Relation of My Imprisonment

by Russell Banks

  But no, I would not allow it. The body is not the temple of the worship of the dead; it is the priest’s vestment, no more. To attend with any great part of one’s time, energy and treasure to the care of this vestment is to leave off the proper use of it, which is merely to signify the office. For we have been granted ordination at birth, and only death can properly remove the vestment and the obligation that adheres to it. Tending to it ourselves, I told them, cultivating it, treating it as if it were some object of worship itself, is to fall into a subtle yet dangerous form of blasphemy. Said the prophet Dirk, We wear our bodies. They do not wear us. For while we can ignore them, they can never ignore us. In life, it is crucial to learn what can be ignored, and then to ignore it. For what cannot be ignored, must be worshipped. (Dirk, xxiii, 12-15.)

  As it happened, then, the two who had asked it of me that I let them use my body to exemplify the bodies of the future purchasers of their program, these two had up to then been my most consistent protectors against the raids against me by the madmen and the marauding gangs of youths, who spent much of their idle time accosting the prisoners who often walked about without any clannish loyalty from among the principled violent ones. Unfortunately, my argument against my protectors’ plan for my body was such that it smouldered them angrily against me, so that they withdrew their protection and talked bitterly against me among their brethren, until there was no other protection from any of them forthcoming.

  And thus in a short time I was accosted by one of the gangs of knife boys, and to punish me for my cowardice, which let them pitch me around one to the other while they laughed at me and urged me to stand and fight any one amongst them, the leader of the group cut my skin with his knife, not deeply enough to injure me in any debilitating way, but sufficiently to indicate his capacity for killing me and his deliberate withholding of that capacity. The cuts were also deep enough to create the scars on my face which have caused so much rumor and confusion among my brethren. I hope now that there will be no more wild and exaggerated tales to soar about the countryside concerning the sufferings of my imprisonment. To be sure, there followed numerous other encounters with violence which were equally characterized by their unavoidability, now that my protection from the athletes and body builders had been withdrawn, and even though several of them indeed left me with injuries, none of the injuries have given rise to the type of rumor and outright lie as have done the scars on my face, so for that reason I will not ennumerate and describe them here.

  Excepting the company I kept with those men among the prisoners who could be called the philosophic ones, I was now more alone than I had been since my arrival in prison the year before. This did not so much depress me as it frustrated me, for I had, in my enjoyment of the daily company of these various fellows, sought to work amongst them for their conversion to the wisdom and the ultimate salvation of the worth of a life that lay in keeping my faith and observing its sacraments. I was not capable of expressing this ambition in my dealings with the philosophic ones, however, for their conversion is not normally accomplished by their coming to know the texture and the quality of the life of a believer. No, the philosophers, though they may indeed adhere to a set of beliefs for no other reason than that they themselves once, when youthful and less taught in argument, came to know the texture and quality of the life of a man they admired, once they learn how to philosophize with those beliefs will brook no further conversions to be similarly accomplished. Thus they are seldom seekers of belief so much as they are defenders of it, and therefore, if you would attempt to work conversion on them, you must first destroy their present set of beliefs, and this, according to scripture, would be in defiance of the dead. Shatter not any man’s faith if you would have him as your brother. Let him love your faith and with his love shatter his own. Make not a man naked before you present him with a cloak. (I Craig., vii, 18.) In addition, I was not as clever and schooled as they generally were, and often, in explaining the nature and the principles that defined my own mode of worship and the very necessity of worship itself, I made a poor case for myself and my brethren, and I sometimes glumly conceded that I was making no sense.

  So it came about that, even though these men were then my only companions among the prisoners, as I was compelled by my love of the dead and my wish to obey scripture, I left off attempting to work conversion among the philosophic ones, with the immediate result of their no longer desiring me to come among them. As long as I had been willing to argue against the faith they defended, I had been welcomed as one of their fraternity. But when I determined that by my own faith I must not attack theirs (and by that means also no longer to be forced into glum concessions of making no sense), the philosophic ones no longer found me of interest. This was to become a considerable deprivation for me, for I had learned to value the companionship of the philosophers above all others and for reasons that had nothing to do with the disputation they themselves valued so highly, and when I was no longer able to sit with them at table or in the prison reading rooms or even to play dominoes with them (for when I left off arguing against them, they no longer were able to respect my intelligence), I sat alone in my cell and wondered what they were doing at that moment, what they were saying to each other, what they were analyzing, discussing and evaluating together, for these were men who talked with feeling and intelligence about many of the things that interested me.

  I did not complain then, nor do I now, even though I had fallen into a deep solitude that was broken only by the sporadic visits of my wife, who was growing more weakly, and, for a brief period, the occasional conversations I had with Jacob Moon prior to his departure from his post as jailor, which also took place that second summer of my imprisonment, when he assumed the directorship of the Society Of Prisoners. I did not complain of my solitude, first, because there was no one but my wife to hear it and I did not wish to increase her sufferings by a relation of my own, but also because I knew that my solitude had been achieved by me in the service of the dead, and so I saw my sufferings as yet another way to tender mercy to the dead, and this made me glad.

