Pacifist, page 8
(I have since concluded that no matter if a man went about here and there killing people, but called himself a pacifist, there would be those, and they would be legion, who must wonder of his balls, would think him a castrato.
I don’t remember the details of the quarrel with my father that caused me to leave home, but figuratively speaking, it had to do still and most of all, I believe, with my being out of uniform.
My father was himself an old soldier, and most proud of it.
23
Prison; Chillicothe; the psychiatric ward:
During the day, those of us in the psychiatric ward considered to be peaceably aberrant were allowed the freedom of the ward. We were few, and accordingly, friendly. There was a tall gangling youth from the Tennessee mountains who bore a startling resemblance to the statutory rape sailor in Rochester, as though he was indeed that sailor, but this much altered, gone loose-limbed and bright-eyed mad. A babbler, smiling and bobbing, a verbal stream of consciousness would pour from him excitedly sometimes for hours on end as he wandered from cell to cell about the ward, largely being ignored, or stood at an open-barred window and talked simply to the day, talking mostly of remembered random sights and sounds of the hills and people of his native mountains, and of the prettiness of the various automobiles he’d seen there, a few of which had seemed to him so pretty that he’d stolen them.
Once, as he babbled, my attention was caught and I stopped and listened and heard described unforgettably the sights and sensations of the drinking of spring water dipped from a mountain spring, as dipped from a spring with a blue clay bottom and tendrils of tree roots showing, with the sunlight coming in under the trees and down through the leaves and following the bright tin dipper darkening down into the water and brightening back up again, so that the water was too pretty right then to drink and you had to wait.
And after that when he was babbling about cars, I felt I probably knew better than did the law or medicine why now and then he stole one … although I allowed then, as I do now, that a hunger for beauty is no doubt as rare a thing among thieves as it is among merchants.
Also in the ward, having been there for some time when I arrived, was another conscientious objector to war, whose name I remember, but whom I shall call, wrongly, William. William would not eat meat, wear shoes, hurt a fly, use tableware, or shave. I can’t remember why he wouldn’t use knife or fork, but he wouldn’t. He ate with his fingers, waved flies away with a fan.
He was small, fragile seeming, with pale blue eyes and fine straight sandy-colored hair. He spoke slowly, and with a great earnestness, on all subjects. Unfortunately his voice was thin and had a tendency to break.
William believed that any one man could powerfully change the world, and that this could and must be done through the way of non-violence, with loving kindness.
He worked at it.
A young black in the ward—a klepto who couldn’t stop stealing even in prison—enjoyed ridiculing William by bringing him a supposedly living fly in his closed fist, only to discover, when his fist was opened, that the fly, alas, was dead, and how awful. William was always saddened by this.
It was, however, this same black who took it upon himself to look after William each time he was returned from yet another session in the tile room, William being once again quite out of it, all shaved and sedated and wrapped in wet sheets.
This treatment was supposed to persuade William to a more conventional sort of thinking. It would confuse him for a time, but that was about it.
William would not be corrected. Nor would he assist at his own imprisonment in any way. (This was a point of view I had also once held, but had soon abandoned.) Also, he would not refrain from lecturing his captors, when given the opportunity, on the various errors of their ways.
I questioned him repeatedly as to the tactical wisdom of this last, but to no avail.
I found him not the most reasonable of men, which I said to him.
Sadly, he confessed that he found me not the bravest.
In time I grew weary of him, his theories and exhortations, his earnestness, his loving kindness, his foolish damn fan and dirty feet.
They wearied of him in the tile room, too, apparently, those who should have prevented it allowing William to be gang raped by a number of other hospitalized inmates. After which he was sent to the medical prison facility in Springfield, which was a hell-hole then and quite likely still is.
I have no idea what finally became of him. If he still lives, then somewhere out there is a pretty damn tired old crazy Christ.
While still in the psychiatric ward I was examined at some length by the prison psychologist.
The interview took place in a small bare room. The psychologist was a short, round-bellied, soft-spoken sort who alternately smiled and frowned for no apparent reason, and who looked a little like Louis Lepke gone to pot. The examination got off to a bad start when I was asked if I had been troubled with bed wetting when I was young. The correct answer was no. But did he think I might really say yes? Then I was asked if I liked girls. If I liked boys. If I masturbated. Each question was asked quickly, after a period of silence, as though the intent, each time, was to catch me by surprise. I had previously considered psychology among the more dubious of sciences, but this man seemed to me downright silly.
The questions were apparently being read from a printed form which the psychologist held on the desk before him, and upon which, usually without lifting his head, he made what seemed to me lengthy notes on my yes or no replies. Then, quickly, intently … had I ever had sexual intercourse with my mother? This time he looked up with the question. He looked up warily; he was not altogether a fool. It was a stupid and insulting question, to which even a pacifist might have taken rude exception.
