Therapy?
I switched dorms and went to the Therapeutic Unit. It sounded like the place someone like me needed to be. Plus it had the added benefits of a six month cut off my sentence upon completion and removal from my job in the kitchen. A prison kitchen is one of the most disgusting environments on the face of this planet.
I continued sending C. letters, but by now I was down to one every couple of weeks. She continued not responding. Not that I blame her now, but back then...........
There was a creative writing class in the T.U., taught by one of the counselors. A guy I had worked in the kitchen with went to the class, and he stopped by my bunk one night to talk about it. I had mentioned before to him that I wrote. He told me I should come to class and I told him I would think about it. He asked if he could check out some of my writing and I told him I was working on a few things and would show him once they were straightened up. Now I had to write something or be a liar.
The T.U. is supposed to be different from the other dorms in the prison. It is supposed to be peer driven, with as little interference from the counseling staff and officers as possible. You can imagine how well this goes over. There are two reasons why this fails. Reason number one is that most inmates don't like being told by other inmates that they are doing something wrong and most inmates don't like to tell other inmates they are doing something wrong. (There are some who enjoy the latter, but they tend to spend most of their career in protective custody.) Reason number two is that the people in control seldom want to give up that control. It is all nice in theory, and looks good on paper when presented to the people in the state government responsible for funding these things, but it is basically a bunch of bullshit.
I am not good at telling people what to do, so I took a job as a tutor. This way I avoided any of the jobs which put me in the line of fire. When I wasn't at a class or tutoring someone I sat on my bunk and read, staying out of everyone's way.
GOD?
The T.U. doesn't require that you turn into a religious wacko, but it does encourage it. Prison in general is home to every misinterpretation of every denomination imaginable, and in the T.U. your are encouraged to find some belief system or spirituality to ease you over those inevitable bumps on your road to recovery. I have known Buddhists who couldn't go more than a day or two without starting a fight, Black Power Muslims who wouldn't think anything contradictory when showing you pictures of their white baby mommas and mixed children, and Christians who felt the the Bible gave them the right to hate any and everybody who was slightly different than them. All you have to do is find out which one of these freaks you think is right and join up.
I didn't make any commitments, but started looking into religion. I read the Bible, Torah, Koran, and the Buddhist Sutras. I read about Taoism, Jainism, Hinduism, and Paganism. When I ran out of religious isms, I read about Empiricism, Existentialism, Pragmatism, Cynicism, Skepticism, Communism, and Socialism. I read about every ism I could find in the library. I didn't know what kind of ist I was or which ism was right for me. I closed my eyes at night and thought about crosses and prayer rugs and infinities and meditation and salvation. I wondered if I had a soul, and what it meant if I did or didn't. I saw Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and Shiva. I wondered about beings and existences and essences and Things-in Themselves.
The problem is this: I don't get religion. I don't have the part of the brain that is susceptible to that particular ailment. I was raised a Catholic. I was baptized, had my first communion, and was confirmed. I had to attend religious instruction classes until the tenth grade. None of this stuck with me. I don't remember anything other than other than sitting in class wondering what my friends were doing and wishing I was out with them. Oh, and that one of my instructors was Billy Sheehan's, the famous rock bassists, older sister. Of Mr. Big and The David Lee Roth Band fame. Yes, THAT Billy Sheehan! (And yes I did just Google his name to make sure I spelled it correctly.) The two bright spots of my religious experience were the parties after my communion and confirmation and the money I received. I never had a spark or an Aha! moment. When people talk to me about the ecstasy and rapture they feel, and how they "Just Know" things that they can't possibly know, I get embarrassed for them.
But I was going to try.
I decided I could be a Buddhist. I signed up for Buddhist Sangha, which met from 3:30 to 5:30 Monday afternoons.
I don't know if this is what the Buddha had in Mind?
My first encounter with Buddhism in prison was more awkward than I ever could have imagined. I mean, it's Buddhism? Isn't it supposed to be all warm and fuzzy? Calm and welcoming? If I wanted to feel awkward I could have stayed a Catholic. I walked into the room where the Sangha was being held. About a dozen people sat on chairs, which were arranged in a circle. It appeared about eight of the attendees were regulars, and the rest of us were newcomers. I was the only person there for the first time, though.
The first half of the Sangha went by quickly. I learned that Sangha meant community. I was told that I could enter into a powerful group, that not everyone could understand this power. This group had tapped into the vital forces of the universe, and now had them at their disposal. All you had to do was chant a Japanese phrase for at least 15 minutes a day and this power could be yours. The rhythmic sound of this phrase was perfectly in tune with those forces, and when you repeatedly uttered this phrase the vibrations of your vocal cords put you in tune with this force. Or something like that. The veterans talked about how much this Buddhism had done for them. They said that anything you wanted could be yours if you chanted for it. Some of them had received sentence modifications and had good jobs waiting for them upon their release. Many had chanted for, and received, sums of money to be deposited on their accounts. To my knowledge none of them chanted for world peace.
When they were done they asked if anyone had any questions. I had a few.
I asked the veterans if they had ever done any meditation. I wasn't an expert on the subject, but most of the Buddhism I read about at least mentioned meditation. They didn't meditate. I asked them about the Eight Fold Path, and if they thought that chanting for material objects conflicted with the Four Noble Truths and the fact that the Buddha said that our desire was pretty much the problem with us humans. The had somewhat convincing answers, which seemed rehearsed, sort of like a con game or a snake oil sales pitch. They didn't meditate and they didn't follow or even know any of the precepts which I had come to understand were at the heart of Buddhism. They kept coming back to, "Trust us. It works. Chant for something for at least 90 days, for at least 15 minutes a day, and you are guaranteed to get it." My thinking at the time went along the lines of if you were stupid enough to do this for 15 minutes a day for 90 days, then you would be stupid enough to accept the excuse served up to you when your dream didn't materialize.
