#also i made them live together because. me and st paul housing complexes are best friends (not) and i wanted dewey & mason to be roommates

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 30/01/2021 (Wellerman, Fredo, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish & ROSALÍA)

I’ve never been more thankful for a song being this big – “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo spends a third week at #1, blocking “WITHOUT YOU” by The Kid LAROI at #2. Thank God. Anyway, we’ve got 10 new arrivals so let’s cut the chit-chat and start REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

Of course, after this brief rundown we always do. Thankfully, the site actually updated last week, so I can go through this as routinely as possible. For drop-outs, it’s a lot of recent new arrivals falling out either off the debut or a few weeks after – most of them being pretty crap – but we do have some notable drop-outs, like “Forever Young” by Becky Hill, “Plugged In Freestyle” by A92 and Fumez the Engineer, “pov” by Ariana Grande, “Love is a Compass” by Griff, “Tick Tock” by Clean Bandit and Mabel featuring 24kGoldn, “Lasting Lover” by Sigala and James Arthur, and finally, “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran. Now to move onto the chart proper, we do have some movement to discuss. Firstly, we have some fallers, those being “Dynamite” by BTS at #32, “positions” by Ariana Grande at #39, “Lemonade” by Internet Money and Gunna featuring Don Toliver and NAV at #41, “All I Want” by Olivia Rodrigo at #43 off of the return, “SO DONE” by The Kid LAROI at #46, “Best Friend” by Saweetie featuring Doja Cat at #47, “Midnight Sky” by Miley Cyrus at #48, “What You Know Bout Love” by the late Pop Smoke at #51, “Wellerman” by the Longest Johns practically being replaced at #52 (We’ll discuss this more later), “See Nobody” by Wes Nelson and Hardy Caprio at #53, “Notorious” by Bugzy Malone and Chip at #55, “Looking for Me” by Paul Woodford, Diplo and Kareen Lomax at #60, “Bad Boy” by the late Juice WRLD and Young Thug unfortunately purging to #62, “WAP” by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion at #67, “Pinging (6 Figures)” by Central Cee crashing off of the debut to #72 and “Diamonds” by Sam Smith at #74, joining our two returning entries – which are just older songs getting another brief pick-up at the bottom of the charts. Those are “Baby Shark” by Pinkfong and “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper at #75 and #73 respectively, by the way. Oh, and we also have “Martin & Gina” by Polo G at #65, but I honestly can’t see that song going anywhere – and I really like it. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have any gains, however, as finally, we can see some rising hits trying to fill in the cracks, like both of Rudimental’s debuts from last week: “Be the One” with MORGAN, TIKE and Digga D is up to #58, whilst the incredibly worse single “Regardless” with RAYE is cracking into the top 40 at #40. Sigh, well, we do have some more promising gains, like... “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals at #38? “Friday” by Riton, Nightcrawlers and Musafa & Hypeman at #37 off of the debut? Okay, 2021 might end up being pretty rough, huh? Thankfully, we have a plentiful amount of new arrivals to waive any of my fears, so let’s just start with those.

NEW ARRIVALS

#70 – “Overpriced” – M Huncho

Produced by Quincy Tellem

Oh, come on! Okay, so this is M Huncho, UK trao’s answer to the late MF DOOM, except without any of the lyrical complexity, storytelling abilities, genuine wit, charming sampling and production techniques, brilliant discography... he’s pretty much just a guy whose main gimmick is the mask, and it’s on this single cover too, seemingly in a museum. This song in particular is just one of these melodic trap cuts with wavy acoustic guitars blended with synths beyond recognition, topped off with odd bass mastering and a checked-out performance from M Huncho, who spends way too much time on his verses going “doo-doo-doo-doo-doo”, before the beat switches for a verse that fades out after like 20 seconds. What’s the point of any of this, honestly? It’s not awful – the bass does kind of knock – but I really don’t understand why this is here, or why M Huncho is a big name. It’s not even as good as AJ Tracey’s trap bangers and it’s not even as funny as D-Block Europe, which I’m surprised by, considering that he had his own stupid hit with “Pee Pee” around this time last year, and that song was actually good. Also, M Huncho, what do you think your fans get from you dissing them? If you’re going to brag about your “house by the lake” and then rap about how some unnamed individual “still lives at their mum’s in a council estate”, consider that a lot of your audience will still live with their parents in council housing or be surrounded by people who do. Someone who really came from poverty should know that this is classist and disrespectful to your own demographic. Yeah, this is worthless. Why’s this guy still charting? At least Young Adz knows how to write a hook.

#65 – “New Love” – Silk City and Ellie Goulding

Produced by Silk City and Picard Brothers

Okay, so we do have some energy on the chart – or at least half of the credited acts have. Silk City is a duo of producers, those being Diplo, a true weirdo in mainstream EDM who’s honestly kind of fascinating and oftentimes a fluke genius (especially in its work in Major Lazer and Jack U with Skrillex), and Mark Ronson, one of the greatest producers of the 21st century so far, probably most known for “Uptown Funk!”. These guys did have a hit together with Dua Lipa in 2018 in the form of “Electricity”, but it’s been a while and I’m interested to see how they work with the complete non-presence that is Ellie Goulding. It’s with some level of disappointment that I say that she’s not a non-presence here, as this is otherwise a pretty neat house tune with some excellent 90s keys and a deep-house groove I think is pretty fun. The strings in the pre-chorus are great and build-up to a fantastic chorus... or at least the instrumental is fantastic, because Goulding is a waste here, mixed way too high and honestly just faltering her vocals here. She sounds awkward through multi-tracking and even worse without it, as she clearly goes for a rough swagger that cannot work with her light, almost fairy-like voice she’s relied on much of her career. The intricacies of this production are really admirable, but Goulding was clearly an afterthought. With a real diva on vocals, or honestly just a sample of a soul or diva house track, this could be excellent. As it is, I’m bored. Next.

#63 – “Typhoons” – Royal Blood

Produced by Royal Blood

Oh, okay. Well, this is a pleasant surprise. Royal Blood are an English garage rock duo that rock pretty hard, and don’t go for anything else beyond that, which to me is a breath of fresh air, and, yeah, this is good. Is it as good as their debut? Of course not, their biggest hit “Figure it Out” is still incredible, and this one goes for a more synthesized 70s feel, even accentuated by disco keys in the pre-chorus. The riffs are still here though, as that main guitar line is pretty awesome. I see this as a mix of garage rock revival bands from the 2000s like the White Stripes, as well as some stoner-adjacent bands like Queens of the Stone Age, with a more classic hard-rock groove and Mike Kerr’s signature yelp, and it works for what it is, so I’m excited for that upcoming single. Nothing’s particularly impressive here, but I’ll definitely go for this over the rest of what we have charting, so I’m not complaining. This is good, you should check these guys out, even if they tend to be a bit derivative. That tense bridge with the looming background vocals and intensifying riff is genuinely epic, by the way, even if there isn’t much more of a pay-off behind just... the chorus again, which ends up rendering as flat as a result. Regardless, it’s a good break from the norm – which for a chart week like this, I’m especially glad is here.

#61 – “Your Love (9PM)” – ATB, Topic and A75

Produced by ATB, Topic and Rudi Dittmann

German DJ ATB was showing his girlfriend his new recording studio when he got carried away with a single guitar sound and made a song out of it, “9PM (Till I Come)”, named after the time the track was finished. Later on, he took the track and added some whispered vocals from Spanish model Yolanda Riviera. This happened in 1999, by the way, when this song was released to great success in Europe, leading to a hilariously dated album cover but still a UK #1. The song is honestly kind of bad, relying on a pretty typical house groove, ugly MIDI guitars and that seductive vocal loop. Regardless, since 90s nostalgia has come way too fast, Topic has remixed the track with A75, a collaboration we’ve seen before on “Breaking Me” from last year, which sucked. To be fair, the original song is pretty empty, so I’m interested to hear A75 add some vocals... and he just sounds pained over a deep-house rip of the original. The ugly MIDI melody stays, just now it’s drowned out and even more synthesized – this is the guitar sound you liked so much? I hope she left you. Let’s move on.

#59 – “My Head & My Heart” – Ava Max

Produced by Jonas Blue, Earwulf and Cirkut

Speaking of being bored, here’s pop singer Ava Max, with a new lead single from the deluxe edition of her debut studio album, Heaven & Hell. This one’s produced by Jonas Blue, which, alongside a redundant “Jonas Blue remix”, is probably why it’s charting. What’s sad is it’s not really very good, as the vocals are over-processed over fake hand-claps and clipping mixes that make those plastic synths sound even worse. Admittedly, I like the rubbery future bass-esque bass line here, but that’s really as far as my appreciation for this goes, as the writing is non-existent, and Ava Max is barely here. It’s honestly really similar to “New Love”, except this one’s not even as interesting as that track, going for an exhaustingly tired house-pop style that while she is a natural fit for, it does make the 2000s synth-pop she started with sound inspired in comparison. Oh, and the “Jonas Blue remix” is practically a glorified bass-boost that makes this sound even uglier, so, yeah, skip this.

#42 – “Apricots” – Bicep

Produced by Bicep

Bicep is a Northern Irish electronic duo from Belfast, and this is an instrumental from their most recent album, Isles, which clearly must have stood out enough for it to debut at #42. I can understand why too, as that sample from Hugh Tracey’s African music recordings, particularly the vocal sample used, is really infectious and interesting. I don’t think everything surrounding it is enough to really make it less annoying, as it running through nearly the entirety of a four-minute track makes this sample lose its lustre too quickly. It runs its course far before the song has the chance to build up into a house track, with that sample crushing everything that isn’t the percussion in the mix anyway. The keys are really cool, and I can’t fault the strings and ambiance that keeps the song building up for as long as it does. It also takes a sample from a Bulgarian folk choir, which they paralleled to the Celtic folk they grew up hearing, and honestly, this is just a cool blending of global music rather than an actually good song, ending with me respecting this more than actually enjoying it. The synths by the end sound fantastic as does the Bulgarian chanting, but it doesn’t really have a great climax or drop to make the build-up worth it, defaulting to a generic house groove by the end that fades out before it can have any real impact. So, yeah, this isn’t bad, but feels like a waste of some really great ideas. I guess I can say that “Northern Irish remix of an English ethnomusicologist’s recordings of African music that also samples a Bulgarian folk tune” isn’t quite as much of a developed idea as “Kazakh remix of an American rapper of Guyanese descent’s trap song in a Brazilian house style released on a Russian record label”.

#35 – “Lo Vas A Olvidar” – Billie Eilish and ROSALÍA

Produced by FINNEAS

It’s not often that songs in non-English languages chart in the UK. Whilst in the US, Latin music is such a force that it’ll launch hits for many Spanish-speaking artists, this isn’t the case in decidedly smaller Britain, where a still multicultural society tends to produce art that is always in English. To be fair, we don’t have a place like Puerto Rico, and the few songs I’ve talked about this year that have been in a different language... well, basically the one song I can remember off the top of my head, was in a Nigerian Creole language. So, why’s a Spanish song by Spanish artist ROSALÍA charting so high? Well, it’s also a Billie Eilish song, and it’s also from the HBO teen drama Euphoria. Yeah, a teen drama makes a lot of sense for Eilish to soundtrack. This has been teased since 2019, and is actually ROSALÍA’s first song to chart here in the UK, so is it any good? Well, yeah, actually, it is. Both Eilish and ROSALÍA have excellent whispery tones that complement FINNEAS’ muted, ambient production perfectly, and their harmonisation sounds great, with both singing in Spanish here for the most part. That chorus is pretty janky, though, and I don’t really see the point in the Auto-Tuned interludes, even if they both sound great playing off of each other with a lot of tuning in the outro. This is pretty minimal and dare I say awkward, kind of eerie, so I don’t see it sticking around, but as a longing break-up track, they both sell it well. Next.

