A Real Life

Over the years I’ve gotten into many debates, not because I am particularly good at winning arguments, but rather as a way to pass the time. To challenge what I perceived as wrong, or opposing views when bold opinions were given. 

 

There have been “I listened to the whole game” sports debates, when plays and stats were contested. “Mathematics is the only absolute” was a proclamation that I had a really good time with, because I spun a web of absolute nonsense out of something that should have been absolutely serious. “You don’t know what you are talking about” political rants could never be avoided, especially when MAGA became a thing. Then religion found its way in, ethics and morality. Alas, we are poor bastards of Socratic methodology, yet our thoughts and actions have evolved to meet the demands of this environment. 

 

But do we live a real life?

 

It is usually at night when the eyes are weary and the mind wanders into the realm of speculation that the deeper longings come to the surface. Call it story time, if you will, where men who’ve bonded will share insight into their past, or more deterministic views of the present. 

 

Enter a friend whose name I will shorten to J. I had met him years before, during those week long stays on various pods. When our paths crossed we were cordial and respectful, learning to trust slowly. Our relationship found new depth in 2015 when I was notified that my aunt died. A late night foray into remembrance is how we shared the grief. He listened to me describe her trials with her daughter before returning to Taft, Texas. How the final letter from my aunt stressed a desire to come visit me, then she overdosed on a mixture of pain and psychotropic drugs a mere fifteen days later. J talked about his uncle’s untimely death, how mysterious it was that he up and disappeared away from his life in northern Texas, to be found dead in another state. The common theme, of course, was that we both lost supporters, friends, and loved ones. In a way it was a tavern scene, where ale, a toast, and ribald banter provided a sort of closure. 

 

Understand that J is a big man, both in stature and presence, with a brash personality often bold and “in your face”. He never minces words, nor suffers fools lightly. He can also be kind, attentive, and caring, though I imagine he’d say something like, “don’t tell anyone or I’ll have to kill ya.” With that in mind, it was mid-week late in 2017, well past midnight, and damage control was on — a hip-hop show that broadcasts out of Houston, Texas. J liked his rap which I usually tolerated. When I did not want to listen to it, and said as much, he would go on to challenge “how cultured” I really was. As if I lacked layers of awareness into the depth and complexity of what life is…. 

 

Anyhow, I didn’t immediately respond.  Hmm, I thought to myself, he can’t be serious, but the statement kept echoing in my mind like a well struck gong. “Not a real life…,” is all I heard, over and over, as if I were back in the 3rd grade writing lines on a chalkboard. Of course there was a certain truth to the words, but I didn’t feel they told the whole story. 

 

Even now when I look back on the moment, I realize that J was not expecting a reply. He had been telling a story about how his brother would call a radio show and request a song, then wait by the radio for it to come on so he could record it. It was after we laughed about his brother pressing a hand-held recorder to the radio speaker that J suggested we don’t live a real life. There was an abrupt change in his mood.  The sadness in his voice, edged with bitterness and regret, indicated to me that it was unlikely J would change his mind. Still, it ate at me and ate at me, until I couldn’t help but interrupt J’s story with a comment of my own. 

 

“What…what did you say?” He diced the air with his query as he turned his radio down. 

 

 “Yes we do,” I said.

 

 

 

 There were times when I thought I knew what living was. In a general way, life is supposed to follow some sort of order, right? It should flow along towards specific goals. Events strung together among the relationships that bind us. 

 

When I was a little boy, mom and dad were my world. They were together and that made me feel complete. We travelled and lived as a family, and that felt so very real, right up until the fabric of that reality was ripped to shreds. Dad’s anger got the best of him. Unable to withstand his abuse any longer my mother left. She took my baby brother with her; I stayed behind. 

 

The life I thought to be real ceased in an instant. I was forced to change and adapt to, then suffer the new arrangement which was a nearly four-year-long custody battle. I was kidnapped by my mother and the court made her take me back. One night in a grocery store, dad grabbed one of my arms, mom took the other, and they played tug-o-war with my body. Had they managed to tear me in half that would have perfectly matched how I felt.