I wish I had said how stupid and insulting I found the question, but the truth is that I simply looked at him in disbelief for a time before saying, no. How I wish I had said, “No, we never got around to that, mother and I; you see I was only thirteen when my mother died, and I was still wetting the bed,” but I didn’t.
I remember the question and that I answered only, no. Later I was asked in what way were a fountain pen and a safety pin alike. I said they were both machines. This clearly upset the man; he wasn’t sure if a fountain pen and a safety pin were machines or not. It seemed to matter to him. For the rest of the interview I had the feeling I had the upper hand.
A fellow objector, a Yale divinity student who worked in the prison front office, informed me later that the psycholgist’s report found me to be free of any significant abnormalities and bright enough most likely to make a go of it at the profession or academic discipline of my choosing.
It was a fair enough report, I suppose, but to be candid, I am inclined even yet to think of psychologists as being more or less a pretty witless bunch of mother fuckers.
(Some branch of an Eastern religion—I think it is—holds that if one awakens too suddenly and hurries about too immediately thereafter, the soul gets left behind, and some rather considerable difficulties may be expected until the soul catches back up. A fanciful notion, but one I’ve always found persuasive, or as good as any to account for those days when one finds oneself inexplicably spaced out, or out of step most of all with one’s own drummer.
(I have thought since, anyhow, that something on this order is what may have happened to me at Chillicothe, or in the events leading up to Chillicothe.
(It may well have all started on that morning in college when my roommate woke me—I had been up late partying—by shaking me awake and telling me that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. I woke immediately. I had no idea where Pearl Harbor was. Nor had my roommate; nor had anyone else. But soon enough, we knew.
(I remember that day well, as do many of my generation, remembering precisely where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was so with me. I was asleep in my fourth floor dormitory bedroom, dreaming of a girl named Blossom Bear. My roommate shouted in my ear. I awakened abruptly from a dream of love. “Pearl Harbor?” I said.
(“War,” he said.
(My soul, I’m sure, never caught up with me again that day.
(Later that same day I called my girl—not Blossom Bear—at Holyoke. She was terribly upset. How could she explain my pacifism to her friends and family now that we were at war?
(Things hadn’t been going too well between us anyhow, I suppose, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have caught me dreaming instead of Blossom Bear.
(Still, my soul must have been losing ground right along through there, and in the days that followed. And so perhaps it never did quite get caught up with me again until they wrapped me in wet sheets in the tile room at Chillicothe.
(Be that as it may; somewhere in there some kind of attrition had taken its toll, until finally in the psycho ward I slept long and well, and, as far as I’m concerrned, took back my soul. At the end of the quarantine period I was returned to the general prison population as one judged adequately to be aware of who and where he was and for what it was that he was being punished.)
24
While thinking on madness:
It is generally understood that prior to that moment when the psychotic young man pulls out his pistol and takes aim at the president or rock star, he has given much thought to just such an action. It is, on the evidence, not all that sudden an act of madness.
If the demented young man has reached the conclusion that the thing to do is to kill the president, it is only at last that this has come to seem to him a compellingly reasonable thing to do; or if not reasonable, then somehow necessary. The gesture, so slight, that pulls the trigger, is heavy with accumulated error, and is simply the act that accomplishes the denouement, the solution, the unraveling, that has at last become inevitable.
It was, with the sick young man, back there about the time the gun was bought that things went badly wrong.
As regarding war, I would imagine that there is an analagous time when things went badly wrong back there with us.
Which is to say that I think that modern war is a similar, but tribal, psychotic happening. It is surely no more the act of sane and reasonable men than the act of a lone assassin is the act of a sane or reasonable man. In each instance the progress of madness is not random, but is rather a step by step affair that adheres to a chilling logic all its own. The progression from the possible … to the inevitable … to the accomplished fact, follows the same psychotic pattern; a movement, increasingly, away from reality, simple sanity, toward catastrophe, an event of grotesque and terminal destruction.
And what is significant in this, I think, is that the occurrence of war—as with the contemplated act of the assassin—moves toward the inevitable to the degree, simply, that one becomes familiar with it as a possibility. It seems to me as deadly simple as that.
Whatever; it is a fact that increasingly now we are being told by various of our political and intellectual leaders that, “… we must begin to think the unthinkable.”
This, of course, is what psychotics do best.
25
I’m not sure how long I remained at Chillicothe—a few months at most—before I was transferred to the federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky.
At Chillicothe, as at most federal prisons where conscientious objectors were being held, objectors tended to be employed, along with embezzlers and other white collar criminals, in the administrative office of the prison, so that we objectors often knew what was going on in the prison and in the prison system itself well before many of the prison civilian employees did. So it was that I knew in advance that I was to be transferred to Ashland, and transferred there as an agitator.