#28 – “Skin” – Sabrina Carpenter

Produced by Ryan McMahon

Joshua Bassett’s response flopped immensely, meaning that now it’s Sabrina Carpenter’s time to shine, because if it’s anything she gets out of this Disney love triangle, it’s a hit song, and people clearly want to hear more from the women than they do from Josh. Telling. Now I’m not one to follow Disney teen drama because this is all a marketing gimmick. I mean, the songs dropped every Friday so anyone who can’t see through this is either blind or... a child, and considering the audience, that second one is more likely, which is fine. Popular music is, ultimately, in the hands of teenagers and record executives, and all of these break-up response diss track... things, tend to feed into both hands, whilst also giving these talented young actors a bigger break. This is Carpenter’s first charting hit in the UK, after all. The song is decidedly worse than “drivers license” though, and by a lot, as the mixing here isn’t even competent, as Carpenter’s voice clips through these ugly pianos, worsened by how her voice does not sound great here at all, as she struggles through that terrible chorus. She may say that this isn’t a response to Rodrigo, but given the lyrics and how quickly this rushed release was put out, are we really supposed to believe that? The percussion here is gross as well, drowned in bad reverb that makes this just sound grey and dull. The strings building up to a climax are barely there, and when they are, they sound like they’re elevating a really garbage performance from Carpenter, who can barely keep up. This is supposed to be a ballad yet it sounds so stiff and controlled, meaning that Carpenter trying to let loose on the vocals makes this awkward and painful. I’m sorry, but this is really bad, and I hope it doesn’t stick around. Thankfully, I don’t see that happening.

#20 – “Back to Basics” – Fredo

Produced by Dave

Lil Chocolate Frog’s got a new record out this week that I’ve yet to hear, and this is the lead single, produced by his long-time friend and collaborator, Dave – who’s awesome. I’ve typically been less kind to his mate Fredo but honestly, his ever so slightly off-kilter style has grown on me too, and this song is a pretty good introduction to that. It’s one verse over rattling trap hi-hats and a really eerie vocal sample, and Fredo flows casually and smoothly over the beat, in his typical careless, just barely there style, which works well over a pretty subtle beat like this. Fredo’s lyrics are pretty interesting here too, as amidst flexing and gun-play, he has some pretty funny lines, although far from Dave’s wordplay, rather relying on fun one-liners where he says he’s “kind of Christian”, doing revision on drug trafficking, will run for mayor, and because of how much of the gang violence is sadly amongst ethnic minorities, he himself is racially profiling his “opps”. One line near the end of the track actually made me laugh, when he says he counts up twenties while eating porridge. It’s not funny on paper, sure, but the delivery is gold. He shows more character here than he has since “Funky Friday”, also with Dave, so I’m pretty excited to hear this record, which Dave actually executively produced. It’s also got the late Pop Smoke on a track with Young Adz, so at least I’ll let out more of those laughs. This lead single is pretty good though, and I can see it going top 10 next week with the album boost.

#3 – “Wellerman – Sea Shanty” (220 KID x Billen Ted Remix) – Nathan Evans

Produced by Saltwaves, Billen Ted and 220 KID

Last week, the sea shanty “Wellerman” charted as a cover by the Longest Johns. It’s a fine acapella cover, and this version, by Nathan Evans, was originally similarly acapella, except for the tap of a table as percussion to keep time. This version got even more viral on British TikTok, and if I recall correctly, he quit his job to be signed by Polydor, which is pretty scummy on Polydor’s part. I mean, you know this guy won’t have any more hits. Regardless, this version debuted at #3 thanks to a remix by DJs 220 KID and Billen Ted, three English producers. According to their Spotify duo, Billen Ted used to be a death metal band of all things but then transitioned into writing for dance-pop tunes, and have worked with 220 KID, even if this is technically only their second single. This remix is actually pretty cool to be honest, as it takes the original track and adds some needed energy, mostly through this generic 90s house beat and some admittedly really nice pianos. It’s nothing special, and I would usually criticise something this generic, but the song’s not even two minutes and it’s a pretty inoffensive remix that genuinely adds to the original song through that brilliant flip of the original hook melody in the drop, so I can’t complain. This won’t last, but I’m not mad that it’s here.

Conclusion

I’m actually somewhat pleased with this chart week, which I wasn’t expecting initially, as you can probably tell from my above cynicism. Regardless, we’ve got some variety here (though I don’t see much of it sticking) and I’ll give Best of the Week to Royal Blood for “Typhoons”, with a tied Honourable Mention for “Back to Basics” by Fredo, and, God damn it, “Wellerman” by Nathan Evans and remixed by 220 KID and Billen Ted. Shut up, it’s fun! Worst of the Week will probably go to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Skin”, with a Dishonourable Mention for the complete lack of effort that is M Huncho’s “Overpriced”, just being mildly offensive if anything. Here’s our top 10:

For next week, I mean, a girl can hope for some Weezer, but it’s more likely that we’ll be met with a Fredo album bomb and some scattered efforts from that middling Lil Durk deluxe edition. For now though, you can follow me @cactusinthebank for more ramblings and thanks for reading. I’ll see you next week.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 78

The neighbor dad next door liked to drink every night – often in packs of other men just like himself, in the back of his house. Sometimes these nights became violent. We could hear his kids crying, his wife drunkenly screaming for order while causing a fair bit of confusion herself. Once two men fell into our back yard and were grabbling and drunkenly trying to pin one another down in what they must have thought was a high end fight scene in the movie of their sad little lives.

The neighbor dad came over to our house one night and started accusing my brother David of stealing his shitty Coors Light beer. David was not stealing his beer at all of course. There was some other son of one of his friends that was eventually found to be the culprit, but this guy was adamant that it was David, threatening to shoot David if he saw him on his property, as if anyone with any self respect wanted to be seen on his shitty property. He eventually convinced the other men who were just like him in our town that David was coming onto his property to steal his missing beer, his most beloved drink, and they all took to calling David names as they drove by. If we were taking our nightly stroll, men would stumble out of the bar and accuse David of being a thief, and once in awhile they called David a 'dob'. We wondered for years what that might mean. It was all very weird. It seemed like from age thirteen on, other men wanted to fight David. I am not entirely sure why.

David signed up for football. I knew he didn't want to. The only reason he had signed up for football in the first place was because my father had been adamant about it for so many years and David didn't feel like he had the right to say no. It was something deeply personal to my father, some big momentous ordeal that had to be done. I think he felt that David had to live the life that he himself hadn't. He wanted David to become a strong football loving American white man – and not the strange hippie that my father had chosen to be at that same age. He wanted to live those wholesome boring American dream victories vicariously through David, perhaps to stave away the fact that he himself had never left the area he lived in, had two failed marriages, thirty-five failed online relationships, a failed business, a growing reliance on alcohol, and a wasted thirty-five years working at a factory who wanted him gone before he could receive the retirement he deserved.

I knew David didn't want to play sports anymore. Not even boxing really. I was sitting on the computer in the living room one night, as David was sleeping on the couch. David started talking in his sleep. He was panicking in his dream, stating over and over that he didn't want to play football. I looked over alarmed, and he had the look of someone who was drowning. A dream like that speaks volumes. David didn't want to go through with it, but he had already signed up. And it was eating him alive that he was doing this. He wanted to listen to music and collect albums, and read and challenge and critique everything he liked against the world. He had no interest in being brawny or masculine – at least not in the way my father wanted, and he hated everyone far too much to have any ambitions whatsoever. He felt completely outcast, and it happened at a young age all at once. It was harder for him than for me I think. I was born an outsider, and had ambitiously worked my way into a system anyway. I had that humility. David just woke up one day feeling like everything was a lie.

For two weeks David went to practice. His coach was that same foul disgusting man that I remember talking inappropriately about the teenage girls in my class and what he would like to do with them. He had talked about my best friend Ava and her weight. He was a loathsome hideous pretentious sick fucker with a whistle. I don't blame David for hating it. He went to practice for two weeks. They forced the boys to run around the field for a very long time, essentially going for miles or until the boys crumpled, at which point, the football coach would crouch over them and scream in their faces until they pulled themselves up and continued to run. David threw up several times. This didn't in an of itself stop him, but it would have stopped me. And then one day, David quit.

This caused my father to have some kind of meltdown. I remember sitting in the kitchen, and not knowing what had happened. I remember he was grimacing with fury and confusion, and leaning over the kitchen sink and then telling me to leave him alone – as if someone had just died. I thought getting upset because your son isn't going to be a small town football star was exceedingly lame. Later he blamed me almost entirely, as he had started to catch on that I had become a cold undermining force to him. His younger kids listened to me, not him. I guess there had been a fight, and David had said to my dad 'STOP TRYING TO LIVE THROUGH ME!'. Which did sound like a very 'me' thing to say, but it was all David. I think anyone around could see the dynamics for what they were. And if it was me, I feel very little sympathy. David's dream self was telling him not to play football, which to me means serious business. You don't fuck with dream stuff. It knows you in a way you don't. Plus, the world has too many 7th grade football players. It really does.

Of course, I wasn't happy with David either, but for different reasons. He went from being a sweet considerate person to being malicious towards Allison and I. It was getting harder to deal with, and I was trying not to hate him, but that resolve was breaking. I just couldn't go between two different realities, my brother as one of my best friends and my brother as someone who wanted to really hurt me. We ended up going up to my grandmother's house in my mother's van. My grandma was trying to get rid of her possessions. She had collected a lot over the years in her line of business. She couldn't sell things on eBay they way she used to. She was tired of packaging and shipping books. Plus, some weird asshole priest in town had taken it upon himself to see that the St. Vincent de Paul shut down – somehow in the complexity of the tax world this was going to financially benefit him personally. And that left my grandma out of work. So she was giving a lot of it away to my mother, who is almost a hoarder.

We drove up there, and a lot of it was work we couldn't really do. My uncle who remodels homes for a living, was also up there at my grandma's, remodeling a part of my grandma's house. It was kind of strange to see that room go. It was a special room full of crafts and beads. Different little tiny shelves went up to the ceiling, each one had a different kind of item inside. As a child I had been mesmerized and wanted to get into everything. He changed that room into something far more spacious – it's a better room ultimately, but for nostalgia reasons I will always miss the old room.

During our three or four day visit, we would sleep on the floor, and wake up early in the morning to the sun beaming down on us and to the snotty little noses of the Yorkies who excitedly sniffed us and licked our faces. On the second to last day of our visit, our uncle Rick wanted to take us rafting down the small river close to where my grandma lived. I was skeptical, as our last rafting trip had been pretty terrible with our father, but given that Rick had all the proper equipment and boats for all of us to use, and the fact that the water was manageably shallow – it wasn't some major north American river, just a forgettable small one, I eventually felt more optimistic.

My uncle Rick is an alcoholic/workaholic. He never had children, and he once told me this was intentional, as his alcoholism would destroy his kid's childhoods the way that my mother and her brother's childhood had been ruined by their own father. I don't particularly think my uncle Rick is all that great, but for some reason this answer was one of the most socially responsible and respectable answers I had ever heard come from someone in my family. It made sound sense to me.

Rick would work very rough jobs that gave him a lot of money and that took up most of his time. He was very anal about his work, and if you were trying to help him but weren't, he would shoo you away in a hostile fashion. After a job well done he would take that money and buy alcohol with it, get into insane fights, wreck his cars and get massive DUI's which cost him just about all the money he could have ever saved from the job he was doing, which would intern require of him to work even harder – causing him to stress and feel like drinking, and when he drank his life would fall apart rapidly and it all would happen over and over again. He will die an alcoholic. He even used to run his own AA meetings back in the 90's when he had a few years under his belt of sobriety – so he knows full and well what he is doing.

For some reason my uncle Rick reminds me intensely of my mother and father mixed together. It's uncanny and weird. He's not related to my father of course, whom I am sure sees nothing of himself in any member of his ex wife's family. But it's true. They are similar. And the differences are made up with the similarities he has with my mom – his sister. It's truly weird to me. The only addition to the mix is that he's a worse alcoholic than either of them. For this reason, I see him as a sort of parent to me, though I have never told him this, as it's a half handed compliment. Not that we are super close, but he's the complete hybrid of those two people who brought me into the world for whatever reason. And he's probably right, if he had kids he would ruin their lives. But since he didn't bring me into the world, I don't really have to hate him.

