Russell Banks - Relation of My Imprisonment

Iwas 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.