"Disch, Thomas M. - Camp Concentration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

BOOK ONE


May 11
Young R.M., my Mormon guard, has brought me a supply of paper at last. It is three months to the day since I first asked him for some. Inexplicable, this change of heart. Perhaps Andrea has been able to get a bribe to him. Rigor Mortis denies it, but then he would deny it. We talked politics, and I was able to gather from hints R.M. let drop that President McNamara has decided to use "tactical" nuclear weapons. Perhaps, therefore, it is to McNamara, not to Andrea, that I am indebted for this paper, since R.M. has been fretting these many weeks that General Sherman, poor General Sherman, had been denied adequate hitting power. When, as today, R.M. is happy, his fearful smile, those thin lips pulled back tightly across the perfect deathshead teeth, ifickers into being at the slightest pretense of humor. Why do all the Mormons I have known have that same constipated smile? Is their toilet training exceptionally severe?
This is my journal. I can be candid here. Candidly, I could not be more miserable.


May 12
Journals, such as I have erewhile attempted, have a way of becoming merely exhortatory. I must remember, here, to be circumstantial from the start, taking as model that sublime record of prison existence, _The House of the Dead_. It should be easy to be circumstantial here: not since childhood has mere circumstance so tyrannized me. The two hours each day before dinner are spent in a Gethsemane of dread and hope. Dread lest we be served that vile spaghetti once again. Hope that there may be a good hunk of meat in my ladle of stew, or an apple for dessert. Worse than "chow" is each morning's mad spate of scrubbing and polishing to prepare our cells for inspection. The cells are as bony-clean as a dream of Philip Johnson (Grand Central Bathroom), while we, the prisoners, carry about with us the incredible, ineradicable smell of our stale, wasted flesh.
However, we lead here no worse a life than we would be leading now outside these walls had we answered our draft calls. Nasty as this prison is, there is this advantage to it--that it will not lead so promptly, so probably, to death. Not to mention the inestimable advantage of righteousness.
Ah, but who is this "we"? Besides myself there are not more than a dozen other conchies here, and we are kept carefully apart, to prevent the possibility of esprit. The prisoners--the _real_ prisoners--hold us in contempt. They have that more sustaining advantage than righteousness--guilt. So our isolation, my isolation, becomes ever more absolute. And, I fear, my self-pity. There are evenings when I sit here _hoping_ that R.M. will come by to argue with me.
Four months! And my sentence is for five years. . . . That is the Gorgon of all my thoughts.


May 13
I must speak of Smede. Warden Smede, my arch enemy. Smede the arbitrary, who still refuses me library privileges, allows me only a New Testament and a prayer book. It is as though I had been left, as was so often threatened, for my summer vacation with the loathed Uncle Morris of my childhood (who counseled my parents that I would "lose my eyes" by reading too much). Bald, booming, fat with the fatness of a ruined athelete: Smede. One might despise him only for having such a name. Today I learned from the small portion of my monthly letter from Andrea that the censor (Smede?) had not blacked out that the proofs of _The Hills of Switzerland_, which had been sent to me here, were returned to the publisher with a note explaining the rules for correspondents with prisoners. That was three months ago. The book is in print now. It has been _reviewed!_ (I suspect the publisher hurried so in the hope of getting a little free publicity from the trial.)
The censor, naturally, removed the review Andrea had enclosed. Agonies of vanity. For ten years I could lay claim to no book but my wretched doctor's thesis on Winstanley; now my poems are in print--and it may be another five years before I'm allowed to see them. May Smede's eyes rot like potatoes in spring! May he convulse with the Malaysian palsies!
Have tried to go on with the cycle of "Ceremonies." Can't. The wells are dry, dry.


