This Is the End

In every beginning sleeps the promise of an ending. Works of ancient philosophy as much as contemporary breakup songs address the inevitability of things coming to an end. The Pariah's Syntax started eighteen years ago. Although I wasn't thinking at the time about how or when I'd stop blogging, this wrap-up was bound to come.

I'm minutes away from typing the concluding sentence of this final Pariah's Syntax post. Come 2026, this blog will be an archive. You'll need to follow my Substack if you want to keep reading.

I wonder how many hours I've spent blogging. It all started when a friend offered to post on MySpace some stuff I'd written. Three short personal essays went up on that platform before officials declared social media off-limits for prisoners. I briefly vanished from the public eye, then my supporters got clarification: the DOC gave written authorization to post my writing online, provided I leave out my address and don't try to "solicit pen pals."

Perfectly acceptable. The goal was never two-way communication. That MySpace page existed so I could share perspectives and thoughts from my prison cell. Way back in 2008, that concept felt revolutionary, even a little bit transgressive. Today, websites like Prison Journalism Project, the American Prison Writing Archive, and the Marshall Project showcase the writing of incarcerated people everywhere. Sharing this type of work no longer feels edgy—but it's no less important.

Regardless of how routine authoring this blog has come to feel, eighteen years of doing anything is a long time. I've changed along the way. Forever an unrepentant weirdo, I nevertheless believe that touting my pariah status smells too much like victimhood. I'm an outcast accurate in terms of my legal status, but I've said for years that I am not my case. I'm ready to emerge from this restrictive pariah-cocoon, fully fledged, and fly.

Call it a pivot, a rebranding, a transition, whatever you prefer. The Pariah's Syntax, after this, will be no more. Look for a new beginning on a different platform, with content delivered in a more direct way, along with a few cool surprises.

Go to my Substack now and click "Follow" to be sure you don't miss my first post on New Year's Eve. I'm excited to see you there!

Five Books I Read This Fall

Pagan Virtues: Poems is the 2020 collection by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn, as well as the first book of poetry I've read in a while. It opens with an older poem, "A Postmortem Guide (1)," containing these resonant lines: I learned to live without hope / as well as I could, almost happily, / in the despoiled and radiant now."

Who alive today doesn't understand what Dunn's scratching at here? (Or, to paraphrase another of his poems, published elsewhere, who isn't one, once?) What I like most about Dunn's work is its quality of everydayness. It's the work of a poet who's most interested in getting by. If poetry is an act of bearing witness, then Dunn succeed in what seems to be the most unobtrusive way possible, with quiet observations on moral positions, political alignments, our motivations to work, and other seeming mundanities. This isn't to say that he's dull or wishy-washy. Rather, Dunn at his best gives voice to our frequently inarticulate confusion and frustration with our "despoiled and radiant now."

That phrase expresses a very Buddhist sentiment, recognizing the beauty in what Zen master John Daido Loori called "the whole catastrophe"—i.e., life, the universe, and everything. Daido Roshi isn't featured in the Lion's Roar publication Deep Dive into Zen, but Norman Fischer, Guo Gu, Joan Sutherland, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Josh Bartok, Shinshu Roberts, Stephen Batchelor, and Judy Roitman are. Their writings on Zen Buddhism encompass the history, practices, and quirks of this 1,500-year-old lineage, and make this free e-book an engaging read for the practitioner or the curious reader alike.

The poet and writer Kapka Kassabova wrote three other titles about her travels throughout eastern Europe's Balkan region before Anima: A Wild Pastoral. I didn't read them. For that matter, I'd never heard of her before encountering a New York Review of Books piece about Anima, the last title in her so-called Balkans quartet about the hardscrabble livelihoods of rural people and the animals they live with in southeastern Europe. I'm not ordinarily one to seek out what one might call "adventure writing," but the review intrigued me. Anima seemed like something greater.

The book opens with Kassabova seemingly in search of some je ne sais quoi, hoping to inject more meaning into her existence. She anticipates fulfilling this quest by taking up with nomadic sheepherders in a high village "long, scattered, and empty," called Orelek. (Because, you know, she was in the neighborhood anyway.) Her description of the forbidding, mountain road to town—"hostile, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it to bar entrance—reads like a passage from a Gothic novel. It's a potent start. Kassabova writes a beautiful reverie, and Anima is replete with examples of that talent.

