The Torture Game

“Who wants to be on the torture list?”

The seven year old girl in a strawberry stained dress and white sweat pants promenades around the noon foursquare game. Her arms outstretched she holds a sheet of yellow construction paper with a list of names written in primitive red crayon.

“Who wants to be on the torture list?” She singsongs her invitation over the sounds of the foursquare boys who shout at the game like racetrack gamblers.

“What happens if you’re on the torture list?” I ask the four foot interrogator and her two friends when they pass by. “It means you’re bad,” scowls the girl with the list, whose knit cap weighs heavy over her eyes. “And we carry you to our torture room and we torture you,” adds the dark-haired assistant. Curious I ask them to describe the activities within the torture room. They pause, look at one another sheepishly, then realize they haven’t thought that far ahead. The leader shrugs her shoulders in embarrassment, grabs the sleeves of her friends and pulls them along while frowning at me, “Let’s get away from him!”

During the week that I serve as volunteer recess monitor at my sons’ school I watch these girls and their friends engage in the torture game. The game is disturbing—the list of names, the mock torture room hidden within a circle of shrubs, the kids carried away while giggling and shouting “Don’t torture me!” The victims laid on the rain soaked ground while the girls march in a circle pointing and shouting, “You are bad. You are very bad.”

The paid teachers and parents monitoring the lunch recess react differently to the torture game. One mother confronts the girls and in abstract phrases like “This is inappropriate play” tries to communicate the dehumanizing nature of their game and suggests the girls run over to the jungle gym. With flat expressions the three friends nod their heads obediently and then carefully wait until the mother moves to the other side of the playground before resuming their covert operations. Other parents who notice the game shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. “I guess they’re trying to make sense of it,” one father suggests and then half mumbles, “I guess we all are.”

In the same way that children have difficulty imagining a world without cell phones or mp3 players, the images and language of torture is now part of the landscape of life within which young people are being formed. Whether photographs of snarling dogs lurching at the throats of shirtless men and naked bodies attached to electric wires or radio newscasters debating the merits of “simulated drowning,” children now take for granted that their country inflicts cruelty and pain on other human beings.

In the Imperial County Jail, behind a two-inch Plexiglas wall stands 76 year old Father Louis Vitale in an orange jumpsuit. He has a large, slightly goofy grin. His white, half-moon hair sticks up like he’s rubbed it with a balloon. After the guards unlock his shackles, he waves at my friend Frank and me then sits down, lifting a heavy black phone up to each ear, “Welcome to the Imperial jail!” he shouts.

Franciscan Louis Vitale is in the third month of a five month sentence. In November of 2006, he and Jesuit Stephen Kelly attempted to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture techniques at Fort Huachuca, Arizona--headquarters of US Army Intelligence and the training center for military interrogators. The priests were arrested as they knelt in prayer halfway up the driveway at the army base. I drove out to the Imperial jail, just ninety minutes east of San Diego because I too, like the children at my son’s school, am trying to absorb the reality that ours is a nation that inflicts cruel and inhuman punishment on other human beings.

Sitting across from Father Louis I ask why he’s willing to be jailed for this issue. “Hearing that this country is engaging in torture just hit me in the gut. It should hit everyone in the gut. That’s where I feel God, in my gut. I just had to do something. I think if I didn’t, I’d just get depressed.” He leans forward toward the glass and pauses to look me in the eye then adds, “this isn’t just about the victims, this is about the people who have to inflict the suffering as well.” He tells me about Alyssa Peterson, a young US Army interpreter who trained at Ft. Huachuca. She was sent as part of the interrogation team to one of the US prisons in Iraq. After just two sessions in the cages, she committed suicide. “This has got to stop,” Father Louis later writes from his prison cell, “Not just because of what it’s doing to the victims, but because of what it’s doing to the souls of the men and women in our military.”

What’s most striking about Father Vitale is his demeanor. Torture is a serious issue and obviously Vitale is responding with his life, and yet his demeanor is light, he smiles and laughs easily, there’s little animosity in his voice toward the military commanders or Bush administration officials who have authorized and advocated for torture. In conversing with him I notice how often he tries to see things through the perspective of those who carried out these crimes, “I can see myself in their shoes, I used to be in the military, I shared many of their viewpoints at one time…” he tells me. When I ask him how he’s able to keep from getting bitter and angry, how he avoids demonizing those who have placed him in prison he smiles and says, “Well I like people. I’ve always liked people. I’ve never met anyone that I wanted dead. I’ve never met a person that I wanted to see in hell or anything like that. I’ve always liked people.”

