Reading Lord Byron in Frackville, PA
by Quincy Saul
February 2014
1.
Reading
Byron in Frackville
Lord
Byron’s poem The
Prisoner of Chillon
has opened the minds and hearts of thousands to the plight of a
prisoner, and posed profound and unanswered questions about the
meaning of security and society, of fraternity and freedom. He helped
us to consider, in the deep way which only poetry can, “the
fate of those / To whom the goodly earth and air / Are bann’d, and
barr’d – forbidden fare.”
Today,
reading Byron's poem in the waiting room at the Frackville
penitentiary, we must reconsider these questions. If the early
European dungeons have marked our collective consciousness and
imagination with indelible dread, then today’s penitentiaries have
not yet been understood.
Our
society still does not understand where its prisons come from, does
not understand their lineage from the time “Since
men first pent his fellow men / Like brutes within an iron den.”
2. Seamlessness
The
difference and distance between this society and its prisons is
smooth, seamless, spotless. One arrives at a prison just like one
arrives at a shopping center or a school. They are neither hidden as
some dungeons were, or on display like the Bastille, or Chillon.
Prisons are simply another ubiquitous institution, and its aids and
ministers attend to and comport themselves with no greater sense of
purpose or sanctity than any other modern employee. To visit a prison
reveals this seamlessness of freedom and captivity. Muzak plays in
the waiting room. The staff joke about the working day, sports, and
pop culture.
There
is, I think, a new kind of terror in this arrangement. The seamless
aesthetic distance between prison and the outside world places us all
in an ambiguous precariousness to our own freedoms, of movement, of
thought, and of spirit.
As
long as you are on one side of the counter you are free to go, but
also suspect and suspicious; safe but insecure. The difference
between one side of the counter and the other is not the arbitrary
decree of a monarch of course. Today it is a massive institutional
system, based on hundreds of years of legal precedent. But the
relation of your average prisoner or prison guard to this judicial
system is equally distant as the king was to his subjects. Your
average citizen can't dream of representing themselves in court,
whether this be a court of the kings and generals, or of judges and
lawyers. The appearance of a secular democratic process conceals a
relationship of captive and captor which is no different in the
essentials from the castle of Chillon and its famous prisoner.
3. Society is the Target
Make
no mistake that it is society and not just the prisoner, that is the
target. The authorities are open about this. “The purpose of the
Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in prison
and in the society at large,” said Marion prison warden Ralph
Aarons, one of the architects of modern solitary confinement. If
medieval prisons tortured individuals, today’s prisons torture
society. It is done slowly, surely, on present, past and future
generations, with an air of normality which would terrify a 19th
century executioner. With 1 in 3 black men going to prison, and with
7.5 million under carceral custody,
and everyone under close surveillance, the
scope of this prison system, since man first pent his fellow man, has
widened to include and contain all of society. What Byron told of a
group of brothers, we may now say about our wider brotherhood in this
society:
Our
voices took a dreary tone
An
echo of the dungeon stone,
A
grating sound, not full and free,
As
they of yore were wont to be:
It
might be fancy – but to me
They
never sounded like our own.
We,
born and raised in a prison society with few poets heir to the
conscience and craft of Byron to awaken and ask more of us, do we
recognize our own voices? To the extent that we identify ourselves
and our accomplishments as part of this society, do we identify with
our prisons as well?
The
visiting room and entrance are decorated with certificates of
accreditation, photos of volunteer dinners (!?) and award ceremonies.
Portraits of the state secretary of prisons and staff have replaced
the monarch’s regalia. We are reminded of our own complicity, as a
poster reminds us “Homeland Security is Everyone’s
Responsibility: Get Involved!”(Also on the walls: the employee
recreation association1,
employee of the quarter, and the mission statement, gilt framed above
the desk.)
On
the other side of the bars, prisoners no longer contend with the damp
moldy dungeons full of rats; with the organic qualities of being
buried alive which tortured the prisoner of Chillon. Now it is all
spotless and hygienic. But they are buried alive no less, not with
manacles, but with 24/7 fluorescent lights and cable TV. Is society
buried along with them?
