Outer Banks (45 page)

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 individu
als 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.

But without my coffin, without access thereby to the sacrament that could have provided grace with ease, I was forced to lengthen the cycle, to add link to link, until at last, no matter how I squirmed and wriggled, I could not deny the evidence that all the links would be the same and endlessly, and that all I was about during these complaining days and dreaming nights was the business of binding myself into time. It was a discovery made possible by intellect, rather than by rite, but it was no less gratuitous for that and thus no less an aspect of the grace that flows from the dead. I fell on my knees, as I do now, and I thanked the unruffled, objective, endlessly uninvolved dead for the freedom to think clearly and thereby to free myself from the bondage of the finite, the chain of life, the links of the desire that springs from memory.

This episode in my spiritual growth marked the end of my weakness for nostalgia. By cleansing myself of my desires for varieties of food, for varieties of drink, and for endless numbers of money, I cleansed myself of the taint of nostalgia. And thus was my growth allowed to continue, where before it had been impeded and had even been thrown backwards so to create a diminishment. It was a painful period in my life, and often a bewildering one, but all that was to make my ultimate freedom from it the more victorious and exemplary.

F
OR REASONS AT
first unknown to me, when I was falling regularly into disputes with those prisoners who previously had joined me daily in my complainings, I felt compelled to blame myself. Later I saw that my reasons were natural if not well-founded, for as much as I had made myself come forward after months, even up to a year or possibly more, of complaining and then dreaming and then making specious argument, by that same distance as I had come forward was I regarded by my old associates with mistrust. Now, this is in the nature of things, that when a companion comes forward and leaves you behind, you will bridle at him when he speaks to you and attempts to bring you forward also to stand beside him. You will try to argue that he has fallen away, and he will argue that he has come forward, and so the two of you will fall into dispute.

It was not wholly a legitimate thing for me to do, then, when I proceeded so quickly to blame myself for the disputes, but after all, I was the one who had moved out of step, and I could not think of my movement except as a forward one, and so naturally I could not help but attempt to convince my fellow prisoners to follow me to that place, which place I knew was no more than a quickstep nearer to death. Yet all the same, I knew that if I had
not tried so diligently to bring my fellow prisoners to a deeper understanding of the worship of the dead, there would not have been those painful, sometimes frightening disputes and arguments and the numerous sudden flights of irritation. My companions did not want me to leave them, whether by means of a step forward or of a falling away, but once I had done so, they did not want me to try to take them with me.

Yet I had no choice in the matter. It was my calling to make coffins to aid in the further worship of the dead, and in the absence of conditions which would make that activity possible, in order still to practice my calling I was obliged to draw others unto the dead in whatever ways there were available to me, and in this case, at this time, the only means available to me was argument. And so, whenever possible, I met my fellow prisoners with argument and deep reasoning, with intent talk and formal challenge and with careful discussion, bringing my own most complicated and subtle thoughts to bear on the question of the proper place for a human being's attention, and in the process drawing forth from my fellows their most complicated and subtle thoughts on the question. Thus, if I could not make my fellows a coffin, I would make them some deep and thrilling argument instead. If I could not work for the dead in one way, I would do it in another.

The first of my previous companions to grow weary of my company and to show it to me were those who in the previous winter had got me to dress myself up as a famous actress and go about in the exercise yard where there were many of the simpler prisoners and offer them my autograph, which they excitedly accepted and soon were squabbling over amongst themselves, to the lasting amusement of my companions and also to me at that time, although later it seemed to me a pointless and even slightly cruel thing to do, and I was ashamed of myself for having done it. But after I had gone through my long winter and spring of complaining and griping and fantasizing and ratio
nalizing, and eventually had come to know myself in this matter, then I could no longer join these fellows in their play and their jokes on the other prisoners. I was forced to refuse them on several occasions, first when they came to me and invited me to join them in their attempt to trick up some of the exercise equipment in the gymnasium so that the bigger, athletic men would be likely to fall and hurt themselves when they began to exercise, and then a few weeks later when they wanted me to help them decorate the dining hall for a Mayday masquerade party. I thought both activities wrong headed, the first because it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury and the second because the celebration of the first day of the month of May was a deliberate carry over from the days when it had not yet been thought of to worship the dead and men and women went around year after year making holidays out of seasonal and celestial cycles and changes which they foolishly associated with the patterns and needs of their own mortal lives. The amnesty associated with the solstice and applied every year to the short-term prisoners and the tried and convicted political and religious offenders willing to sue out a pardon, as they called it, was a celebration of this type. Possibly this amnesty was one of the reasons why Mayday, too, was regarded as such a significant holiday in the prison. I could not say for sure, but when I offered my reasons, as described above, for not wishing to participate in the preparations for the masquerade party associated with the holiday, I was told by one of the celebrants that soon the amnesty would be made, and then all the prisoners in his group, and here he waved his hand in a circle to indicate to me his many friends, would be gone out of prison and would be lost to one another forever. Some of them even had wives, he said to me, as if this were a sad thing, and many of them would be obliged to go back and make their residences far from one another all across the nation. Thus, he said, Mayday was an important holiday for them.

