Relation of My Imprisonment (7 page)

It here came to me that the gift of the hope chest would have to be made by someone of means, if it were to be a believable gift, and such a person would have to be a philanthropist who had determined to aid and comfort those who, among society's less fortunate creatures, had been designated by society as its prisoners. Now since there was no way to regard me as worthy of being singled out by such a benefactor, for there were many who were as needy as I and some even more so, then the gift of a hope chest would have to be made to many prisoners equally and at once, enough of them so that I would not seem to have been specially chosen for the gift. The only number of prisoners that seemed appropriate, however, was three hundred eighty-seven, which was the number of prisoners, including me, then inhabiting my particular prison. I very quickly calculated what this would mean, in terms of materials alone, so as to estimate the approximate cost of such a huge undertaking as the manufacture of three hundred eighty-seven hope chests, and to my disappointment, I determined that the project would require over a half-ton of cotton batting (one thousand one hundred sixty-one pounds, to be exact), and also one thousand nine hundred thirty-five yards of red velvet cloth, and over two and one-third linear miles of twelve by one inch pine board.

At my recital of these quantities, my wife gave a high laugh and turned away from me, as if to hide tears of discouragement, for I knew that she could not imagine any benefactor wealthy enough to be willing to pay for such an undertaking. And we both knew that we could not request the gift of these hope chests and their contents from my impoverished brethren, my fellow coffin-makers who were now so scattered in the land as to be hopelessly out of contact with one another and quite incapable of a cooperative endeavor of these proportions, even had we been able to pay for the materials ourselves.

I then resolved that the cost of the hope chests and the contents therein might be borne by those wealthy citizens who seemed frequently to be willing, when properly approached, to finance the causes of the underprivileged among them, a surprisingly large group of ladies and gentlemen who, when they believe that most of the fashionable others in their class are supporting a particular cause, will themselves support that cause without question or stint. What was needed were a group of money collectors, a person able to arrange the appropriate publicity, an accountant or two to attend to the financial details and to keep scrupulous track of all funds, also an attorney, secretaries, an office of some sort, an executive director, and a board of directors. And we would need these people and facilities in the reverse order of their naming, for, once we had invited several prominent philanthropists to serve on our board of directors, which invitation, by the flattery of being singled out, they would eagerly accept, we would then be able to hire an executive director at a salary consistent with his or her responsibilities, and once we had hired an executive director, we would be able to hire the necessary secretarial help to take care of the paperwork that would commence to arrive once the newly hired attorney had filed for the incorporation charter and with it the plea for exemption from taxation, which would not be granted by the tax authority, of course, until we had procured the services of several accountants and clerks so as to keep our records in a satisfactory way, at which point we would be ready to hire the publicist, and as soon as he or she had begun his or her work, we would hire a battalion of collectors to begin calling on the numerous individuals who wished to support our particular cause.

My wife now grew exceedingly excited, and she showed me that the most important link in this chain was the post of executive director, for that person would be required not only to arrange and bear the responsibility for all the contributions coming in, but also for all the expenditures, the half-ton of cotton batting, the two and one-third miles of pine board, the thousands of yards of red velvet cloth, and the purchase of the blankets, linens, clothing, &c, and also that person would bear the responsibility of letting out the contracts to the numerous cabinet makers and woodworkers for the manufacture of our three hundred eighty-seven hope chests, a tedious task and one that could only be performed by someone close to me, so that it could be guaranteed that my specifications for the hope chest would be followed exactly.

