“They can put a person in jail, but they can’t put his mind in jail.”
I squirmed away. I brushed at my shoulder.
“What’s wrong? Did I burn you? No, look here, it didn’t fall, the ash is still here, you see?” He laughed.
“They are the ones whose minds are in jail. But don’t worry. Don’t worry. Already things are happening. This outrage will not happen. I have it on good authority—public sentiment will gather for us. You cannot put innocent people to death in this country. It can’t be done. The truth will reclaim us. You’ll see. You’ll see, my big handsome boy. Am I right, Jake?”
“Of course. But calm yourself.”
“Before our trial even started we were found guilty by the paid hirelings of the kept press. There was no possibility for a fair trial. On that ground alone.”
“Paul.” Ascher stood up. He was looking at the guard. “I don’t think this ought to be discussed right now,” he said.
“It’s all right. I want my son to know. An organization is being founded to fight for our freedom. To tell people the truth. He should know that. He should know we’re not alone, the Isaacson family. Soon the whole world will be behind us in our fight to regain our freedom. And he can help! You want to help, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s my boy, that’s my wonderful boy.” He held my face in his hands and pulled me toward him and kissed the top of my head.
Why hadn’t my mother mentioned this? Without her endorsement I couldn’t tell if it was true. Nevertheless, on the drive back to New York it was his voice I heard in my mind. I had felt the humiliation of having to leave them there. But as I thought about it it seemed less degrading to my father to be in prison than to my mother. It was his voice that rang in my ears outside the prison, in the car, on the way back to New York.
Probably none of this is true. There’s a lot more I can’t remember. But the first visit was the worst. The other visits were easier. We had things to tell them. We played games. We drew pictures. We settled into a regular routine. We shared the joys of a number of stays of execution. And toward the end they were allowed to see us at the same time. And the four of us in that room in the Death House, the family, back together, at last. And the four of us were together in that room. And we were reunited. And at last we were reunited.
Before the famous Egyptian adjustment of the Chaldean calendar, in 4000 B.C., judicial astrology proposed thirteen signs in the Zodiac of approximately 27 degrees each. The thirteenth sign was Starfish. We do not today know where it was located in the Zodiac. It is believed that as the earth’s axis gradually altered, an entire chunk of the night sky, including this constellation, disappeared. But until that time Starfish was considered one of the most beneficial of signs. A Starfish ascendant suggested serenity and harmony with the universe, and therefore great happiness. The five points of the star lead not outward as is commonly believed, but inward, toward the center. This symbolized the union of the various mental faculties and the coordination of the physical faculties. It referred to the wedding in the heart of the five senses. It implied the unification of all feelings. Belief was joined with intellect, language with truth, and life with justice. Starfish in opposition to Mars usually meant Genius. Under the influence of Venus it suggested Peace. For some reason astrologers today don’t mention Starfish and there is a common superstition that it means bad luck. This is undoubtedly because modern man can conceive of nothing more frightening than the self-sufficiency of being of the beautiful Starfish: he mistakes it for death.
LOOKING FOR STERNLICHT
I had not wanted to take Phyllis with me. There was an element of danger, crowds, confrontation. And since I was going to do what was being done, perhaps without grace, perhaps with flagging resolve, perhaps failing, perhaps shitting all over myself, I didn’t want her there. But she began to feel the old torture, she said I was excluding her. It wasn’t true but I didn’t want her to feel that way. And then I thought of driving into the heart of darkness alone, across borders, across checkpoints, and the thought of being able to talk to her appealed to me. So there we were, all of us driving down a crisp sunny morning late in October 1967. I had put a hundred and eighty dollars into the trip. Brakes, front end, two new tires, new plugs, a tune-up. It was a tight smart little Volvo. There were other cars on the road with recognizable people in them, cars with five and six passengers, and horns blew on the Turnpike and people in little cars scooting around the trailer trucks waved at each other and held two fingers up to the windows. Nevertheless a sense of driving across borders. Across checkpoints. A sense of driving into the heart of darkness.
