Matlin’s Autobiography

By David Matlin

I don't know exactly where to begin any "autobiographical sketch." I suppose my journey into the making of an art begins with my desire to be an artist and writer by reading and studying William Blake with a deep shy privacy and to be in that if possible a writer, any way I could and can get to it, a writer who studies. I've never forgotten in the more than thirty years since those initial moments how Blake turns the meaning of apocalypse into an innovative archaism, not the one of shadowy finalities, the stale leakages of the human breath away from itself and its body, but something that has the nerve to be tender and refreshed, that the apocalypse can only "come to pass by an improvement in sensual enjoyment." The quality of humor, of literal human and humane concentrations might help to remind us that the constant killing, the constant directives of waste and annihilations are not finally the Totality, the begged for potentials of our estrangement so huge none of us as members of our species can name it, or have the stamina or composure to resist the apparent sensualities and orders of this estrangement which threatens each of us with its hungers.

I can't imagine another geography for fiction or poetry or essays or at least the fiction and poetry and essays I want most to practice, most to be alive at this ugliest threshold to another century. I look upon the novel as a loom where the boldest experiments can be chanced, and I also see the novel as a furrow, yes as verse too. I suppose that begins with my childhood walking the endless furrows of my father's rose fields where he told me in that now faraway world of the Santa Ana River Valley that the most potent of all fertilizers is the human footstep and at the same time watching my mother knit her sweaters and dresses shawls and capes watching her drink her martinis and California wines and hold her favorite cigarettes in ivory and sweet smooth mother-of-pearl cigarette holders. As a man I've come to know that I'll never know how much that statement and those images have seared me especially in relationship to the literal plowing, literal furrowing of possible illumination about human existence a novel can evoke particularly in this time of deepest peril in which all of the ancient practices which had once defined what a humanity might be are rendered more and more fragile.

There is too the desert, the vision of the Enola Gay stuck out in the middle of a Chino California post-World War II cornfield, B52s hovering over the nights and days of a Southern California childhood with the tents of evangelist cults shimmering in the now distant early parking lots of vanished shopping centers, housing developments, the tar-stained bubbles of the La Brea Tar Pits, the gang war rages of the small orange and lemon grove communities where I cut my teeth and grew to early manhood. Stories and their active contributive charms as Henry James pronounced their possibilities.

In the summer of 1998 I received a grant from Poets & Writers to go back into New York State's prisons. It had been three years since Clinton's Crime Bill of 1995 had destroyed not only the education program I had worked in for so many years, but similar fully accredited Higher Education Prison Programs across the nation. I wrote Vernooykill Creek, The Crisis of Prisons in America as a personal response not only to Clinton's cynical and base legislation, but as part of a private vow to the men I worked with in those man made hells, their families, their communities. And I've come to realize, this principle of violation as both domestic and foreign policy is one our nation's most unfortunate forms of "unparalleled" skill, the quiet morally principled accomplishments of atrocity and extermination extending from our "Indian" solutions to the realms of the twentieth century and it immediate "beyond" into the initial reckonings and judgements of the twenty first. The explanation of the unprecedented quietude of the brutal came not from one of ourselves but from a visitor from France, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, who with the coldest of his almost forbidding precisions defined our own coldness for us in a way we still can't unravel even before the constant unravellings that have come for us as a result of September 11th:

The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race

by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with

indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly

depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the

United States have accomplished this twofold purpose

with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically,

without shedding blood, and without violating a single

great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.

It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for

the laws of humanity.

In its most crucial sense autobiography is Bios, a tracing of the vital processes of an organism and what brings that organism to both life and death in its environment, its regions of having been alive. It is also the intimacy of our unease before the making of language and a reminder of the spells and charms that will come from trying to keep one's eyes open knowing that no one lives easily before any of the endurances that will come to mark them. As a writer my region is the Nation, and a part of my study has been prison and how close prison is bringing the Nation to autopsy, how close prison is to the harshest unfoldings of our post-9/11 world.

