Prison & The Mother

Francis X. Kroncke

1.

What spirit awaits in prison? Upon release, I had an answer at once deceptively simple and innocently complex. That an evil presence stalks the prison corridor. That prison is a sacrament – makes real whether one seeks it or not - of this presence: the ghastly Shadow of The Male - a perversion I named The Lone Male. This realization - that Prison is the primary sacrament of patriarchal Biblical culture - fundamentally altered my Traditional spiritual understanding. Yet, the shocking story is that Prison is also inhabited by a nurturing, comforting, healing presence (though not by invitation). I would start parole as a pilgrim in search of fuller communion with The Mother.

2.

 In prison – “Inside” -  things go backwards. Time is tricky, here. I escape, often, yet am always a captive. Constitutionally, I am a slave of the State.  Existentially, I am the freest of all humans. Freedom is sung to the rhythm of the chains, the cadence of cell doors slamming, the clang of spoons on grub trays.

I am back at Creation: Genesis. Time goes neither forward nor backwards but is a presence of remembrance, remembering an embrace whose heart has been cut out. The Adamic Lone Male: “The Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh.” She is only from inside him; cut out from him and Him. She exists only as part, as an expression – parole - of the Lone Male’s interiority.

Back at Golgotha: Who is the criminal exposed in the hissing indictment: My God, my God why have you forsaken me?  Prison is a playful experience. Its thrills and pleasures span the macabre, the horrible, the orgasmic, and the spectacular. It is a theater whose rules I partly know; I will never know more.

Prison gives rise to peculiar ways of thinking because it is a sacrament. Its ritual and liturgy deliver me into the alien presence of criminality.  Backwards to Cain’s confrontation with Yahweh. Backwards to Jesus’ sacrilege on breaking the Sabbath. Cain is here. And the condemned, death-row Jesus.

Powerful exterior forces play tricks on me. Things, everyday things, are not what they seem. My name is my number: 8867-147. My clothes degrade rather than express me. The hair over my lip is a privilege, granted by a controller who owns the body that was mine.

My convict’s eyes condemn me to see what only God should see - the play of sin and the repentance of pain. My face is no longer young or old. It is eternally innocent: fresh to the touch and warm as a newly dead corpse.  When I look at others, I am denied the comfort of grace. I no longer see them in the beauty of their differences - shades of skin and shapes of bone, gimps and rugged cowboys. I see the self-torturers at the weightlifting pit, their bulging bodies but husks for tormented souls.

Prison’s backward jolt thrusts me into the primal experience of what it means to be a male in patriarchal society: solitary: Lone. Adam in The Garden before he is cut. A sacramental jolt: I am immersed in a Void, blinded by its stark light: blacks and whites, no grays. There is only He; only. Only Father. Only Male. Paradise!

3.

Most prison stories are wrong. Prison, they allege, is a male stronghold where the most macho and violent males are corralled and beaten into discipline by other males, super-males flexing the glistening muscles of steel death, brandishing the symbols of a potent sexual power. On some days it looks like that; the appearance is illusion.

Prison is cutting me into a female. The Edenic Inside woman of the patriarchal culture. I am prisoner of The Lone Male, bride of The Man.  My married name -- 8867-147 -- will be mine to the grave. I am chattel and wear the clothing of khaki anonymity - which The Man finds fetching. He constantly guards me and Counts me in the light and in the darkness of my time serving him. Courteous, he opens doors for his lady who waits, keyless, and calls for The Man to unlock the knobless doors. I wait. He is checking out my restrictions. I wait. I wait. He has a lock on the keys to my heart.

And it is his power, the fearsome force of that exterior institutional power, which makes me bend over and spread my cheeks. [Scream: “C’mon, it can’t be, we’re both guys!”] A sacramental eros is effected: I, at any moment, am his: night, morning, afternoon delight. At any place: I am walking the hall and he says, “Open your mouth”... he probes my ears, I rake my hair, shake out each shoe ... and bend over. And, then the door is banged: it’s over. So simple. So quick.

It happens every day, every time I go to the Visitors room. Take the cartoonist eye: behind the wall is arse mouth being inspected as on the other side the family awaits: sons and daughters, dads and moms, lovers,  babies. I emerge not looking raped. I neat up. Primp and pat. But it is done. I am now the trick. His squeeze.

It’s like that. No intimate space permitted. I am not just possessed, but swallowed - consumed. (He pauses, waits for my response: Shouldn’t I admire his great virility?) I am now Inside feminized. I am now the real presence of the symbolic actions that constitute prison.

To be such a female – cut from Inside - is an experience searing in its complexities and contradictions. Questions: Am I afraid of - or truly fascinated by - his terrifying mystery? His predatory power over my time, my space, my flesh? Do I dare confront what I have become? Do I dare admit the security my married identity brings?

The answers have equal yeses and no’s. After all, what is his power if it is all playtime? He knows that he can get me to pull down my pants at any time, but he also knows that I am sticking it in his face. I have days when I am relieved that I am in prison - at least I know who has the gun.  Yet, I recall mashing my face against the Yard’s chain-linked fence, envying the insects who flitted between the weeds and the flowers. 