In this capital city of wide streets and white marble monuments and public greens, a sense of foreign country.
“Is it just me?” I said.
“I think everyone must feel it who’s coming for the weekend,” Phyllis said.
Great caution is required. You drive slow. You hug the wheel. In one public building is a famous crime museum. In the famous crime museum are pictures of the Isaacsons in handcuffs. A shortwave radio from Isaacson Radio, Sales and Repair. A dental x-ray mounted like a Kodachrome against a light screen. Tourists stroll by. In another public building is a file no one has ever seen.
We drive to the designated church, park the car, and join the others. It is a quiet beginning on the Friday afternoon of Pentagon Weekend. A few hundred only, marching from the basement of a church to the doors of the Justice Department. We string out for a quarter of a mile. Movie cameramen walking backwards photograph our faces. I do not see Sternlicht. Washington cops on motorcycles with sidecars purr alongside in the warm sun. It seems to be an academic gathering. Many poets from the universities. Middle-aged publishers in tweeds. Academic wives and sexy church ladies wearing loafers. Longhaired college boys in denim who chant Hell No We Won’t Go. It is a peaceful, orderly march. The sun is out. I carry Paul. Phyllis, beside me, smiles and hugs my arm. The self-conscious sense of doing something animates the marchers. Old friends gossip. The line strings out.
We chat with Professor Sukenick who has also come down. Possessed of a delicate sense of occasion he does not ask me how my work is going. We stroll to the Justice Department. There on the steps a microphone is set up for speeches. Cops guard our right of assembly. Cops stand in the doors of the Justice Department to ensure that we stay outside. Photographers take pictures of our faces. Four young American Nazis in swastika armbands are there to hurl taunts. They are taunt hurlers. As the speeches begin I find a place for us to sit down. Phyllis feeds the baby. I walk around the edges of the crowd, from sun to shadow, from shadow to sun. Dr. Spock is there. The Chaplain of Yale is there. The demonstration today is an act of civil disobedience. The young cats turn in their draft cards, the older cats aid and abet them. Arrest is invited. Sitting on the steps listening to the speakers is Norman Mailer. He wears a dark suit and vest. He leans forward, his left forearm on his left knee, his right fist on his right knee. Behind him, festooned in the deep stone sill of the ground floor Justice Department window, is Robert Lowell. Lowell is arranged cherubically. I watch Lowell smoke and press his eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose. I watch him making up his poetry.
The point of the drama is reached and the draft cards of hundreds of college boys across the country are dropped in a pouch by their representatives. There is applause. Others in the crowd are invited to add their own cards, Many do. I make my way through the crowd, and drop my card into the pouch, and say my name into the microphone. Daniel Isaacson, although the card is in the name of Daniel Lewin. My ears glow from an inner surge of righteousness and fear. What a put-on. But I have come here to do whatever is being done.
The pouch is delivered to the Justice Department, the demonstration ends, and nothing seems to have happened except the demonstration.
That night a crash committee set us up at the home of a sympathetic lady who had opened her house for “the Movement.” It was an old, well-maintained house in a
quiet neighborhood. The lady showed us to our room. “I can’t physically march,” she said, “but I can support those who do.” She was a frail, gracious lady whose soft quavering voice seemed to transmit itself through her hands which shook with a slight palsy. Her house was very still. It was brimming with silence. Thin white curtains hung across the window of our room. There was a large oversoft bed with a cathedral headboard of mahogany. The baby was placed in a wooden rocking cradle. The floor was constructed of wide planks fastened with pegs. On an old splintery hope chest stood a white bowl and inside the bowl was a large pitcher with fine fractures in its glaze. Phyllis was charmed by the room. She ran her fingers along the glass curtains, and inspected the old pitcher and washbowl. She rocked Paul to sleep in the cradle and took off her clothes and brushed her long hair sitting crosslegged in the middle of the soft bed. She was serenely happy suspended in this quiet room in the absolute stillness of this house.
