Imprisoned Artists and Crafters, Rejoice!

Paging through a Blick Art Materials catalog, I feel like a kid in a candy store, clutching a thousand-dollar gift card. This shopping spree was made possible by two recent developments: a prison policy change and the first round of 2020 economic stimulus checks.

To the first of these we owe an interesting bit of happenstance. In my many years' imprisonment, I never before witnessed a wholesale administrative turnover like the past few months at ERDCC have seen. Within a couple of months we lost the warden, deputy warden, institutional activities coordinator, chaplain, recreation director, and education director. And that's just the positions that I know about.

Historically, someone assuming a position of authority in a correctional center tends to assert that authority in some significant, usually unpleasant way – getting rid of a privilege the prisoners enjoy, or curtailing movement around the institution. When the last warden of Crossroads Correctional Center assumed power, her first decrees cut recreation times in half and instituted mandatory institution-wide lockdowns when fistfights broke out. Subsequent years did nothing to save her reputation among the population.

ERDCC's recent changeover has been painless. Every change I've seen so far has been positive. The most inclusive of these actually has the potential to change people's whole outlook on life: an expansion of the prison's "in-cell hobby craft" procedure.

When I first came to this facility, two and a half years ago, I was amazed to learn that prisoners here could order colored pencils and drawing paper from outside venders. It was the most meaningful approach to facilitating prisoner self-improvement I'd ever seen. Then my friend Zach, who was at Crossroads with me, wrote and said that Western Missouri Correctional Center, the prison where he ended up, allows its residents to mail order supplies ranging from acrylic paint and calligraphy pens to glitter glue and cross-stitch stuff. Reading his letter, I very nearly got jealous.

There was no reason to get emotional. About a month ago, ERDCC started letting us send off for a slew of different arts-and-crafts supplies. Charcoal, paint, markers, glue, origami paper, sketch boards, yarn, crochet hooks, needlepoint hoops, puzzles, snap-together model kits, popsicle sticks and so much more – there's hardly any medium, or tools for working with it, that aren't at least partly permitted now. Best of all, government stimulus checks, as well as any government payments yet to come, guarantee that anyone who wants to create will be able to unleash that creativity.

In the good ol' bad ol' days, Missouri State Penitentiary ("the Walls," where a lot of old prisoners did time) offered options galore to the creatively inclined. A guy I knew who did time there used to build grandfather clocks. Another tooled leather for wallets, purses, and saddles. One friend and former cellmate of mine remembers etching glass and making Tiffany-style lamps. A display case showed visitors these goods, with price tags attached, so the creators could profit from their work. The days of prisoners' self-sufficiency are probably long gone, but ERDCC's enabling of people's creative ventures marks a major turn for the better.

The Blick catalog has pages upon pages of artists' pens. I think I'll order five.

Five Books I Spent My Fall Reading

Taking up a new job really changed my reading habits. While it didn't take away so many hours, it did refocus how I spend them. Much of what I read these past three months was computer-coding material for work – dense manuals of instructional, logical language that I picked through intently, deliberately, often doubling back in recursive bouts of questioning, of either the text or of my own coding aptitude.

Besides this, though, there were "real" books. Really good "real" books, even. First was The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion, translated and with commentaries by the beloved Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In its original Sanskrit, this sutra is known as Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita: the Diamond Sutra. It chronicles a discussion by the Buddha about the emptiness of teachings and of concepts in general. Some call the Diamond Sutra confounding. Followers during the Buddha's lifetime were unsettled by the section of the teaching that reads, "Tathagata [the Buddha] means the suchness of all things [dharmas]. Someone would be mistaken to say that the Tathagata has attained the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, since there is not any highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind to be attained." Referring back to his own teachings, the Buddha went on: "This is why the Tathagata has said, 'All dharmas are, in fact, Buddhadarma.' What are called all dharmas are, in fact, not all dharmas. That is why they are called all dharmas."

It's about the idea of a thing versus the thing itself, not mistaking the map for the destination, and not getting all tangled up in motives... I think. Anyway, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion might not be a thick book, but this essential Buddhist text packs a lifetime's worth of teachings into its few pages.

The debut novel of Dutch poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, in a very different way, has a lot to say. The Discomfort of Evening won the 2020 International Booker Prize. A preteen farm girl's depression and desperation in the wake of her younger brother's death held some interest for me, but the Booker Prize-win attracted me more than the novel's synopsis did. Booker winners are typically excellent. The Discomfort of Evening is a very good, very dark book about the ways in which repression and isolation ruin lives.

Susanna Clarke's amazing first novel, the fully realized fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, with its historical richness and intricacy, blew me away. I looked forward to buying and reading her next, but nothing else by the reclusive British author seemed forthcoming. A profile of Clarke I read this year in The New Yorker revealed that she suffers from a mysterious condition and spends days at a time shut away in a dark bedroom. Nevertheless, a new book was finally coming: Piranesi, Clarke's first novel in sixteen years. I mentioned the New Yorker article to several people and, without telling me beforehand, the generous Emily C. made Piranesi a surprise gift. (Thank you, Emily!) And what a gift! Mysterious, magical, startlingly funny, and somehow both simple and labyrinthine at once, the novel held me rapt from start to finish – well worth the wait.

