prose+cons

.sentences too long for words

"Grandpa, why don't you just finish your sentence?" He thought my sentence was just a whole lot of words I had to write, like copying a sentence over and over for a punishment assignment at this grade school. He couldn't understand that my sentence continues for twice my natural life.

Leonard Peltier
Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance

 

The Message

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
just as doing nothing is an act.

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There's no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility.

What you do i s who you are.
You are your own comuppance.
You become your own message.

You are the message.

-=-

Doing time creates a
demented darkness of my
own imagination...

Doing time does this thing
to you. But, of course, you
don't do time.

You do without it. Or
rather, time does you.

Time is a cannibal that
devours the flesh of your
years

day by day, bite by bite.

.this 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an open letter from his cell in Alabama on April 16, 1963. It was directed at white clergyman who agreed with his cause, but not with his demonstration tactics of non-violent protest. They believed that civil rights could only be won in the courts and not in the streets. Below are (my) key excerpts from the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" originally published on May 19, 1963 in the New York Post Sunday Magazine without King's permission.

 

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

-=-

"…freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. "

-=-

"…when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are)…"

-=-
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood….I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

-=-

"Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?"

-=-

read the full letter

.de profundis

Originally published in 1897, De Profundis is now in the public domain and available for free download.

Oscar Wilde's two years behind bars provided significant time for his reflections on injustice, passion, and scorn for his homosexual lover whom contributed to his imprisonment and reportedly left him creatively/financially bankrupt. Once released from 'hard time,' Wilde published only one other important work prior to death in Paris on November 30, 1900. 

"Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons."

-=-

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

-=-

"The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it."

-=-

"I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes."

-=-

"Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation."

-=-

"Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world."

-=-

"I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that."

-=-

"I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."

-=-

"Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system."

-=-

"The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me."

-=-

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

-=-

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence."

-=-

"... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."