4. Buried Alive and Dead
The
brothers of the prisoner of Chillon die in confinement, and are
buried in the dungeon with him. Byron describes the horror of his
brother's eternal captivity, and his restless soul, as his captors
would not even bury him above ground, “even
in death his freeborn breast / In such a dungeon could not rest.”
While
we have no team of Byrons equipped to tell the tale, this is not an
obscure story but the common fate of thousands in our own times who
have died in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Like the brothers of
the prisoner of Chillon, they are kept captive even in death, buried
on the prison grounds. (Read “From the Bottom of the Heap” by
Robert Hillary King for details.) Our pleas for justice or even
simple dignity have gotten us no further against today’s dungeon
masters than in Chillon:
I
might have spared my idle prayer
They
coldly laughed – and laid him there
The
flat and turfless earth above
The
being we so much did love;
His
empty chain above it leant
Such
Murder’s fitting monument!
Who
has been murdered? Whose chain has become a monument?
Or
in our most efficient of societies, is the chain already in use
elsewhere, the second skin of another captive? Or is it being
prepared for us, who dare tread this uncomfortable and heavily
guarded ground of thought and feeling?
Do
not look to the age of reason, it has not dawned among those captors.
Now as much as in Byron’s times, they are “inured
to sights of woe.”
Only now this conditioning is not the crude mix of punitive
retribution, pure brutality, and vague notions of God, King and
Country. Today there is an entire culture industry, including an
all-pervasive mass media matrix, to lend the veneer of legitimacy and
the common good to this ancient sadism.
5.
Solitary Confinement
Byron
taught us about the torture that is solitary confinement. He recounts
the relief and succour that the brothers of Chillon found in each
other;
Twas
still some solace in the dearth
Of
the pure elements of earth
To
hearken to each other’s speech
And
each turn comforter to each…
But
when only one brother remains the dungeon takes on another, utterly
more terrifying character…
There
were no stars, no earth, no time
No
check, no change, no good, no crime
But
silence, and a stirless breath
Which
neither was of life or death;
A
sea of stagnant idleness,
Blind,
boundless, mute, and motionless!
Today
in the USA according to official Bureau of Justice statistics, on any
given day there are 81,000 prisoners of Chillon, neither alive or
dead, in solitary confinement.
How
can we comprehend this? How are we, and how can we be moved by the
poetry of Byron in a society that has turned what was once an
peculiar epic legend into a mass produced banality of daily life?
6.
Institutionalized
Byron,
as many prison poets before him, made us question the difference
between inside and outside. When the prisoner of Chillon had been
confined long enough, the dungeon had become a part of him, to the
extent that the outside world was already lost to the prisoner’s
imagination. He finally concludes,
And
the whole earth would henceforth be
A
wider prison unto me. . . .
It
was at length the same to me
Fetter’d
or fetterless to be. . . .
My
very chains and I grew friends
So
much a long communion tends
To
make us what we are: -- Even I
Regain’d
my freedom with a sigh.
What
was a subtle and chilling riddle for the times of Byron has become an
apocalyptic ultimatum for a society which contemplates with calm and
taxes the daily devouring of the lives of 10s of 1000s of prisoners
of Chillon.
What
has our long communion with this society made of us? This question is
not metaphorical. Recidivism rates are at steadily high levels and
prison populations are growing. Prisons have become a structural
outlet and containment mechanism for a surplus population whose labor
the political economy does not require, and whose desires and
expectations it cannot provide for.
Ours
is a society in which incarceration has become so ubiquitous,
seamless and normal, that we may not even recognize freedom, given
opportunities to regain it.
We
therefore reach the unavoidable conclusion that freedom is no longer
outside the walls of the prison, but outside of society itself. Does
this awaken an anxiety in you? Do you disbelieve it? Do you believe
in the possibility of real freedom in a society that keeps 1% of its
population locked down and 100% under surveillance?
7.
A Frantic Feeling, When we Know? Or Rusted with a Vile Repose?
Even
if our immediate consciousness does not reveal and condemn and indict
the brutality and horror of this prison nation, freedom survives. It
survives in ways we don’t always recognize, but which we must learn
to recognize and weave together, if we are to answer Byron’s modern
ultimatum.
