practical peace

My Ten Books

For six years I lived in a prison cell where I was allowed to possess ten books. I could also have the books for courses I was taking in the prison’s education program, but only for the duration of the course for which they were assigned. My jailers were not particularly anti-intellectual; they had security concerns. They had to limit the amount of flammable material available in the event that we staged a riot and started burning things up. They had to rigidly control clutter in case we might be using disorder to hide a weapon, drugs, an unauthorized plastic container, or an extra piece of fruit.

Some inmates defied the rules. They would accumulate extra books, counting on the casualness of the officers’ searches to slip them by. But I went to prison to give up being an outlaw, to stop spending mental energy wondering if I would get caught at something. Even if I could push the limits, what would be the point? Would twenty or even thirty books be enough? Instead of defiance, I chose adaptation.

It was no easy thing to get a book into that prison; there were rules, variously interpreted, erratically applied. The books had to be sent directly from the publisher or distributor (although one high school friend succeeded in getting two books a year sent by her local bookstore until a more alert gate watcher came along). No used books, of course. It might or might not be necessary to have the books pre-approved on a property form, just like clothing or a television (which is how I missed out on Cold Mountain, sent as a birthday present by a friend who had mastered the Byzantine rule sets of the Health Department to run a a restaurant, but whose shipments to me were returned as often as they were delivered). [TS: you have a note that says “simplify” next to this whole Cold Mountain part]

A received book might be logged in to my property inventory, in which case I would have to take an hour off work at my tutoring job to stand in the Property Line and pay postage to have it mailed out before I could receive another one. But sometimes books would com in unrecorded, and I could just sort of lose them in the library or education area, confident that they would be of use to somebody. The system worked well enough that I was never without something new and interesting to read. Doing time, I read Silas Marner, Crime and Punishment, the complete works of Anna Akhmatova, Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, Isabelle Allende’s In the House of the Spirits and many more.

I had to come to prison form a life of all kinds of richness—music, love and friendship, food, nature, and books. In our dining room a seven-foot-high, five-shelf case held nothing but cookbooks and restaurant management texts. I was, after all, a chef and restaurateur. But I was also an intellectual without portfolio. Though I had left Brandeis at twenty-one, I spent the next twenty-five years reading, thinking and using my life as a field study, pursuing an understanding of people and cultures and processes of change. The walls of the study in our house were lined with more bookcases: basic texts on geology, chemistry, cellular metabolism, organic gardening, house building, home repair, sports medicine, modern Russia, chaos theory. [TS: note in margin: clarify—back & forth].

My meager prison bookshelf reflected a similar mix of interests. Eight of the ten books were keepers, each having come to me at some point in the prison time, to stay with me until it ended. Of course, two of these ere cookbooks, even here [in prison] where my culinary escapades were limited to granola, doughnuts, and candied orange peel cooked up on a four-burner cook top in raggedy pans from ingredients available in the prison canteen. [TS: note in margin: bring “prison canteen to front of sentence].

There was Roy Andries DeGroot’s The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, a classic among foodies whose passion is the local and the seasonal. Adam Gopnik managed a mild sneer at it in a New Yorker article about Alice Water’s restaurant overlooking the Tuileries at the Louvre. The loving and sensual descriptions of cherries, wild mushrooms, game, and garden vegetable prepared tenderly, almost spiritually, at a country inn in a French Alpine valley must seem just over the top of city dwellers. It would be easy to dismiss it as a yearning for mythical golden past.

But I have stood on a west-facing Oregon hillside at the tail end of a long spring whose exceptional warmth was perfect for the trailing mountain blackberries and black-cap raspberries. I picked berries as the sun set, filling flats with the rare harvest, then drove home to cook them down with sugar into preserves as special as the rarest vintages of Burgundy. I have served dry-aged strip loin steaks, hand cut form local beef and topped with chanterelles, in modestly priced restaurants. I have directed the preparation of desserts from heaps of just-picked raspberries and tree-ripe peaches from local orchards. The availability of this quality of food and of the farm and market relationships that support it were waxing, not waning, in the land I thought of as home. Living here, in a prison in Massachusetts, I kept this book to keep alive the memory of [that other way of living. TS: your note about that phrase: -concrete, evoke, “grounded”.