And there it was. The key to holding the sorrow of our country’s engagement in cruel and inhuman practices. The way to resist and root out our involvement in torture, war and perpetual violence. You have to like people. You have to value people above ideology or structures, you have to value human beings, even those who have done terrible things, above politics or patriotism. You have to remember the perspective from the great religions, that each of us, every one of us, harbors a little piece of holiness within. And that everyone, even the most criminal among us, should be treated with a basic dignity.

To be liked is much more powerful then to be loved. To love is often an obligation, a commandment, an expectation. How many times have I listened to adult friends tell me of neglectful and abusive parents but then end their comments with “But I know they loved me.” If given a choice I would much rather be liked then loved. This is the genius of Father Vitale…he likes people, he likes the person who is being tortured as well as the military commander inflicting the punishment. When you like people more than ideas, you can’t stand to see them harmed, the reality of torture hits you in the gut, shocks your conscience, and you have to do something, you have to make it stop.

This past Sunday as I sat in church I noticed the girl from the torture game sitting in the pew in front of me. She wore a light floral dress and held a chocolate candy bar. During the hymns she stood up on the pew, then turned and like a wild badger frowned and flashed her brown smeared teeth at me. This was a post-Easter service and so we were singing and smiling and celebrating the enduring life of Jesus that was able to absorb and transcend the fear, hatred, and violence that lives within the human creatures. And I wondered if the girl in front of me connected the hymns, the stories of Jesus and his suffering on the cross to the dark and shadow torture game that she likes to play. Despite the children’s sermons and Sunday school classes, my suspicion is that this little girl will continue to struggle to understand the reality that human beings, human beings from her country, systematically and secretly inflict pain on other people.

Meanwhile I look at the little girl and her smeared chocolate face. Just like at school her eyebrows are furrowed, her eyes narrowed and serious. While the congregation sings joyful hymns the ring leader of the torture game keeps her back to the altar and scrunches her face at me. I lower my hymnal and take this girl in. I match her eyes. I think of Father Louis Vitale. I think of his smiling face and remember his parting words, “Don’t feel sorry for me, I’m a blessed man, I’m following my gut!” And then I look at the little girl and I realize…I like her.

My Daughter's Rabbit: A Play in One Act [notes and opening scene]

Notes to Director:

[1. The difficulty in communicating the power of this work lies in making the facial features of the Rabbit character visible. This issue might be addressed through video projection, intimate seating, or having the action of the play pause from time to time while "Rabbit" moves to the edge of the stage allowing the audience to perceive Rabbit's emotive features. Once registered, Rabbit then returns to his mark and the drama resumes.

2. Regarding the part of Rabbit, it is best played by an actor no larger than 18 inches in height. The actor should be flexible and nimble with quick reflexes. A background in Mime Corporal is also helpful to the part. Rabbit needs to embody a range of emotional expression including: terror, nervous terror, cautious terror, nocturnal terror, terrified shock, confused or misplaced terror, terrifying rage, wistful terror, curious terror, and lust. Unlike most children's plays that resort to oversized masks and stuffed costumes, it is best for the facial features of the Rabbit character to be visible. The actor should be sans costume, painted in the black and white patches of a traditional Dutch bunny, with a simple cotton tail above the buttocks and some sort of elongated ears attached to the side of the head.

3. Note the use of a video screen placed above the stage. Much like background music in cinema, this screen is used to display words and images that cue the audience to the emotional meaning within the scene.]

Setting: Present day. A town in rural Oregon whose economy depends on the rise and fall of the biomass industry.

Staging: A pellet stove glows orange on stage left. A leather couch with visible teeth marks on the four legs sits facing the television set in the center of the room. There are also claw and teeth marks on the television stand, the wood paneling, and every other prop within two feet of the floor. The electrical cords for the television, lamp, playstation game are all taped two feet above the floor, out of Rabbit's reach. A small kitchen sits stage right.