 

Life then for me was about being the “Danny” each side wanted me to be. In my father’s presence, fearing his anger, I was timid, weak willed, and withdrawn, trying to be so very perfect to avoid punishment. With mother I was freer, but a peculiar shyness made me clumsy to that notion. I did the best I could to meet the expectations in each environment, to please the family members on each side who hated each other, because I didn’t want them to hate me. 

 

Those divisions became greater complications as I got older. I wanted to resolve them, but I did not know how. Dad went to jail. Mom got custody of me. 

 

Many moves followed, putting me in different schools where I was forced to meet new people. It could have been a grand adventure had I been predisposed to seek out the positive aspects of those situations. Unfortunately, though, I struggled because I felt like it was a betrayal to get to know people only to leave them behind. Betrayal was an acute aspect of my reality. I felt betrayed by my father’s abandonment and by the tension in my family. I really did not want to replicate that in other parts of my life. It was impossible to avoid getting too attached to people, though. Which means the suffering I endured was unavoidable. 

 

My teenage years were very frustrating because my grandfather died and dad was a shadow. I was a victim of abuse due to being naïve. Those losses and hard lessons made me retreat even more, again because it was too hard for me to find positive lights in those dark, negative experiences. 

 

Life for me kept evolving, constantly changing but it was never less than real. I felt it every day, navigated every circumstance, and faced the consequences of my actions, good or bad. 

 

When I entered high school I had a well-established identity crisis and not a clue as to what I wanted to do. If life is about the relationships that bind us, I also failed because I found it hard to connect with people. But let me be very clear: I had a wonderful family. Both sides were kind to me in their own ways, it is just that I internalized things in a way that prevented me from truly appreciating that.

 

I also had yet to develop the ability to really consider another’s perspective through their eyes, all that might be complicating their life as a means to understand behavior. My narrow-minded focus led to selfishness, and all of the inexplicable, self-destructive behaviors I would eventually exhibit. 

 

 

 

“Stop being a jackass,” J said. “You know what I mean.”

 

And I did. Of course I did. But J also knew that I had a way of looking into things deeper, fleshing them out. For nearly thirty minutes we had gone back and forth on the subject of life. He kept up a steady stream of belittling phrases, while I openly explored the idea of what life is or could be in various places. 

 

From my prison recliner- a rolled up mattress I leaned against, the folded up towel I sat on, and the table I propped my feet on — I contemplated the images of my life that flashed through my mind. How I had lived at each stage and how it all kept changing, forcing me to do the same. Right up until the point when I entered prison. 

 

“We live within the expectations of this environment,” I said after a long break, to let him cool off a bit. “All of what we do is real, the choices we make, the consequences we endure, and the relationships we have.”

 

“What expectations?” he asked in a snide tone. 

 

“The rules, what we do….”

 

“But we don’t have to do anything.”

 

“You could look at it like that if you want to, but part of living is also about ordering things for yourself, right?”

 

Heavy breathing came through our mic system. We could recline in our respective cells and have civilized conversations that did not require yelling out our doors. 

 

J however was done with the conversation. “You are being an idiot.”

 

Well, maybe so from his perspective. I could only sigh and let it go. I fully understood how he longed to be out in the world with his brother, enjoying what life out there could offer. It was a sort of shell he had packed his mind into, I guess, where the seed of hope for release kept emerging as bitterness. 

Was I a total jackass to challenge his views concerning why he didn’t want to do anything in this place by the rules? He had already sacrificed 20 years to the “system” as punishment for being an accomplice to a crime, a crime in which the actual shooter received less time. Other accomplices were already in the world. The unfairness of why he was being kept in a cell weighed heavily on him, it saddened me. But that, too, was a part of what a real life is. It is the pleasure, longing, expectations, and pain. If we are keeping a tally arguing fairness then every man or woman in prison should be in a constant rage. 

 

One of these days, I do hope the Law of Parties is repealed. Under the Law of Parties an accomplice to a crime can receive a comparable sentence to that of the actual offender. J, at 18 years old, was sentenced under the Law of Parties and received a capital life sentence, for which he will have to serve 40 flat years before he becomes eligible for parole. During the time my friend has served already, his mother died and an uncle. His brother became a high school teacher, married, and his kids are all grown up. The beautiful thing is that they keep in contact with J, support him the best they can, but still it is as he would stress, “not a real life.”

