We sat around a cluster of small tables topped with peeling laminate. One of us was reading Jack Gilbert’s “In Dispraise of Poetry.” Pipes gurgled overhead. The steel doors only partially muted the sound of somebody screaming in the segregation block: guttural, inarticulate roars. The C.O.s boots clomped along in the hall outside.
Still, the classroom is a placid place compared to the block. When I visit, some people come to class just for a chance to sit in a room where less is happening. Where there’s less noise. Less need for hypervigilance.
There’s a big array of computer screens in the control room downstairs, ostensibly showing video feeds from the security cameras monitoring each block and drunk tank, but sometimes – more often in the bad weeks – guys in the control room are using the giant monitors to display somebody’s stream, a first-person shooter, the caffeinated player wearing his headset, unblinking eyes twitching at the top corner of the screen, gun barrel blazing at the bottom, electronic avatars of other human players getting murdered en mass. While waiting for an officer to come and take me upstairs, I’ve stood and watched in the reflection of the one-way mirror that the new sheriff recently installed. This mirror is hung warped and it contorts my face: my elongated forehead looms over little goblin teeth. Watching the Twitch stream seems way better than looking at that version of myself and feeling like a monster for my own begrudging complicity with the workings of this place.
Which is all to say that people in the block can’t necessarily expect that the C.O.s can keep them safe. Sometimes the blocks are being closely watched; sometimes they’re not. I’ve been told there’s not much overt violence in the women’s block; a fair few men lose teeth. Makes a body jittery.
In the classroom, nobody gets the shit kicked out of them, which might be a nice change of pace.
And I hope the poems I bring are liked.
“When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,”
a man read,
“he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.”
A man with unquiet hands, who hadn’t talked much yet in class, said the poem reminded him of schizophrenia. He felt like Jack Gilbert might understand something of his own experience.
“Mental stuff, I’m different, you know?” he said. “I’m different, and it’s special, right? But sometimes I would like to return that gift. But I can’t return it. Right? Returning it is not an option.”
He’s special and rare like the white elephant. An ornate spiral, a mind that whirls between connections. Many researchers have studied the link between schizophrenia and creativity.
Biological variation creates a spectrum of traits. More or less muscle mass, more or less metabolic fire churning through our veins, more or less ability to focus on either a singular task or on the surrounding environment (with the latter type of focus often referred to as an attention “deficit”). Some sorts of variation could’ve led to a person being declared a speaker or mystic in bygone eras; those same once-heralded variations might make modern society feel overwhelming.
A ruinous elephant. Beautiful beast.
We’ve locked this man in jail.
Frank Brown Cloud 