TORTUOUS EXPLANATIONS
We have been told by our leaders that putting someone in a tiny, lightless cell for 40 days and nights is not torture. I know better, because I have seen what two weeks of such sensory deprivation will do to a healthy young Vermonter.
I hope he is well, and if by any remote chance he recognizes himself in what follows, I hope he will get in touch. Especially I hope this if he has led a troubled life, because he will always be one of my heroes.
The scene is Vermont’s annual State Science Fair, in the year 1964. I have made my presentation to the judges, and now I have time to walk around and see what others have done.
My father urges me to pay attention to one disheveled presenter who stands at a table with no posters, no equipment, no display except an opened notebook. Later I will realize that for years Mr. Barna had been teaching his Otter Valley English classes Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” set in a Communist prison during the Cold War, and probably that was behind the urgency with which he made his recommendation.
The “experiment” that the young man conducted was in the field of psychology, and the subject of the experimenter was himself—certainly not the traditional scientific method of verifiable objectivity, but very much in the spirit of many pioneering scientists. He had decided to spend two weeks in the space under his house’s stairwell, without any source of light, to see what effect the experience would have on his thoughts.
He came close to spending the next few weeks in a mental hospital. Hallucinations, often very disagreeable, were only part of the torment he forced himself to go through. When I spoke with him, he still seemed shaky.
But he came out of it bearing knowledge that our present-day leaders could learn from: a human being is not separable from the environment the senses re-create, and in particular is not separable from other people. When the science fair prizes were announced, I won a first in chemistry, and he got nothing. My father and I were both outraged. This and other frustrations with trying to do science at the high school level diverted me from an intended career as a researcher, ultimately into poetry. Literature, you can do anywhere, with minimal equipment—like the political prisoner who wrote her works on bars of soap, memorized them, then washed away another day.
This was the period of my life when I was enamored of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of radical individualism, expressed in such novels as “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” I can’t say that I made the connection then, but now I will say it: this young man’s investigation, and many others showing that the ecological principle of interdependence applies just as much to people as to other organisms, have made it clear to me that Rand’s views are toxic gibberish. “When I was younger, young in oh so many ways/ I never needed anybody’s help in any way./ But I am older now and not so self-assured./ Now I find I’ve changed my mind, I’ve opened up the door.”
To think that 40 days of such deprivation do not constitute torture reeks of the kind of extreme right-wing individualism that sees the person as the soul and as the personality, the one within the other inside the head, both changeless. It’s the same anti-psychological, anti-sociological view that sees education as clearly defined training, not a sometimes messy growth process, and thus sees the penalties of the No Child Left Behind Act as a way of making Schools (which exist independently of the people who constitute them) meet standards, so that students will be exposed to the right lessons and acquire the necessary skills, which will result in their giving the right answers on tests rather than flubbing the questions to get even with the system. It’s the same essentially punitive view that opposes any contact with countries that take stances vastly different than ours, such as Cuba and North Korea, then points to their deprived conditions as proof that their way of life is inferior to free (except for them) market capitalism. Always there is this nugget of indestructibility that can be pushed around, penalized, forced and deprived, then have the necessary magnitude and leverage to change—always in the way that the punisher wants, never by making a deeper commitment to a contrary view or by devising subterfuges and sabotages or by waiting for the right moment to exact a fearsome revenge, or by inspiring family or friends or allies or the next generation to do so.
In the case of extracting information from prisoners at Guantanamera—did I misspell that?—the soul-persona view assumes that after 40 days in the dark, the mind that is left will 1. be capable of remembering information accurately, 2. be willing to deliver it completely; and perhaps most importantly 3. be capable of putting one word in front of another. Playing Nixon’s tapes educated the nation as nothing else could have; how about playing us some of the interrogations?
If there is any question, let’s make the experiment. Let some stalwart subordinate in the current Administration come forward and volunteer, not for going in harm’s way in Iraq or Afghanistan, but for a month in some former basement coal bin. Let them report on their experience with no initial debriefing or counseling or advising or threatening, on national television.
Guantanamo, that’s it. Guantanamera was a song the Cubans adopted almost as a national anthem—“With the poor people of the earth/
I want to cast my lot” is one translation of one of the most popular versions—as well as a Sandpipers hit parade success in 1966 and a staple of folksingers thereafter. And the Sixties, as the right wing has been assuring us for the last over 30 years, never really happened.
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