I could feel a certain sympathy for them. It was true that most of this particular group of prisoners would indeed be affected by the workings of the amnesty at the solstice, for most of them, as it turned out, had been confined for political reasons, in so far as the manner of their affection for men and their preference for the company of a man to the company of a woman were to be understood as crimes against the state. For indeed, when the continued good health of the state is economically dependent upon the family and upon sexual unions therein between a man and a woman, to withhold oneself from participating with eagerness in such a union is to undermine the very foundations of the state. Though I myself was not guilty of this particular crime, I was, however, guilty of a crime similarly identified, and for that reason I felt a special kinship with these surprisingly good-natured fellows. I say surprisingly because I knew how much they had suffered for their predilections and derelictions, and it would have been a reasonable thing for them to have been far more bitter and belligerent towards those of us who were not of their particular persuasion as regards the family or as regards copulation with women. (Many of them, in confidence, did tell me that they often had copulated with women and in fact were very fond of the company of women, even more than was I myself. I found this hard to understand. Actually, I found it hard to believe, and that is what I found hard to understand, for why should I not believe what I am told by a man I do not hold to be a liar?)

They made no particular protest to my refusal to join them in their tricking out the exercise machines, even when I volunteered my reasons for not wishing to join them, which were, as I said, because I feared it would cause unnecessary anger and possible injury. I added that the taking of one's pleasure from any increase in the quantity of anger in this already steaming world was inattentive to the teachings of the dead, and here I showed them from
The Book of Tribulations
(xi, 13) that the man who cultivates anger cultivates a desert. But they heard me not, and
heard not the words of the dead, and instead went laughing away from me and set about to arrange the exercise machines so that several of the machines did indeed break with malicious force as soon as they were used, and as I had predicted, this caused a significant amount of anger, which did not seem to dismay my friends in the least, and also caused one rather cruel injury to the groin of one of the men caught in a tricked-out machine, which injury did not sadden any of my friends, at least in no way that I could determine.

When a few weeks later they came back to me and tried to convince me to join them in making their decorations of the dining hall for the purposes of the masquerade party associated with Mayday, they were more persistent than before, the which persistence I credited to the fact that as a coffin-maker I was known to be a clever man with tools and certain of their plans were sufficiently elaborate that they required the aid of people who were clever with tools. So when I refused them and gave them my reasons, which I have already described and will not say over again here, they were irritated with me and fell into arguing heatedly with me, some of them, while others tried cajoling me, while yet others promised rewards and certain unnameable services in return for my help. But I resisted them all. To their arguments I responded with counterarguments, which I fortified and validated with scripture, so that before long it was clear to everyone that all they had to present on their side was merely the argument of justification by sentiment, whereas mine was the argument of justification by metaphysic, and when I had pointed this out and had reminded them of the hierarchy among forms of argument, they were silenced, though I fear they were not convinced. To those who tried cajoling me with their high spirits and jokes and the promise of hearty fellowship, urging me to go along with the group because not to do so would leave me in a solitary way, I responded that without the dead I am forever in a solitary way and with the dead I am never alone. This also was successful
in silencing them, and their cajoling ceased directly, and they too went off from me, leaving only those few who were making promises of unnameable services to me in return for my helping with the decorations, which help involved the construction of a garlanded and festooned temple in the middle of the dining hall, along with some machinery and stages for certain proposed theatrical and musical productions. To these last among my former companions, I said that I had turned my attention away from the living and toward the dead and that I was therefore striving mightily not to be a man of time any longer, which meant that such sensual pleasures as they promised were meaningless to me at best and corrupting to me at worst. Therefore, said I, to offer me a meaningless pleasure is to offer me no pleasure at all. It is to offer only confusion, guilt and fretfulness, for which I would not be able to thank you, for which, in fact, I would virtually resent you. No, said I, the service shall be mine, and that service is to refuse you, so that I will not resent you. But this did not please them as I had hoped it would, and with several blatant shows of their disgust and incomprehension, they departed from me.