We ended up going on this rafting trip which was a lot of fun. Allison and I shared our boat. My uncle Rick and David shared another, and my mom was given her own. My mother didn't heed his warning that you should avoid the rocky shallow parts, since the rocks will eventually find a way to break a hole in your inner tube boat, and she felt sheepish and had to get in one of our boats when her boat collapsed. It all worked out though. It was a fifteen mile stretch of a shallow river/large creek (I don't know which). It was a perfect temperature. It was relaxing, and beautiful. All around us we saw fish in the clear water, and deer. I put it down as one of my more cherished wholesome memories – unconnected to anything sinister or complex. Just me out in the water. It is weird at moments of simple clarity and softness in living that I wondered about how I had stayed up all night contemplating suicide from a academic standpoint, or trying to make sense of human nature in my thought so it could be corrected. It was rare that I ever just had a day like that.

David ended up throwing this massive hateful tantrum towards me. He freaked out over a game of monopoly, and I don't remember what happened from there, but he was acting really rude and mean towards us. My blood pressure was up. I wanted to slam him in the face, but that wasn't something I was going to do now. I didn't want to do that ever again actually. So I kept my calm. I also could tell that he was trying to upset me and Allison. He wanted to see tears, and he was going at any length to get those tears. I was eventually made so mad I was afraid to speak, afraid to give him the satisfaction of upsetting me. I just pretended that he wasn't getting to me. Actually, it was really hurting me. It was disappointing me and making me feel horrible, and I didn't even know how to comprehend it. Eventually, as we were packing the van on the last day he caused some kind of chaotic issue with Allison and refused to pack this van. It wasn't a matter of packing your average van. It was like, two hours of work. And he just refused to help. My mother's back was out, and David said he would scream if Allison went out there – so my mother relented and sent Allison inside. If David had instead decided on going inside, seeing as he refused to be of service, this would have made it easier for Allison to come out and help, but he was intentionally setting it up so that I had to pack the van by myself.

My grandma watched, and I could tell she was frustrated. David had a way of using domestic terrorism to get his way. Everyone was afraid of him when he turned into this person. All the same, I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of frustration or tears. So for three hours, I worked up a huge sweat, my muscles tingling as I packed all of my mother's hoarder stuff into the van box by box, bag by bag, furniture piece by furniture piece. On the way back, Allison and David lived buried in stuff. They had only a little bit of breathing room. They must have resented the fact that I always got to sit in front, account of the fact that I was bigger than them, and the fact that I have always suffered extreme car sickness, making it inevitable I would be put up front anyway.

I packed the van, and while I did it David would glare at me and laugh at me and stick his face out at me like I should punch him. He sat there intentionally looking at me working, getting some weird satisfaction from sitting and doing nothing. Of course, maybe this was some kind of punishment for how I had babysat when I was thirteen years old. But I was twenty-one now! If we are all to suffer the consequences at the age of twenty-one, eight years after the fact, the god help us all. I was infuriated, but I somehow learned to use that fury and turn it into one psychotic grimacing smile. I held back, and when I finally had a half of a house worth shoved into the back of the van, I ran to the back room of my grandma's house, flopped face first into the blankets where my mother had slept on the floor, and just extruded this agonized fury in silence. I opened my mouth and nothing came out – only some black evil smoke that I had been holding in for several hours as I whistled past David. I closed my eyes and vividly imagined popping someone's eyes out of their sockets, clawing away at skin, snapping off fingers and toes. I had somehow held into this rage that was almost too much for me to bear. I felt shaky and weak and disoriented. And something emotionally strained in me broke. I loved David, but I didn't see him as my friend anymore. He was an enemy. He was old enough to know he was ruining the relationships he had with everyone around him and he didn't care. I had rarely if ever felt so hurt and frustrated as I had then. I could hear my mother's pampering voice in the kitchen, trying to appease him. I realized that ultimately, Allison and I were going to have to work around him, just like we worked around our parents. He was toxic. I hadn't let go of him as my brother. But I sort of knew from then on that things were going to go south for us. It had already started, and there was no way for me to reverse it.

At around this very same time, a totally bizarre situation happened, and it changed our family's dynamic forever. My dad had started occasionally visiting the local bars both in Kendrick and Juliaetta, a small town not far from there. He had met this young woman, this very young woman – only two or three years older than me. My father had just turned sixty. He didn't look that old – he still looked like he was in his late forties, but he was indeed  sixty. It's not illegal, and I am not in the business of judging what two consenting adults do, but I really don't see a twenty three year old woman and a sixty year old man have in common. They had literally nothing in common. They had no shared interests or experiences. They didn't even really know how to talk to one another. She seemed confused and unstable. She had two kids, and a sad story and she needed a place to stay. I don't know if my father honestly deluded himself into thinking that he was going to be some kind of hero in a nonromantic way towards her, or if he had it in mind all along. He will always point to the woman and say it was her who initiated the relationship.

It started out he just gave her some money to help her out. He told me about it, chuckled nervously and assured me they weren't going to be in a relationship. And then she was calling him and soon they were suddenly an item. It all happened literally within a week. I remember the day it happened, and it was so strange. I had spent the day out in Lewiston with Sarah. We had listened to the Tom Waits record 'Heartattack and Vine' and Mr. Seigel had played. I ended up getting Mr. Seigel stuck in my head over and over again. And somehow I knew like, reality had shifted. Something had cracked to pieces and things were going to begin shifting all around me relatively rapidly. I didn't associate it with anything, I just knew everything was wrong, but it wasn't the kind of wrong you cry about or try to understand. It's the kind of wrong that has pushed the wheel towards sheer absurdism. You laugh in self defense because nothing makes any fucking sense anymore. Down is up. Something in the back of my head just tingled.

So I went in, and my father said that Crystal was going to be living in our house now with her two little boys, and she was suddenly just going to be the wife I guess? It was very weird. This woman was my age. Her father had sexually abused her, and she could never stop talking about it. It was very tragic. She was obsessed with older men who played some kind of role that her father had played. She literally talked about her father every single night. I don't really feel like this was wrong per say, but like, shame on my fucking dad. This in a way went beyond anything he had ever managed to do. It didn't even really effect me that badly. I just looked at this strange sister-mom and felt bad for her and thought my dad was a disturbed fucking idiot for bringing her in the house. I knew then and there too that he would never learn. Because he always was some kind of expert at the end of each failed relationship, and he always went on and on about how they were bad and he was good and he had learned his lesson. He imparted all kinds of confusing and harmful and clueless rhetoric. But never had I thought he would date someone this young, someone so obviously dealing with mental illness – someone who was literally looking for an old man to take her father's place in some horrible abusive scenario she kept reliving every day of her life. I remember just coming in the house and starting at my father straight in the face and shaking my head. He couldn't even go against me for that.

At the same time, he was in some kind of existential crisis because David had quit football. He had only now decided to see David's behavior as some kind of problem, conveniently when he wanted to punish David for something entirely stupid. David was staying up later than normal, which is totally normal for thirteen year olds. Furthermore, my father sometimes kept us up till midnight, so he was also just as guilty of letting us stay up late on school nights. But my father had his douchebag pants on I guess, and when he was in the upstairs hallway, he looked into David's bedroom and saw that David was awake. He started shouting at David to go to FUCKING BED!!!!! like a lunatic, and then David gave him some attitude, and My father lunged at David, grabbed him by the neck and slammed him against the wall and punched him in the face and accused him of being a 'faggot homosexual'. Then he kicked David out.

I only found out later on, once David's side of the story came to light. My father was very vague about the entire thing. I later found out the reason that he kicked David out was in part because Crystal thought David was 'weird'. My father was so insecure and was so embarrassed to have a nonfootball playing son who some local hillbilly woman-child of low intellect that he barely knew for two weeks had thought his own son, whom he had spent his entire life raising – and though indeed flawed, didn't deserve to be kicked out or abandoned or abused by his father for the very personal choice of choosing not to partake in school sports was worth throwing away on behalf of. I looked at this entire situation with absolute disgust. Despite my issues with David, he really did get fucked over. And if you haven't learned better by the age of sixty, you will never ever learn. You will forever be that hopeless.

I had actually been secretly planning to send Allison to live with our mother up till the point where David got there first. Between my father and brother, Allison's life was getting pretty shitty. I wanted her to experience a new school, to maybe find opportunities somewhere else. I knew the ship was sinking. Crystal was not the cause of it, she was just an indication. I didn't hate her at all. It was weird because we were both so close in age, I would invite her to take walks with us at night, and she would generally talk about her abusive childhood, drifting between idealizing how great it all way, and feeling abused and empty. I just listened to her. Her sons were totally unruly, but I learned to appreciate them as well for what they were. I knew Crystal couldn't help what she was doing really. She had little to no experience outside of bars and living in the middle of nowhere with old cowboys. She had never visited a big city before. She told me that she thought that the horror movie, The Ring was real. She thought all horror movies were real because she couldn't fathom that anyone could think something like that with their own imaginations.

The family unit was combusting. I knew I would be fine because wherever I went, Sarah and Allison were still my family. I suddenly found myself certain I would be getting out of there. Whenever I was feeling unsure of myself, I realized that I almost didn't have a choice, and Sarah was pushing me along and helping me so much. Compared to me, she seemed so organized and sociable and competent. As for David, what could I say? It's not that I didn't love David or worry about him. I wanted to beat my father's brains out for hurting him. But he really was on his own because every time I tried to get close he attacked me or Allison and it got to where saw him as a threat, though not as an enemy. There was nothing further I could do for him. I was really sorry because I knew that we were at this pivotal point where, the things that were going to happen in the coming year or so were going to effect and ripple throughout the rest of his life. The decisions he made now was going to shape his future in a way that was going to cause him to struggle horribly when he got older and realized the consequences of it all.

When David lived at my mother's I only got tidbits of their altercations. Eventually David shoved my mother, but then again, maybe it was my mother that shoved David? I couldn't tell the truth. Because my mother was having some kind of crisis, and so was David and they were both at each other's throats. And then, my mom started telling me that she had called the cops on David. David denied this ever happened. I know that it did a few times because I remember him saying so himself. But then again, my mother really could be lying. Talking about it now with anyone is hard because everyone's memory is warped by intense emotions. I knew the  both of them to be half crazy. I also know my mom – if she finds out someone wants to hit her she does everything in her power to make them hit her. I remember once fighting with her and she started screaming with this big wicked smile on her face 'HIT ME!!! HIT ME!!!' and I just looked at her with confusion and disgust. Like she was putting her cheek out at me, and it was beyond stupid. She wanted to get the satisfaction of believing herself to be a victim. It's my mom's thing. She's always a victim. I just looked at her and said 'What the hell? I am not going to hit my own mother.' I felt bad if I even cussed at her, even when she full out deserved it. It's just not in my nature to get in the hog pin with my mom. It's debasing and unclassy and ultimately giving into this notion that my life was and forever would be so small, that conquering her pathetic self with an arrogant and mindless jab in the face in our dirty ass kitchen  was the most I could ever hope for. I just had to keep my eye above them all. My revenge would be my freedom from it someday. I had to look to the great big beautiful and mysterious world I lived in and not into the abysmal eyeballs of these maniacs that I called family. I wanted to transcend them, not give into their awful ways.

David stopped going to school. A lot of it was my mother's fault. She didn't really care at first – probably didn't get him where he needed to be because she couldn't understand that you need to keep your kids in school. But then it became a legal issue, and David still refused to go to school and they had fights about it. He wasn't old enough to be making this decision for himself, and yet he was because nobody was in his life to create any kind of stability for him. My dad had thrown him by the wayside for Crystal's minor convenience. My mother was a selfish and distracted chaos queen. He was too young to even realize the consequences of not going to school. But on the other hand, how can I really blame David? I myself stayed in school only because I am thirty percent more afraid of authority than David was, and I had friends and romantic interests that kept me curious about my school life. I barely hung on by a thread, and if I hadn't had those things I might have stopped going altogether as well. David didn't have those minor favors that I did. And at his very same age, I only went to school half the time as it was. I just did it differently, and I went to a school that nobody in a position of state power was going to step in and force me to go to. Idaho is one of the most ungoverned states. You wouldn't believe the kinds of things people get away from outside of the major cities.