Many of New York State's prisons are situated in the some of the most beautiful countryside in North America. One of my Poets & Writers destinations took me to Western New York and the gorge of the Genesee River in Letchworth State Park. I'm a Westener who spent almost thirty years in New York, both its wonderful City and its Catskill Mountains, my wife Gail's, homeground. But I grew up with the Sierras, the Grand Canyon, the huge sweep of deserts where you can still find the bones of ancient cheetah and elephant lying in remote canyons. I was not prepared for what I saw hidden by the gently sloped meadows of this ancient Seneca world. The cliffs of the Genesee Gorge fall a sheer thousand feet into swamp, sand bar, and a waiting river that has been eating this plateau since the final recession of the last glaciers. When I was there in that July its two water falls were raging. It seemed to me as I stood at their edge that they could barely hold the deliverance of run-off swelling with rainbow, mist, and the demonic roar of water that must have filled the minds and souls of ancestor Paleolithic artist/hunters who knew the melt with a fateful ripping proximity which may still yet haunt the secret core of dreams beyond any of our knowing. The reach of sky and time has a scale that strikes you with a first intense immobility before the folds of earth and the folds of invisibility that have welled up into all the life gathered and gone here. One of my heroes also lived out the last years of her life next to these cliffs. Mary Jameson the white girl made captive at fourteen and never returned, became a Seneca woman holding one of the great and mostly hidden stories about women and about America. Attica lies just over the immediate horizon and I had to be at its gates early the next morning. I don't like maximum security prisons. They scare me at levels I still can't quite articulate even to this day though I spent a good crease of my working years inside these supposed "Justice Spaces." We've made no settlements on the moon or mars (though we could use prisons and their deprivations as the preparatory models for the dreary earliest "Martian" settlements and the already prepared "inhabitants" lying at the front ends of our future since our rulers may be trying to arrange for another planet), but the one space we have claimed as a new empire is prison and before I go into these "spaces" I try best as I can to get my breath. There's much less preparation for the man-infected malevolences of a cyclops like Attica. You can feel it sucking at everything around it. It reminds me of those slow motion films the Atomic Energy Commission made of atomic fireballs as they breathed and ruptured and grew for only those terrible seconds, but it was enough and you knew as a little kid, more than you could ever want. I spent a whole day with the people in that "warehouse." I've been in mean ones, but none of them compare to this and when the end of that day came I was late, couldn't get passed the gates, and when I did Gail was standing in a near panic, the unstated one she'd lived with all those ten years, knowing I could have been taken hostage in a riot. Two weeks later there was a minor explosion. You could feel it stretching the walls and what had gone before it too in 1970 when this warehouse became the largest site of Americans killing Americans since the Civil War.

