the inmates, and students. I need to find the right words and build them, one by one, like adobe blocks in a house fit for desert living, into a story in which I find meaning, energy, life force, and my truth.

A story can be revised in times of crisis. Now is just such a time. We need to get out, to wake up, to un-plug, to slow down, to stop long enough to realize that some of the old stories no longer work. The stories of a desert that will support massive, water-hungry cities no longer work. The stories that we don’t need a wild nature to define us as civilized no longer work. The stories that we do have to pay attention and to do the hard work of actively taking responsibility for this time, this place, our communities no longer serve us.  It is time to re-write, re-think, re-see our stories. It is in that rewriting that the experience of being alive can shift from fear to awe, from subjugation to co-existence, from apathy to agency, from poison to medicine.

In a similar manner, each of us has the opportunity to “go to the words” when we consider what story we will tell about this time of our lives. This time, of course, is the here and now, whenever we stop to consider what it is we will write, when deliberate for a moment to consider the path words will take, and choose the telling that best serves our purposes.

***

Too soon, the two hours of workshop are over, and it’s time for “count.” The inmates have to get back to the units, their cells. We gather up the loose books and poems to be copied for the next workshop and talk.

James asks “Are you coming back next week?”

I answer that I will.

He says “Good.” Then he nods, about to say something else. But then declines. The connections are always incomplete, unresolved, needing work.

We walk out together. He pauses to light a cigarette at the electric lighter that is mounted on a steel pipe at the corner of the sidewalk, a crossroad in the yard. “Well, take care,” he says and turns toward his unit. He knows how to survive and he tells me he is learning how to live.

I take the bus back to the Main Gate and pass through the sally port. The prison recedes in the mirror as I drive back up toward the interstate and then toward Tucson and home. I feel more alive than any other time in my weekly routine. I have touched something and know that I am one of the most selfish men on Earth. I do this for me. I need a push to go into the words, need confinement, need prompting, but most of all need care, and dare I say it – love – for life, my place in this moment, this forbidding desert, this open sky.

The reverie fades and I am immersed in the business of livelihood and needing to eat -- back down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. At Paco’s, my favorite Mexican taco shop, I try not to spill salsa on my prison pants. Here in re-entry after the writing workshops at the prison, it is quiet enough to sit and let the prison voices lift off and away from me. Those voices dim soon after passing back into the “free world.” There is so much noise here that I have to listen hard to remember what they said, how they said it, and let those voices settle into my mind before I forget them, voices in search of the words born of patient selection, of answering the right questions, of a desire to be true.