At around this same time, my sister Roxanne and her husband Jeremy split up. It was a long time coming, too long a time. Jeremy had become more and more violent and abusive each passing day. He raped Roxanne. He was selling drugs, and he was prepping Sagen, Roxanne's daughter to molest her. At one point, shortly before Roxanne had reached this point with him where she couldn't handle it anymore, her second youngest daughter Hayley, who was only six at the time woke up from a night terror and Jeremy ran in there, grabbed her off the ground by her hair mid sleep, and shoved her against the wall violently. All for having cried out loud in her sleep – which woke him up. The guy deserved to be dead in my book. I couldn't visit there anymore because Jeremy was such a horrible person I couldn't hold it in anymore. My mother had called CPS on Roxanne with my strong eager encouragement, and she had lost her three children she had with her ex, Jody. Jody was also awful, but not a cruel and sadistic monster like Jeremy. I mean, I would cross the street to avoid him for sure, but I wouldn't wish death on him. Sagen Roxanne kept, since Sagen was older and had more say in where she went, and Roxanne's youngest little girl, Meliah she kept as well. Meliah was temporarily kept with Jeremy's sister, who was strangely normal compared to her folks.

It all ended I guess when Jeremy, whilst high on meth, held a knife to Roxanne's neck and threatened to kill her, as he believed she was stealing his drugs. He held her hostage, and eventually one of his friends had to tackle him down to get Roxanne free. So Roxanne finally told him to leave. And at first, we were all relieved. She had been with Jeremy for nearly six years, and every time I thought about what Roxanne and Jeremy were both putting those kids through, whenever I tried to contemplate what Roxanne was going through I felt this sick jab in my chest. It was strange to see how Roxanne had evolved from the hyperactive little girl she had been into this adult. I loved Roxanne a great deal. I believe her bright personality is part of the reason I get excited and feel up for anything. And of course I liked her. But given the damage she was doing and had done to her children at the behest of a man, it was hard to feel like I could warm up to her. So we all thought that Jeremy was the key element in her life, and if he was gone everything would get better. It's not what happened.

Jeremy had kept Roxanne on drugs, but he had always been the master of the drugs and he chose how much she used and how often – in order to keep her competent enough to take care of the chores and the kids. With him gone, Roxanne was able to use all the meth and pills she wanted without him controlling her doses. And then she and Sagen started using together. It was crushing to hear about. Sagen had literally won an award at her school, hand signed by Barack Obama for her gifted intelligence and her excellence as a student. People had seen her as some future lawmaker or someone of great future thinker. Her principal cared about her on a very personal level. So when Roxanne got her own twelve year old daughter on meth with her, we were all besides ourselves. I couldn't believe it. And then soon Sagen just stopped going to school altogether. The state tried to tie her down. They tried to give her to her father, but she ran away. Sagen's father had molested her, and had very little to do with her life, and she hated him. She stole from him and fled. When she ran away, Sagen's father had the audacity to write the Dr. Phil show and told Dr. Phil about Sagen's behavior, and the show actually offered to fly her over with her parents and have it out on the show, which Sagen refused. It was so crazy. Like, I can imagine how absurd it would have looked. Sagen would have randomly called her father out as a molester, and Dr. Phil would have tried to throw her in some kind of boot camp or rehab or something in between. This is just how far my family's madness had gone. Dr. Phil wanted us on his show! I mean, not me obviously as my problems largely manifested themselves internally in a way that would not make for that great of entertainment. But that general anxiety and dysfunction permeated pretty much throughout everyone in our family.

To bring this down to the more mundane, and to mention something before I forget. All that summer, and well into the fall, Allison and David owned rabbits. They joined some kind of FFA rabbit club, that was run by this really creepy dude named Frank that lived at the end of town. Frank had always been this guy on Halloween that dressed in a gorilla suit, all four hundred pounds of him, and chased kids. He chased me when I was five, and it almost scared me to the point where I had to stop trick or treating. I imagine this might have bent my bias against him. He was well known to walk about town until he found someone to talk their ear off, and he thought of himself as an inventor, though he never invented anything.

Allison started talking to his son Wayne, this very heavy kid in her class who was always cruel to due to his weight and I was always prodding her to be nice to him. I had watched him once when he was five in the store. He was always a very outgoing and nerdy boy, and had always been fat. He came up to some girls who were my age to show them some toys he liked. He was absolutely innocent and adorable, and they had pretty much called him names and were incredibly cruel towards him. I remember seeing the look of hurt on his face, and when Allison was in his class, I always urged her to go against the grain and be nice to him. From a very early age, he learned that he wasn't equal to anyone else, and it was massively fucked up. He never was a very good friend to Allison however. He was guarded and kind of crazy. I mean, he wasn't awful – just kind of know-it-allish, and it turned out he was obsessed with Stalin and dictators and most definitely voted for Donald Trump in the last election, and that was really weird.

Allison got this Dutch lop. He was a soft and adorable. If you turned him on his back and cradled him like a baby he would close his eyes. Rabbits are very simple creatures though. I loved him, but we never could do much with him, and it felt weird to keep him locked in a cage his whole life. It's not the way rabbits should live. We also had to make sure he ate the right stuff. My father ended up feeding him some bulb plants at first and it nearly killed him. And it turned out being gay. It never would mate with other rabbits, and got frenzied with disturbing rabbit lust and slobbered sexually whenever it was around other males. He was normally a very soft cuddly creature, but when Allison took him to the fair that year, he hopped across the table and began attempting to forcefully mate with the other rabbits, and it became this huge fiasco at the local fair that nobody will ever forget. David ended up getting this English lop, which are huge, and have the big ears. At first the English lop was really cute, but he soon became vicious. He would attack you if you got near him. He was hard to feed, and he would look at you and bite the cage with his teeth. We ended up having to give him back.

Allison and David eventually left the Rabbit Club. Frank was getting really weird for the both of them. David's rabbit went mad being caged up and full of hormones, so he gave the rabbit back and left the club. I think Frank ate that poor boy. David just remembers staring at Frank as he was conducting a meeting, and Frank had this insane smile on his face. One of his toes was infected and green and there were flies eating away at it. David looked up at Frank, who know that David had been looking at his toe, and he smiled into David's eyes – sort like 'see?' Which was a very disturbing for David. He imagined that Frank was perhaps secretly feeding the flies on purpose or something, and liked the flies eating the infection of his toe. They were literally covering the wound.

Allison's rabbit we found a home for with one of my father's girlfriends. She had a big space for the fuzzy guy, and as far as I know he lived a happy life – considering. Allison left too because Frank and his wife wouldn't stop trying to force Allison to date Wayne, and that got very strange for everyone. Frank was so forward about it, he would talk as though Allison and Wayne were going to keep up his legacy together, and one time accused Allison and Wayne of 'humping in the back of the pick up as Wayne's parents drove' something foul and crude and it just made everyone really uncomfortable. Frank was very good at being just the most uncomfortable person. He always said the most disturbing things. His house was filthy and he kept his rabbits in inhumane conditions. The inside was filled with the filth of rabbit, and they never did the dishes. Allison just didn't want to go there anymore.

On the upside, David caught a kitten around Wes's house, the guy my mother took care of for a living. I haven't mentioned it a lot, but all three of us, me, Allison and David spent a lot of our time at Wes's for those years – mostly going with our mom and leaving with her after her work was done for the evening. It was sort of boring – the walls were stained with nicotine, there were always old westerns playing on television, occasionally some gross old perverted man would stop by for a visit. But Wes was kind of a member of our family. And he bought us things. He wasn't shouting that my mother marry him or any of that disturbing stuff anymore. He paid my mom's bills though, which was kind of weird. It really amazes me just how often my mother has gotten other people to pay her bills. She works hard, but spends hard and often is low on money, but she always found a way. Wes's was ultimately a lot nicer than staying at our mom's for the day. Wes in his wheel chair and his scratchy voice, usually getting slight better from some illness that had really taken him down. He would buy us shrimp dinners and give us birthday money and jobs to get paid for outside. After his previous animal companion had been killed by getting ran over, he bought a new dog. Her name was Samantha, and she is by far the most well mannered easy going creature I ever met. She was half Chow, half Newfoundland. She was all black, and there was absolutely nothing that would upset her in anyway. She was very fat because she had a thyroid issue and Wes kept feeding her sandwiches and KFC. We often had to shave her in the summer because it was too hot for her, and she looked like a gray ridiculous potato. Thankfully dogs don't know what they look like – otherwise she might have been a bit embarrassed.

The kitten that David managed to catch was a stray male cat. I asked if I could keep it and my father said yes. I had had a kitten the year before. But that neighbor dad drunk had caught her and sent her to the pound because he didn't want her to grow up and beat his outdoor cat up, Tux, whom he had declawed. Her name had been Frances, and to this day I am slightly furious. I had a collar on her and everything. You can't just go taking people's cats to the pound. Anyway, this new kitten I named Nim, after Nimue from Arthurian Legend. I believe it was Merlin's lover, if my memory serves me well. But then we found out a month later that Nimue was a boy, so I shortened it to Nim. It was nice to have a kitten to take care of.

Nim eventually grew to be very aggressive though. He went wild and ripped into me one day with the intent to kill me. My mother came over to pick up once, and he bit her so hard she needed stitches. He was nobody's favorite cat. And he had pica, which sounds cute but is actually a disease that causes cats to eat stuff they aren't supposed to neurotically. The delight in question was my little sister Allison's sausage curl locks. Never anyone else's hair, only hers. While she slept, he would creep up to her face and begin eating her curly black hair. She would wake up in the night with half of her hair literally wet with his saliva and chew up. It was aggressive and simultaneously like he was nursing I noticed as I watched him in horror a few times. Allison's whole face would be covered in Nim's drool and it smelled. We slept in the same bed, so eventually I stayed up and waited for him to guard her against such intrusions. I would take him and throw him off her, and he would immediately run manically back up to her head and begin chewing aggressively whilst looking me dead in the eye, and I would throw him off. It became a war where I blocked him as he attempted obsessively to get to her hair. Eventually, he sort of gave up, but I had to keep waking up occasionally to make sure he wasn't up to trouble.

PART 77 - https://tinyurl.com/yc8bathg

PART 76 - https://tinyurl.com/y95kx2bo

PART 75 - https://tinyurl.com/y9afl9of

PART 74 - https://tinyurl.com/ydfkomx9

PART 73 - https://tinyurl.com/y6vy2jeu

PART 72 - https://tinyurl.com/yaegqs9x

PART 71 - https://tinyurl.com/y6v3ln9a

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-70 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-70

[blackkudos]

Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucia poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Early life and Childhood

Walcott was born and raised in Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies with a twin brother, the future playwright Roderick Walcott, and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of African and European descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island which he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His father, who painted and wrote poetry, died at age 31 from mastoiditis while his wife was pregnant with the twins Derek and Roderick, who were born after his death. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule.

As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons, whose life as a professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them. Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named "The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers".

He studied as a writer, becoming “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English” and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Walcott had an early sense of a vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote:

At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem, in the newspaper The Voice of St Lucia. An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in a response printed in the newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his two first collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs. He later commented,

I went to my mother and said, 'I’d like to publish a book of poems, and I think it’s going to cost me two hundred dollars.' She was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back.

The influential Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work.

With a scholarship, he studied at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

Personal life

In 1954 Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, with whom he had a son, Paul, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. Walcott married a second time to Margaret Maillard, who worked as an almoner in a hospital, and together they had two daughters, Elizabeth, and Anna; they divorced in the mid-1970s. In 1976, Walcott married for a third time, to Norline Metivier, but this marriage also did not last.

Walcott was also known for his passion for travelling to different countries around the world. He split his time between New York, Boston, and St. Lucia, and incorporated the influences of different areas into his pieces of work.

Career

After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist. Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remains active with its Board of Directors.

Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted international attention. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play". The following year, Walcott won an OBE from the British government for his work.

He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis and retiring in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including the Russian Joseph Brodsky, who lived and worked in the US after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irish Seamus Heaney, who also taught in Boston.

His epic poem, Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the Iliad, has been critically praised "as Walcott's major achievement." The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review, which chose the book as one of its "Best Books of 1990".

Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honor after Saint-John Perse, who was born in Guadeloupe, received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

His later poetry collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolors; The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received the T.S. Eliot Prize.

In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta. In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex.

As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, he became one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia, granting him the title of 'Sir'.

Oxford Professor of Poetry candidacy

In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry. He withdrew his candidacy after reports of documented accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996. (The latter case was settled by Boston University out of court.) When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, this aroused their interest in the university decisions.

Ruth Padel, also a leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases. Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned. Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and journalists including Libby Purves, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the American Macy Halford and the Canadian Suzanne Gardner attributed the criticism of her to misogyny and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumour.

Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez, published a letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement, and criticized the press furore. Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair, because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination". Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation.

Writing

Themes

Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented, "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote, "the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature." He also notes, "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."walcott's work deals in the realm of everyday people.

Influences

Walcott has said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.

Playwriting

He has published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.

Essays

In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.

Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:

"What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson."

Walcott identifies as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes, "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."

Omeros

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from The Iliad. Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.

Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that is headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.

Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.

Criticism and praise

Walcott's work has received praise from major poets including Robert Graves, who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries", and Joseph Brodsky, who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience".

The poetry critic William Logan critiqued Walcott's work in a New York Times book review of Walcott's Selected Poems. While he praised Walcott's writing in Sea Grapes and The Arkansas Testament, he had mostly negative things to say about Walcott's poetry, calling Omeros "clumsy" and Another Life "pretentious.". Finally, he concluded with the faint praise that "No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered."

Most reviews of Walcott's work are more positive. For instance, in The New Yorker review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, Adam Kirsch had high praise for Walcott's oeuvre, describing his style in the following manner:

By combining the grammar of vision with the freedom of metaphor, Walcott produces a beautiful style that is also a philosophical style. People perceive the world on dual channels, Walcott’s verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, and each is constantly seeping into the other. The result is a state of perpetual magical thinking, a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get up and start talking.

He calls Another Life Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes the painterly qualities of Walcott's imagery from his earliest work through to later books like Tiepolo's Hound. He also explores the post-colonial politics in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence." He calls the early poem "A Far Cry from Africa" a turning point in Walcott's development as a poet. Like Logan, Kirsch is critical of Omeros which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain over its entirety. Although Omeros is the volume of Walcott's that usual receives the most critical praise, Kirsch, instead believes that Midsummer is his best book.

Death

Walcott died at his home on 17 March, 2017.

Awards and honours

1969 Cholmondeley Award

1971 Obie Award for Best Foreign Play (for Dream on Monkey Mountain)

1972 Officer of the Order of the British Empire

1981 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ("genius award")

1988 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

1990 Arts Council of Wales International Writers Prize

1990 W. H. Smith Literary Award (for poetry Omeros)

1992 Nobel Prize in Literature

2004 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement

2008 Honorary doctorate from the University of Essex

2011 T. S. Eliot Prize (for poetry collection White Egrets)

2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (for White Egrets)

2015 Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award

2016 Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Lucia

Wikipedia

[farsouthproject]

The Decay of the Angel:

Yukio Mishima and Paul Schrader on the Body, Death, Suicide, Sexuality and the Nature of Evil

Being a reworking of three previous blog posts into one essay.

On a hot day after Christmas, in a second-hand bookshop in Newcastle, New South Wales, I came across The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima. It was one of those books that resonates immediately at some visceral level without even having to open the cover: the book as fetish object. On beginning to read in the shady basement where I was staying, one of the first impressions the book made on me was that the title, in English, seemed to be a mistranslation. The decay referred to pertains to a dimension dreamed by a rich old man, Shigekuni Honda, one of the novel’s main characters. The name of this dimension has been more often translated into English (from many and various Asian Buddhist texts) as the ‘God Realms.’ So the ‘angel’ who loses her wings would belong to a pantheon of gods and goddesses rather than a host like the seraphim.

A closer translation into English might have resonated with Wagner’s Götterdämerung (Twilight of the Gods), that I suspect may have been in Mishima’s mind when he wrote it. One strand of narrative traces Honda’s reconciliation to a less simplistic Buddhist world view than that with which he begins in the book. Could Mishima also be alluding to Nietzsche’s death of god? The allusion to decadence is still there. Despite the questionable title, The Decay of the Angel has been rendered in beautiful translated prose that evokes the sea, the ships, the industrial harbour of Yokohama, Honda’s dreams, and his obsession with a sixteen-year-old boy, whom he takes for a reincarnation of others he has followed in his life, all of whom have died young. Both Honda and the boy Tōru seek to destroy each other in a web of evil that ultimately threatens to destroy them both.

It was after completing the writing of this book, which Mishima considered to be his masterpiece, the last of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, that he committed seppuku, planned as a grand theatrical staging of a ritual suicide at a headquarters garrison of the Japanese Self Defence Force, or the army by any other name. Mishima is considered by many to be a proto-fascist but the truth seems to be far more complex. Paul Schrader’s film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, takes on the complexities of Mishima’s entire life as art; another resonance with Nietzsche’s idea of life as a constant act of creation: an expression of the will to power.

In an interview about his Mishima film, Schrader says, ‘I do believe that the life is his final work and I believe that Mishima saw it that way, too. He saw all his output as a whole, from the tacky semi-nude photographs to the Chinese poetry to the Dostoyevskian novels to his private army – it was all Mishima.’ (Schrader on Schrader, Faber and Faber.)

The film has never been distributed in Japan. Schrader says, ‘Mishima has become a non-subject. People read about him but there is no official viewpoint, so that if you’re at a dinner party and his name comes up there’s just silence. Now, that atmosphere of cultural discomfort is amplified by the fact that one of the precepts of the Japanese psyche is that outsiders really can’t understand them… So if (the Japanese) don’t understand Mishima, how can a foreigner possibly hope to?’

It’s true that when reading writers of other cultures, or writing about them, or making films about them, inevitably the maker creates his or her imaginary versions of that culture that those who are born into it may not share at all and resent the intrusion on the shared cultural construction of those born in place.

Schrader – as does Mishima’s biographer John Norton – sees Mishima’s suicide as the ultimate theatrical expression of a man who wanted to reconcile art and political action in real life. The film builds toward this climax in a collage of ‘present-time,’ flashback, and novel-dramatization, each with its particular filmic ‘look’ that draws on Costa Gavras, the black and white of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and the present day theatricality of the set designer Eiko Ishioka. 

Purity, the Emperor and Suicide

A red rising sun opens the film and the image is underscored by Wagnerian echoes in the extraordinary music composed by Philip Glass. The music quickly transforms into a military snare tapping a march, as Mishima vests himself in the dress uniform of his private militia, the Shield Society. The film begins on the day when Mishima sets out with four cadets from the Shield Society, ostensibly to instigate a military coup but with the intention of committing seppuku because he knows that the coup will inevitably fail.

The end of the mission is foreshadowed in the film’s dramatization of Mishima’s novel The Runaway Horses. A group of military cadets plot a coup. Their leader, Isao, says to his followers: ‘The Emperor’s face is not pleased. Japan is losing its soul. In a single stroke, we’ll assassinate the leaders of capitalism. Burn the Bank of Japan… At dawn we’ll commit seppuku.’ To his military superior he says of the plot: ‘Japan will be purified. We’ll only use swords. Our best weapon is purity.’

In a telling interrogation, the police detective, who has arrested the young plot leader, says: ‘You’re still too young and pure. You will learn to tone down your feelings.’ Isao answers: ‘If purity is toned down it is no longer purity.’ And the detective: ‘Total purity is not possible in this world.’ And Isao’s reply: ‘Yes, it is… if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.’

As a young man though, it appears that Mishima’s resolve of purity and oneness with the spirit of Bushido was undermined. Schrader’s film depicts Mishima in his late teens where he claims that his dream is to be a soldier and fight for the Emperor and Japan. The young Mishima is mortified when he exaggerates his physical weakness at his army medical and is discharged as unfit for service. In the film’s voiceover, the adult Mishima character says, ‘I always said I wanted to die on the battlefield. But my words were lies, I never really wanted to die.’

Schrader uses this moment as a turning point where the character of Mishima resolves to perfect his body, the better to embody the spirit of the Samurai. And this worship of the perfect body resonates with Mishima’s sense of his sexuality.

The Body and Sexuality

Schrader was stopped from using Forbidden Colours – Mishima’s most overtly gay novel – by Mishima’s widow who wished to play down her husband’s sexuality. Schrader got around this by basing some scenes on Mishima’s semi-autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. He introduces the writer’s sexual orientation as he deals with the writer’s childhood. In the movie’s first chapter, entitled Beauty, at the age of twelve, Mishima is taken to the theatre by his grandmother and through an open door, he sees three Kabuki actors, all of them men, one of whom is playing the part of a woman, the others in effeminate make-up. Schrader’s shots of the boy and the actors creates a palpable sexual tension. At school, the boy is ridiculed by his classmates for being a poet. When the boy Mishima sees a picture of St Sebastian pierced by arrows it arouses him to masturbate.

During the black and white flashback sections of the film, Mishima is dancing with another man in a gay bar. He’s upset when his dance partner jokes that Mishima is too flabby. Mishima takes up bodybuilding to improve his physique.

In voiceover, Mishima says, ‘My life is in many ways like that of an actor. I always wear a mask. I play a role. When he looks in the mirror the homosexual, like the actor, sees what he fears most, the decay of the body.’

In the second chapter of the film, entitled Art, Schrader develops the character’s sexuality using a dramatization of Mishima’s novel Kyoko’s House. The actor in the story takes up bodybuilding as he fantasizes having the physique of a matador so that his body will be as beautiful as his face.

There follows a long voiceover soliloquy as Mishima, lauded in Japan, respected abroad, goes on a journey across the world.

‘As the ship approached Hawaii I felt as if I emerged from a cave and shook hands with the sun. I’d always suffered under a monstrous sensitivity, what I lacked was health, a healthy body, a physical presence. Words had separated me from my body. The sun released me. Greece cured my self-hatred and awoke a will to health. I saw that beauty and ethics were one and the same, creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical. I attained physical health after becoming an adult. Such people are different from those born healthy, we feel we have the right to be insensitive to trivial concerns. The loss of self through sex gives us little satisfaction. I was married in 1958, my daughter was born in 1959 and my son in 1961.’

In the dramatization of Kyoko’s House the bodybuilding actor gets into an argument with a visual artist. The actor says, ‘The human body is the work of art. It doesn’t need artists.’ But the artist replies: ‘Okay, let’s say you’re right. What good does your sweating and grunting do. Even the most beautiful body is destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artist’s scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.���

The actor signs a sadomasochistic pact with an older woman libertine who cuts and burns the actor’s beautiful body before they commit suicide together.

Evil as Aesthetic in De Sade, Genet and Mishima

In The Decay of the Angel, the old man, Shigekuni Honda steals a glance at the young Tōru ‘and felt that he was seeing in that glance his own life… The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness. A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death as it composed noble condolences, that invited the world to destruction while seeking the last possible moment for itself… his own inclinations all through his long life had been to make the world over into emptiness, to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality.’

Honda wants to cultivate Tōru’s evil potential. The evil in The Decay of the Angel is all on the level of personal betrayal. The aesthetic is similar to that of Jean Genet who gives himself over to sordid betrayal and punishment. He makes Evil into Good, or more than that: into holiness and sanctity; hence Sartre’s essay Saint Genet.

In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille points out that in Sartre’s essay on Jean Genet: ‘It seems to me that the whole question of Good and Evil revolves around one main theme – what Sade called irregularity. Sade realised that irregularity was the basis of sexual excitement. The law (the rule) is a good one, it is Good itself (Good, the means by which the being ensures its existence), but a value, Evil, depends on the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening – like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken.’

Just as Honda wants ‘to lead men to nothing – complete destruction and finality’, Sade in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome imagined as many ways as possible to destroy human beings singularly and collectively. Bataille says: ‘In the solitude of prison Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires, on the basis of which consciousness has based the social structure and the very image of man… Indeed this book is the only one in which the mind of man is shown as it really is. The language of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome is that of a universe which degrades gradually and systematically, which tortures and destroys the totality of the beings which it presents… Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’

Sade spent time in jail because he acted out to some extent the frenzies to which he was driven. He did cut a female beggar, Rose Keller, with a penknife and pour wax into her wounds. He did organise orgies at the castle of Lacoste though not to the extent of acting out the fantasies he wrote of in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, but for sure, women and men were badly hurt. In comparison with characters in the writings of Genet and Sade, the evil of Honda, or of Georges Bataille’s characters, is a little tamer. Honda, as we see, holds back at ‘the last possible moment.’