In 1997 I moved clear across Americas back to my native California to teach in the MFA Creative Writing Program at San Diego State University. This Border contains new immigrations from not only every region of the Pacific Rim, but much of Latin America, and parts of Africa, regions of an expanded Bios the Nation is in the process of becoming. The "Wall" at the Border of San Ysidro, to keep out the truly desperate hordes, extends literally into the Pacific and on into the dangerous remote deserts where people die and mummify by the hundreds trying to get here and through an often 128 degree sun, those human cargoes left in their secret flight to become the broken mirages no civilization has ever been able to cancel without finally canceling itself. It is the sight of perhaps the largest migration in human history, certainly one of the most ancient beginning with the Beringian surges south, and now in what still truly to be named age we're living through, a surge back toward the north, along with the largest amassment of police agencies ever devised to check, monitor, and harass such human desperation from the giant cities to the mind searing plains of the Yuha Desert. In the neighborhoods adjacent to my own, there are at least thirty seven languages spoken. San Diego State locally is referred to as the "Peoples' University." The other mixture in this new human geography is the military. San Diego is a "Navy Town" and large numbers of my students are children of Vietnam War veterans. I teach literature fiction and the art of the essay and I've often seen those young women and men compose bewildered deeply touching portraits of fathers and mothers broken by what happened in Khe Sahn or Da Nang more than thirty years ago. Some of their fathers wander the streets in a haze of drug addition or battle trauma they've never gotten over and the children are left to wonder about the leftovers with unusual grieved compassions and questions, some of whom themselves are meth refugees in this place called "The Little Town of Methlehem." Many of my other students are the first of their generations to have come to the great accomplishment of an actual University Degree, their parents and grandparents having been part of the migrations ripping at this Border for generations who hoed fields, dug ditches, worked themselves to a disfigured bone to give their children a chance at America. At the same time 75% of the students at San Diego State work either full or part time and must struggle hard for an education in a present California which houses the largest most dangerous prison industry on the planet, a self-feeding implosion which drives up the costs for not only higher education but any education by untold billions, creating for the Universities and local school systems a clumsy bewildering scramble for the leftovers and chastened students who must themselves attempt to survive in the labyrinths of their chastened educational institutions. Blake saw the apocalypse too, the one that must have yet one more embrace of loss and in his, and our time of erased maps, the human work gone truly guideless, even rotting, an embrace grasping desperately as action no matter how withered, its own opposing triumph. The Great Bard would have seen this fevered brooding as the living picture of his "soft affections" a discovery made in the epic poem Jerusalem which at the beginning of this time and its two hundred year distance from Blake may yet still present an image of lucidities no matter how frightening or ruthlessly precise. The "soft affections" are the mass of numinous wish formations the poet saw at their demonic birth at once usurping desire and infecting the human populations who would become the eventual dependents of industrial and consumer hungers. Those "soft affections" are the ones that can be hammered into all the forms of cruelty and deceit in our world, the ones that sift frantically for the ruling unrealities luring and demanding the forfeiture of the most vulnerable real each of us must invent and hold in ourselves if we are to have any hold on living and breathing not as the livid evocations of exile but as the initial restoration of the Human Work apart from the bewildering sum of the species as Missing Person.

In 1985 I went into New York State's maximum security prisons. I had no idea what was to come. I would spend the next ten years teaching men who were mostly Black or Latino the most basic forms of remedial reading and writing, and depending on the nature of their bids or sentences, follow them, their families and their communities all the way to a Masters Degree fully accredited by the State University of New York. I realized from that earliest beginning, and I still don't know quite how, that the one thing I had to leave behind if I was going to continue going through those gates, was my own will despair, and my secret pride in it. It wasn't just that there was no room for that sense of loss, it was the fact that a continued carriage would have meant demeaning and further reducing the people I would work with for all those years to follow. The final hold they had in the midst of catastrophic and unimaginable loss was their desire to gain an education. I could not afford to and they would have never let me infect them. These were the most skilled predators you and me'll see in any world. And though they had to let go of that skill to get another one, they can read what you're carrying as if it spilled on your forehead. I've come to believe that it is crucial for an artist to teach in this time. We are at a terrible crossroads and the one assurance we have is that there is absolutely no longer any map anywhere. Perhaps we are now at as dangerous a passage as we were at that point of the Great Dying that began approximately twenty thousand years ago and the as yet unaccounted for scars we might carry as species in the face of that lethal secret which may have helped turn us toward the fates of this civilization. Where can we begin to think, and in thinking not be overwhelmed by the disshaping ravages everywhere we see around us, to form the mind anew before unbearable, disowning hungers and their organized, fearful totalities.