Characters:

Rabbit
Daughter [Five years old]
Father

[As the scene opens, Daughter is watching a public television show entitled, "Baby Animals." Father is absorbed in preparing his morning coffee. The portable rabbit cage sits center stage, its water bottle empty and wrenched sideways, the feed trough filled with wood chips and rabbit droppings. There is a partly chewed Kleenex box in the cage. Rabbit sits in his cage facing the audience with a look of uncertain, unfocused, terror.]

Screen display: "Guantanamo"

Father: [While carefully filling coffee grinder] Shouldn't you let the bunny out? I don't think he's been out of his cage in two days.

[Father grinds the coffee. The electric whir startles Rabbit sending him to scramble for safety within his four by two foot cage. Rabbit kicks up wood chips, black rabbit droppings, and bits of chewed cardboard in search of shelter.]

[The grinder stops.]

Father: [Glancing at Daughter]: Sweetie? Shouldn't you spend time with your rabbit? Rabbits need attention to feel loved.

Screen display: "We all need petting."

[Daughter stands, eyes still directed at television screen, walks over and unlatches cage door. Rabbit, startled by the sound of the latch, frantically attempts to dig through plastic cage floor. Daughter returns to couch. Rabbit eventually stops digging, nervously peeks out of cage. Meanwhile, father opens dishwasher door, removes coffee cup]

Water, Wind, and Smoke: The Lover Draws Near

(Nikos Kazantzakis 1883-1957)

Tonight the wind blows cold across the Siskiyou Mountains. The air is merciless, full of ice and minerals, filtered clean by snow, rock, and frozen fir trees. It's supposed to be spring. Once again I have planted too early. The peas, mesculin ( chicory, chervil, cress, dandelion, sorrel mustard greens) will be black with frostbite by morning.

Five days ago I was in Lubbock, stuck in a hot windstorm that rattled the windows in the airport. The air full of grit, the sun a brown butter stain. I spent an afternoon watching a farmer fold his field, trying to keep the topsoil hidden. By the time I flew out it was too late to make my connection. I found an airport hotel in San Francisco. The next morning I woke early, opened the sliding glass door, and crossed the cigarette strewn patio, the highway and airport parking lots to get to the edge of the bay. Then it came over me: the smell of the ocean! Even the gray clayed corner of the bay that sits still beside the SFO runway, even this emptied body of water is full of dreams. I sat on a bench, my eyes shaking at the sunrise until I finally closed them and just breathed in the sweat, the salt and water, the primordial sperm and egg, the musk from God and Mother Earth screwing. I called Jill and vomited longing all over the wireless phone. "I need to live by the ocean. Who can keep their soul without the ocean?" The waves, the beach, the churning blue and what it brings. It is more than a symbol. It is the motherlode.

But here, miles from the sea, where the Cascades and Siskiyous bang shoulders, the air is cold, stone polished, sharp enough to sliver your lungs. Still, I stood outside tonight and breathed the silver air and watched the sun burrow itself into these same rough mountains, until the sky went deep black and purple and my ears fell from my head and shattered.

Now it's late. The wife and kids are in bed, sick with chest colds and fever. I have built a fire and sit reading Kazantzakis, my dead father's pipe burning between my teeth. I love my inheritance: the dark smell of the tobacco, the burning leaves in this tiny wooden bowl. The smoke is heavy and weaves a dark, fragrant ribbon through my beard. My book, printed in 1961, lies under the glowing pipe and now smells like the cedars of Lebanon, or the wise men's camels, rank with the incense of God.

Listen with me by this fire for a moment while I read you a passage, eyes red from smoking at this late hour. Listen to Nikos, to Nikos Kazantzakis and his longing. See if he doesn't describe the ocean Kirk-- the bay in San Francisco, the orange fire in this stove, the soft ash from my father's pipe blanketing my beard:

One night as I was passing through the Turkish quarter, I heard a woman singing an oriental amane' in a voice full of woefully convulsive passion. The sound was somber, raucous, very deep; it issued from the woman's loins and filled the night with despair and plaintive melancholy. Finding it impossible to proceed, I halted and listened, my head thrown back
against the wall. I could not catch my breath. My suffocating soul, unable any longer to fit within its cage of clay, was hanging from my scalp and weighing whether or not to flee. No, the singer's female breast was not being convulsed by love, not by that total mystery the coupling of a man with a woman...It was being convulsed by a cry, a command to break our
prison bars of morality, shame, and hope, and to give ourselves over to, lose ourselves in, become one with, the fearful, enticing Lover who lies in wait in the darkness and whom we call God. Listening to the woman's woefully convulsive song on that night, I felt that love, death, and God were one and the same.

