Over the Wall

I am looking out my small wedge-shaped window—inmate proof window, a product of the increasing specialization of prison-building developed over the course of the past 20 years. (Some have called the 20^th century in America the century of incarceration. The Economist published an article recently referring to America as the Land of the Unfree.) The window is of the fashionable neo-medieval, an archers slot reborn as an escape-proof window.

I am looking out, beyond the razor wire, at the sparkling lights on the hills, suburbs about a half-mile away. They might as well be a thousand miles away, though. I look out at them every night, and they have become painful symbols of all that I am not, all that I cannot have, all that I have been forcibly removed from.

I have a German friend that remembers peering over the wall dividing East from West Germany as a child. She remembers seeing, from time to time, women just like herself, peering back at her, bags or children in their arms, with longing and resignation in their eyes. She remembers feeling sorry for them. She understood, even as a small child, the deprivations they endured on the Eastern side of the wall, only a few yards of concrete and razor wire between them. But she too felt that short distance represented a huge existential gulf.

I am staring again now, imaging myself to be one of those women, peering back with a torn spirit—longing, yet deeply resigned (the most painful docility). Is anyone peering back at this moment, thinking about the deprivations endured on this side of the wall?

My friend has frequently spoken of that experience as formative—teaching her the brutal absurdity of man-made divisions. Perhaps it was the immediacy of her encounter, her proximity to the wall, the fact that she could see the women’s faces and read their eyes; perhaps it was this immediacy, this contact, that taught her the lesson.

Or rather, forced it upon her mind. We must never forget that we build walls, in part, to forget. To shut out. To ignore. Ignorance is blissful because it has very high walls.

Walls, in this sense, are a failure of the human spirit. We build them so that we cannot see the woman’s face, or read her eyes. If we do not see, we do not care.

Walls are necessary I guess. Yes, they’re necessary, just as long as they are not absolute. Walls can indeed be beautiful. So long as they have doorways…