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Somehow, writing gives me “power,” or at least the visceral sense of power. I don’t know exactly how that works, it just does. Always has. I’m feeling shitty, say, or down, or depressed (that one’s a little harder) or angry, resentful, bitter, whatever, and I sit down facing the screen and start jabbing the black keys with my thick fingers and blam; something inside me transforms somehow, like magic.
Right now it’s 2:45 in the afternoon. Wednesday, July 17th. I’m in my writing office. All the lights are out; the window curtains are pulled back allowing the sharp afternoon light in. The ceiling fan whirs on full blast above me, and I feel the cool air dance along my naked shoulders and back. (I am wearing pants, shoes, no shirt.)
Reading is the grist for my literary mill. Currently I’m reading Dostoevsky’s prison memoir, Notes From a Dead House. It’s fairly boring, more like a sociological treatise than a memoir, and actually it is technically considered “fiction.” Truth is he wrote it based on notes he took while in prison for four years in a forced-labor camp in Siberia which he was thrown into for being a part of a socialist-utopian group in St. Petersburg called the Petrashevsky Circle, based on Mikhail Petrashevsky. (Dostoevsky's politics changed while in prison.) He wrote it as “fiction” and about a first-person narrator with a fake name doing ten years for murdering his wife, because he needed to get the book past the czar’s censors.
He went to prison in 1849. He was 28 years old. But he didn’t just go to forced labor in a prison fortress. He was also part of a theatrical execution firing squad production. In other words: Being told by the prison authorities that he and his circle were to be executed by firing squad, he was put up against the wall, had the rifles aimed at him, and then, at the absolute last second, it was called off, his life spared. This had all been performed on purpose by dictate of the czar. He wanted to put the fear of God in them, and in a very real way it work. The reason for the arrests and heavy punishment was that in just the year prior—1848—Europe had been wracked with revolutions attempting to upend czars and kings. Revolution was in the air. It was the year Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published. In other words: Those in power were terrified.
In prison Dostoevsky slowly changed his politics. For one thing, he did something Marx never did (and he, like Marx, came from the middle-class, aka the nobility): He was forced to interact intimately with the Muzhiks (the Russian peasants), who mostly made up the prison population. And in doing so he lost sight of the peasants as a political symbol and became aware of a much deeper, more nuanced, more complex, more messy and human side of these people. Previously, “in freedom” he’d made many assumptions about these people, but now he realized most of his assumptions had been wrong. He saw them now not as ideas or symbols but as people, weak and flawed and jaded and joyful and capable of feeling pain and suffering just like him. He experienced empathy, to use a contemporary word.
He felt his privilege there, felt his class status, even if he’d technically been stripped of any privilege once thrown into prison. The peasants, he wrote, needed him to still talk and act and be like the nobility, and they would be as they naturally were, too. It was a symbiotic relationship. An unconscious class structure which made them all feel normal. He drank tea and read the Bible (the only book allowed in prison) and took notes and smuggled those notes to a man who worked there who gave him the notes years later, when he got out, from which he produced the memoir. He made a few “friends,” though he says that genuine friendship was more or less impossible inside. He writes about the milieu inside prison, the non-verbal, unconsciously understood social rules. And if those rules were violated you’d get a yelling at or, sometimes, a brutal beating.
There were stabbings sometimes, by inmates. Sometimes inmates broke an official rule and had to “run the gauntlet,” meaning walk through hundreds, sometimes thousands of ruthless rods, which guards whipped the naked backs of the men with.
Dostoevsky was, like most writers, sensitive and also profoundly observant. He watched, even when he wasn’t watching. He listened. He recorded conversations, fights, whippings, the behavior of the guards, even a Christmas play the inmates put on at one point. He plays the role of prison-sociologist; he tries not to judge or condemn his fellow inmates, or even the most gruesome, cruel guards (though he does occasionally); he simply lays it all down for posterity.