This last came as quite some surprise, as it had seemed prudent to me—upon entering the general prison population and after looking around and listening about—to remain as modestly inconspicuous as possible without being obviously chicken. My fellow non-pacifist inmates, whatever their other social failings, were virtuously, even violently, patriotic. They were young, conventionally red-blooded; when denied all access to the sexual or criminal outlets of their choosing, patriotism did indeed become their last refuge. They were hardly those among whom a thoughtful worker for social justice and world peace would seek to win converts. There were, of course, a few pacifists who tried, but I, fresh from the psycho ward or not, was not among them.
(I would guess, as a matter of fact, that a more patriotic group cannot be found in any nation during wartime than in its prisons and reformatories. And I would suggest that this tells us something at least about one of the reasons why men are willing to go to war in the first place; not so much that they are all that hot to defend what they have and what they are, as they are to escape it.)
And while that may not have been an observation first made by me—as to what can persuade a man to put down his welding torch or pocket calculator and to pick up the real or symbolic gun and go off to kill or get killed instead—it was for certain an observation brought home to me at first hand, and most forcibly, as it was to other objectors, with a fist in the mouth or a knee in the groin, as this or that imprisoned patriot would have it.
We cowards numbered, I’m sure, not more than fifty; probably less, in a population of many hundreds. With such odds, it was remarkable that although we were most of us more than once beaten, none of us, at Chillicothe, were actually beaten to death.
Friday nights, I remember, were movie nights, and the movies more often than not were war movies. And so on weekends, with nothing else for the general prison population to do, it was open season on conscientious objectors. We joked about it among ourselves; couldn’t the administration at least show the bloodier movies on week nights?
Steve was a socialist, a scholar, a New Englander; precise in speech, deliberate, logical, often devastating in debate. He had that sort of detached intelligence—a respect for clear thinking in and of itself—that could not easily remain silent in the face of aggressive and otherwise unchallenged stupidity. At the time I met him, he had, as well, discovered that it lessened the impact of a blow to the head if one moved one’s head with the blow. Steve asked me about it during our first meeting. Was it, he wanted to know—was moving one’s head with the blow—in my opinion, a compromise of the principle of non-violent resistance?
I told him I thought not.
I also pointed out to him that by leaning forward toward a blow to the head—most of which blows your average brawler throws in a round-house fashion—the blow will wrap harmlessly around the neck, or better yet, bruise or bust some knuckles on the bastard’s hand as it comes up against the harder part of one’s skull. Make them, for God’s sake, hit your head, not your face, I told him. At that first meeting his face was a bruised and lacerated mess.
We became friends. Steve was impressed, if somewhat taken aback, by my occasional gutter vocabulary and my familiarity with the skills involved in fighting with one’s fists. He confessed that he found me a rather unconventional fellow member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I had told him of my meeting with Lepke. He doubted that he himself could have ever quite so hit it off with the man. Steve talked like that.
I remember him telling me one day, quite thoughtfully, that he supposed it must be extremely difficult for one of my background and so earthly an orientation just to stand there and take it.
You have no fucking idea how difficult it is, I said. But I think he did.
I ducked, went around all such confrontations, avoided all such ‘taking of it’ as decently I could.
Steve, I’m sure, understood. But for himself, he stayed and contended, and rolled with the blows as best he could.
He was no kind of an athlete at all.
Many of the pacifists and war resisters I met in prison were from the traditional peace churches; they were brave in the strength of their traditions and their faiths. Others, like Steve, were men only of principle, without faith or illusion; they were simply brave.
During the months I was at Chillicothe I worked in the shop where prison uniforms were made and shoes were repaired. My job was to polish the shoes as they were finished. I sat on a box and listened to prison talk and waited for shoes.
Racial segregation was practiced in federal prisons at that time in all areas except work assignments. I spoke out against it in the shop, even though in the shop I spoke mostly only when spoken to, which wasn’t too often. The one black who worked in the shop took me aside and told me, with indifferent concern, that that kind of talk could get my ass killed.
Remarks or questions directed to me more often than not identified me as a nigger lover or a draft dodger, or a nigger-loving draft dodger. Those with whom I worked did not similarly identify their distinguishing eccentricities, but they were variously car thieves, burglars, armed robbers, white slavers, rapists, embezzlers or bootleggers. I liked the bootleggers. They were like caged animals, they missed the woods and their freedom so. While the others were not all of them stupid or hostile, the majority were.
I did not build good time at Chillicothe.
There was an attempted escape while I was there. The boy worked with us in the shoe shop. I would guess that mentally he was about twelve years old. He was tremendously impressed by the fact that he had somehow called enough attention to himself to be put into prison. He listened intently to anything anyone had to say. He loved us all. It hurt him that no one believed him when he talked about escape, a go at the fence. I told him I believed. The others got tired of hearing about it. So he set a date and a time and told us he’d do it then, and he did. I don’t know what he thought was really going to happen, but he got shot through the stomach.
I understood at the time why the boy thought that he finally had to go for the fence, but I never did understand why anyone thought they had to shoot him. They could have walked up to the fence and pulled him back down. Probably he would have cried.