Then came the second half of the program. One of the veterans placed a tiny (about two inch by two inch) piece of white plastic in front of the group. It had carvings, which you could barely see, on it. I think the idea was it was supposed to look ancient and ivory. The veterans said this piece of plastic was very powerful. Some type of portal into the heart of all existence or something similar. We were all coached on the proper annunciation to ensure we sent out the right cosmic vibes. Then someone rang a bell and everyone started chanting. It went on for 15 minutes, at which time the bell rang again and the chanting stopped.
When the chanting stopped I sat there feeling weird, not particularly comfortable. The veterans talked about the power they felt in the room. A few of the newcomers joined in to say they felt it as well. I didn't feel shit.
Still, I let them sell me on the 15 minute 90 day plan. I decided to chant for a letter (and hopefully some money) from C.. Screw world peace. I chanted about five times over the next few weeks, and attended Sangha for a couple months. I never received a letter. I became an apostate.
Something did Happen
I wrote something. I even finished it.
The pressure was on and my fear of looking like an idiot took charge. This guy wouldn't go away. He kept stopping by to ask if I wanted to come to class and how my writing was coming along. He persisted and I ran out of excuses. I either had to show him some writing or admit to him that I talked about being a writer but didn't actually write. At least if I showed him something I wasn't a liar. I never said I was a good writer.
I wrote a story about a man and Jesus having a conversation. Jesus was up on the cross, and the man stood in front of Him expressing some concerns he had. Jesus and the man went back and forth, the man expressing doubt and Jesus trying to convince him that faith was the best option. In the end, there wasn't much of a resolution. Jesus closed his eyes and the man, now being called the doubter, walked off unconvinced and still a skeptic.
I showed the story off the next time the guy stopped by my bunk and asked if I was done with any of my writing. He liked the story and told the instructor of the creative writing class about it. The instructor called me to the officer's desk the next day and asked to see my story. I gave it to him, and when he brought it back to me he said it was excellent and told me he would like to see my other writing when I got it done. Other work? I had no other work, but now I had praise and motivation. I started writing more.
I wrote a few crappy stories which focused on my dislike of religion, rape and violence and other forced symbolism. I was trying hard to get across a point which would have been much better to handle with a little subtlety and not so cliche. I didn't know this yet.
The next thing I wrote that had any value to it was a story about a family who had been farmers and soldiers. It followed three generations and three wars. The family faithfully served country and God, and in the end neither rescued them from the banks and the foreclosures. I sent a copy to C.. I wonder if she still has it? I would like to rewrite it.
It is pretty easy to see that my subject matter was being influenced by all the isms I had been reading about. My soul searching never gave me a Divine Revelation, but it made me more sensitive to matters I hadn't given much thought to before. My writing opened up to more than just how unfair my life was and how unjust my situation. I could write about how unfair life was to other people.
Writing in General
What I consider writing, or, more exactly, the idea I have about the writing process has changed considerably from those first few stories. I am not a pro, don't know if I ever will be, but you have to learn something. It is impossible to put a sizable portion of your life aside, devoting it to any one thing, without learning something.
This is what I thought back then: I thought that writing was a painfully slow process. I would sit there for hours and hours, writing and erasing, crossing out, crumpling up, and starting over. I thought you had to make it as perfect as possible, because once you finally got it all down, that was it. I had no concept of rough drafts or multiple rewrites and revisions. I thought you had to nail the perfect opening, and if you didn't then you never got started, never got past the opening paragraph. This all seemed to be getting worse. The more I tried to write, the less I could get onto the page. It started to really bother me, sitting for hours staring at a blank piece of writing paper, the lines begging me for words. I searched for solutions, even read a book about write's block.
The answer to the problem, or at least what the problem was, was explained to me by the counselor who taught the creative writing class. He had taught college level creative writing for 17 years, and had been a journalist for a while after graduating college. He used to tell me he would sit down one day and write about all the amazing things that had taken place in America and and all the exciting things that had happened to man during his 70 years of existence. He had seen and done a great deal. He knew more than I did. I had no reason to not trust him. He had the credentials.
I read several books on writing back then, both on technique and style. I worried about my grammar and vocabulary. I never worried about having anything to say, just how to say it. My lack of education scared me. My idea of a writer was someone who had an MFA and had been through the famous workshop at Iowa. I worried about commas, semicolons, colons, sentence structure, what a paragraph was and what went into it, and all the other rules of grammar. The thought of writing a passive sentence or ending a sentence with a preposition freaked me out. I felt like I didn't know enough six and seven syllable words to amount to anything. What if I didn't have enough conflict or a proper resolution? What if I couldn't state clearly my theme or plot, had no story arc, or had a flat character? The more I read, the more paranoid I became.
My counselor noticed I wasn't showing him as much work as I had been and asked me why. I explained the situation as best I could. He told me the rules were there to be broken, or bent as far as you needed them to go. The trick that separated the average writer from the good writer was knowing when to bend the rules and when not to. This came with practice. You had to get enough knowledge of grammar and punctuation to know just what you had to and what you could get away with. He also told me I wasn't doing myself any favors by comparing my rough drafts to the polished masterpieces of the great writers, It's okay to look for inspiration, but when you let yourself get intimidated by the things you are reading you have to back off a bit for your own good.
I took his advice, and decided I would just write and worry later. It didn't go exactly like that.
To be continued........................
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