The Lone Male, confronted, is ghastly Warrior Shadow. Joshua at Ai. Desirous to enslave, not just for the State but for intimate, personal reasons. “… all had fallen by the edge of the sword until they were consumed … all the people of Ai.” Massacre. All the people. Vietnam gooks, and, now, me. “The personal is political” – so destroy my name, obliterate my moral witness, consume me! … I first realized that the government desired to consume me when I learned that it had no conceptual or juridical category for political prisoners. So, it redefined me. I was charged with being a burglar - not a traitor or blasphemer: camouflaged as a “common criminal,” stripped of my moral discourse and witness. Swallowed: my trial lasted several weeks during which Vietnam Vets, historians, theologians, biological warfare scientists, and I testified …  in his Final Instructions, however, the judge directed the jury to disregard everything which I and my witnesses had said. Consumatum est!

This Biblical Loneness underpins the State’s politics, economics and morality. It is present to me in its perverted form as Shadow, but they are so thoroughly identified with The Lone Male Warrior, they believe that it is the Light. War is Peace. Thus, the final, everlasting punishment: the prisoner must be made impotent. Reinserted Inside The Man. Made to exist as a Lady. Rehabilitation: I must accept transformation into a fag.

It took some time for confession to reach my tongue. I knew that I was Inside feminized, but could not, would not, confess it.

4.

How are males taught to see the real Male, feel masculine identity? In this media culture - with its prime time wars: “Am I watching a War Movie or the Movie War?”- the line separating the fag from the “real man” is simple.  If you do not become John Wayne, “The Duke,” you are a fag. The Duke’s world is starkly black and white, no grays.  And only idealized females are allowed into his embrace. Touched by his mere shadow they bend their necks for his boot.

Lust does not charge the air around The Duke and his ladies. He does not seduce them, nor they he. He corrals them, like so many fillies. His eyes never dance over their bodies. He craves, instead, to possess their female power. He refashions the nurturing, healing, teaching and other feminine traits of his women into tools for conquering the frontier of the American Spirit. The inevitable storyline is of a spunky, strong-willed woman whom The Duke breaks to the saddle. Breaks her Will as he re-possesses what is spiritually his birthright; takes her back Inside himself.

The Duke’s power is unbridled. There is no Male identity outside his spirit. He is Adamic Lone Male. Solitary: uncompanioned. No other expressions of Maleness are honored nor acknowledged – there is only Warrior maleness. All Light, he claims no Shadow, and what is Evil is non-Lone-Male: non-human or sub-human – cloven-hoofed Satan, The Snake … Gook. His Enemy is not another Male God but a perversion of himself – a lesser male: the fag. He who bends, assumes the position – not macho enough to defend his own body, guard his backdoor; worse: who lusts for another male’s shaft. The Enemy’s crime is always, fundamentally, erotic and genital. Fags must be massacred!

Paradoxically, The Duke catalyzed my cultural deviance and criminality.  When I had to “take the beach” – raid Draft Boards - I found that The Duke’s Maleness was transcendental. Though I would not, could not, follow him into bloody battle, I strove to sacrifice vicariously. I fashioned my anti-war activity in imitation of The Duke. I took pleasure in the battle. Flexing intellectual and moral muscle, I fought toe to toe with the war warriors.  I took their blows, their taunts and insults, their handcuffs and barred cells, their Byzantine legal degradations. I would show them that a non-violent warrior was no wimp, homo, queer. Like The Duke, I rejected the deviance from the Warrior role: I made my stand on being, penis to penis, as totemic as he was.

 I slashed and burned my way into prison. They took me resisting to the last. I was impervious to their chains and cuffs, iron cots and mealy grub, loud insults and hissed threats. The years of Resistance had taught me how to use my body to broadcast what could not be directly spoken. My enemies were Warriors ... my companions were Warriors. So was I. I stood naked and proud among them, The Duke of Non-Violence.

... I confess: I am a fag: The Lone Male’s “lady.” ... I thought that I could resist evil, counter The Lone Male - in Warrior style. Now, I confess my failure. “Duke, I’m fagged out!” Inside, my Will is broken: “Yes, I am a fag!”

5.

In Solitary Lock-Down, the shrill echo, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?,” pierces the tombed silence. No answer comes, no salvation from The Lone Male as Father. Caged - where desperation rules, where I will make any promise in my yearning for rescue - I face, stunned, the collusive impassiveness of The Father and of Satan. In The Hole, I crave the easy answer.

But there are only hard answers. There are no answers to the condemned Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” ... Why? -- Satan provides the insight: “Worship me.” Worship me because I am like The Father. I turn stones into bread. I give you authority and glory. I am worthy of worship because I am The Father’s equal. In fact this is Prison’s Revelation: its Truth and so its Lie - that Satan is The Father’s Lone Son, not Jesus.