Who could such a person be? we asked ourselves. My wife did not think that she would be incapable of the job, but I disagreed, for it did seem to me that, because of her longtime association with me and my heresy, it might be thought by the philanthropists, if she were the titular head of the organization, that they were coming out in support of my particular crime of heresy. No, I told her, they would not wish to have their endorsement of the cause of benevolence towards prisoners in general be construed as supporting any crime or prisoner in particular. And besides, I said to her, you are frail and weakly, and the demands of such a position would be beyond your capacities. She protested nobly, but I was eventually able to convince her of the foolhardiness of her desire to place herself in that position, however well-intended that desire. Next we considered her cousin Gina for the post, but again, I argued persuasively that Gina's association with the crime for which I had been imprisoned was almost as close as my wife's, especially since she had been coming to visit only me and no other prisoner for these last several months. We also considered several among the brethren who had not been imprisoned or who were not in any way known for their past or present practice of the various rites associated with our faith, but these too we had to dismiss, for the obvious reason that to organize and operate a philanthropic organization such as we were proposing would be to rip into shreds the careful fabric of invisibility that the brethren had woven in the last year. And naturally there was no imaginable way for me myself, condemned and immobilized as I then was, to direct the soliciting of funds and the expenditure thereof. And so, by gradual degrees, I began again to slip into despondency.

But I was not to remain despondent, for it shortly occurred to my wife to suggest to me the name of Jacob Moon, and immediately the gloom lifted and all was clear and bright again. For Jacob Moon was the perfect man for the job, and he would think so quite as much as we, I assured my wife. The responsibilities and tasks such a post would place before him would not leave him gaping in awe or trembling with unsureness. Jacob Moon was a man of the world, and though in a certain way, because he was so much a man of the world, I pitied him, still and all, it gave him a definite facility for working efficiently and effectively in the world. He was a living demonstration of the only aspect of being a man of time that could in any way be rationalized as a benefit of that condition, for while it is not true that every man who is able to function efficiently and effectively in the world is, ipso facto, not a man of the eternal dead, it never the less is true that every man of time, if he does not agonize over his condition and fight against it, will turn out eventually to be one of our nation's fine administrators, technicians or government functionaries. These people, because they cannot trust to luck or fate or to any of the various forces that transcend their own mortal lives, are forced thereby early in life to cultivate and refine to an amazing degree their skills and the quality of their attention to the ways of the world, with the result that they often become the men and women who are great in the eyes of the world. Only the dead, and those who worship the dead, do not envy them. The scripture says, Envy not the living. Cast not your eyes with longing upon their heaped up wealth and worldly honors, for they are but the wages of inattention to the dead, the fruits of a season lived as if it were endless. (I
Trib.
, ix, 9.) And (I
Trib.,
xxii, 30): Look unto the heavens, and let your feet fall where they may. Whether the road be smooth or rocky matters not to them, nor should it matter to you.

Thus there got created, one afternoon during the first winter of my confinement, the organization that later became known as the Society Of Prisoners, which now employs thousands of collectors, clerks, attorneys, secretaries, assistant directors and directors, the organization responsible for the physical aid and comfort of millions of our citizens (not just the prisoners, who will soon receive their hope chests, but also the manufacturers of hope chests and the hundreds of purveyors of blankets, linens, and clothing, &c.) It is the organization that has come to own and manage large blocks of real estate and public bonds and which has recently funded chairs in the field of prison administration at several of the most prestigious universities in the land. And presiding over all this vast enterprise is the remarkable man, Mister Jacob Moon, who once was my jailor and, in a sense, my brother. My wife's cousin Gina is also an executive in the Society Of Prisoners, for her special skills were required by Jacob Moon hard upon its founding, and even my wife for a brief period was employed by SOP (as the journalists came to call it), albeit in a relatively menial position. Though her later illness and death, which, along with the spiritual clarities it provided her and our children and provided me as well, I will soon describe, prevented her from remaining at Jacob Moon's and her cousin's sides for long, even so, her salary and later her disability pension were more than adequate for the support of her and our children during the period of their greatest need. So while I do not envy Jacob Moon or any of those men and women whose association with the Society Of Prisoners has brought them wealth and worldly power, nevertheless, because it is not expressly forbidden by the dead, I am grateful to them. And, of course and most importantly, I am grateful to them for their enormous effort to make my coffin available to me at the time of my greatest need. Gratitude is a polite form of inattention, we are taught. It corrupteth not.