  I cannot now say with certainty when it was that I reached this period of my deep solitude, which goes on even to today, except to notice that it occurred sometime long before the death of my beloved wife, which means that it probably took place during the early part of the first eleven years of my imprisonment, for I am told that her death took place only a year ago this last winter. Regardless, my experience of the passage of time for those years had become over the years such that I could recall the most distant parts with great clarity and detail, almost as if they were events of barely a month ago. But as the events came nearer in time to the present moment, I found myself unable to recall them very clearly and sometimes not at all. I do not know for sure why this should be so. It is more usual that the opposite should be the case, that I should remember events of ten and twelve years ago only vaguely and with great gaps of forgotten days, with even months and whole seasons missing, and that I should remember the more recently transpired events of my imprisonment with a more reliable continuity and in much sharper and more plentiful detail.

  I have studied this seeming paradox with care, especially in the absence of my coffin, to which ordinarily I would have repaired for meditation and access to a higher intelligence than my own, and I have devised a theory to explain the phenomenon. Here it is. In as much as all my efforts during my imprisonment after the loss of my coffin were bent singlemindedly toward freeing me from being the man of time who moves through tiny segmented cells of experience in time, and in so far as I did succeed in those efforts, by that much would I be freed of the burden and the incriminating stain of memory. And in so far as my success in this undertaking was marked by gradual degrees, so too would my freedom from memory be gradual and relative.

  This made sense to me, and on the several occasions when I related my theory to my wife, it made sense to her as well. I had no one else to confirm or deny or even to question the validity o
f my theory, for, as I have described, my fellow prisoners had removed themselves from my company, setting the kind of precedent which in prison life does not easily get broken, regardless of the regular movement in and out of that society, and when my jailor Jacob Moon had departed from his post, there was no one even among the staff who was willing to associate with me either. According to my wife there were many of our brethren who wished often to visit me in my confinement, but because to do so would bring upon them certain exposure and possible prosecution, they were forced with reluctance to stay away. And even if they had wished to take such a risk, I would not have allowed it, for my best use to them was as an example, not as a companion nor even as an object for their sympathies. Also, as I mentioned, my wife’s cousin Gina, who in the beginning of my imprisonment would visit me frequently, after my having been brought to my senses by the words spoken to me in my dream by my father and his brother, feared that I would only be reminded by her presence of that for which I felt considerable guilt. This I took to be an unintended but precise description of how she herself doubtless felt, and thus I urged my wife to assure her cousin that she need not visit me anymore, that in fact I would consider it unbecoming of her to do so, for I would take it as an indication that she did not herself feel any guilt for the nature of our carnal activities together in those early days of my imprisonment. My wife told me that her cousin accepted this message with her usual placid understanding, and this pleased me and gave me hope that the entire experience had enlarged her spiritual understanding of the nature of carnality and the dead as much as it had my own. But with regard to my theory about the paradoxical way in which my memory had come to function and not to function, almost as if it had come partially to withhold itself, because there was no one against whom I could test it with argument, except my wife, of course, who agreed fully with me on most things of a theoretical nature anyhow, I was not able to be sure that I was not merely constructing an elaborate disguise so as to hide some painful truth from myself. Whenever one is unsure in this way, if he cannot resort to his coffin and there obtain his confirmation or denial, he has little choice, indeed, he is obliged to do nothing else, than to turn to scripture and hope that his confirmation or denial can be obtained there. For as the scriptures themselves say, Certainty eludes him who will not read deeply into the language of the dead. (Craig., xiv, 22.) And truly, there amongst the scriptures did I find confirmation of my theory, concerning my memory’s increasing ability (as I extricated myself from time and came slowly back into the proper and fitting worship of the dead) to withhold itself.

  Now this my reader may think odd, for it may seem to him that I was testing and confirming a theory about the gradual loss of memory with scriptures that I had access to only by means of memory (for the possession of scripture in any printed form was strictly illegal, then as now). May it here be pointed out that my memory was not flawed or imperfect with regard to what it described to me, whether of scripture or of the nature of my experience, as much as it was increasingly absent altogether and increasingly, therefore, reported nothing to me of my experience. My memory of scripture, which I had learned when a mere child, was not affected. But whole days went by without leaving a word in my mind’s report to me on myself, then whole weeks, and then months and seasons, until it was no longer my memory that told me how long I had been imprisoned or precisely when particular events had occurred, as much as it was a tattered calendar on the wall of the dining hall or a casual conversation between two prisoners overheard in the exercise yard or a newspaper in the reading room.

