Last year the administration at one of the prisons I visit gave me clearance to go directly into the hole. Normally, if I get clearance to visit a guy in Intensive Management Unit (IMU)—solitary confinement—it’s in a visiting chamber: a closet-sized room with a shared window-wall separating me from a guy in a white velcro jumpsuit. But this time when the staff at the front desk radioed into the units, I heard them say, “We got a pastor up here for a cell front visit.”
Cell front? I thought. Oh, hell yeah.
My imagination had visited this lower circle of quarantine-and-disposal plenty over the years. But as the heavy doors into these isolation tiers jolted open, I stepped into something unexpected, like something out of Star Wars: an elevated cockpit of angled-out windows with guards’ noses and hat brims peeking over the ends of blinking consoles. These guys looked down four units of hellholes, each two-tiered and spoking out from the center like death petals. One of the guards stood up to wave me towards Upper B Unit.
I remember being surprised that I felt nervous. Of what? I wondered. I’d been in pastoral relationship with men in the prison system for a decade and a half. But there was less certainty in isolation, less communion down here where the contents of each punishment box are <quote-01>swapped daily<quote-01> at any hour of the night. I sensed singular and unsettling mysteries behind the many cell doors surrounding me—bottled rage, a mental health tragedy, a brilliant manipulator, a keen gang mind—each a painful, hidden truth I could reveal by stepping up to the vertical slits of window and peering in. Only I wouldn’t.
It was strange being at the center of a real fucking panopticon, being inside that <quote-02>sinister<quote-02> observation tower.
Sure enough, with my back to the main control, I made my way politely, surveilling myself. A door groaned open ahead of me, and I entered the hole. F Unit. When the echo of the automatically slamming door subsided, before I could sense movement or see faces, I heard—get this—chess coordinates.
“<quote-03>Knight to g4<quote-03>,” a voice announced from the lower tier.
“Huh?” answered another voice on the tier closer to me.
“Knight to g4—Wait, who’s that?”
It went quiet. They live by sound in this realm, and I guessed they were used to certain sounds—guards’ confident yet tired pacing to certain cells, rolling wheels in front of a porter-inmate’s push cart of books or food—but not my hesitant Chucks.
“Who’s there?”
I kept walking past narrow vertical windows, following the stenciled numbers on each cell door. One held a man I’d written letters with for five years but had never met. I stopped at F203 and tapped at the wired glass. My guy looked up, like, What the fuck? Then smiled. He didn’t know I was coming. Neither did I, ‘til half-hour earlier. “Ey, it’s my pastor, y’all!” he shouted.
Quiet on the tier. Then a voice from below: “Alright, then.”
“<quote-04>Spensa<quote-04>,” he shouted, not to me, but to the others—gang slang for My bad. His face was maybe a foot from mine, but the sound came out around my shoes. “They’re in the middle of a chess game,” he said to me now, explaining with a shrug.
“Oh, no way,” I said. “Like, it’s all on pause while you and I talk quietly here at your door?”
“Yeah—it’s just a respect thing. Plus, we never get visits in here.”
“They gave me an hour though,” I said sheepishly.
“These fuckers don’t got shit to do. Their chess game can wait. Fuck.”
“Ok,” I said. “But everyone in their cells can hear everything we say right now?” My voice got softer as I said this, but his didn’t.
“Yeah. But they don’t give a shit. I sure don’t. So--What’s up??!”
That’s where your chess coordinates took me, Wuck.
I never learned that way of playing. I always thought it similar to Battleship, <quote-05>a Juvie favorite<quote-05> I’ve played enough.
That IMU tier was with me while reading your last entry. All the talk of games. Puzzles. The ways to avoid the exhaustion of small talk. Ways of spending time together when you can’t see each other. It’s perfect that you and Pat have begun this very means of chess while America goes into lockdown. When these strangers in that IMU unit shouted simple letter-number combinations to each other, telegraphic data bits, they were building together an elaborate story, the same holographic presence building in their separate cells, on grids penciled into loose leaf paper, invisible to me. A rewarding way to spend their time together.
In prison there’s the cliché but still ever-present line about how you “do your time.” Or else, the saying goes, “your time does you.” Prison is just a microcosm for this reality, though.