Some Stuff about Being Sorted by Density

"Natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit."

All this suspicion of natural impulses that I was raised with. Or those were the maternal voices. Really makes it hard to think when you suppose that to be carnally minded is death. So your meat and your mind are totally different? When what you feel-think must be totally different from what you submit-think, how are you supposed to learn-think at all, except from books of revelation?

In the case of poor souls such as myself, so eager for virtue and indoctrination, the mind/ass dynamic as taught by George Clinton ("free your mind and your ass will follow") has to be reversed: if your mind is to be free your ass must be freed first. Maybe Funkadelic sort of knew they had it wrong. Their substance of choice in 1970 while they were making that album was acid not Derrida.

I am walking along a beach on the California Central Coast. The Flesh of the Central Coast range rises steeply above me, the enormous bay on which I am a dot stretches so far to north and south that my eye cannot make sense of the scale. Just really far. Attempts to calculate the distances make my inner ear freak out, make the world seem tilt and pitch. I look down instead and find my range by the parallel lines of debris: seaweed, different colored gravel and sand, bits of shells with the occasional intact survivor, logs half-buried in sand or upended and flying plastic grocery bags from their broken limbs. The Spirit is blowing in off the Pacific. Some sort of perfect churning machine pushes waves across thousands of miles of open ocean. They hit the steep California continental shelf at about knee-height, they tuck up their feet and scoot a quarter mile across the sand and rock, breathing rafts of seaweed and discarded shells, gathering speed. And then they choose a moment, and for a second or two seconds they stand upright, and somebody sees this or else nobody does. And then some other stuff happens. But the water doesn't have much invested in this sort of question because it's not really the water that does this, anyway. What you're actually seeing is a pattern that has traveled thousands of miles, and before that the pattern came from someplace else.

I am walking along the beach and have begun to be interested in this certain kind of small and impossibly fragile purple shell. Not made for this element, hard to pick up without breaking. It's like any other gathering where you assume that you're the odd one and then you begin to notice people's uncomfortable or lopsided expressions, how much oddness there really is, and you get a little more comfortable. First I walk back and forth looking for these things, searching toward the waves and then skipping away as each exhausted breaker fans across the sand. The water draws me in, the wind pushes me away. A vast breathing that fills the entire bay, composed of a series of tiny scurrying responses to the breathing, composed of something else, composed of something even smaller and more intricate. After a bit, I begin to notice that the purple shells have been deposited about 20 yards from the receding tide, before the darker gravel, after the finest sand, sorted by density. So now I walk 20 yards from the skittering water, another parallel line, a moving and supposedly sentient and supposedly free line. To my ocean side, flat water thins to spilled marbles of foam and sinks into the sand. To my mountain side, the fog is burning off as if the sky were being raised. The wind now blows me sideways, I lean into it for balance, looking for purple shells that I can't really pick up. Without thinking about it, I know that I feel really good. For the moment, the ocean has sorted me.

Two Guys in a Coffee Shop Talking About Stravinsky

[What I overheard this morning in the Key of C Coffee Shop]

Elderly Guy with Glasses: It used to be that everyone loved Stravinsky. What they didn't realize is that what they were responding to was the silence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

[He gestures toward a table next to mine. They set coffee cups down and sit.]

Elderly Guy with Long White Hair and Black Wool Skull Cap: When I was a boy my mother took me to the Easter service at Saint Nicholas, a Russian Orthodox church in Brooklyn. I remember this one point in the service; they blew out the candles, turn out the lights, and we all stood in the dark, in silence. Then the priest whispers: "Wisdom." [Pause] "Wisdom." He then walks around lighting candles and this wall of red--blood red with gold faces...

Guy Smiling With Wire Rimmed Glasses: Icons.

Man With Long White Beard Matching His Hair: Yes. These icons--the mother of God, the crucified Jesus, the saints, the infant, the martyers-- are all suddenly visable, looking at us...with that face of....

The One Who Is Listening: Wisdom.

The One Who Is Remembering: Well, yes. Yes. Knowing. Faces that know something.