And Honda’s female friend, Keiko, tells Honda’s protégé, Tōru: ‘You’re a mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place. You want to get your hands on your father’s money, and so you arrange to have him declared incompetent… your sort of evil is a legal sort of evil. All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon… You’re a clever boy, no more.’

Whereas Sade and Genet pushed their criminality in waking life to extremes beyond ‘decency,’ they pulled back at the last moment from death, and left that ultimate ‘expression of freedom’, if it can be called that, to their literature. Mishima did not go so far in his literature as Sade or Genet, or even Bataille, in their portrayals of sexuality. And Mishima is the better writer for it.

Finally, Mishima didn’t pull back – as Honda and Tōru do – in his life or his death. He was determined to unify his actions and his art. It’s Mishima’s obsession with the body and beauty and its connection to his sexuality and ideas of purity that creates the complex psychology that foreshadows his death by suicide and how he made that theatrical performance of seppuku the union of action and art.

In Schrader’s film, in voiceover Mishima says: ‘The average age for men in the bronze age was eighteen, in the Roman era, twenty-two. Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful. When a man reaches forty he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.’

But Mishima already was losing the desire to live. Again, in voiceover, the adult Mishima says: ‘A writer is a voyeur par excellence. I came to detest this position. I sought not only to be the seer but also the seen. Men wear masks to make themselves beautiful. But unlike a woman’s, a man’s determination to become beautiful is always a desire for death.’

Politics

In the third Chapter of Schrader’s film, entitled Action, Mishima, as writer, has reached the height of his fame, and has perfected his body to the point of narcissistic infatuation. He poses for photographs as a samurai, as St Sebastian, as the successful artist beside Greek sculptures. He founds a private militia, complete with uniforms designed by himself and the tailor to General Charles De Gaulle. He names his militia the Shield Society, a spiritual army to protect the Emperor and the pure spirit of Japan. He is aware of the ridiculousness of his position. In a speech to gathered dignitaries of the theatre world of Japan and the West he states: ‘Some people have called us toy soldiers. But our goal is to restore the noble tradition of the Way of the Samurai. I have always supported the tradition of elegant beauty in Japanese literature. I cannot stop striving to unite these two great traditions.’

When Mishima is invited to speak on campus at a university protest occupation in the sixties, there is something absurd in his facing the vociferous students. They accuse him of being illogical in his purist stance. He says: ‘Having got to this position out of sheer pride, I’m not going to become logical now. We all want to improve Japan. We’ve all played the same cards, but I have the Joker. I have the Emperor.’

In voiceover, he says of the moment where he faced the students: ‘For a moment I felt I was entering the realm where art and action converge, for a moment I was alive.’

Seppuku

Chapter Four of Schrader’s movie is entitled The harmony of pen and sword. Mishima says in voiceover: ‘The harmony of pen and sword. This samurai motto used to be a way of life. Now it’s forgotten. Can art and action still be united? Today this harmony can only occur in a brief flash. A single moment.’

He dedicates more of his life to the Shield Society.

‘Running in the early mist with the members of the Shield Society I felt something emerging as slowly as my sweat. The ultimate verification of my existence… Our members were allowed to train in the facilities of the regular army. I flew in a combat fighter. These privileges were granted to us because of the symbolic significance of our society. Even in its present weakened condition the army represented the ancient code of the Samurai. It was here, on the stage of Japanese tradition, I would conduct my action. Having come to my solution I never wavered. Who knows what others will make of this? There would be no more rehearsals.

‘Body and spirit had never blended. Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words. Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action. Somewhere there must be a higher principle that reconciles art and action. That principle it occurred to me was death. The vast upper atmosphere where there is no oxygen is surrounded with death. To survive in this atmosphere, man, like an actor, must wear a mask. Flying at 45,000 feet, the silver phallus of the fuselage floated in sunlight, my mind was at ease, my thought process lively, no movement, no sound, no memories. The closed cockpit and outer space were like the spirit and body of the same being. Here I saw the outcome of my final action. In this stillness was a beauty beyond words, no more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female. Then I saw a giant circle coiled around the earth, a ring that resolved all contradictions, a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than any scent I have ever known. Here was the moment I’d always been seeking…’

The final act of the film and of Mishima’s life in politics and art took place on November 25th 1970. Allowed into the barracks of the Japanese Self-Defense Force with his four cadets, and welcomed into the commander’s office, Mishima took the general hostage and demanded that the soldiers of the garrison be commanded to assemble in front of the building in order to hear his speech. The general acceded to his demands. Mishima stepped out onto the balcony and addressed the soldiers. He exhorted them to rise up in the spirit of Bushido and to install the Emperor as the rightful ruler, and to protect the pure spirit of Japan from Western military and economic occupiers. Ridiculed as much by the soldiers as he had been by the university students, Mishima realized that the soldiers had hardly heard a word of his cry for resistance.

Mishima stepped off the balcony from where he had delivered his final address. In the office of the commander of the barracks, he knelt to disembowel himself. He botched the ritual. One of his cadets was supposed to behead him with a sword. The chosen one made a mess of it and another cadet had to take over while the first cadet committed suicide. Tastefully, Schrader doesn’t show the acts of self-butchery. The film closes with a poetic vision of the rising sun and the poetic lines of transcendence  that describe the final moments of Mishima’s character Isao from The Runaway Horses…

What is it in Mishima and in Schrader’s biographical account of his life that holds such a fascination for me?

On an aesthetic level, Schrader is a Western artist who is trying to understand an artist of the East who is a fanatic in his pursuit of perfection. This essay (in the French sense of essayer) became an obsession for me: another way of understanding my attraction to the idea of a pure and unattainable perfection whether in literature or spirituality.

Mishima, as symbol, embodies for me all those weaknesses of systems that strive for such purity of spirit; that are inevitably an expression of the egotism of wanting to be a master – of oneself or of others; combined with the whole traditional set-up of sensei and disciples, that finds its ultimate expression in the blindness or delusion of an inner group convinced of its rightness and purity: the fanaticism of seeking purity in the spirit or in art that inevitably collapses into messy and tragic farce.

Schrader’s film plays this out on screen: Mishima played it out in his life and art. It’s not that Mishima didn’t produced great works of literature. He did. But the extremes that literature permits us to explore belong to art, to cinema, to writing…

De Sade belonged in jail. Genet was happy to end up in jail. Mishima was happy to die as he did. Their literature permits us to go to imaginative extremes, to liberate ourselves of concepts that stop us being internally free; to face up to the dark side of the psyche, to the fascination with the scatological.

Bataille kept his excesses to the literary and the consensual for which it’s possible to have far more respect. Baudelaire, too, to some degree. As a writer who regards commitment to literature and the political to be crucial to life, I can’t help but mention Samuel Beckett. Beckett didn’t shirk his responsibilities to the political world: he risked his life in the French Resistance against the Nazis. At the same time, he had a total commitment to literature.

How much saner, or for me more enviable, is Beckett’s approach than that of Mishima, or De Sade, or Genet? ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Bataille says that ‘Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.’ There were moments in writing this essay where I felt something similar in confronting Mishima’s outlook and embracing Schrader’s interpretation of his life. No doubt, the subject touches something terrifying in the darkness of my own psyche.

At a physical level, Mishima’s choice to die at forty-five when at the peak of one’s power is ridiculous: there is so much more living to do. It’s easier to understand Hemingway’s decision at the age of sixty-two. With mind and body passing sixty, there is a sense of fearing death less than facing mental and physical deterioration and incapacity.

In 2016, I lost my brother to early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Even without such a tragic and heartbreaking illness, at the moment, I’m aware that my physical and mental capacities must inevitably diminish. Having witnessed in another, so close to me by blood, and more, the ravages of such a debilitating illness, the engagement with Yukio Mishima’s writing and Paul Schrader’s film of his life, makes this essay a direct confrontation of my own fears of old age, sickness and death. No matter how much the idea of death as less frightening than physical and mental deterioration, I take solace in Nietzsche’s understanding of our constant becoming as an irrepressible expression of the creative will, aware that there is a part of me, no matter how deep the moments of desperation, that still insists on its expression in life.

[sarahlwlee]

31 Stories in 31 Days: Childhood

What is this? As part of celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (May), I am writing a story a day about my experiences as a Chinese Malaysian immigrant in America. My friends and family have provided numerous one-word prompts to help me create these stories. Today’s word prompt was contributed by both Sheri S. and the word is “Childhood”. Thank you Sheri for your contribution and thank you everyone who stopped by to read my story today.

My father worked for a company called NCR, National Cash Register, a software and hardware technology solutions company that merged with AT&T and eventually separated to return as NCR Corporation. This company required my father to travel overseas a lot for work and at times he would be gone for three to six months at a time for training. Sometimes they allowed him to bring family members to accompany him.

When I was about 3-years-old, my father brought my mother and I with him to St. Paul, Minnesota while he attended another several months long training. My parents use to regale tales of how they lost me at a JC Penney department store while they were in Minnesota.  

This is how my parents told me this story.

My parents were shopping in the same aisle and my father had walked ahead to look for something specific while I sat in the stroller with my mom pushing from behind. Being the mischievous and playful child, my mom said I unbuckled myself from the stroller, stood up and walked away. In my mom’s recollection, she said I must have decided to play hide and seek with my parents. My mom thought I had got out of the stroller to walk to my father who was just a little ways down the aisle. As my mother approached my father, she noticed that I wasn’t with him. He said he thought I was still with her and she vice versa thought I had was with him because I had walked in his general direction.

For the parents reading this story, you can empathize with the utter dread and how mortified my parents were when they couldn’t find me. Both of my parents were yelling my name and reported me missing to mall security. Mall security made a public announcement over the PA system throughout the mall of a missing Asian girl approximately age 3 responds to the name of Sarah and is wearing a Sesame Street shirt. My mother in her state of panic decided to walk around the department store and trace where my little steps might have gone. Her worst fear at the time was that I might have been kidnapped by a stranger. She had watched a lot of television programs featuring young Asian children being kidnapped and sold to adoption agencies because there was a demand for cute little Asian children.

As my mom walked around, she noticed at a distance a familiar little silhouette matching my description at a shoe store. A white woman was helping me try on new shoes. My mother ran up to me and yelled my name, “Sarah!” I looked up and smiled at her. Even waved thinking this was just a fun excursion. She picked me up quickly with tears in her eyes and walked away towards my father who was waiting with mall security. Later, my parents deduced with what little conversation I could offer as a 3-year-old to them that I had been hiding in a clothes rack nearby where they were standing. You can imagine from then on my mother never let me out of her sight again.

A few years later my father was sent on another long trip overseas, this time to Dayton, Ohio. We lived in an apartment complex with a large verdant backyard filled with crab apple trees. At the entrance was an abundant blackberry tree, where I tasted some of the most sweetest berries I ever had in my life. This apartment complex didn’t have many families. So any family with kids would stand out immediately. In the next apartment block, there was a family with two young children Brian and Meghan. Brian was about the same age as I was, seven, and Meghan was about four. Brian became my best friend and playmate when we lived at the apartment.

One day, Brian had invited me out to play and my mother said to stay close to the apartment. We started playing a game of tag in the backyard amongst the crab apple trees. Eventually we stopped playing and Brian asked me if I wanted to see something cool in the woods that was directly behind our backyard. As a kid you never really say no especially since it seemed like an amazing adventure. So I followed him into the woods and he showed me what he had been working on. He had built a wooden slat ladder stapled to a tree and found a perch he could comfortably reach where he could execute his diabolical plan. Not too far away from where we stood was a bees nest. He said he had the perfect prank to pour honey on an unsuspecting passerby and hit the bees nest down so that it would attack them. I didn’t like this plan and I didn’t like this idea at all. I told him this wasn’t very nice and I wanted to go home. He told me to wait while he climbed down the tree and said I was a scaredy cat for trying to leave. Before we returned to the backyard area of our apartment complex, he said he met a few new friends beyond the trees and asked me if I would like to meet them. I said yes and followed him through the thick trees.