Maybe that’s another reason I have been drawn to incarcerated worlds—and relationships. The biggest questions are compressed, made tangible, visible. What seemed obscure and terrifying about being human as I walked through <quote-06>Budapest<quote-06> at age 16, or Berkeley at 21, became terribly clear in the county jail. When the 1,000-volume encyclopedia of reality proves overwhelming, lockdown spaces, for me, function like fables, poems, and songs
These guys playing chess across the distance—it’s the best they can do. It’s resilient, even, how they invent shorthand ways to reach out and relate. These guys might actually hate each other. No reason to trust each other. But here they are, otherwise alone, shouting their turns in a game that reaches through locked doors.
This helps me see your family, and all families, doing the same thing with their games.
It’s what we’re doing here, as I realized in my last letter. I’ve never thought of myself as a fan of games, but here we are. We invented some rules; we’re taking turns. Murph, you lay down a single, a pair, and Wuck and I follow suit. Wuck, you lay down a five card hand, and I find myself matching that with a fatter reflection.
But I’m thinking too how families themselves can be puzzles. That’s the version of the game that gets interesting the second half of life, no? We take apart the version of the story we had growing up only to find out, wait, there’s a new goddamn piece to this story? I’m not related to Grandpa? Back to the puzzle.
Water just blasted into my little study here, dirty water spraying in through the crack at the top of the door and over my head, a tommy gun of fat droplets pounding my bookshelves on the opposite wall. I hired two guys I work with to paint our house. One of them, John—a lanky white guy who grew up adopted into the Mexican gangs—is skulking around our little yellow house blasting its every surface clean. I didn’t have the heart to shout at him or open the door against the water to tell him; he’d feel so rotten and anxious. And it’s my shitty door’s fault. So I pressed my hands and weight and the toe of my sneaker against the door, against the loud water, closing whatever crack was in the wiggle room. I realize now I’ve never held closed a door against a threat like this, against something pushing into my world from the other side. Normally I’m trying to open doors.
I spent the last ten minutes trying to soak up the puddles, patting the water off all the stuff I’ve taped to the inside of that door: Chagall’s sacrifice of Isaac; a poster for a documentary about prisoners I was involved with; a rare photo of a clean shaven Ché Guevarra disguised in coke bottle glasses, suit, tie, and fedora, entering Bolivia where he was killed soon after; an Orthodox Easter poster printed in Russian for the local immigrant church; an original Wendy MacNaughton print someone bought for me at a fundraiser that she actually saw years later when she stood in here with me collaborating on something she was doing for the New York Times; a crayon drawing of Pete the Cat beneath a rainbow Rachel made with Abram when he was just two. All of this was now soaked, or soaking, as I tried to stop the water running down behind each piece and its old loop of scotch tape holding it to my door.
Oh well. Baptize that shit, John.
As I look back at the door again, behind my shoulder from where I type to you, I notice that our Last Supper hangs immediately above where the line of water blasted in. Everyone’s open hands, dramatic gestures, could easily be pointing to the water as if streaming off the edge of our shared Passover table. Some of you guys look alarmed. Some frightened. Others outraged. Paul, our hippie Christ, looks down on the scene in my room with open palms, welcoming what’s crashing in.
<pull-quote>sinister<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Talk to me about sinister. Why is this sinister compared with other schema?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>That a state has effectively embedded its apparatus of control into the conscioiusness of a human being. This is not about instiling values, morals, judgment. This is absolute formation of control within souls being warehoused. The ghosting of the active control staff is an eerie experiment in how total the transfer of surveillance has become.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Hmm. I think about how I am a much better teacher on those days I'm being observed. I'm dynamic and caring, receptive and well prepared! I suppose being that guy every day would be fairly exhausting, but the knowing I was possibly being observed at any given moment might just be the incentive I needed. No union would allow it, of course. Then again, I didn't murder anyone.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Murder is more a rationalization than a justification, mind you. No one deserves the panopticonic gaze.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>the anthropomorphic quality of the structure is sinister.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Because octopi are sinister? Spiders?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>the dark windows allow the structure to be the guard whether the guard is there or not. it’s not the guard that watches, it’s the building. that’s sinister. no?<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I see what you mean more clearly now. Are we basically calling Old Testament God sinister, then, too?<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>um, i’ll let hoke take on that one. but probably not in the same way, no. i’d say old testament god is a bit erratic in his behavior, so in that sense maybe. but, hey, go sacrifice your son is more sociopathic than sinister. mind you, an in-depth unpacking of even that horrific episode can yield some insightful wisdom. again, all you, hoke.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>But the menacing threat of ever-presence! The promise of eventual punishment or salvation!<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Wuck's onto something. Yes. Panopticon. All-seeing eye. I went to--actually was the keynote, oddly--at my brother-in-law's decorated retirement from the AirForce. Aside from naming the parallel (from the podium and mic!) between releasing prisoners and retiring US military personnel--and actually getting hearty laughter and pats on the back from squadron lieutenants over hors d'oeuerves later, rather than silence or scorn--I also brought home Air Force coasters. The Latin slogan is chilling and sinister to me: Videmos Omnia. We See Everything.<p-comment>