The other cookbook, Savaurs de France: Le Languedoc-Roussillon, was pure fantasy. But it was such a lovely fantasy—small (seven inches square, 96 pages of recipes (in French) from the Mediterranean coast of France, with color pictures on every other page. Just to gaze at a photograph of wood-grilled sardines strewn with bay leaves and to translate the recipe beginning, “Videz et lavez les sardines tres fraiches…” could make me feel that all might somehow be well with the world..

The third book, Murray Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, leapt out at me from a full page ad in Scientific American in my early months in prison. The title promised a tour through the Theory of Everything, and I was intrigued by what the author, Nobel physicist and chair of the World Environment and Resources committee of the MacArthur Foundation, crazy-in-love with the natural world, could deliver. I made myself a student of complex adaptive systems theory. I found a whole language to express the intuitions, observations, and conclusions I had been forming for years.

The fourth book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, could not be farther from Gell-Mann in methodology. Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a Jungian analyst, a storyteller in the Hungarian and Mexican traditions, and an ethno-psychologist. Her book has what some might think of as a cult following, with study groups and weekend workshops of women seeking to recover the wild in themselves and their lives. I was probably wild enough already; I kept this book for what Estes has to teach about the power of story. [TS: margin note: close/open]

I had always refused to read literature and had regarding the dozens of major works of English and American literature on our shelves as exclusively my husband’s. Reading Estes, I realized that I hated them precisely because the stories were powerful, went to my soul, told me what the world was. I didn’t want to hear abut the world. I didn’t want an Anna Karenina-Madame Bovary world, or the patricidal frenzy of Oedipus and Lear. Estes challenged me to reclaim the power of story, and I came to trust my dissatisfaction with polemic, manifesto, apologia, and analytical treatise as forms in which to express my own vision.

Estes presents intuition and traditional wisdom as important ways of knowing. Respect for intuition, like wildness, I had possessed before I read her. Her faith in traditional wisdom, on the other hand, provoked my ambivalence, if not outright hostility. Like intuition, it delivers information flawed by blind spots, errors and anachronism. Yet, without it, we would have not cultural continuity at all. To sort out what it does have to teach seems daunting.

I looked to my fifth book, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works for insight into that very task. As he reverse engineers the mind, retracing the influence of natural selection in the environments of our species’ evolution, he illuminates why intuition and handed down knowledge are at the same time vitally useful and inevitably somewhat wrong, essential for survival yet seriously limited in the circumstances of our modern lives. Thinkers who write that we are hardwired for aggression rarely do so with such humor, optimism, and obvious affection for our kind. I trusted his modern respect for will, conscious action, and individuality combined with a sophisticated realism about the powerful influences of biology on our thought and feeling processes.

From this book I got amusement, companionship, and questions. But where to go with the questions? A free-lance thinker locked up with a few books and a lot of time, I hardly felt I could write Steven Pinker at MIT to begin a dialogue about his ideas and mine. I was not part of a workgroup with other colleagues on these questions. With no email, word processor, photocopier, fax, internet research privileges, I existed in the clerical dark of drafts written in longhand, each revision typed from the beginning in a cell shared with a television watcher who finds the clack clack of the typewriter annoying. So I had an ongoing one-sided conversation. “Have you read Gell-Mann? Let’s talk about the fact that genes code for peptides, not directly for behavior. For instance human anti-diuretic hormone is responsible for monogamy when secreted by mice. How does that fit?” {TS: margin note says, “Close this fantasy round table]

Of course, if I were going to challenge a respected scholar’s conclusions, I had better be sure of my biology. And if we would be discussing evolution, I really did need to know that some plants use C4 photosynthesis, which is less efficient than C3 photosynthess but bettrr adapted to hot, dry conditions. For this sort of question I kept my sixth book, a basic biology textbook, Life, Ricki Lewis. The drawings and photographs were my objects of meditation, moving me to awe and gratitude at the wonder of living systems.