Then came my birthday, when even more books flew in. For three of them I have my mother to thank. (Thank you so much, Mum!) The first of those was a book-length philosophical essay by John Gray, entitled The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom. In well under 200 pages, Gray traipses through subjects as seemingly diverse as Jewish mythology, the novels of Philip K. Dick, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Aztec history, prison, reality television (which Gray describes as its own sort of prison), Gnosticism, AI, and the surveillance state – all in service of his wildly entertaining, thought-provoking discussion of whether or not humankind has free will. No spoilers!

Also from Mum was Hermann Hesse's classic Steppenwolf, which had been on my list for a decade. Maybe because of my own Buddhist studies, I spotted shadows of the dharma in the Eastern philosophies vaguely espoused by the author. Only shadows, though. Hesse's book is a novel, not a 2,500-year-old sutra. As a general rule, a person should avoid works of fiction whose purpose is purely to preach (the Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, or anything by Ayn Rand), and, unfortunately, what Hesse seems to have attempted with Steppenwolf was less to tell the semi-autobiographical story of sad old Harry Haller than to promote a particular way of living.

A tantalizing Murakami novel still sits waiting for me. I've already started reading the long-awaited Sandman Omnibus, Volume III, as well as a fat collection of various writings by Montaigne. When these appear in my next reading post, three months from now, they're all but certain to get rave reviews.

Bloody, Awful Morning

Buddhism's first precept, "Refrain from killing," isn't what I think of first. That comes later, when I set the little mouse in the grass. She got stuck on one of the gym's glue traps overnight, and my coworker Gary made the grim discovery beside a supply closet. He lifts the paper trap two-handedly, holding it level while traversing the basketball court.

"What's that?" I ask as he passes me.

"We caught a mouse. I'm looking for someone to take care of it."

I feel sadness drape me like a soiled old shirt. "Take care of it?"

"I can't," Gary says, sounding so much like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh that a moment passes before I register what he's saying. "I just – I can't."

Sighing heavily, I consider what's going to happen. No good outcomes are possible. Whether or not Gary and I act, the mouse will die, and die awfully. She's been on the trap long enough that her tail, her feet, her belly, and even her little face stick firmly to the glue. An extraction attempt will probably cause injuries worse than death. In an even more urgent sense than applies to the rest of us in the world, she's doomed.

Glistening black beads, her little eyes, peer uncomprehendingly at this terrific world. Inside her, I imagine, ticks a tiny terrified heartbeat, lightning-fast. My own heart breaks. I don't want this. But what else is there?

We work in a gym, not a kitchen. There are no foodstuffs here for her and her rodent kin to despoil, no real harm to be done by their gnawing and nesting and other mousy business. Why must we have traps set at all? Must we humans exploit our primacy on Earth at every single opportunity? Is coexistence so untenable?

When I was three or four years old, my parents took me on a month-long Jamaican vacation. Our budget globetrotting skirted what most would call "roughing it." My parents had no problem sleeping every night, side by side, in a tent barely made for two.

One of the places where we spent a week was a coastal town whose cliff face was ceaselessly massaged by Caribbean waves. Free-range chickens had the run of the property where we stayed, fluffy chicks trailing them like iron filings drawn to a magnet, and I, in turn, was drawn to them – to almost every animal I encountered, really. But my inept fingers, when I reached down to cuddle one of the skittering yellow puffballs, either grasped too hard, or the animal writhed exactly the wrong way in my hands, and suddenly it lay, warm but still, in my open palm. I ran, crying, to my father, cradling its limp body like my most precious possession, now broken. As if Papa could undo what I'd done. As if anything at all could.

My father held me close. He reassured me. I wasn't bad; I hadn't done this on purpose. I had been clumsy, though. That alone fueled my sense of shame; I was normally such a conscientious boy. When my sobs eventually diminished, Papa walked me to the cliff. We cast the dead chick into the blue sea and I watched it bob along on the swells while the weight of the world pressed down on my narrow shoulders and I wished the little bird could just be okay again, just as it had been before my hand carelessly ended its life. This first encounter with death lingers with me somehow, like a phantom limb that tingles weirdly before a hard rainstorm.

My throat constricts as I walk out of the gym with the pitiable creature on this despicable trap. Lunch is finished. The yard is almost deserted. The bracing morning air stinks of a nearby trash fire. The mouse appears petrified, and so many things run through my head as I set the trap down on a firm patch of level soil. I think of pets I've loved and meat I've eaten, of dead philosophers and living dharma, of the insects I so often move from sidewalks to safety and that chick I killed thirty-eight years ago. I open my heart to the tiny creature whose impulses and terror I will never be able to comprehend. Tears blur my vision. Welling with a primal sadness that I haven't felt in years, I fold the trap in half and do the awful thing that has to be done. The entire world fails to fall silent in its grieving.