Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract! in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together — soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all — which is their secret from themselves.

My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said — I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality. .? What are we going to do about it?" — yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!

So that sometimes in this quest for things-to-get-in-the-way, I have felt the rock-bottom unit was Woman, so here, so there, so ever hard to pin down.

You evinced experience of this unit, this constant; I did not ask your marital history; thought Efrain followed up on you saying you had something in common with us but all you said was "Crisis."

And in the middle of the midnight of my pursuit which the South American economist about your age but bald traveling I feel sure you know under an alias seemed to understand in the brief time we spoke across the Visiting Room table so many months ago it’s years by calendar and even not by calendar (though the warp of this communication yields sometimes Efrain and sometimes only his absence, paroled) — followed by a second (but only by my count) stranger visit in the Visiting Room after our economist got back from a space launch — that visit the last time I heard from him till recently — I sometimes have felt that after all I have not found that unit and it’s as close as air and wherever I go it is with me, so I will not get shook when some former missionary in a sweater murmurs What a waste, as I’m standing by mop and pail, and I say that in my father’s house there are many mansions, but then see this missionary isn’t the same as the other, his brother, his twin, ever have a brother, Jim? but then am reminded that, no, I indeed did find the fundamental unit microscopic as beings we’re made of, grand as thought, abstract as the age.

And where is this letter by the way? In your hand? someone else younger? Here? Gone? Boiled down? To what?

To be made like my earlier letter and our subsequent afternoon visit? You said you would check out colloids (like to see if there’s any left!). You didn’t read much "to speak of." Thank you for bringing the correspondence form with you. To answer your question, No, Ruth Heard doesn’t write. Of Cubans and our Chilean I cannot say, though one of former was visited by a tall, scarred man sent by a fortuneteller’s friend and it’s general knowledge he’s on the way out of here sooner than legal.

I hear the black chant, the Muslim feet jogging down the concrete tunnel, study session’s over; I hear, I see, the men, two by two, the knitted caps, among them Willie Calhoun Jackson soon to be out on work release. And seeing this limited yet group consciousness bind these men, I think we are all. . but you know what is coming, I felt it a century ago in the frequency emanating from natural sources, cloud, hail, mountain, human plasm making me, as I then was, a hole in somebody else’s head no doubt (smile) — but what is coming you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious passed like a watchword so brief as to be unspoken from the South American through you was it by chance but really by itself. And so I know that he needs my help, though you might not know this, though you may know the gravity of his plight which I have not helped.

All this goes too far too fast, and whatever is true in your racket, Jim, brevity’s wit may turn out gravity’s vacant nutshell (read "-house," as in "nut-" or read "multiple dwelling")

Yet I slow down to be complete — holding no brief for speed, what do you really like doing fast? in and of itself you get plenty of time to fix all that — then if you follow not for the purpose of honoring a super’s garbage cans which he would speak of and as often keep watch over in case a neighbor, a kid, even own daughter’s boyfriend at school should leave a lid unsecured having stashed an old out-of-state plate where any animal or other might get into the building’s garbage, which is neither here nor there I’ve learned later in three places which are all prison which in turn I may not have said, but it’s a very good experience being transferred, as I have been twice, no middle-of-the-night police-state nonsense, right after breakfast, and you can get well-known for being well-known.

And when you get there you are as ageless as before though for once time done is space crossed, but might as well be the river in Australia longer than our Mississippi, endless as the abundant dairy products Miriam and I are farming in New Zealand calling to mind dairy-product cancer but also life as it was at first, where land is for the having.

To own land, Jim: not theft, as Juan thinks, practicing on my typewriter till the last minute — eleven o’clock when the juice surges elsewhere leaving us in technical darkness. For even if such property comes down to your claim through heirs upon the future, it is a transient holding minor as an accident, kernel of corn falling from a bird, a wind; one corn falling like theory, evenly from heaven, not to mention the paper manufacturer’s daughter who in her race for the State Senate and in preparation for that long-winded body added to her pilot skills learned at our airfield just outside these walls with a course in bailing out, but overshot the acreage her father owns, and someday, always in skirts, she will own for miles all around airport and prison, and on the Sunday of a Puerto Rican festival she drifted down too low, and, clearing one rampart but not two, she found her fantasy skewed, she yanked her lines expecting an answer that wouldn’t come, accepted with total-body wit the double-chute bare bloom, nearly twisted her leg descending onto the volleyball net with its angry holes stretched in lost memory — practically landed in the caldron of beans and sausage which would not have ruined underwear she was anyhow bare of but dispersed a long line of PR inmates and families and could have corned the ice cream but missed the rice, the coffee urn, the bandstand wired for poetry at that point, and missed a man and a small boy playing catch in the sun — catching up on lost life with a third, a known visitor in a western fringe outfit and hit a picnic table by the far wall where Efrain was getting it on with his full-blood Iroquois girlfriend fingerprint masseuse though while kissing turning both their heads so he could watch the Unidentified Woman’s flight approach out of the corner of his eye.

To touch down and be besieged by admiring strangers who, all but the Chilean’s associate the journalist Spence who had been talking to the Cuban’s little boy, could not be blamed for not knowing the industrialist’s daughter was the new owner of this land, if you see; for, sometime during my fourth or fifth year inside, the truth came to me (which I could never discuss with Shin the Cambodian would-be correspondent who when he used to come wanted to discuss the extra lift a guard gives you on your way up to the Box or how many assault problems per new inmate, plus profile which guys lose their wives in here within six months, ‘stead of basic problems like what I’m telling you came to me): that property is theft only of yourself: where are you if you have land? Why, you are there. It’s got you like the tax man leans on next year, which you have let’s say borrowed from him, but where is he if you want to blow him away or drive him nuts? You learn there’s a new man.