When
you get locked up, or when someone you know gets locked up, or when
you let yourself really feel and contemplate the confinement of
another, when you find no reason or justice in this, when you work to
make a difference, and encounter a bureaucratic edifice every bit as
impenetrable as Chillon, you encounter what the prisoner of Chillon
did: “A
frantic feeling, when we know / That what we love will ne’er be
so.” Hold
onto that feeling. Explore it. Embody it.
Love
alone cannot bring us freedom, but the struggle to find it can. This
struggle can only begin and proceed in earnest, when we realize how
much we have already lost.
And
haven’t we? Like the prisoner of Chillon, don’t we feel free as
we pace our dungeons, at the inscrutable will of nameless captors?
“It
was liberty to stride / Along my cell from side to side.”
Georg Hegel
in his famous essay about Masters and Servants, talked about “a
type of freedom
which does not get
beyond the attitude
of bondage.”
Like the prisoner of Chillon, don’t we look out the window into the
wild and beautiful world beyond (a world of danger and
unpredictability), only to retreat from the window, in need of rest
for our eyes?
Yet
our plight is much more profound, as we find ourselves on the
outside, looking in, looking all around, no more sure of the meaning
of freedom or our purpose on this planet than the one who has dreamed
of nothing but freedom for unnumbered years only to finally fear it
and lose its meaning. We can’t lose its meaning.
This
is the dangerous and urgent lesson of reading Byron in Frackville.
Because we are losing it. In muzak and vending machines, in control
units and mission statements, in Homeland Security and employees of
the quarter; we are losing the meaning of freedom in the dull aching
anxiety and ambiguity that this system has elevated into a way of
life. We are losing the meaning of freedom on the outside, perhaps
even more than on the inside. Our “limbs
are bowed, though not with toil, / But rusted with a vile repose.”
8.
For Tenets they would not Forsake
Some
on the inside know all this better than we do. Like Byron’s
prisoner, the 15-16th century libertine monk Francois Bonivard, they
are there not by simple accident, but indeed because they have
refused to forsake the principles of real freedom.
These
political prisoners – about 100 of them in the USA by the most
conservative count – are all heirs to the prisoner of Chillon, all
deserving of another Byron. They have suffered and suffer still in an
anonymity which is perhaps the cruelest punishment for those who
sacrifice all for others. Why are they locked up?
But
this was for my father’s faith
I
suffer’d chains and courted death;
That
father perish’d at the stake
For
tenets he would not forsake
And
for the same his lineal race
In
darkness found a dwelling place.
While
there is no shortage of freedom loving martyred fathers from whom we
can trace lineages, perhaps the most obvious referent is Jesus of
Nazareth. Also a several-time fugitive political prisoner, Jesus and
his followers' role as an anti-imperialist political prisoners, as
prisoners of war and prisoners of love, is all but forgotten between
Christmas and the collection plate. But from empire to empire, the
lineal race of those willing to perish for tenets they refuse to
forsake, holds strong.
Today
darkness has been replaced with electric light. Byron's Prisoner of
Chillon has met with Orwell's Winston Smith in 1984 – in the place
with no darkness.
Our
society has scrapped crucifixion in favor of more quiet and more
total control, replacing torture of the body (for the most part) with
torture of the mind. But there is an unbroken line from the crucifix
to the control unit. It is a line drawn by kings and CEOs, and a line
we are all walking, inside and out.
The
message and the questions are too deep to be measured with any
specific contemporary call to action. On the contrary our answers
must be total, embodied, existential.
We
now contemplate what must be done on tiptoe, glimpsed through the
bars of a dungeon we may be only beginning to recognize. Most of us,
like the prisoner of Chillon will return to the comforting darkness,
the communion of chains, in which we now all sit, “rusted with a
vile repose.” Will you?
If
we really want freedom for society and ourselves, we must suffer
chains and court death, and find solidarity and honor in the lineal
race of heroes who today still deserve your permanent mobilization
and heartfelt support.
1
One
of the guards was out “hunting bambi” that morning, I overheard.
Incidentally, we saw over 10 dead deer, and dozens of other road
kills in the 2 hour drive on the highway from New Jersey to
Pennsylvania on the way there.
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