Relation of My Imprisonment

by Russell Banks

  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.

  So it was that my complaint about the food, though it had commenced as a social activity, soon had validated itself against the physical surround, and thus strengthened, had taken on an obsessive and energetic quality that was matched by the complaints of only the most disgruntled and epicurean among my fellow prisoners. I was not at this time aware of my having joined these fellows in their distraction, of course, but even if I had been, I do not think I would have resisted, for a process had been set in motion that would not be ended until I had been able to turn my attention back once more to the proper contemplation of the eternal dead, who never hunger after variety or epicurean delight. The reason for this persistence of mine in complaining about the food, I then believed, was my desire, pure and simple, for varied and delightful food, and often at night while I lay in my cot and listened to the coughing, wheezing, murmuring sounds of my fellow prisoners in the darkness, I would image to myself a breakfast of fresh chilled melon, followed by a platter of shad roe and poached eggs, with hot crusty cloverleaf rolls and a pot of pure mountain-grown coffee, or a lunch of delicately flavored conch soup, fresh broiled trout and chilled white wine, with a key lime pie for dessert, or an evening meal that began with cold split pea soup with mint, cabbage in white wine, wild rice with mushrooms, a deep green spinach salad with vinegar and oil and subtle herbs, and a crown roast of pork with sausage-apple stuffing, and a cold orange souffle as a dessert. My mouth would fill with water at these images as they paraded past, one exquisitely arranged meal after another, glistening and aromatic, but soon I would topple from this pinnacle of wavering, transparent and transitory delight and would fall into a contracting pit that began with dissatisfaction, passed through resentment, and ended with gloom.

  Night followed night, and so too did my longings continue unabated, evoking each night a fresh cycle of foods that I could not have, leaving me, as a result, gnashing and groveling at the bottom of my pit in frustration and gloom. Sometimes I imaged to myself only light and delicate, pastel-hued meals, fresh fruits and vegetables and thinly sliced meats, and the next night would come a menu of heavy, succulent, roughly flavored foods, to be followed the next night by a variety of casseroles and sauces, and so on, with all the accompanying greens, appetizers, desserts, breads and pastries, with all the appropriate wines, and lingering after-dinner platters of cheeses and chilled fruit and clarifying liqueurs. My desire seemed to me endless, bottomless, infinite. But so too seemed my frustration, and thus there came those moments at the gray beginnings of dawn when, questioning the legitimacy of my desire, I dragged it out before me and tried to upbraid it for causing me such sleepless frustration and gloom, and I would find myself unexpectedly defending my desire, arguing that it was endless, bottomless, eternal, asserting that thus my attachment to it was but an expression of a growing freedom from time.

  This was a cruel rationalization that was but a subtle means of sustaining my desire, of feeding it like some kind of parasite that had attached itself to the interior wall of my gut. But I did not understand this at the time, because I was weak and out of contact with the voices of the dead, for I had not my coffin at this time. My dreams were silent, and I had no voice but my own to advise me, and whatever construction I could put upon the scriptures that yet rang in my head, and while my own voice told me in consoling terms that my desire was a natural one for a man who had been cast away in prison, the scriptures, or so did I construe them, told me that the appetite that cannot be sated, the longing that knows no end, the desire that feeds only on itself, these are but a few of the many paths out of time. Anywhere,
so long as it is out of this world! cries the prophet Walter (vi, 12). So I reminded myself, and thus, at the bottom of my pit of longing, would I raise up my head and listen, and soon a consoling peace would come over me, and I would sleep.

  For several months did this circle turn in me, of complaint followed by longings which evoked glittering images followed in turn by gloom which I nightly escaped by rationalization and misconstrued scripture. It was in the early spring, when I had been imprisoned for almost a full year, which at that time seemed a great long while to me, that several unexpected events occurred. Most men and women who are not of our faith would not regard them as events, but that is of no importance here. For events are what they were, and what follows is how I understood them then. Though I will reveal shortly how I eventually came to understand them, through the guidance of the dead, for now, so that my trials and tribulation can be better grasped by the reader, let me withhold my later comprehension until I come to describe its fortunate arrival.

  The first event was simply that I noticed one night while I lay in my cot and conjured images of loaded boards of steaming food, before I had come to the part in my nightly sequence when I began the quick slide into despair, I realized that the feast set before me was one I had already imagined, was a meal I had conjured several months earlier. This came upon me first as a surprise, for I had thought the menu could be infinitely varied, and then as a disappointment, for immediately the image of the meal seemed less succulent, less attractive, less necessary than before, and my mouth did not fill with water quite as before. I did not understand this diminishment of my desire, and somewhat fuddled, I tried again, and I sent the broiled trout back to the kitchen, as it were, as if the waiter had made a terrible mistake, and ordered again, this time a crispy roast pig stuffed with apples and sausage. But this meal too was familiar to me, for it too had I earlier brought forth from my imagination (for there did I then believe these images to emanate from). Again I returned the meal to the kitchen and called for another, barbecued swordfish, but this too, when it appeared steaming in its juices before me, I saw I had already ordered once, and thus it went sailing back to the chef, who by now must have been close to despair himself. On it went, one after another, until I began to grow shrill and wild, ordering rapidly and without care.