Beyond the trees was another apartment complex that looked like terrace houses. Off to the left were two little girls who looked like they were my age and they were in their bathing suits running around a plastic kiddie pool and an outdoor sprinkler. Brian ran towards them waved his arm at me to follow him. It looked like fun what they were doing and we were meeting a few strange men drinking beer on the lawn. Before I could even begin playing with these girls or even learning their names, I heard someone yelling my name in the distance, “SARAH!” It was my mother. Oh no... I had wandered too far from the apartment. She was furious and demanded I come to her immediately. She walked me back quickly to the apartment with what look like fumes were coming out of her ears. When we were in the apartment, she started yelling at me why I had wandered off beyond where she could see me and that I could have been hurt by some stranger. She even said did you do this because you don’t love me? Being young and not knowing how to explain my actions nor even how to respond to her last question, I just stood in silence filled with remorse. The short end to this story, I was grounded for several weeks. Over the next few days, Brian kept coming over to ask me out to play, but my mother kept telling him to go away because I was grounded.

After weeks had passed, my mother asked me to join her to see Brian’s family. I was so excited to see my friend again and go play. However, it wasn’t what I thought it was. His family was packing up their belongings into the car, they had bought a house in a nearby suburb and they were leaving shortly. My mom got a copy of their mailing address so that I could be pen pals with Brian. I was really sad that day and wondered if we could go visit them at their new home. My mom said no. We were leaving in a week to return to Malaysia. My dad’s training had come to an end. She promised me that I could write to Brian when we were back home in Malaysia. I held to this promise and planned to write when I returned home.

When we returned to Malaysia, I quickly pulled together my special stationary that I had received as a gift from my aunt and started writing my one page letter to Brian. I asked my mother to help write the address on the envelope and also mail it. Many weeks passed and then months, I never heard from Brian again. I don’t even know if he got the letter. The beauty of being a kid at the age of seven, it was easy to be distracted by school and old childhood friends. Before I knew it, I had forgotten about Brian.

[lodelss]

Mia Armstrong | The Marshall Project | August 2019 | 9 minutes (2,400 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​.

Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder.

The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.”

In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

That decision, Turner v. Safley, established how courts should weigh the constitutionality of prison regulations, and has formed the legal basis for prison weddings across the country​—​most often between one incarcerated person and someone on the outside. It opened the doors for a niche industry of ​officiants​ ​who​ ​specialize​ ​in​ prison weddings. And its clear articulation of marriage as a fundamental human right was even cited in ​Obergefell v. Hodges​, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 2015 affirmed the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

It all started in 1980 at a prison in Missouri.

* * *

Renz Correctional Center was a three-story white building nestled in the Missouri River bottoms north of Jefferson City, about 120 miles west of St. Louis. Designed as a minimum security prison farm for men, by the 1980s ​Renz had turned into​ what corrections officials called a “complex prison”: one that housed both women and men.

Renz Correctional Center in March 1986. The prison closed after being destroyed by flooding in 1993. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

The women were mostly medium- and maximum-security inmates. Many had been ​convicted of killing abusive husbands or boyfriends​, and were sent to Renz after an inmate stabbed the superintendent of an overcrowded and violent women’s prison in Tipton, Missouri, in 1975.

By 1982, Renz housed 138 women and 90 men, according to reporting from the Kansas City Star at the time. That created a “mixture of security problems and volatile problems, such as rivalries between competing suitors” involved in love triangles, prison officials said then. Attorney Henry Herschel, who represented Renz superintendent William Turner on behalf of

Missouri’s attorney general, remembers male inmates passing coke bottles containing semen to try to impregnate female inmates.

“Superintendent Turner was constantly trying to stop women from getting pregnant,” Herschel said.

State officials also worried that Renz lacked adequate security features, so to keep order Turner turned to regulation: He implemented a strict “no touching” rule. Male and female inmates interacted only for about an hour each day. Turner also implemented strict policies to regulate mail and marriages between inmates.

* * *

That was the situation at Renz in 1980, when Leonard Safely, who was serving a short sentence for writing bad checks, met Pearl Jane “P.J.” Watson, there on a 23-year sentence for killing a former boyfriend.

The two got to know each other in the prison’s exercise yard​—a​ nd, the Kansas City Star reported, “romance seemed to blossom.”

But a romance novel it was not. Shortly after they began a relationship, Safley and Watson had what court documents describe as a “noisy lovers quarrel.” Safley was sent to a different prison, and later to a halfway house. The two tried to stay in touch via letters.

Missouri, however, mostly allowed letters between inmates only if they were immediate family members.

Safley did his best to get around mail restrictions at Renz. He opened a post office box under the fake name “Jack King,” and recruited his mother and friends to mail letters for him. Some made it to Watson, but many were refused. When Safley went to Renz to see Watson on a weekend pass from his halfway house, his visit, too, was refused.

Safley and Watson also wanted to get married. At the time, the Missouri Division of Corrections was not required to help an inmate get married, but also was not specifically authorized to prohibit inmate marriages. At Renz, however, marriage requests were often denied.

Fed up, Safley sued prison officials in 1981, challenging the marriage, mail and visitation rules.

“I’ve never fought for anything so hard or wanted anything so much as to marry P.J.,” Safley told Richard M. Johnson, a staff writer at the Kansas City Star, in 1982.

Watson seemed to feel similarly.

“I love Lenny. I’m going to marry Lenny,” she told the newspaper. “To me, it’s wrong for them to do this. I sit in here, wondering how he is, and when he writes me I don’t get it. I was just really getting depressed.”

Leonard Safley in his room at the Kansas City Honor Center, in a 1982 clipping from The Kansas City Star. DAN WHITE/KANSAS CITY STAR

Shortly after filing their lawsuit, Safley and Watson found a workaround. At a preliminary injunction hearing in March 1982, Safley’s attorney Floyd Finch offered Judge Howard Sachs the opportunity to resolve the case quickly.

“We’ve got an officiant here, and we’ve got the wedding ring and a marriage license. So if you wouldn’t mind letting us use your courtroom, we can go ahead and get this case resolved right now,” Finch remembers telling Sachs.

The attorney for the state objected. But Sachs told The Marshall Project he remembers being surprised and amused by the marriage proposition, and saw no “substantial state interest” in preventing it.

In that courtroom in Missouri, with Finch serving as the best man and giving away the bride, Safley and Watson wed.

“Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” said the Rev. Johnny Blackwell, a methodist pastor who officiated the wedding, as Safley placed a ring on Watson’s finger, according to the Kansas City Star.

They exchanged vows and a kiss​—​it all lasted about five minutes. Afterward, Finch remembers the couple was allowed to sit together for about 10 minutes. There was no honeymoon.

* * *

Standard living quarters for female inmates at Renz Correctional Center resembled college dormitory rooms in August 1978. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

Not long after the wedding, Finch and attorney Cecelia Baty visited Renz. They wanted to see if other inmates had complaints about the marriage and correspondence rules. What they found helped them construct a class action case.

Inmates told the attorneys their letters had been returned, and several women had been denied permission to marry because Turner believed it was not in their best interest or because of their relationship history. One woman’s request was denied “because she did not know enough about” her fiance, according to court documents from the state. Another inmate couple was denied in part because the woman had “an extended sentence for her crime and was from an

abused situation which contributed to her imprisonment for murder.” One woman was denied permission “because she was in protective custody and could not identify any of her enemies.”

In December 1983, in the middle of the class action lawsuit, the Division of Corrections changed its policy on inmate marriages. Whereas the old policy did not require the division to facilitate marriages but didn’t give specific permission to prohibit them, the new policy required a superintendent’s approval for inmates to marry. Prison officials were only supposed to approve marriages “where there are compelling reasons to do so.”

The new regulation did not define what would constitute a “compelling reason.” But testimony made the definition clear: pregnancy or a child born out of wedlock.

The trial on the class action suit began February 23, 1984, and lasted five days.

Representing Safley and the other inmates, Finch and Baty argued that the regulations at Renz were an unreasonable restriction on inmates’ fundamental First Amendment and marriage rights. Turner’s rules, they argued, were born out of a protective attitude toward the women under his custody.

Herschel, representing the state, argued that the restrictions were necessary for Turner and the Renz staff to fulfill their obligations to rehabilitate inmates and keep the facility secure.

I’ve got a right to look forward to a better life. I’ve got a right to plan on something after this institution.

A few months after the trial, Judge Sachs used a legal standard known as “strict scrutiny” to rule the marriage regulation unconstitutional, calling it “far more restrictive than is either reasonable or essential for the protection of any state security interest, or any other legitimate interest, such as the rehabilitation of inmates.”

Sachs’s ruling said the decision by two adults to marry was a personal and private one. “Even inmates have the right to make their own mistakes,” he wrote.

Sachs also ruled the prohibitions on inmate-to-inmate correspondence were “unnecessarily sweeping” and had been “applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner” that infringed on First Amendment rights.

The state appealed to the Eighth Circuit, which upheld Sachs’s rulings that the mail and marriage prohibitions were unconstitutional. So Herschel petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. At oral argument in January 1987, Justice Antonin Scalia questioned the value of a prison marriage in the first place, citing what he called the attributes of an “ordinary marriage” that are missing in prison.

“Well, Justice Scalia, if you asked the inmates here why they want to get married, they give, in my opinion, a compelling response,” Finch answered. “Because they want to spend their life with someone, even if it’s only by mail.”

Scalia wasn’t satisfied.

“Couldn’t they make that commitment just as well by sending them a fraternity ring?” he asked.

There was laughter in the courtroom before Finch was able to respond.

“I don’t think that the religious attributes of a marriage ceremony can be fairly equated with a fraternity ring,” he said. “…the important thing about the marriage decision is that the inmate is standing up and saying, hey, while I may be incarcerated, I’ve got a right to look forward to a better life. I’ve got a right to plan on something after this institution.”

* * *

Trades, such as sewing, were taught in the educational wing at Renz Correctional Center in August 1978. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

The justices decided the case in June 1987. In the majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court upheld Missouri’s mail regulations because they were “related to legitimate security concerns,” not restrictive of “all means of expression” and content neutral.

On the other hand, the “almost complete ban on marriages,” the court found, was not “reasonably related to legitimate penological objectives.”

The justices acknowledged that the right to marry “is subject to substantial restrictions as a result of incarceration,” but determined that many benefits of marriage​—​emotional support, religious significance, legal and property rights​—w​ ere “unaffected by the fact of confinement.”

Herschel wasn’t particularly surprised by the ruling on marriage, which he acknowledged was the state’s less compelling argument.

“It was weak,” Herschel remembered, “because we were telling adults, however many mistakes they have made, what to do.”

But the most significant part of the Turner v. Safely decision was the Supreme Court’s determination that prison regulations that infringe upon inmates’ constitutional rights must be “reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”

The court laid out a test to assess reasonableness, including considering whether the rules are rationally connected to a legitimate government interest and whether inmates have alternative ways to exercise their constitutional rights.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Harry Blackmun concurred with the majority striking down the marriage restriction, but dissented on the approval of the correspondence regulation and the application of the reasonableness standard.

“Application of the standard would seem to permit disregard for inmates’ constitutional rights whenever the imagination of the warden produces a plausible security concern and a deferential trial court is able to discern a logical connection between that concern and the challenged regulation,” Stevens wrote. “Indeed, there is a logical connection between prison discipline and the use of bullwhips on prisoners.”

The decision was in some ways a pyrrhic victory for Safley and Watson. Sometime between the Supreme Court’s oral argument and when the ruling was issued, they were divorced. The legal precedent their marriage set would last for decades, but the marriage itself only a few years.

“These marriages may not all work out,” Finch had told the justices during oral argument. “But at least they’ve got a right to try to make a better life for themselves.”

* * *

Gillpatrick and Wetherell, the two Nebraska inmates, are still waiting to be married.

The Nebraska attorney general is appealing the district court’s decision that prohibits prison officials from denying the couple’s request for a e-wedding ceremony, according to a spokesperson who offered no comment on the case when reached by The Marshall Project. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services also said it could not comment on pending litigation, but confirmed that the ​policy preventing marriages between inmates​ except in special circumstances​ i​s still in place.

That’s the policy the district judge d​ eclared “facially unconstitutional under Turner v. Safley.”

The department has thus far refused to facilitate an e-wedding ceremony based on its interpretation of a state law that it believes requires couples be physically present during wedding ceremonies, according to court documents.

Prison officials are not alone in their opposition to the marriage.

“I live with my son’s death every day, and don’t think anyone that lives with a life sentence deserves this right,” said Denise Abts, the mother of Wetherell’s victim, in a 2014 statement to KETV in Omaha​.

