Response 5: Essays from Prison

I must admit that my attraction to this book lay in the fact that Lamberton is writing from prison. The reasons for this are selfish, and I devoured the only essay on prison itself before going into the assigned essays.

The fact that he wrote most of these essays from his cell fascinates me. When I write about the environment - when I write anything - I am always near a computer with internet access, constantly fact-checking myself. That he could write in such detail, with such intimacy, with probably only a prison library as a resource is something I admire, something I will strive to emulate.

It seems that always when I read something by a new author, I am looking for similarities I have with that author. It's my way of relating. I found the amount of similarities between Lamberton's experience and my own slightly disconcerting. It started with the rattlesnakes. My father also caught a snake, as a child in Colorado. My ten-year-old dad brought a diamondback home to his father, who promptly killed it with a shovel. He still has the rattle.

Like Lamberton, I used to work at a summer camp. I participated in a somewhat illicit relationship with a man who was too old for me - though my transgressions were not as severe as Lamberton's, I can relate to what he describes in the introduction, the feeling of elation in sneaking into the wilderness. The fear of discovery. Losing weight. Et cetera.

Old Hat Gulch was an essay of premonition. I have long believed that symbolism does not only exist in fiction. The idea of symbolism is that we (humans) attach meaning to events or objects that would be otherwise meaningless. I don't believe that Lamberton attached feelings to the coyotes howling at the end of the essay as a mere literary device. He was experiencing the emotions he gave the coyotes: mourning a loss and a predestined atollment. He was mourning his marriage, he sensed that his relationship with the girl would not go far. In his own mind, he was outside reality, and yet he manages to use the heightened reality of the desert at night - the possible mountain lion, the soaptree yucca grove, the coyotes - to reflect his altered state of mind. Is that not what we search for in nature; a reality that is somehow more real than our lives? It reminds me of Thoreau saying that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

And it begs the question - what is real? Do we have the power to define our own realities, and damn the man, damn the consequences? I think, as writers, we have the power to shape our reality and our experiences. Writers are primarily thinkers, after all.

Lamberton did just that, both before prison and during prison. His reality became that of the desert, of the swallows, the rattlesnakes, of memory and imagination - and he never left his cell. It makes me wonder what realities we create (everyone does it) in order to cope with our own lives of quiet desperation. Fantasies of love, career success, religious fulfillment: these can be created externally OR internally. I tell myself that my cats love me. I ignore the fact that they probably only love me when I'm feeding them. I tell myself I have a measure of talent as a writer, as a student of language, as a friend and a listener. I'm the only one who can decide whether or not these things are true.

I couldn't figure out, from the introduction or the author bio, whether or not Ken Lamberton is still in jail. I don't think he is. I'm going to labor under that delusion, I will decide that it's true. At this point in my life, I need to believe that there in an end to prison. Instead of believing in God, this is what I'll use to give myself hope.