Jesus’ satanic temptation is mine: to shrink God to Only Father - to worship Lone Maleness. As Lone Male and Father I shall be faithful to the Warrior God. In The Hole, this makes Satanic sense.  I have lived within The Lone Male’s illusion: obeying a Church which claims that God is only Father authority, that there is no Goddess: no Mother, no feminine spiritual power .... a State which claims that it can change the stones of war into the bread of peace. I have acted within this illusion: transubstantiated into Messiah. I warred in the name of peace.  Prison shatters all these Warrior illusions. My numerous follies are scrawled on cell-block walls.

At that choking moment when my convict eyes observed myself as fag, as the idealized Inside female of The Lone Male fantasy, a Presence and a Power strengthened me. A Presence which asks no one to become enslaved, no one to become a patriarchal female.

Splayed naked in The Hole, I met the Goddess who is present as Mother.

6.

How does one now testify to the unnerving calm of metanoia? Of turning to face the person whose presence was as close as an embrace - an embrace by one whose face one does not see - The Mother? At the third temptation, I had to respond, testifying as to whom I worshipped. Not the God whom Satan imitated - the lonely, solitary confined Father, the patriarchal Warrior Male Shadow. But turning from Him, testifying to that of God which is The Mother.

But how is the Mother recognized? At first I didn’t see her. There is no one here. Just empty beds, foursquare for the inspection. Neatness and savagery. At night Prison beds creak with lonely lust and the air carries hissing indictments of The Father’s abandonment. “My God! My God!....” Orgasmic surrender, in dreams, in the flesh: I roll over and pull the pillow over my head.

I felt some presence around me, smelled her, ached with a pregnancy months over due. I sought salvation in female messiahs. They must know! I was desperate. What was within me was feeding upon me and I was withering. …“Why have I not killed myself?” … No messiahs! Are there no messiahs of any sex?! I awoke, ten thousand times, that first year of parole, and kissed my bottle: “...in remembrance of me.”

I experience Her impatience. She laughs at my Messianic yearnings. Says that there are no Messiahs, male or female. I surrender Mother, accept me though I stink. The Mother’s presence enfolds me.

7.

Ha! Convict liar! “I’m innocent! I didn’t do it!” Ha. “8867-147, you’re guilty. More, despicable. Pathetic! You’re sweet-talking what you truly saw of Her when Inside! Faggot!” … At a moment of blood lust, She comes. There are 70 inmates in this dorm. It is “Lock-up and Count!” again. I hate that son of a bitch Matthews. The fucking hack runs mind-games on me. Fucks with my mustache, fucks with my locker, fucks with me standing in line for chow. I wake from my grave with his eyes staring at me, raping me. I must kill him. I am pleased by the thought ... I would give anything for the power to crush him, fucking head by fucking leg into a little pile of shit! .... “pierced his side with a spear” ... Now rehabilitated: now, Him: Lone Male Warrior. Sprinkled with blood, sodden with lust: Hers – huddled, yes, by The Mother: but Dark, Warrior Goddess.

Blood lust. I hide. What shames me? It was only fantasy ... No! I tasted him dying in my mouth. What more need I know but that I willed it? The staggering moment of First Blood. A communion with Her, Genesis’ Divine Consort, who was and is ever present, simply not seen, vaprously visaged in the Void: my Dark Mother – Terrible. She who eats her children. She whose celebration is the massacre ritual of the Dark Father, Warrior God.

I’ve been lying. I saw the rib. It is the penis. Her mythic substitution. Tricking Adam, Her son who believes he has not Her blood in his. Tricked by Eve, Dark Daughter – her sugary smile, her blushing purity: Lies! Lies. But my lies. Lying to myself about the Dark Inside me. Lying about my Light. My Light is as Dark as anyone I accuse – isn’t this Prison’s revelation? Shackled am I to Her and Him: myself as Dark Father and Dark Mother: Terrible.

Now my Lie exposes The Mother’s truth: spiritual birthing requires that only by fully accepting my Lone Male Warrior violence can my robust Male-coupled-Female come forth. That being passionately non-violent is a way of creatively imagining one’s Warrior violence.

What appears as the dying of birthing is the shattering, trembling delivery of a presence from within. Is this your resurrection, Mother? I know The Father’s - risen to conquer. Is this yours - conquered to rise? Why tell me about birthpain, are they not but your violences? Your truth is too hard.

8.

How to make present this new spirit of Female-coupled-Male? To even imagine a mythic image not Biblical, not Warrior? I experiment: walk around without violent defense, not just non-violent offense. Practicing: to live as if I am no one’s enemy. Not that I will not be called Enemy, for the Warrior will always be, but to walk the earth allowing myself to be embraced, welcoming others Inside my embrace.

To mother and to father: to be child to: everyone. Curious, baffling oxymorons guide me: courageous vulnerability, intimate openness, savage sweetness …imagining myself robustly erotic: an eros of Ouroboric embracing, that to be One I must be Two.

Imagining a singular family, each and everyone an Earthfolk.

I laugh, a very, very hushed laugh, imperceptible but to me. “So, this is it!”

{This has evolved from the earlier, "Prison, Bottomming-Out, Mother." }