“I don’t think we need to spend a lot of money litigating this for these people…” said former CNN host Ashleigh Banfield in a ​2014 Legal View segment​ discussing the case. “You lost your liberty. Deal with it. So did your victims, for a lot longer and a lot more painfully.”

Gillpatrick and Wetherell did not respond to a request for comment sent via their attorney, Amy Miller of the ACLU of Nebraska.

Miller said that while the couple was happy with the June ruling in their favor, they “also had the tempered awareness that the state was probably going to continue to fight them.”

Three decades after Safley sat in the Supreme Court and 25 years after flooding closed the prison where his love story started​, “this isn’t an issue that’s going to go away,” M​ iller said. “Especially in a country that continues to have a mass incarceration problem.”

* * *

Published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

[lodelss]

In Sickness, In Health — and In Prison

Mia Armstrong | The Marshall Project | August 2019 | 9 minutes (2,400 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​.

Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder.

The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.”

In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

That decision, Turner v. Safley, established how courts should weigh the constitutionality of prison regulations, and has formed the legal basis for prison weddings across the country​—​most often between one incarcerated person and someone on the outside. It opened the doors for a niche industry of ​officiants​ ​who​ ​specialize​ ​in​ prison weddings. And its clear articulation of marriage as a fundamental human right was even cited in ​Obergefell v. Hodges​, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 2015 affirmed the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

It all started in 1980 at a prison in Missouri.

* * *

Renz Correctional Center was a three-story white building nestled in the Missouri River bottoms north of Jefferson City, about 120 miles west of St. Louis. Designed as a minimum security prison farm for men, by the 1980s ​Renz had turned into​ what corrections officials called a “complex prison”: one that housed both women and men.

Renz Correctional Center in March 1986. The prison closed after being destroyed by flooding in 1993. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

The women were mostly medium- and maximum-security inmates. Many had been ​convicted of killing abusive husbands or boyfriends​, and were sent to Renz after an inmate stabbed the superintendent of an overcrowded and violent women’s prison in Tipton, Missouri, in 1975.

By 1982, Renz housed 138 women and 90 men, according to reporting from the Kansas City Star at the time. That created a “mixture of security problems and volatile problems, such as rivalries between competing suitors” involved in love triangles, prison officials said then. Attorney Henry Herschel, who represented Renz superintendent William Turner on behalf of

Missouri’s attorney general, remembers male inmates passing coke bottles containing semen to try to impregnate female inmates.

“Superintendent Turner was constantly trying to stop women from getting pregnant,” Herschel said.

State officials also worried that Renz lacked adequate security features, so to keep order Turner turned to regulation: He implemented a strict “no touching” rule. Male and female inmates interacted only for about an hour each day. Turner also implemented strict policies to regulate mail and marriages between inmates.

* * *

That was the situation at Renz in 1980, when Leonard Safely, who was serving a short sentence for writing bad checks, met Pearl Jane “P.J.” Watson, there on a 23-year sentence for killing a former boyfriend.

The two got to know each other in the prison’s exercise yard​—a​ nd, the Kansas City Star reported, “romance seemed to blossom.”

But a romance novel it was not. Shortly after they began a relationship, Safley and Watson had what court documents describe as a “noisy lovers quarrel.” Safley was sent to a different prison, and later to a halfway house. The two tried to stay in touch via letters.

Missouri, however, mostly allowed letters between inmates only if they were immediate family members.

Safley did his best to get around mail restrictions at Renz. He opened a post office box under the fake name “Jack King,” and recruited his mother and friends to mail letters for him. Some made it to Watson, but many were refused. When Safley went to Renz to see Watson on a weekend pass from his halfway house, his visit, too, was refused.

Safley and Watson also wanted to get married. At the time, the Missouri Division of Corrections was not required to help an inmate get married, but also was not specifically authorized to prohibit inmate marriages. At Renz, however, marriage requests were often denied.

Fed up, Safley sued prison officials in 1981, challenging the marriage, mail and visitation rules.

“I’ve never fought for anything so hard or wanted anything so much as to marry P.J.,” Safley told Richard M. Johnson, a staff writer at the Kansas City Star, in 1982.

Watson seemed to feel similarly.

“I love Lenny. I’m going to marry Lenny,” she told the newspaper. “To me, it’s wrong for them to do this. I sit in here, wondering how he is, and when he writes me I don’t get it. I was just really getting depressed.”

Leonard Safley in his room at the Kansas City Honor Center, in a 1982 clipping from The Kansas City Star. DAN WHITE/KANSAS CITY STAR

Shortly after filing their lawsuit, Safley and Watson found a workaround. At a preliminary injunction hearing in March 1982, Safley’s attorney Floyd Finch offered Judge Howard Sachs the opportunity to resolve the case quickly.

“We’ve got an officiant here, and we’ve got the wedding ring and a marriage license. So if you wouldn’t mind letting us use your courtroom, we can go ahead and get this case resolved right now,” Finch remembers telling Sachs.

The attorney for the state objected. But Sachs told The Marshall Project he remembers being surprised and amused by the marriage proposition, and saw no “substantial state interest” in preventing it.

In that courtroom in Missouri, with Finch serving as the best man and giving away the bride, Safley and Watson wed.

“Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” said the Rev. Johnny Blackwell, a methodist pastor who officiated the wedding, as Safley placed a ring on Watson’s finger, according to the Kansas City Star.

They exchanged vows and a kiss​—​it all lasted about five minutes. Afterward, Finch remembers the couple was allowed to sit together for about 10 minutes. There was no honeymoon.

* * *

Standard living quarters for female inmates at Renz Correctional Center resembled college dormitory rooms in August 1978. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

Not long after the wedding, Finch and attorney Cecelia Baty visited Renz. They wanted to see if other inmates had complaints about the marriage and correspondence rules. What they found helped them construct a class action case.

Inmates told the attorneys their letters had been returned, and several women had been denied permission to marry because Turner believed it was not in their best interest or because of their relationship history. One woman’s request was denied “because she did not know enough about” her fiance, according to court documents from the state. Another inmate couple was denied in part because the woman had “an extended sentence for her crime and was from an

abused situation which contributed to her imprisonment for murder.” One woman was denied permission “because she was in protective custody and could not identify any of her enemies.”

In December 1983, in the middle of the class action lawsuit, the Division of Corrections changed its policy on inmate marriages. Whereas the old policy did not require the division to facilitate marriages but didn’t give specific permission to prohibit them, the new policy required a superintendent’s approval for inmates to marry. Prison officials were only supposed to approve marriages “where there are compelling reasons to do so.”

The new regulation did not define what would constitute a “compelling reason.” But testimony made the definition clear: pregnancy or a child born out of wedlock.

The trial on the class action suit began February 23, 1984, and lasted five days.

Representing Safley and the other inmates, Finch and Baty argued that the regulations at Renz were an unreasonable restriction on inmates’ fundamental First Amendment and marriage rights. Turner’s rules, they argued, were born out of a protective attitude toward the women under his custody.

Herschel, representing the state, argued that the restrictions were necessary for Turner and the Renz staff to fulfill their obligations to rehabilitate inmates and keep the facility secure.

I’ve got a right to look forward to a better life. I’ve got a right to plan on something after this institution.

A few months after the trial, Judge Sachs used a legal standard known as “strict scrutiny” to rule the marriage regulation unconstitutional, calling it “far more restrictive than is either reasonable or essential for the protection of any state security interest, or any other legitimate interest, such as the rehabilitation of inmates.”

Sachs’s ruling said the decision by two adults to marry was a personal and private one. “Even inmates have the right to make their own mistakes,” he wrote.

Sachs also ruled the prohibitions on inmate-to-inmate correspondence were “unnecessarily sweeping” and had been “applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner” that infringed on First Amendment rights.

The state appealed to the Eighth Circuit, which upheld Sachs’s rulings that the mail and marriage prohibitions were unconstitutional. So Herschel petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. At oral argument in January 1987, Justice Antonin Scalia questioned the value of a prison marriage in the first place, citing what he called the attributes of an “ordinary marriage” that are missing in prison.

“Well, Justice Scalia, if you asked the inmates here why they want to get married, they give, in my opinion, a compelling response,” Finch answered. “Because they want to spend their life with someone, even if it’s only by mail.”

Scalia wasn’t satisfied.

“Couldn’t they make that commitment just as well by sending them a fraternity ring?” he asked.

There was laughter in the courtroom before Finch was able to respond.

“I don’t think that the religious attributes of a marriage ceremony can be fairly equated with a fraternity ring,” he said. “…the important thing about the marriage decision is that the inmate is standing up and saying, hey, while I may be incarcerated, I’ve got a right to look forward to a better life. I’ve got a right to plan on something after this institution.”

* * *

Trades, such as sewing, were taught in the educational wing at Renz Correctional Center in August 1978. COLUMBIA MISSOURIAN

The justices decided the case in June 1987. In the majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court upheld Missouri’s mail regulations because they were “related to legitimate security concerns,” not restrictive of “all means of expression” and content neutral.

On the other hand, the “almost complete ban on marriages,” the court found, was not “reasonably related to legitimate penological objectives.”

The justices acknowledged that the right to marry “is subject to substantial restrictions as a result of incarceration,” but determined that many benefits of marriage​—​emotional support, religious significance, legal and property rights​—w​ ere “unaffected by the fact of confinement.”

Herschel wasn’t particularly surprised by the ruling on marriage, which he acknowledged was the state’s less compelling argument.

“It was weak,” Herschel remembered, “because we were telling adults, however many mistakes they have made, what to do.”

But the most significant part of the Turner v. Safely decision was the Supreme Court’s determination that prison regulations that infringe upon inmates’ constitutional rights must be “reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”

The court laid out a test to assess reasonableness, including considering whether the rules are rationally connected to a legitimate government interest and whether inmates have alternative ways to exercise their constitutional rights.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Harry Blackmun concurred with the majority striking down the marriage restriction, but dissented on the approval of the correspondence regulation and the application of the reasonableness standard.

“Application of the standard would seem to permit disregard for inmates’ constitutional rights whenever the imagination of the warden produces a plausible security concern and a deferential trial court is able to discern a logical connection between that concern and the challenged regulation,” Stevens wrote. “Indeed, there is a logical connection between prison discipline and the use of bullwhips on prisoners.”

The decision was in some ways a pyrrhic victory for Safley and Watson. Sometime between the Supreme Court’s oral argument and when the ruling was issued, they were divorced. The legal precedent their marriage set would last for decades, but the marriage itself only a few years.

“These marriages may not all work out,” Finch had told the justices during oral argument. “But at least they’ve got a right to try to make a better life for themselves.”

* * *

Gillpatrick and Wetherell, the two Nebraska inmates, are still waiting to be married.

The Nebraska attorney general is appealing the district court’s decision that prohibits prison officials from denying the couple’s request for a e-wedding ceremony, according to a spokesperson who offered no comment on the case when reached by The Marshall Project. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services also said it could not comment on pending litigation, but confirmed that the ​policy preventing marriages between inmates​ except in special circumstances​ i​s still in place.

That’s the policy the district judge d​ eclared “facially unconstitutional under Turner v. Safley.”

The department has thus far refused to facilitate an e-wedding ceremony based on its interpretation of a state law that it believes requires couples be physically present during wedding ceremonies, according to court documents.

Prison officials are not alone in their opposition to the marriage.

“I live with my son’s death every day, and don’t think anyone that lives with a life sentence deserves this right,” said Denise Abts, the mother of Wetherell’s victim, in a 2014 statement to KETV in Omaha​.

“I don’t think we need to spend a lot of money litigating this for these people…” said former CNN host Ashleigh Banfield in a ​2014 Legal View segment​ discussing the case. “You lost your liberty. Deal with it. So did your victims, for a lot longer and a lot more painfully.”

Gillpatrick and Wetherell did not respond to a request for comment sent via their attorney, Amy Miller of the ACLU of Nebraska.

Miller said that while the couple was happy with the June ruling in their favor, they “also had the tempered awareness that the state was probably going to continue to fight them.”

Three decades after Safley sat in the Supreme Court and 25 years after flooding closed the prison where his love story started​, “this isn’t an issue that’s going to go away,” M​ iller said. “Especially in a country that continues to have a mass incarceration problem.”

* * *

Published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2NeM85m via IFTTT