Another group of men with whom I fell frequently into dispute were the athletic men, most of whom were committed to violence, I admit, but who only opened themselves to its use in a principled way, in comparison with the several madmen and the dozen or so youths who saw violence more or less as a symbol for something else (rather than the more usual opposite way of regarding it). These the madmen and the flightly youths with knives and other honed bits of metal that they secreted in divers parts of their bodies and clothing, these were a type I did not dare dispute with. I confess it now, even though I know that had I then my own coffin to which I could have resorted for strength and wisdom every evening, I surely would have dared to confront these madmen and youths who are, every time they are seen, in a wild chase for anyone who would obstruct or hinder them, and the one who would do so would get mashed up
by them, for it is the mashing that they love. They often chased after me to obstruct or hinder them, but I would not, despite their attempts to force me by making outrageous demands upon me. For without my coffin, no matter how elevated and rigorous my attempts to transcend the limits of my mortal structure, I was never the less in this respect, in the respect of my physical cowardice when faced by a madman, or a gang of wild-eyed youths trying to make themselves secure by committing acts of violence, still a man of time.

It was not so difficult for me to stand and bring forth argument with the athletes, though, those hulky, bulky men who lifted enormous weights and exercised for long hours every day and even at night, for I knew that, regardless of their commitment to and enjoyment of certain acts of violence against other human beings, it was under the guidance of principles of self-defense and was thus predictable. They relished and told long stories of mighty bouts, recounted great bone-crunching episodes of violence, but all their stories and accounts were guided by the wish to point up the principle of self-defense, its necessity, utility and justification, almost as if they were telling little fables or parables designed to say the virtue of their authors' lives of heavy discipline, their lives of contrived restraint. And of course, because they tended to be much larger than most men and much stronger and more skilled in the ways of breaking bones and tearing muscle and rupturing organs and various membranes, they also tended to regard the granting of protection as closer to the act of grace than they did the actual perpetrating of violence on the body of someone smaller, weaker or less skilled than they. Instinctively, almost, they knew that if they withheld their great power, they would be exercising the greater power, for grace, which is always gratuitous, functions essentially to dignify and glorify the dispenser. It is self-redounding, and for that reason whether it is utilized by the recipient or not matters not a whit to the dispenser.

Over the course of my first year of imprisonment I had often been placed under the protection of one or more of these men, a pure act of grace on their part, awarded to me regardless of my need or particular qualities and given out solely because they were huge and I was not, because they were skilled at various of the martial arts and I knew nothing of these, and because they were extremely strong, especially through the upper body, and I was no stronger through the upper body than any man who has spent his adolescence and young manhood as a builder of coffins. I welcomed this dispensation, naturally, for it meant a distinct falling off of the number of mean and nasty occasions during a day when I would be accosted by one of the madmen or the gangs of flighty youths out looking for someone unable to keep himself from obstructing or hindering them. I also enjoyed the companionship of these large, soberly disciplined, methodical men, and many were the mornings and late afternoons when I would descend the stairs to the exercise room, where they moved about like enormous beasts of burden in the cool, dim light, lifting barbells and cast iron weights, pulling rhythmically on thick rubber belts attached to the walls, studying their development in the mirrors that lined the room. Sometimes a pair of them would meet together on a mat and wrestle for a while; under strict rules and heavy manners, so that they would not injure one another by accident. It pleased me to stand and observe while they went through their numerous exercise programs and afterwards to listen to their conversations about bodies and physical tests of all kinds and even sometimes, especially after the spring, to discuss matters with them, such as the need to worship the dead.