The last time I had been in Washington, D.C., the occasion was a vigil at the White House. Susan and I held candles in our hands and rested our foreheads on the White House fence. That is a famous news picture. It appears as if we’re looking through prison bars. Washington was our town, I played Washington when I was a kid.
The next day, Saturday, is the big event. We sit for hours in the grass at the Lincoln Memorial and listen to the speeches. All around us people with signs on placards, on poles. Young Christian men and women, veterans, radicals with long hair. Self-conscious professors, older women in walking shoes and red noses of pert participation. Guitarists. Freaks with painted faces and gendarme capes waving broom handles crowned with boxes decorated with pictures of flowers and Joan and Bobby and Allen. Scuba divers with white bones painted on their black wetsuits. Priests. Members of organizations with hand-painted banners. It is a beautiful day. All the happy freaks of cold war have poured out of their chartered buses, climbed out of their sleeping bags, each life famous, and come to march on the Pentagon. The crowd is enormous. At the steps of Lincoln Memorial hoarse speakers shout into their microphones. I feel the concussion of crowd assent. I come under the awful conviction of everyone’s greater right to be here. I feel out of it. It seems to me that practically everyone here, even Phyllis listening past the point of normal attention to the endlessness of the droning speeches, has taken possession of the event in a way that is beyond me. I feel as if I have sneaked in, haven’t paid, or simply don’t know something that everyone else knows. That it is possible to still do this, perhaps. Or that it is enough. In the heat of midday it is suddenly time to rise and form up in the march. Lasers of sun spear at the eyes of camera lenses. Bodies rise. Heat rises. Banners are raised, unfurled, the equipage of the picnic army clanking and groaning and creaking into rank.
In the jamming crowd I feel the first whispers of death by suffocation.
“This is where it begins to get heavy,” I tell Phyllis.
She looks at me in alarm. I take her arm to get her out of there, walking away down the green, walking the other way.
“But this is what we came down for!”
“I don’t want to have to worry about you, Phyl. I want you to go back to that lady’s house and wait there until I’m through.”
She was very unhappy.
“Phyllis, you didn’t really intend to take your baby into that. Troops with bayonets. Tear gas. Did you? You can’t be sure what’s going to happen.”
“But I want to go!”
“All right, you go. Give me Paul and you go.” She doesn’t want that, and I feel acquiescence to my logic—to the logic of my right and need to come here to do what is being done—in the sudden lack of resistance to my hand of her arm, the consent of her hurried steps as we go looking for a cab somewhere in the direction of Washington.
All day I looked for satisfaction. At one point during the squeeze on the bridge from the Lincoln Memorial across the river, I thought I caught a glimpse of Sternlicht in a three-pointed hat. But I was pretty far back from the front line where he would have been. There were more speeches in a parking lot across the highway from the Pentagon. Then I followed some people running toward a break in the fence: you ran up an embankment, across the highway, and you were on the Mall at the mouth of the Pentagon itself.
It still wasn’t clear what was going to happen. The mood was festive. There were rumors that achieving the Mall was meaningless because it had been permitted by arrangement between the organizers of the march and the officials of the Pentagon. Then, as it began to turn dark, lots of people began to leave. There was room to see where the MP’s and the marshals stood in rank at the steps of the front entrance. There was room to move up front. One could examine the mandarin faces. God was on their side. No matter what is laid down there will be people to put their lives on it. Soldiers will instantly appear, fall into rank, and be ready to die for it. And scientists who are happy to direct their research toward it. And keen-witted academics who in all rationality develop the truth of it. And poets who find their voice in proclaiming the personal feeling of it. And in every house in the land the muscles of the face will arrange in smug knowledge of it. And people will go on and make their living from it. And the religious will pray for a just end to it, in terms satisfactory to it.