One thing that becomes clear from the start is that she's an incurably restless sort, peripatetic and prone to a poet's romanticization of hard living. This isn't to say that she seems to fetishize the dark-skinned shepherd, Sásho, with his sad history as a feral child, his "surprisingly good smoker's teeth," and his drunken bouts of grownup depression. The two of them share '80s comedies on a smartphone screen in a pasture and fall almost inevitably in love. It does sometimes feel like a fetish, though. More than once, I shook free of her captivating spell to consider how much of the book felt like an account, however beautiful, of the author's slumming?

The reader just has to remember that she's the medium through which this account reaches us, not the story itself. Anima is about humankind's relationship with nature and the poetry of living in balance. The mesmeric love that Kassabova has for the concept of equilibrium shows where her heart truly is, not with the ruggedly handsome Sásho but with the earth itself, with its incomprehensibly complex interconnectedness, with the often amazing simplicity of the lives led in harmony with it.

Early in his life, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh made interdependence a major focus of his teaching. He just called it by a different name. Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism is his book outlining the tenets of the Order of Interbeing, which he founded after the Vietnam War, to strive for social justice in his homeland and beyond.

What he called "mindfulness trainings" were teachings compiled from multiple traditional sources in his effort to renew Buddhism for a new age. These fourteen precepts represent an expansion of the five vows that Buddhist laypeople sometimes take—to refrain from killing, from taking what isn't given, from speaking what isn't true and good, from ingesting intoxicants, and from committing sexual misconduct. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings incorporate not only precepts followed by Buddhist monks and nuns, but also the traditional Bodhisattva precepts undertaken by practitioners all over the world who want to transform suffering and injustice into peace and equity.

Ode to Joy

Beethoven's immortal "Choral"—his Ninth Symphony, completed 201 years ago—provides some necessary cheer on difficult mornings. When it's not even 9 AM and, from two doors up the walk, someone's thumping Master P on their boombox for the whole wing to "appreciate," I need all the help I can get. Closing my door muffles the thumping, and Ludwig Van obscures it the rest of the way.

The recording I have is of a performance by the North German Symphony Orchestra. It's not a jaw-dropper, but it's more than good enough for another year-end in prison. Even after years of practice, thinking of reasons to be cheerful in this place sometimes takes the help of Beethoven's Ninth.

Other mood boosters: instant Folgers, steaming in a plastic mug; new socks bought from the canteen; powdered milk and bran flakes; those rare days when a headcount clears on schedule; feedback from a viewer who watched one of my Real Talk episodes; post-workout shakiness; saying goodbye to someone I helped in the Reentry Center, the day before they go home; winning a root beer on game night; predawn silence, predawn darkness; noticing thoughts and feelings pass while I count breaths in corpse pose.... I could go on.

The other day I read, If you don't feel gratitude, you're taking it for granted. I used to think of "cultivate gratitude" as another of those schmaltzy, faux-philosophical slogans you see on embroidery and kitchen plaques—right next to the one that reads "live, laugh, love." But mindfully working to develop gratitude offers genuine rewards. It delivers palpable, sometimes life-changing results—that is to say, an ability to feel joy.

As with four-leaf clovers and Waldo, the more you look for joy, the easier it gets to find. I started simply, years ago, by looking to scrape even a scintilla of pleasure from a day in prison. What I learned is that, unlike in a scavenger hunt, joy offers durable value in the form of heightened resilience.

The Ninth is a delightful work you probably know, even if you're not a fan of classical music. Pieces of it feature in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. The film's delinquent protagonist, Alex, is subjected to a torturous aversion therapy meant to burn away his criminal inclinations. In a scene now cinematically infamous, Alex is forced to watch hours of horrendous, violent film clips, scored with the music of his cherished musical hero, Ludwig van Beethoven, including the symphony's fourth movement, the instantly recognizable (in this case ironic) "Ode to Joy." The effect is that Alex can no longer hear Beethoven without becoming extremely nauseated, and we viewers can't unsee the terror he endured while being reprogrammed.

Alex and I both changed dramatically during our time in prison. He was locked up a criminal; I was locked up despite not being one. His change was forced; mine was organic and gradual. He came to loathe Beethoven; I came to love all of Beethoven's symphonies and listen to them often. I haven't watched or read A Clockwork Orange in decades. I wonder what other antitheses I'd spot.

These days, I find joy whenever I step outside and smell fresh air. Turning on a faucet, I experience joy at having access to clean, running water. When my eyes refocus after meditation, I often take a deep, relaxed breath and smile. I look for opportunities everywhere. There are hard days, as well as challenging weeks, but it's amazing how often I find those moments of joy.