  Suddenly, as if to quiet me for a moment while the poor harried chef struggled to assemble his masterpiece, there was set before me a glass and a dark bottle of twenty year old port wine. I poured a glassful, raised it and with my eyes praised the regal hue of the wine, sniffed it with pleasure, and let it into my mouth. This was the second event. For it was as if the wine had replaced the banquet of before, and instantly my earlier endless desire for delicious and various foods had been replaced by a new endless desire, this one for fine wines, hearty whiskeys, froth-topped ales and sharp tangy liqueurs and brandies that heat the chest. In my mind I drank off the bottle of port wine, and as soon as it was emptied, I tumbled as before into my pit of despondency, where I nursed myself with consoling rationalizations concerning the spiritual quality of my desire and with scripture appropriated and translated for my own greedy use.

  The next night I requested a brilliant beaujolais, and then the following night a chablis from an obscure but old and honorable vineyard, and then, one night after another, one excellent old wine after another, until it occurred to me that a peaty ten year old whiskey from the north would be pleasant, and then a bottle of cognac, a coffee brandy from the tropics, a rice wine from the orient, a powerful honey liqueur, a pale and breathtaking rum, and on and on, long careful solitary nights at table as I raised glass after glass to the light, admired the color and texture, brought the glass to my lips, and while it still quivered there, suddenly plummeted into the pit of frustration, resentment, gloom, there to anesthetize my pain with specious argument and misapplied scripture.

  So it was that I did also complain as before among my fellow prisoners when at leisure or at table, except that now I whined about the prohibitions against alcoholic beverages and other intoxicants, and that now the prisoners among whom I gathered to complain were the swollen-bellied addicts of alcohol, the slaves to gin, the nervous red-nosed lovers of whiskey and rum, the bleary-eyed connoisseurs of wine. No longer were my consorts the epicureans with their jowls and gout, the feasters and thick-lipped lovers of dripping chunks of flesh and all the fastidious gourmets of my small society. To exchange one group of complainers for another, however, was merely to rattle the chain that bound me, though I did not realize that then. I believed instead that I had moved from a dull group of misanthropic associates to a group more responsive and sensitive to my spiritual quest. Such was the extent of my delusion, the degree of my depravity. And so it was that by night I conjured images that eased my hungers and slaked my thirst without releasing me from either, while by day I sourly studied and discussed prohibitions and limits without attempting to transcend or overleap them.

  I do not know how long, as my condition, this would have gone on, or if in the end I would have profaned myself utterly and turned irreconcilably away from the dead, had I not one night exhausted the inventory of wines, whiskeys, brandies, liqueurs and ales that were available to me and had I not, while wildly sending back each new bottle as it appeared to me, suddenly been distracted by the image of money. Be not astonished by this, for someday you too may find yourself in a similar trap, and then may you recall that after the desire for food comes the desire for drink, and after the desire for drink comes the desire for money, cash, coins, currencies of all nations, bullion, personal checks, bank checks, refunds, all forms of money, one after the other, in bound stacks, in high trembling columns, in glimmering solid bricks, in all the forms that you have ever seen. Oh, what chests of money I had hauled out, what safe deposit boxes, what caches and stashes I rifled and gloated over during those long summer nights! What great good fortune suddenly would shower me with riches, coins of all realms falling through my fingers, bills stuffed into all my pockets, my wallet bulging like a thick mackerel in my hand, while I lay there in my cot in the darkness of my cell, counting on into the night, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars and cents, pounds, pesos, francs, marks, pesetas, reals, ruples, yen, lira, and on and on, as if the numbers were able to run endlessly on all the way to infinity.

  Precisely as I had before, I moved to a new link in the chain that bound me, turning my backside to my former friends, the lovers of drink, so that I could complain alongside those who were poor, those who resented the wealth of certain individuals among us or the wealth of the jailor and his assistants, who, by bribery and other emoluments, had managed to supplement their salaries quite handsomely, and even resented the wealth of the citizens who remained outside the prison and whom we never saw but still remembered. Thus, as before, my days were spent with all my attention directed bitterly to the limits that bound me, and my nights were spent in vain fantasies that those limits did not exist, with the inevitable collapse against the unavoidable knowledge that they did truly exist, and the last self-solacing whimpers at dawn that this terrible cycle somehow expanded my spirit.

  Oh, foolish, deluded, self-profaning man of time! What will save you from yourself? What will turn you away from this pathetic ferreting about? Must you count all the money in the world, all the dollars and all the cents, all the bills and coins ever issued by all the treasuries in the histories of nations, before you can see the truth? Must you exhaust all the finite inventories in the .universe, and still go on longing, before you realize what it is that you long for? Do you not know that while you are counting, still counting, long before you have neared the end even of this finite set, death will come and take you, and everything will have been for nought, for zero, as if you had never counted the monad that all along stared you in the face?

  These are the questions that came to me, then, one slow word at a time, until it appeared to me that the chain I was forging was itself endless and that it could go on longer than I could. For while
it is the chain of delusion itself that is infinite, my own delusion was that each finite link was infinite. Had I possessed my coffin during those months of my vain desires, I surely would have seen that each set of desires was a finite set, for I would have seen, as I see now, that each set depended on my personal memories of food and drink and monies in order for me to image any particular member of that set. And when I had seen, by virtue of the grace sacrament provides, that I had been all along experiencing nothing more than the desire that springs from memory, no twisting of scripture would have worked for me to excuse myself. Thus armed, I would have steeled myself against the desire by denigrating the memory and then by turning all my attention to the further contemplation of the dead, who have no memory.