Russell Banks - Outer Banks

So it was that I did also complain as before among my fellow prisoners when at leisure or at table, except that now I whined about the prohibitions against alcoholic beverages and other intoxicants, and that now the prisoners among whom I gathered to complain were the swollen-bellied addicts of alcohol, the slaves to gin, the nervous red-nosed lovers of whiskey and rum, the bleary-eyed connoisseurs of wine. No longer were my consorts the epicureans with their jowls and gout, the feasters and thick-lipped lovers of dripping chunks of flesh and all the fastidious gourmets of my small society. To exchange one group of complainers for another, however, was merely to rattle the chain that bound me, though I did not realize that then. I believed instead that I had moved from a dull group of misanthropic associates to a group more responsive and sensitive to my spiritual quest. Such was the extent of my delusion, the degree of my depravity. And so it was that by night I conjured images that eased my hungers and slaked my thirst without releasing me from either, while by day I sourly studied and discussed prohibitions and limits without attempting to transcend or overleap them.

I do not know how long, as my condition, this would have gone on, or if in the end I would have profaned myself utterly and turned irreconcilably away from the dead, had I not one night exhausted the inventory of wines, whiskeys, brandies, liqueurs and ales that were available to me and had I not, while wildly sending back each new bottle as it appeared to me, suddenly been distracted by the image of money. Be not astonished by this, for someday you too may find yourself in a similar trap, and then may you recall that after the desire for food comes the desire for drink, and after the desire for drink comes the desire for money, cash, coins, currencies of all nations, bullion, personal checks, bank checks, refunds, all forms of money, one after the other, in bound stacks, in high trembling columns, in glimmering solid bricks, in all the forms that you have ever seen. Oh, what chests of money I had hauled out, what safe deposit boxes, what caches and stashes I rifled and gloated over during those long summer nights! What great good fortune suddenly would shower me with riches, coins of all realms falling through my fingers, bills stuffed into all my pockets, my wallet bulging like a thick mackerel in my hand, while I lay there in my cot in the darkness of my cell, counting on into the night, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars and cents, pounds, pesos, francs, marks, pesetas, reals, ruples, yen, lira, and on and on, as if the numbers were able to run endlessly on all the way to infinity.

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 individuals 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.

FOR 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.