  Thus I gradually lost my old ability to move easily among sequences of events, public and private, and my old ability to relate the two chains so that I could immediately know what public events had transpired at the same time as a given private event. There was a morning, for example, when, upon looking into the mirror over my wash basin, I realized that my hair had gone all to white, where before it had been dark brown, and I cannot now say whether I made that discovery mere days before I learned of my wife’s death or seven whole years before. And there was the period of several months when the prisoners were talking amongst themselves of the war that the nation was evidently prosecuting abroad, and I cannot say whether this period was before or after my hair had turned white. And though I can remember the evening of resignation when I decided that I would no longer every ninety days file an appeal for a trial at the upcoming quarter-sessions, so that I could be tried and properly convicted and thus be made eligible for amnesty at the following solstice, a decision I knew was based on the fact that I had been refused such a trial by peremptory notice a hopelessly repeated number of times, I cannot now say how many times I had been refused. That is to say, I cannot now say on what numerical basis I made such a momentous decision.

  Doubtless there are some among the brethren who would say that this seeming dysfunction of the memory, even if it indeed was a direct result of my attempt to remove myself from the life of a man of time, was a deprivation and a kind of suffering. But I cannot agree. For the prophet Walter says, There will come a day that will not differ from night, and a night that will not differ from day. (vii, 7.) No, this was not a dysfunction of the memory. It was a more and more frequent withholding of itself, and thus it was another of the many kinds of grace that get granted to those who worship the dead.

  And grace, as I have said, is the gift that redounds to the greater glory of the giver, and in that way does it serve its purpose. By this gift, therefore, was I permitted to see the true and overwhelming nature of the dead all the more clearly. To hear the voice of the dead is to obey it, and to see its everlastingness is to honor it. To obey death and to honor it, then, are to make the life of a man overflow with meaning. If the gradual loss of my memory, properly understood as grace, served to make my life gradually more meaningful to me, how could I call it a dysfunction Or even more absurd, how could I call it a deprivation or a kind of suffering?

  THERE came to me a slowly dawning realization, like the spread of a thick silvery light, that my wife had left off coming to visit me in my imprisonment. For a long time her visits to my cell, where we would sometimes converse and more often would sit comfortably together for hours in affectionate silence broken only by some one or another of my thoughts or memories that I felt would be of use in her instruction, had been less and less frequent. Or so it then seemed to me, for whenever she did appear to me there, it did seem to me that I had not been in her company for a long while. As I look back now to that period of my imprisonment when I first began to notice the infrequency of her visits to my cell, I picture her as being somewhat distracted and erratic in her words, but I did not then notice that her behavior was anything out of the ordinary. I had noticed, naturally, from the very beginning of my imprisonment, even from the day of my arrest, when, because of the tumult and frenzy of those days she had been delivered too soon of the child she was then carrying and which as a consequence had died, that her health was precarious and that she was often in pain and would fall to coughing and wincing from it. Her condition worsened, and I did notice that and did advise her on how to medicate herself as best I knew how, and I did direct her to those among the brethren who I knew could provide her, out of their love for me, with aid and comfort and who would also stand forth in the support of our children. For this support my wife expressed often to me her large gratitude, for she as well as I knew how dangerous it was for them to make any show of public sympathy for my dependents.

  During those early years of my confinement, my wife and I were at deep peace with one another and were in continuous agreement on all the questions, quandaries and tribulations that beset us and the numerous ways by which we tried to answer and alleviate them. But there came at last a season when it was known to me that no longer was I capable of advising or otherwise aiding her in her attempts to contend with the obstacles she faced in the world outside my prison as she struggled to care for herself and our children. Her knowledge of the outside world had g
rown to be superior to mine. And thus I gave off attempting to provide more than a generalized and abstract reassurance, which I am sure must at times have led her to believe or to fear that I no longer cared very deeply about the welfare of my family and that I no longer held for my wife the same passionate devotion as when before I had been imprisoned. It is to this belief or fear, then, that I credit her increasingly distracted and erratic behavior, which I did not notice at the time but from which, if I had noticed it, I would have drawn the same conclusions as now, and I would have tenderly remonstrated with her so as to show her the constancy of my caring about the welfare of my family and the continuity of my devotion to her person.

  This was not of course the cause of her death, any more than it was the cause of the death of my first wife, the mother of my five children, even though, according to the physicians who attended the women during their last days, they both died from the same affliction, a congenitally distressed heart, the physicians called it, worsened by the depredations of poverty and the stress of life and time. My chiefest grief is that I could not be in attendance when these two precious women passed over from their sufferings in life to their comfort in death and that, therefore, my last memories of both my wives are sombered to such a huge degree by the character and intensity of their tribulation in life rather than of their bliss in death. Thus it had been with a certain amount of envy that I had heard my first wife’s father tell me how his daughter had joined the dead, for during the months of her dying I had been compelled by my calling to provide crucial training to the many in the north who wished to become coffin-makers. And it was with a similar envy that I heard my sons tell me of the dying of my second wife, their stepmother, during the winter of the eleventh year of my confinement. Here is how it came about.