When You Caused The Bad Things

Incarceration is a double tragedy: separation and guilt.

Separation from society, family and friends is physically symbolized by the walls, double and triple fences, the concertina wire. It is reinforced by the maze of hassles both inmate and visitor must navigate to see each other face to face. Separation is getting news about a death in the family with no opportunity to say goodbye. It is getting news about a birth in the family with no opportunity to say hello.

Really, the separation of incarceration is more akin to isolation, in the way isolation is the opposite of community. Sure, we form our own communities in here, but I have an outdate, so these communities are only temporary – and they’re not the communities I would choose in the free world.

To say I don’t belong here raises eyebrows, but I don’t say that as a protest of innocence. What I mean is that I fit into the prison communities as well as a salmon in the desert. What stands between me and my ocean home are fences, rules and a handful of years. I’ll endure the separation, this isolation from my communities.

After all, I really have no choice. It is my fault.

The term “thinking errors” gets tossed around in here. I use it to sum up the bad choices, the flawed characteristics and misunderstandings of self that caused the separation. Yes, I can trace some of the thinking areas to the actions of others, but even those ultimately come back to me.

What do they say? When you point at someone else, there’s three fingers pointing back at you? In fact, blaming other people for your thinking errors is one of the most common thinking errors. If you go too deep it gets chicken and eggy; I’ve always defeated the paradox by completely discarding anything I cannot control, including the actions of others.

That sort of laser-focus on myself can be productive, but it also creates a room-sized elephant. It means I caused my own isolation. I sure wish that elephant would take a break every once in awhile, maybe go out for a coffee. But no, he’s pretty much always there. Reminding me that my thinking errors – the actions I could have controlled – isolate me from my community and from my loved ones.

There are loads of books out there meant to help people who endure tragedies. The nonfiction strain of these books I call ‘’when bad things happen to good people”, after one of the first and best of them. There may not be a better match between a book’s title and its content.

And of course, overcoming externally-generated challenges is the stuff of uncountable fiction.

There doesn’t seems to be as much for the person who must endure a tragedy of his own making. Maybe I’m looking for a ‘when bad things happen to people who primarily cause those bad things “. A shorter title possibility is ‘the flawed person’s survival guide”. I’m guessing books like this exist, but I guess they are not popular enough to grace the library bookshelves of this or any prison where I have been – so, they’re missing their target audience.

So, let’s turn to fiction. Yes, there are loads of characters who cause their own tragedies. The thing is, it almost never works out too well for them. If they survive at all, they endure forever-marked by the tragedy, carrying a pack of wisdom rocks that is doubled by the realization that they caused their own tragedy. This is why someone who is forgiven feels “as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders”. Maybe the reason so few self-help books for the self-induced tragedy exist is because such a book would consist of only two words: “forgive yourself”. But that belies the popularity of the self-induced tragic character in fiction. It can’t be that simple, can it?

As the controlled movements at this prison periodically put me shoulder to shoulder with a smattering of the two million Americans whose self-induced tragedies landed them here with me, isolated from their true communities, I maybe have too much time to contemplate how to find a source for help. Either fictional or nonfictional. How do I forgive myself? What else must I do to overcome? Is there even one fictional character who is fully redeemed, unmarked, after paying the price for his own flaws?

These swirling thoughts don’t really go away. The elephant is difficult to banish. It doesn’t help when you, as a part of your goal to read all Pulitzer-prize winning novels, come across an example of fiction that nails the self-induced tragic character so well that you could swear the author understands prison. Read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose to understand what I am talking about.

In 1876, young artist Susan Burling Ward goes west from comfortable middle-class life in New York to join her engineer husband at a mine in California. Though certainly limited by the options available to women of that time, this is her first flawed decision. It leads to a separation and isolation in a dangerous West that tests her ability to survive. There’s almost no stability. She briefly returns to New York, she goes to Colorado, finds a brief, lovely home in Mexico, then to Idaho.

Maybe all these moves aren’t really her choice, but remember: the self-induced tragic character must always deal with forces outside her control. It is the actions that are caused by the fatal thinking errors that define her. For Susan Burling Ward, that literally fatal moment turns a story of triumphant survival into one of tragic endurance.

Stegner’s description of the last 40 or 50 years of Susan Burling Ward’s life, the sentence she served for her bad choices, is brilliantly summed in one short section: she lived them all in emotional isolation from her husband, although they remained living together.

Susan Burling Ward’s prison sentence extended to her son, who decided he could not suffer his mother, and then to her grandson, the narrator of the story. Is there finally a glimmer of hope at the end? Not for her son but for the narrator? Has he finally finished her sentence? Was self-forgiveness two generations late? That’s up to you to read and decide.

Link to Angle of Repose on Powells.com

Posted by Drevil, 2/18/2018