It was now dark and getting very cold. It was possible to find a bonfire and be with others. There was a lot of dope to smoke. The feeling was good. Here and there, ceremonies of burning draft cards. Constant heckling of troops, singing; diggers coming around with loaves of bread, and baloney, and beer, and Pepsi. Still I am exhausted with this striving. It is as if my presence—none of them knows—but my attendance has robbed the day of genius.
But here in the chilling night a very thinned-out crowd is beginning to insist on itself in the night shadows of the great black looming walls of Pentagon, and the people are younger in this growing stubbornness, they are not polite, they are not particularly nice, many of them, but in changing wind flurries intimations of tear gas establish skirmishes hidden from the eye and the meaning of distant shouts. And their manners are not fine but they have to get through many levels of not particularly civilized let alone cool behavior in order to make clear to themselves and to the soldiers the true value of the occasion, which is to say its real nature. And yes, my brothers, war sucks, and american imperialism doth suck, and I’m beginning to feel the imminence of satisfaction. And here most of the older people are gone, and the reporters are gone, and the cameras are gone, and what the later hours of evening find—perhaps it is already midnight—is an accidental community of hard-core Quakers and rads and new boys and new girls of the new life-style and also one pusillanimous adventurer now crept and climbed to the foremost rows of disputants in order to do what is being done. And suddenly he is there, locked arm in arm with the real people of now, sitting in close passive rank with linked arms as the boots approach, highly polished, and the clubs, highly polished, and the brass highly polished wading through our linkage, this many-helmeted beast of our own nation, coming through our flesh with boot and club and gun butt, through our sick stubbornness, through our blood it comes. My country. And it swats and kicks, and kicks and clubs—you raise the club high and bring it down, you follow through, you keep head down, you remember to snap the wrist, complete the swing, raise high bring down, think of a groove in the air, groove into the groove, keep your eye on the ball, eye on balls, eye on cunts, eye on point of skull, up and down, put your whole body into it, bring everything you’ve got into your swing, up from your toes, up down, turn around, up high down hard, hard as you can, hard as you can, harder harder: FOLLOW THROUGH!
Daniel drank his own blood. It was Pentagon Saturday Night. He swallowed bits of his teeth. And he was lifted by the limbs and he was busted on Pentagon Saturday Night.
And I will tell now how one boy in the big cell, in this grand community of brotherhood bust, how this one boy is unable to share the bruised cheery fellowship of his companions or care for the gossip that Artie Sternlicht has topped
everyone by landing in the hospital, or feel this group-sing spirit of gap teeth and seventy-six handkerchiefs dried crimson around the head; but sits in the corner, unable to stretch out full length, a spasm of wariness bowing his spine, knotting his fingers to his palms, his knees to his chest, his head to his knees. He cannot enjoy such places. They are too familiar. He knows how far they are from home. He cannot survive such places in careless courage. He is sensitive to the caged air rubbing his skin, the night of this place nuzzling his ears. He sweats in a chill of possibilities knowing now what it means to do what is being done, and sweats every minute of just one night only one night, every second sweating it, a twenty-five-dollar ten-day suspended trip INNOCENT, I’M INNOCENT I TELL YA, eyesight skating up and down the walls like flies, interpreting the space between the bars, and Daniel discusses the endless reverberations of each moment of this time, doing this time in discrete instants, and discussing each instant its theme, structure, diction and metaphor with her, with Starfish, my silent Starfish girl
The next morning I paid my fine and was released. It was another lovely day. I got back to Washington and found the car and drove to the neighborhood of old American houses and found my wife in the quiet white room of the quiet American house. Phyllis immediately began to cry. My right eye was closed. My lips were crusted and swollen and I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to eat. It hurt me to breathe, but I found I could ease it somewhat by holding my arms against my ribs. Blood was dried all over my shirt.
I didn’t want her to go on and on. “Listen,” I said, trying not to whistle through my teeth. “It looks worse than it is. There was nothing to it. It is a lot easier to be a revolutionary nowadays than it used to be.”
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
Early in December