Half Bald Guy with the Glasses: This is what Stravinsky was formed in. These ideas. This presence. This mystery and sense of holy wisdom. This is what informed his music. This is where his music comes from. Standing before icons, singing hymns. That mixture of music and silence was in his bones.

Elderly Guy With Cap And No Socks Leaning Back In Chair: It was also what he was pushing against. He was cosmopolitan you know. I don't think he went to church as an adult. He was trying to overcome his background, push against the religion of his youth. What formed him was also what limited him...at least in his mind.

[The two men nod heads. Lift their coffee cups to their dry, quivering lips]

Man with Glasses Whose Beige Pants Are Worn At The Cuffs: Now of course, its all Beethoven.

Man With White Billowy Shirt and Native American Vest With Black Trim that Matches Skull Cap: Yes. This mixture of classical and pop music....a mess.

The Four-Eyed Man: [Leans forward] No wisdom.

The Long Hair: [Swinging arms wildly] No one practices. No sustained interest. No discovery of what makes something great.

Man With The Poor Eyesight: We should demand our students become members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Then they'd have something to play against! [Pounds fist on table]

The Man in Exotic Fabrics: [Points at conversation partner] Ha!

Living with Robert Bolaño

For the last two months I have been reading Roberto Bolaño. Anything I say about him will be wrong, will feel like some sort of betrayal or failure to understand what it is that I am so grateful for when I read his novels. And this will be not least because I don't know what I am so grateful for. I think this sense that what is so good in Bolaño is precisely what is hard to convey might be related to how, when a good friend says that he would like to pick up the check, it feels best to accept his generosity without much thanks. The best response to generosity is low-key, and easeful gratitude. I like to think that would please him. And I hope that when his essays are translated perhaps he will have said something on this subject: why do his novels, which at no point presume to explain to the reader what is true, have me so interested in the word true. A word I had hoped to outgrow.

Bolaño was born in Santiago in April, 1953; his family moved to Mexico City when he was 15. And here things get hazy. The hugeness and energy of Mexico City, the weirdly metastasizing quality of Mexican politics and literary ideology, the newness of the urban slang, all seem to have exhilarated him. He returned to Chile in 1973 to support the new socialist regime of Salvador Allende, and was briefly imprisoned by Pinochet after the coup. He died of liver failure in 2003, after a long illness caused, according to series of articles informed by other articles because of an early addiction to herion. His wife and a close friend have separately confirmed that he ingested many substances but denied that heroin was one of them. In various articles and interviews with people who knew him at various times in his wanderings through Latin America and southern Europe, it is possible to find denials of almost all the facts of Bolaño's biography.

Part of this problem about the facts of his life must be because he came to attention so quickly, and was almost immediately gone. He wrote nearly all of his enormous body of work in a startling dash during his last 10 years. And so the highway has not yet been built that will soon carry news of his life and thought back and forth between his moments and his official biography as it comes to take a permanent shape. Part of the problem is that so much of his work remains untranslated. And part of the problem is his own apparent lack of concern with telling things the same way more than once. His own accounts of his life in speeches and interviews follow a logic of momentary connections that is similar to the narrative logic of his novels. He becomes interested in an object, in an idea or a book or a moment or a condition, and away he goes. Winning the 11th Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives reminds him of his childhood dyslexia, of wearing a soccer jersey with "11" and so forth.

But let’s return to don Rómulo before we get into Jarry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt. This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldn’t tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogotá, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular Ángeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would don Rómulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rómulo used to live. According to Gimferrer (although he wouldn’t put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.

The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts; for instance, if don Rómulo, during his stay in Barcelona—and I say “stay” and not “exile” because a Latin American is never exiled in Spain—had worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install itself in the novelist’s house)… As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I walked a little further, and there was the plaque. That’s what I saw, in my mind.

The connections are synaptic as often as temporal or spacial. His sentences revise themselves as they go. The habit of thought that you enter into when you spend days reading Bolaño is that the memory is a vast and interesting city to be wandered in, to be searched for good places to sit, to be eavesdropped upon, to be mined for threads and connections of all kinds. But especially ones that have to do with people, their beauty and goodness and indifference, their desires and orderliness and stray impulses. That events are to be treated the same way, as if anything might be significant or anything might be insignificant. Bolaño chronicles all these things with an even hand, scrupulous about detail and respectful of the ways that events tail off into silence.