Crazy Killing World

July 27, 2007

Sleepless at 3am and I’ve read through a flurry of last day, last hour, and last minute messages regarding the imminent–and as of a few hours ago past–execution of Darrell Grayson. Grayson started writing poetry during his long incarceration, so the impending date for imposing the final act of his death sentence has captured their attention. I don’t accuse them of being hypocritical or ridiculous, though such protests are inevitable the latter. How else can anyone feel about a bunch of poets suddenly deciding to protest, taking to their telephones to make themselves heard, no matter how vaguely? How else can anyone feel about any effort to take on the immense machinery of death that has been spawned in this country as a way of dealing with death? All such efforts are ridiculous because of the mismatch in scale.

To be clear about where I stand, I have to remind myself constantly not to say things like “regarding the imminent murder of Darrell Grayson.”

I have an uncle who undeniably and admittedly killed a man. He was a teen, drawn thin by years of drug abuse, a livewire of paranoia. His victim was a cab driver with an infant daughter. If this state had the death penalty my uncle probably would have seen it. In his 30 years in prison my uncle has become someone else. It took a while but he has educated himself: written a novel, learned to play the flute, become skilled in origami and bonsai. My uncle who took a life has saved lives as a member of a medical team, attending to those who tried to go over the fences topped with razor wire so sharp that it has been known to cut off birds’ feet. My uncle has served as lesson and counsel for many of my family members.

Without my uncle, who I’m too young to remember outside of prison, I doubt I would be alive today; I would have given into the constant call I feel deep in my bones to take my own life. I think of him, that he has not only “dealt with his situation” but made good come from it, that he endures, and that call becomes a low buzz I can live with.

My uncle will tell you that the death penalty is better than life imprisonment. If parole is just a joke, as it is for him for political reasons, then the state should just be honest and kill him rather than condemn him to decades of the kind of life available behind bars. People don’t understand what goes on in the world behind the walls: half seem to think it is some kind of hotel, half write-off the reality as fiction so they can sleep at night. I guess the “make them suffer” crowd gets their way despite themselves. And I get my way… I still have my uncle.

I’d like to say I was dreaming of Darrell Grayson, that I was restless and couldn’t sleep because of what was about to happen to him. I’d like to say I tossed and turned trying to come to terms with the ongoing brutality of man against man, not that I have a summer cold, that my healing back still aches a bit, that I am lonely and tired of trying to maintain some distance from the one person who assuages my loneliness and who I can’t have. I’d like to say that, with a man about to be executed it wasn’t still, in some way, all about me.

I ponder our capacity to ignore the world around us in favor of our personal maladies. I ponder our ability to make ourselves feel little or nothing at all. Empathy is a great gift of being human, our ability to turn that empathy off and disengage is a necessity to survive the responsibility of bearing that gift. That we can so quickly “move on” from great tragedy, no matter how personal that tragedy might be, allows us to survive that tragedy. But it is in feeling the pain endured directly by ourselves and indirectly through others that we attain our most human trajectory.

I wonder how to approach my place in a world so badly in need of attention rather than the numb automaton that is the body politic, insulated by lack of engagement and numbed by approaching the world as a function of surveys and polls and positions designed to appease rather than engage. I don’t want to live in constant, willful ignorance of the world around me so I can get by another day at work, another week in the career, another year of life. Nor can I withstand opening my eyes too wide for too long. I don’t look down on the poets making their phone calls hoping for a reprieve for the condemned man; I am thankful that this particular instance got any attention at all.

But what to do? The question is about what we do, from which we derive the answer of who we are to be. We have to be the center of our own lives, but we also have to recognize that there are many centers in this complex system we live in. It is crazy to lurch through life with my eyes closed. But I go crazy when I open them.

Tags: engagement, insomnia, justice, protest