<p-comment>In Genesis, early on, the first time God is named is by Hagar, an exploited immigrant slave who has been forcibly impregnated, regularly assaulted, and has fled to the desert for her life with a baby in her arms. This God's presence meets her tenderly in the desert and is the first to say HER name. God asks her story, where she's going. Then Hagar, the abused nobody of the story, is so moved by this presence that she names It: "You are El Roi, the God Who Sees" (Me). This is a different kind of all-seeing.<p-comment>
<p-comment>The observation in Murph's classroom is motivating. An audience, and it brings out the best in performer Murph. It's a carrot.<p-comment>
<p-comment>In the panopticon, it's all stick. Punishment. Nothing aspirational, calling for one's best. It's fear and self-policing.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Most images of God are this, yes. We wrongly map those onto the OT. It's just the pagan/impulse/deity imagination. The AirForce. Mom and Dad. Panopticon. SantaClaus.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>There is plenty of potential for the stick in an observation, though.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Also, I know you can interpret Job a million different ways depending on which moments you emphasize, but one could certainly invoke Job to counter your Hagar.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Like Wuck said, dude's erratic.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>as are the orienting points of interpretation—they reveal your orientation.<p-comment>
<p-comment>and that hagar story legit just made me cry.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Your orientation: wuss<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Knight to g4<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>?! (dubious move)<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>Spensa<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Explain.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>A contraction of "dispensa," which means in Spanish what it sounds like in English. Again, it means "my bad," like, "dispense with the grief; I admit I'm to blame." That kinda thing. It's popular among Angelenos.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i’m folding it into my vocabulary over dinner tonight.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>a Juvie favorite<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>man, did i play a lot of battleship as a kid. we had the electric set. i can still hear the distorted bombs in my mind. reminds me of the countless hours of minesweeper during my high school years on our computer at home, my dad and i battling for the best times.<p-comment>
<p-comment>i got the app now. i'll play it occasionally.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yeah, we need all these Wuck/Anthony Webber stories. So much here.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Wow. Gunning for Minesweeper times like high scores in Pacman or Galaga!<p-comment>
<p-comment>The Wuck voice inside me says something like, "but unless we were playing the exact same grid these times would be irrelevant."<p-comment>
<p-comment>Is this the space you want to occupy in my brain?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>yeah. i’m fine there.<p-comment>
<p-comment>to elaborate, however, the grid matters less the larger it is. i’ll forever feel robbed that on the small grid my dad had the insanely high score of like 7 seconds or some shit, and that absolutely was because of the grid. fucker.<p-comment>
<p-comment>my favorite new addition to the game in the app: whatever space you click first is never a bomb. it’s like the grid doesn’t fall into place, the puzzle isn’t constructed for you, until you reveal your first square. pretty neat, huh?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>Budapest<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>budapest?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>My dad attended a missionary conference in rural Hungary, and I tagged along. He encouraged me to take a train to the capitol for a few days on my own (my mom freaked). I explored the city alone--climbed neo-gothic battlements in the cold rain, sat in cafes with no one to talk to but my journal, got lost in smelly alleyways--and felt the immense loneliness and fear of the world, felt how small and fragile I was.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Freaking Blue Danube over here.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
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<pull-quote>swapped daily<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>solitary in spaces where others have been similarly solitary. living in apartments in brooklyn, i sometimes think about the notion of shared space through time, but solitary confinement is a whole other level. i mean, even lying in bed typing this now, hearing the random car pass outside is of a certain comfort.<p-comment>
<p-comment> i cringe, as i’m sure you do, at the likening of self-quarantining to the prison system, but there are whiffs of overlap.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Sometimes I wonder about the prison experience, how I might weather it.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Aren't there prisoners who prefer solitary to general population?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>ha! not on orange.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>