I couldn’t help thinking of Adolf Hitler writing Mein Kampf in 1924 while in prison after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, his attempt at taking down the government in Munich. (Except, of course, Hitler was born eight years after Dostoevsky died, was Austrian and not Russian, and was evil incarnate and not a brilliant, tortured writer.) I also thought of Ken Kesey’s classic 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The first-person Native American narrator, Chief Bromden, observes everything around him sociologically, just as Alexander Petrovich, the first-person narrator in Notes From a Dead House does in the prison memoir. No or little judgment, just observation. Listening. Waiting for something to happen.
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In a certain way most writers—definitely me—exist in a sort of self-imposed spiritual, metaphysical prison. We’re held back from society by the bars of introspection. The bars may be made of genetic shadows—able to be passed through—but they feel like steel nonetheless. We’re “in prison” not because society has put us there, but rather because we’re locked, so to speak, in our own minds, places of wild, jungle-thick imagination, sincere sensitivity, and emotional depth, all things more or less devalued by society, especially now when everything is about social media and live streaming and politics; in other words: Superficial, skin-deep, outrage-marketing, the sludge of empty meaninglessness. Narcoleptic, narcissistic nihilism.
In some ways writing breaks me free from my cage. Always has. Like alcohol once did when I was younger. But alcohol, once my soma pill in Brave New World for “freedom,” turned out to be a hardcore prison guard, beating me every time I put the bottle to my lips. In the end I had to escape that prison.
But writing was different. It allowed me to enter a wholly new consciousness, to feel into my wide imagination, and I didn’t have to consume any magic potion, or take any drug; I simply sat down, aimed my mind at the world, or went into my deep interior, and started jamming the black keyboard computer keys like some deranged madman trying to finger jab his way into freedom. (My wife describes the sound thus: It sounds like you’re “beating up” the keys.)
Writing opens up new inner worlds and allows me to escape the current objective world, which is totally out of my hands and uncontrollable. That’s another major reason for writing, and it’s a similar reason many give for having kids: A sense of legacy, aka eternity, aka control. If you can write something, perhaps, symbolically, you can, at least on the page, transcend death. (With kids of course you do this by continuing the generations, passing on your DNA, etc.) You can express a sense of control on your limited world. You can chase the notion of eternity. There’s something erotic, juicy, communal, even necessary, about this idea of eternity. Kierkegaard wrote often about this concept. For him, to chase eternity was to in essence crave God. Acceptance, faith, letting go: These are to allow eternity into your inner circle.
Dostoevsky’s story also highlights that for writers literally everything is material. Even prison. The death of loved ones. Every success and every failure. Your deepest loves and your deepest hates. Your truest, gnarliest fears. That’s the beauty of the language of writing: You hurl linguistic spears at The Unknown. Whatever emotion you may be feeling—however badly you may want to throw in the towel—there’s always the written word. We’ve had this—writing—for 5,000 years, going all the way back to the Middle East and Egypt.
Human communication is profoundly crucial. Whether verbally or symbolically—and that’s precisely what writing is, crafting intra-understanding between people by using marked symbols to form letters, words, sentences, etc.
I hope each of us who writes can think of ourselves as being free from the prison we sometimes live inside at least some of the time. We may live in an inner-spiritual prison but that doesn’t mean we can’t walk outside in “the Yard.” It doesn’t mean we can’t see over the walls topped with rolling barbed wire. It doesn’t mean we can’t imagine ourselves outside of that prison, strolling, free, amongst the non-convicted. Perhaps I mean to say: Writers are “the convicted,” the ones condemned to have vision, awareness, observational skills. Not that we’re victims or saviors; we’re neither. We’re just people like everyone else.
And yet something deep in my core cries out against this and says: No, we are special. Unique. Different. Maybe we are in some ways. Societies are made out of mass groups from which individuals exist. Writers are, if nothing else, total individuals, people who think for themselves, act independently, do not join the status quo, do not try to blend in or be “normal.” We push back against all that. We think, which is more and more dangerous in our contemporary times. And we grin while facing death on the page.
Excellent essay. Very thought-provoking