Contacts
Some of the men in Canaan have wives and children. When he is condemned to Block C, effectively he has already lost them. It is not always as simple as that. They often continue to haunt him, just as — I imagine — he haunts them in their own version of existence, for years. The fact that the haunting is a haunting of love and futile need and the carcass of hope rather than a specter of vengeance does not make it any the less terrible — nor, indeed, any the less fearful, though the fear is of a different kind. It is the appearance of the vengeful phantasm that is feared, while it is the departure of the phantasm of human contact which is dreaded as the ultimate extinction of being in the world.
The incoming letter is always and absolutely devoid of hope and life no matter what its contents. The Dear John letter, when it comes, is virtually a euthanasia. It is the outgoing letter which is the focus of uncertainty. That is the contact with something to offer, apparently. That is the contact which will always retain some kind of meaning. The incoming letter cannot prevail against the environment; it can bring in nothing of the outside world for more than a fleeting instant, because nothing of the outside world can survive in this kind of a cage. The outgoing letter, on the other hand, carries part of the inmate back, away from the prison, out into the daylight. It is a kind of escape; it tells the inmate that he still has some kind of existence in the world which human consensus says is real. It may be only an existence scribbled on paper, like the works of an author long dead, but it is an existence of a kind and an existence which can continue to grow and ramify as long as the inmate can put pen to paper.
The outgoing letter, I must make you realize, is a thing of the utmost importance. This is vital to your understanding. Will you please accept, if only as a working hypothesis, the extreme importance of the outgoing letter? I promise you that this will be the only favor this document will ever ask of you.
Now think.
Censorship operates with respect to every piece of paper that passes in and out of Block C. They censor the books that come in, and if you underline words in the books they rub out the lines on the way out. All lines can be erased. There are only pencils — soft pencils — available to inmates in Block C. When a prisoner writes a letter, he presses down hard, to make sure that even if the words are rubbed out the impression remains. He runs the risk of having his letter destroyed in consequence, if he strays too far over the borderline of what is “tolerable,” but it gives him a little extra latitude. I have known men who would quite literally write certain passages in their letters in their own blood to prevent erasure. This is futile, because such letters are virtually certain to be destroyed.
These are some of the rules of censorship:
A prisoner must not write about prison conditions.
A prisoner must not write about prison guards.
A prisoner must not write about prison events.
A prisoner must not write about escaping.
A prisoner must not write about desperation, about the possibility of his committing suicide, nor about anything which implies that his condition, mental or physical, is intolerable.
I offer these without comment, save to say that each and every one of these rules may be transgressed to a degree which the censor may consider “harmless.” One never knows where the line is drawn. More important, one never knows whether one’s letters get out unviolated or not, or to what extent they have been violated if so. Incoming letters which might tell a prisoner about such censorship are themselves censored.
There are other rules:
Letters may be sent only to, and received from, people on a list of authorized correspondents which the prison authorities must approve.
Only two letters may be sent per week. (There is no limit on the number of letters received in a week.)
One may write only to individuals that are personally known to the prisoner, never to individuals who are not known to the prisoner and never in any circumstances to an organization of any kind.
Again, no comment. But an observation: people outside try many devices for making their letters less easy to censor — pressing down hard to make an impression, using all kinds of code and invisible ink. Most fail. Many letters are simply intercepted. There is no way for the prisoner to tell his correspondents on the outside about the things which may or may not have been censored from letters. Any such reference is automatically censored.
Perhaps there is one thing more to be said about contacts, and that is about the guards. They are always present. There are always a lot of them. They are human, too.
But there are always the cameras as well. At every junction there is a camera set high in the wall. Total surveillance at all times. We can never know who it is that enforces the rules and regulations of the prison. Perhaps the guards would let us live, just a little, if they could. But they have one endless chorus which puts an end to all our efforts to make human contacts out of them. The regulations rule absolutely supreme.
“It’s not me, mate,” the guard will say. “It’s the camera.”