May 14
Spaghetti.
On nights like this (I write these notes after lights-out, by the glow of the perpetual twenty-watter above the toilet bowl) I wonder if I have done the right thing in electing to come here, if I'm not being a fool. Is this the stuff of heroism? or of masochism? In private life my conscience was never so conscientious. But, damn it, this war is _wrong!_
I had thought (I had convinced myself) that coming here voluntarily would be little different from joining a Trappist monastery, that my deprivations would easily be bearable if freely chosen. One of my regrets as a married man has always been that the contemplative life, in its more rarefied aspects, has been denied me. I fancied asceticism some rare luxury, a spiritual truffle. Ha!
On the bunk beneath mine a Mafia petit bourgeois (snared on tax evasion charges) snores his content. Bedsprings squeak in the visible darkness. I try to think of Andrea. In high school Brother Wilfred counseled that when lustful thoughts arose we should pray to the Blessed Virgin. Perhaps it worked for him.


May 15
Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita indeed! My thirty-fifth birthday, and a slight case of the horrors. For a few moments this morning, before the metal shaving mirror, my double, Louie II, was in the ascendant. He mocked and raged and muddied the banner of faith, not to mention hope (already quite muddy these days), with his scurrilities. I remembered the dismal summer of my fifteenth year, the summer that Louie II was in sole possession of my soul. Dismal? Actually, there was a good deal of exhilaration in saying _Non serviam_, an exhilaration that is still confused with my first memories of sex.
Is my present situation so very much different? Except that now, prudently, I say _Non serviam_ to Caesar rather than to God.
When the chaplain came by to hear my confession I didn't speak of these scruples. In his innocence he would have been apt to take the side of the cynical Louie II. But he has learned by now not to employ the meager resources of his casuistry against me (another retrograde Irish Thomist, he) and pretends to accept me at my own moral valuation. "But beware, Louis," he counseled, before absolving me, "beware of intellectual pride." Meaning, I have always supposed, beware of intellect.
How to distinguish between righteousness and self-will? Between the two Louies? How, once committed, to stop _questioning?_ (That is the question.) Does someone like R.M. have such problems? He gives the impression of never having had a doubt in his whole life--and Mormons seem to have so much more to doubt.
I am being less than charitable. Those wells, too, are drying up.


May 16
We were sent out of the prison today on a detail to cut down and burn blighted trees. A new virus, or one of our own, gone astray. The landscape outside the prison is, despite the season, nearly as desolate as that within. The war has at last devoured the reserves of our affluence and is damaging the fibers of the everyday.
Returning, we had to file through the clinic to get our latest inoculations. The doctor in charge held me back after the others had left. A moment's panic: Had he recognized in me the symptoms of one of the war's new diseases? No, it was to show me the review of _The Hills of S!_ Bless, bless. Mons in _New Dissent_. She liked it (hurray) though she took exception, expectably, to the fetish poems. She also missed the references to Rilke, which I so labored over. Weh! While I read the review the good doctor injected what seemed like several thousand cc's of bilgy ook into my thigh; in my happiness I scarcely noticed. A review--I am _real!_ Must write a letter to Mons, thanking her. Perhaps R.M. will mail it for me. Maybe I'll even be able to start writing again.


May 17
The two faggots with whom, grudgingly, the Mafia and I share our cell (it is not, you will observe, _theirs_) are suddenly not speaking to each other. Donny sits on the can all day and tinkles blues. Peter broods butchly on his bunk. Occasionally Donny will address a loud complaint to me, concerning Peter's promiscuities, real or imagined. (When do they find opportunities for unfaithfulness?) Danny, younger and black, is feminine, even in his bitchiness, which is skilled and futile. Peter, at thirty, is still rather handsome, though his face has a seamy, second-hand look. They are both here on narcotics charges, though it is Peter's distinction that he once stood trial for murder. One gets the impression that he regrets having been acquitted. Their passion has too much of the element of necessity about it to be quite convincing: If you were the only boy in the world, and I were the only other. Now who's being bitchy?
I must say, though, that I find this sort of thing more palatable at second hand--in Genet, for instance. My liberality balks before the real thing.
So there is, in this context, an advantage in being as fat as I am. No one in his right hand would lust after this body.
I had thought once of doing an inspirational book for fat people called _Fifteen Famous Fatsos_. Dr. Johnson, Alfred Hitchcock, Salinger, Thomas Aquinas, Melchior, Buddha, Norbert Wiener, etc.