ARTISTS AND PRISONERS have more in common with each other than have the servants of the State. Put it another way: the warden of the prison is not expected, still less required, to answer to his conscience; he is expected (and required) to execute the will of the State. (How he explains this to his children is, cunningly enough, no concern of the State, which has every reason to believe that the son will grow up to be like the father.) Or, to put it in yet another way, the artist, insofar as the State is compelled to consider this inconvenient creature at all, is nothing more—and also nothing less—than a potential prisoner. The artist is the prisoner at large who has so far escaped his just deserts by means of his private cunning and the liberal bleeding-heart public cowardice.
What artists and prisoners have in common is that both know what it means to be free.
Now, this is a thoroughly unattractive paradox which I, like many another, would like to be able to avoid. But it is impossible not to recognize that the people who are endlessly boasting of their freedom—we’re the best because we’re free!—loathe the very suggestion of such a possibility for anyone other than themselves. They are forever stitching flags, making and threatening and dropping bombs, creating instruments of torture and torture chambers and overseers and deputies and detention centers. Their notion of freedom is so strenuously calisthenic, not to say defensive, that freedom becomes a matter of keeping everybody else out of your backyard. Or bomb shelter: there are none, by no means incidentally, in the ghetto. (If I happen to be wrong about ghetto bomb shelters, I would love to be corrected.)
A vast amount of energy (the word is not yet obsolete) and an indefensible proportion of the public treasury—this government is spending our money, after all—go into endeavors which have as their single intention and concrete purpose and effect that no one be so rash as to act, or to dream of acting, on his or her right to be.
I have suggested that the connection between the artist and the prisoner is an unattractive paradox. But it is more than that. I have called it an unattractive paradox because it would seem to indicate that, in general, we value freedom, or find ourselves compelled to attempt to define it, only when it is arbitrarily limited, or menaced: when another human power has the right to tell us when and where to stand or sit or move or live or make love or have (or claim) our children—or bow mighty low, or die. We do not feel this way about the rain, the snow, the thunder, or the earthquake, or death. These have no reason to consider our hope, or anguish. The thunder which deafens me or the water which drowns me is not a man like me, is not compelled to hear my cry or answer my plea.
But we are compelled to hear each other: knowing perfectly well how little can be done, one discovers how to do some things.
This may be part of the definition, or pride or price of freedom, for this apprehension necessarily involves a real recognition of, and respect for, the other and for the condition of the other. The other is no longer other and is indeed, as the song puts it, closer than a brother—the other is oneself.
There is absolutely nothing, in my experience, more painful, more devastating, than this revelation. One can scarcely live with it, but one can certainly not begin to live without it. It is this perception, as I begin more and more to believe, which gives the person the energy—the passion—to break the chains which bind him. Or, to be accurate, the chains which bind us. The unattractive paradox is that it is this danger, this action, this recognition of what it means to love one another, which defines freedom, which brings it to being, which makes it as real as the Word become flesh, to dwell among us.
Brethren, please remember, especially in this speechless time and place, that in the beginning was the Word. We are in ourselves much older than any witness to Carthage or Pompeii and, having been through auction, flood, and fire, to say nothing of the spectacular excavation of our names, are not destined for the rubble.
(1982)