*
To find empathy inside the walls of a prison may seem strange at first. But perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to sense a link between the conceptual prison cells that exist in our minds, and the actual prison cells that few of us ever see. And also the way that all of us, at times, feel the walls that separate us from others, and wish we could break free. This may also explain the reason why literature and film and poetry go back again and again to the subject. The human being in extremis, the human being deprived of freedom, of love. We put ourselves in that situation, in that cell, and ask how, or if, we would survive. This is surely what is so moving about the poetry of Nâzim Hikmet and Yannis Ritsos, or the writing of Victor Serge or Antonio Gramsci. Not only to have come through many years of imprisonment, but to have alchemised their experiences into the essence of the human condition so that, with words, they escape the walls which contained them.
Hikmet, eight years into a sentence in Bursa prison, writes to his wife, Piraye, in September 1945 without a trace of self-pity, despite his political imprisonment and appalling treatment:
How beautiful to think of you:2
amid news of death and victory,
in prison,
when I’m past forty …
How beautiful to think of you:
your hand resting on blue cloth,
your hair grave and soft
like my beloved Istanbul earth …
How beautiful to think of you,
to write about you,
to sit back in prison and remember you …
And jumping right up
and grabbing the iron bars at my window,
I must shout out the things I write for you
To the milk-white blue of freedom …
Victor Serge describes how joy can pierce even the darkest cell, writing of his five years in a brutal French jail between 1912 and 1917:
On the ceiling, in a corner, around ten in the morning, a rectangle of sunlight appears: a few square inches.3 The cell and its inmate are instantly transformed … the presence of this warm light … creates an inexpressible emotion. Your step quickens, your back straightens, the day takes on a brighter aspect … Among those who succeed in resisting madness, their intense inner life brings them to a higher conception of life, to a deeper consciousness of the self, its value, its strength. A victory over jail is a great victory. At certain moments you feel astonishingly free. You sense that if this torture has not broken you, nothing will ever be able to break you.
He also takes inspiration from how the anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin had survived his years in prison in St Petersburg. Having no pen or paper, every day, in his head – to keep his sanity – he edited a newspaper ‘methodically, with the greatest seriousness; lead article, bulletins, features, scientific and artistic columns, society items … in this manner he mentally wrote thousands of articles’. Serge does a similar daily exercise, classifying and going over his own stock of knowledge, memories and ideas. He, like Speer, begins to ‘understand the value of “retreats” as they were practised in past centuries in the Catholic world … Contemplation brings about a re-examination of all your values, an auditing of all of your accounts with yourself and with the universe. Introspection opens up the endless vistas of the inner life’.
Both Hikmet and Serge place a great emphasis on the ability of the human being to be free in their minds, even when imprisoned. Yet in our world today, it seems that we are dealing with the exact converse of this – that many people now feel imprisoned in their minds, even when free. That in fact our societies are becoming more and more adept at creating walls and barriers in our minds. And that the technologies which so many felt would bring the greatest freedoms are actually chaining us to addicted patterns of behaviour and shackling our abilities to deal with each other’s humanity face to face. For all the horror of physical imprisonment, I find myself agreeing with Hikmet when he says:
They’ve taken us prisoner,
they’ve locked us up:
me inside the walls.
You outside.
But that’s nothing.
The worst
is when people – knowingly or not –
carry prison inside themselves …
In a remarkable essay from 2004, ‘A Master of Pitilessness?’, John Berger revisits the work of Francis Bacon, and admits that for the previous fifty years he’d been wrong about this painter. For all this time he’d considered Bacon primarily as an artist who ‘painted in order to shock … and such a motive, [he had believed], would wear thin with time’. But at an exhibition in Paris he realises that Bacon’s vision had always been of ‘a pitiless world’, and in this regard, he’d been many years ahead of his time. But it is not the depiction of pain and torture that makes the work original; it is the fact that in Bacon’s paintings the subject suffers alone – ‘there are no witnesses and there is no grief’. I would go further, and say that in much of Bacon’s work it seems as though the spaces his subjects inhabit are claustrophobic, hermetically sealed rooms, totally separated from any idea of a wider world. These are places of utter isolation, where people scream in padded cells and know that nobody will come, not even their torturers.
Later in the essay, Berger, prophetically, wrote this:
The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope to stay relatively rich … On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an ongoing preoccupation with surviving one more night – or perhaps one more week – together. The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us.
A multiplicity of walls – physical but also virtual. The way that technology now has enabled us, as never before, to communicate – but also the way that screens have now begun to distance us, separate us from the human voice, the face of pain and love, physical touch, the bodies of others. Bacon’s dystopian world now edging closer. The illusion of connection, yet the reality of isolation. The prisons we all make in our minds. In darker moments I wonder whether we actually prefer exisiting within the walls we’ve built rather than living between the earth and the sky.
Weil is obsessed by the notion of the wall as well – the image recurs in her work. And the way that human beings imprison themselves – many don’t recognise that they’re in prison, but the wiser ones realise they are captives. With a great deal of work, and suffering, one day the questioning man
will wake up on the other side of the wall. Perhaps he is still in a prison, although a larger one. No matter, he has found the key; he knows the secret which breaks down every wall. He has passed beyond what men call intelligence, into the beginning of wisdom.
She is also fascinated by reversing our perceptions of the world around us, delighting in paradox, finding limitations in the supposed ‘freedoms’ which our societies offer, and liberation in confinement. Sometimes, as here in Gravity and Grace, she, like a magician, allows us to see both sides simultaneously: ‘The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication … Every separation is a link.’