I
was not, however, to come to possess my own coffin for a certain lengthy period of time, which delay came as a result of the numerous obstacles to be surmounted before the Society Of Prisoners could first be set up to function properly, many of which obstacles had been anticipated by my wife and me in the conversation recorded above, but a small number there remained that we had not anticipated and that were due to shortages and other market fluctuations in the nation during those years, and thus encouraged great delay in the delivery of the actual hope chests to the prisoners. During this period of waiting, I languished in many ways as a man of time, though not so much as before, when I had not yet been visited upon in my dream of my father and my uncle and was slinking hopelessly through my days in wickedness and obsequiousness and affectation. For while it had not been difficult for me to change my behavior, such of it as could be observed by another, the difficulty came when I needed to make changes such as no one but I and the dead could see. And the behavior in particular that I came to have to labor over, in order to change myself from being a man of time to a man of the dead, was the desire that springs from memory.

This desire, sometimes called nostalgia, as such is by many overlooked and is by them regarded as of little significance morally or legally. Also, there are people who even go so far as to cultivate the appetite, to encourage the growth of those desires that have set their tap root in the soil of the remembered past. The man who worships the timeless dead, however, cannot be one of these people. He cannot condone the desire called nostalgia, and he cannot regard it as of little significance, for its presence is a sign of his fallen state. Nor can he under any circumstances actually cultivate that kind of attention. But be warned: the desire that springs from memory can trap all but the most wary of believers, and whosoever finds himself trapped, he is no longer a believer.
(The Book of Discipline,
ii, 23.)

Nostalgia comes upon a man's spirit in as many forms as the weather, blithely as a summer breeze that opens his mind to an afternoon one summer long ago when he felt at deep peace with himself, or stormily, as when a sudden violent awareness of the meaning of death sweeps over him and his mind gets crudely yanked back to another moment in time some years ago when he experienced a similarly violent awareness of the meaning of death. Or it can come like the fog, in silence and almost without his knowing, for then it will not come forth-rightly as a form of memory but as something else, as a pure and particularized desire, a direct and focused appetite.

Few of us cannot recognize nostalgia in its blithe form, as simply itself, easy to dismiss as being of little consequence morally or legally. It appears innocent, to be sure, but it is not, so it is providential that what is easy to dismiss is also easy to identify, and for this reason it is only the common mind that gets tripped and trapped here. More difficult to recognize as nostalgia might be the more stormy of the two forms, but to encourage it, one must first determine whether the memory is of a pleasant sort or not, and the pause such a decision requires often exposes the trap. But many even among the most wary do not recognize nostalgia when it comes in like the fog, auguring a clear day but in fact leading in a month of rain. That is desire disguised as pure desire and not itself, which is the desire that springs from memory and which characterizes the man of time. There came a time in my imprisonment when I myself was so entrapped, when I mistook one desire for another and thus was unable to break free of time. Here is how it happened to me.

It began when I grew weary of the stale and flat food that was served up to the prisoners who had not the means to purchase their own victuals from caterers outside the prison. This daily fare of porridge and hard bread in the morning, potato soup at midday, and chickenbacks and rice in the evening, served up relentlessly without variety in the menu, soon caused me to gripe among the other prisoners, for it was a favorite topic of conversation with them, and since I wished to engage in cheerful and sociable talk with them, I was drawn to talk in a similarly complaining manner about the food. I had not noticed that the food was especially worthy of complaint until I had begun to complain of it, when, as if to confirm the reality that my words seemed to describe, I began to peer skeptically into the porridge pot in the morning and groan aloud or to smell the potato soup being prepared and shake my head and mutter bitterly, or in the evening to look to the ceiling with dismay when the attendant shoved my plate of rice and chickenback across the counter to me.