The seventh book, Mathematics with Calculus and its Application to Management, Life, and the Social Sciences, was part of the collection for reasons of both duty and pleasure. As I prepared to leave prison, I planned to go to graduate school, both more grounded and more imaginative than I would have been if my life had followed a more usual course. The time had come to relearn disciplines I had not studied for twenty-five years, like math. But for stress relief when the realities of prison life descended too oppressively, nothing could beat an hour of working math problems, wandering in the clear, cold work of exquisitely ordered relationships.

Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water, eighth on my list, was a small book of essays by Kathleen Dean Moore, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University. In them, the voices of Kant and Aristotle mingle with descriptions of the five-million-year history of a riverbed’s rock, the neurobiology of a tangled ball of mating newts, a mother’s observations of her children in ordinary and extraordinary moments, the quest for—what?—of accountants and golf pros and truck salesmen and nurses gather in a church basement to learn the Texas Two-Step.

In part, I read Riverwalking as personal grief work. The life Moore recounts, hiking and riverboating with her biologist husband, fearing in the night as she watches her son sleeping before he leaves the family for the first stages of adulthood, reminded me too painfully of the life I had left when I came to prison. I cried for all that it had not been: We caught on a snag in an unfamiliar channel of the Willamette River one Thanksgiving, punched a hole in our wooden drift boat, and never took it out again. We worked too much and could barely organize ourselves for an occasional outing to the mountains, rivers, and deserts that we loved. In part, we were trapped by that very love in the weak labor markets of rural Oregon; [TS: margin note says, “ explicate no jargon”];[TS: could not tell whether you scratched out this phrase at the end of previous sentence: in part, my depression made a chaotic wreck of our days. I cried, too, for all that my life had been and will ever bee again. We were a real family, but during my years in prison, my son grew up without me, and distance seeped like freezing fog into the space between my husband and me.

Though it squeezed my chest, I cam back often to Riverwalking. Moore’s reflections make use of the rigor of the philosophical tradition, but reject its intellectual detachment. She bravely concludes that for two decades of professional life she had practiced a discipline that achieves clarity and certainty at the price of isolation, “fractured from the lives of real people.” Yet she is far from despair. She steps boldly beyond the tradition, expressing the truth, the beauty, the aliveness, the call of the search, radically refusing to take the characteristic misstep of naming the ineffable.

What these 8 books had in common was that I could go to them when I was hurting or restless, or interested in thinking about something new. I could choose one, read a chunk, and close it. For days my heart and mind would wander over images, facts, ideas, memories, feelings, and responses, leaving me with a bit to add to the Theory of Everything, or to my own modus vivendi. To read these books hurt. It was to sit with the big questions, with fear and desire, grief, suffering. It was to be stretched. It was to work hard, with urgency, on the problems of our time; to be left feeling impotent, every imaginable action beyond my scope; to rediscover the potency of finding what I could do right at that moment, right where I was then.

These eight books reminded me that if I were to grasp any truth at all, I must consult pleasure, logic, observation, memory, love, fear. I left the last two places on my bookshelf for another way of knowing—adventure, surprise—open heart and mind. I would let a book on the prison library shelf catch my eye, or I would read what others, strangers and friends alike, had sent me. [TS: margin note says, “ go back to first version say more”] Some of what I received was like a bolt out of the blue, or a trip to someplace really special , [TS: note says: Example]. Some I got through only because of my sense of duty to read with an open heart and mind [TS 2 notes: you wanted to move the phrase ‘open heart and mind’ up a few sentences, but no notes on whether to keep this sentence or change this phrase. Also: note says, “Example”]. Many were easy to part with when I was finished reading. Some that I passed on—a small volume of the poems of David Ferry, Deborah Tall’s evocation of place in From Where We Stand—haunted me with their loss. The haunting, too, was another way of knowing, a reminder that even in that prison austerity my riches were so great that sometimes I had to let some of them go.