In D.H. Lawrence's great and disturbing St. Mawr there is a vision of evil, one of the most compassionately rendered I have ever seen, and because of that one of the most shattering. The waves of evil that have swept mankind away without our ever really knowing, without our ever really wanting or wishing such a thing to have happened. If we are living in such a time then how am I and my fellow brother and sister artists going to render our examination with enough care and precision that the reassurance, the "desire for creation and productive happiness" as Lawrence called it, in everyday life, is not cut from its roots. The fact of prison and now 9/11 and its aftermath tells us directly that we have already cut away more of those roots that we might want to or can count. There is the danger, in this time, with the pressure on our Universities to transform into yet one more instance of disembodied corporation, that our arts too may wither, and their studies become a part of all the other disappearance and loss beyond rescue. And why should this most mortal of devotions be spared, be set apart from the rest? How do I begin to tell my students about the truths of this crisis we are living through without both finally scaring them and myself since I am a part of it deeply as they are and in this remember the point of any education as I have come to understand it that the common individual man and woman in the depths of their commonality has in the past and can now again in the present create a personal compassion/regard for the life and care of every other person around them. And equally as I understand it that would be a discipline, a clarifying recognition at once radical and maybe filled with the sense of belongingness we in our ironies so handily despise in what appears to be the enduring code of exile which plays us for a contrivance and wrests from us its triumph of what Blake calls "ravening" slumbers and the betrayals that emanate from the forms of sleep this poet at the beginning of our world set out to examine.

In the late summer of 1998 I was waiting for clearance outside of another prison in the hills surrounding Fallsburg, New York. The bird life that late afternoon was startling, cruelly unhurried. The forest, wind-swept and thick formed a closure where vultures, ravens, hawks perched on its pine sweltered edges. It was a perfect backdrop for the hanging gardens of flesh shredding steel contracted for the escape prone who had come to this terminus to endlessly scrub the walls floors ceilings, to plant flower beds under the thin wind pumped shadows of carefully arranged razors trembling in the air as part of the directive for cleanliness issued by the local warden. These are probably the men or their sons who'll mine asteroids if prisons are allowed in their future directives to swallow up those who are to be born into a future as "surplus." George Washington did something similar in the mid eighteenth century. His acts were also a speculation; on millions of acres of so-called wilderness the Shawnee, Wabash, Seneca, and Miami among numbers of other tribes had inhabited for thousands of years. He sent prisoners there too into what may as well have been the equivalent of an asteroid, to chop down the beloved forest of the alien, and to receive the alien's tomahawk as token of that rage and the beginning of some the most ghoulish wars ever fought. The university as a corporation, the expansion of prison as a mining enterprise, the privitization of the world's supply of fresh water, the justice projections of the bottomless new total earth conflict we have stepped into are all the exposition of the speculative, perhaps the forefront of the 100,000 year drainage of a planet that can no longer perform the services of its one sadly dominant mammalian civilization. The projection of that near geologic time should warn us about how deeply confident this authority is and expects to become and how despair can be refined, since we have begun mining ourselves, and this is a mineral to captured, perfected for other uses, other intentions. Before this collapse of Imagination can an art be made, can a resiliant teaching take hold, one that will offer us an inherited field of living curiosities before the extremity which swarms over and foresakes us? Frank O'Hara in his essay on Robert Motherwell stated that before the monolithic presence of a vocabulary of the exposition of the speculative that starves everything it touches, our greatest artists, rather than being faced down, found the necessity to exist inside "the traumatic consciousness of emergency and crisis experienced as personal event, the artist assuming responsibility for being, however accidentally, alive here and now." I don't know exactly if this can be proposed as a "teaching," as some cozy information that will rise up to deliver any of us from the sordid rupture we are living and, yes, dying through. But perhaps that sense of a "personal event" O'Hara drastically imagines is the beginning of a first dislodgement from our embrace of these lethal stories. As Robert Duncan once reminded the novelist Nathaniel Mackey in a letter, "Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, H.D., Eliot, have a black voice when speaking of the contemporary scene, an enduring memory of the first World War that has revealed the deep-going falsehood and evil of the modern state ... Their threshold remains ours. The time of war and exploitation, the infamy and lies of the capitalist war-state, continue. And the answering intensity of the imagination to hold its own values must continue." Otherwise where will the well for the being of the People, all of us out that single word of our Declaration, be?

David Matlin is a novelist

and poet who teaches and

lives in San Diego with his

family and friends.