 

 

 

Both Matthieu Ricard (a Tibetan Buddhist) and Wolf Singer (a neurologist) would tell you that we relate to the world through what is, to us, a series of subjective experiences. Through our two-dimensional eyes the outer world is formed as a construction of the brain. We ultimately decide what an object is, the dimensions of the world we inhabit, and how we relate to it all.

 

Through the notion of bounded reality, we simply cannot know everything so we only perceive a small amount of the various signals the outer world provides. At the same time, many of those signals may in fact, be wholly unique to us, in such a way that certain signals will be deemed more “real” than others. 

 

The ultimate conundrum then is how, over the course of our lives, we constantly superimpose the processes of the mind on the outer world we are called to relate to. We determine what is real. The constructions of our mind could, in a very deterministic way, be false, but conditioned beliefs often blind a person to the need to change. 

 

Intrinsically, both advanced neuroscience and ancient philosophy (notably Buddhism) makes it clear that we possess the ability to affect the processes of the mind, to then alter how our perception of the outer world engages our emotions. 

 

And yet, there have been movements or general ideas throughout antiquity that would challenge that premise. Human beings can only be improved through selective breeding, or so Plato’s Republic (c.378 BCE) suggested. Tommaso Campanella, an Italian philosopher and poet, imagined utopia in City of the Sun (1623), where the socially elite are only allowed to procreate. Then consider how ruling families bred among themselves, and how other caste systems in various cultures operated, including the brutal caste system in India that still exists today. 

 

In more modern times Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin was influenced by the theory of natural selection and wrote in his Hereditary Genius (1896) that proposed marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. Galton then influenced Darwin with scientific evidence on hereditary genes, which led to Darwin’s argument relevant to evolution that the greatest steps humans could make would be to realize they are not completely guided by instinct. Instead, humans had the ability to control their own future evolution through selective breeding. 

 

The field of Eugenics or “Social Darwinism” pervaded cultural thought in Scandinavian countries, North America, Latin America, Japan, China, and Russia. In the United States, the rise of Eugenics coincided with the Progressive Era, and remained influential up until 1940. In that time however, it achieved support from luminaries such as zoologist Charles Davenport, plant geneticist Edward M. East, Nobel Prize laureate Hermann J. Muller, then President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Roon, and Associate Justice to the Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan. And of course, the Nazis made Eugenics quite infamous. 

 

As you can imagine, the different ways to determine what a real life could be were often determined as nothing more than accidents of birth. The class you were born into was the only life you could know. Here, in the United States, our “American Dream” is based on meritocracy, but the shadow of Eugenics still exists in racist propaganda. It also lingers, to some degree, as the foundations for criminal justice policies and the prison system. Because we are considered negatives, the degenerates that Eugenics supporters wanted to remove from the breeding pool. 

 

Mind training is an effective tool that strongly defies the nonsensical belief in superior breeding. Do genetics play a role in human design? Absolutely! But each man or woman has the opportunity to make choices to strengthen their minds and bodies throughout their lives. Age is not a limiting factor in that process either. Granted, a young mind is not biologically considered fully developed until the age of twenty-five, but even an older mind can be neutrally activated to learn and change. 

 

 

 

So what is the answer? Do we live real lives in prison? 

 

I asked another friend, RT, and he said, “If you are asking me to give an answer right now, I would have to say no, based on activities. And yet, that is a question to sit and ponder. If I do that, I imagine my answer will evolve because I do believe a part of living is in how we react to our environment.”

I didn’t let that initial debate with J die either. On another day, again late at night as we listened to the radio, I asked him, “Did you change your mind about our lives being real?”

 

“No,” he replied calmly, “and when I talked to my brother about it at visit, he agreed with me so there is nothing more to discuss.”

 

J continues to desire the world beyond these walls, and it is hard to fault him for that. My family is out there too, and they are getting old. My aunt died in 2015, then both grandmothers in 2018. Time stands still for no one, and I am locked in here watching it pass by. But then we are all doing time, as Bo Lozoff suggested. We do the time we are given in the environments we live in. As the events of each day blend in with the relationships that bind us, we should strive to be more aware of positive experiences, how they are mentally enriching, enhancing us in various ways, carrying us forward. Otherwise, no matter where we are, what would be the point of living at all?

 

 

(in white, pictured with his father)

Terry Daniel McDonald 01497519