Into Hell, Into Prison

 My dad just finished a week-long stay in the hospital. It was one of the best facilities in the country. He was in a lovely new building with lots of natural lighting. By the end of his time there, he had a room to himself. A room with a view, at that. 

But "Even in this island richly blest [...] Earth is too harsh," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it. Even the best of possible hospitals is still a hospital. And thus, in spite of all its efforts, it still felt like a kind of prison or carceral institution. 

Obviously, that's a crude exaggeration. Prisons don't have rooftop cafés. Perhaps the better analogy is to spending a week on a cruise ship—that is to say, the luxury version of being confined in a solitary prison cell on a floating gulag. 

No matter how nice they try to make the hospital experience, after all, it is still a vast bureaucratic environment in which you are robbed of your personhood, individuality, and autonomy. 

You are left alone for long periods of time with none of the familiar objects or habits to remind you of your social identity and existence. 

Which of us would not go mad under such conditions?

I am! as John Clare wrote. But what I am none cares or knows. / My friends forsake me like a memory lost. / I am the self-consumer of my woes.

And so, even the sunlight and sterile cleanliness of the environment managed to seem sinister over time. 

Even in this lovely room overlooking the bay, the hospital still managed to evoke nothing so much as the horror of Gottfried Benn's Morgue; or the indignities and humiliations of the nursing home in B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal. 

I think the core of the torture of being stranded in such a place is that it deprives you of your routines—all the little ways in which one re-establishes each day some sense of who one is and what one is called to do in the world. 

I imagine being stranded in a place where I couldn't read a book or write a blog, for instance—and it's suddenly clear to me I would not care how much sunlight or how many rooftop cafés it had. Such a place would still be a hell to me. 

"I find the least restriction/ Turns for me a paradise/ Into hell, into prison," as Heine wrote in "Adam the First."

For my dad, at least, this only lasted a week. He is back home now and is able to gradually reestablish his routines and his sense of private order. 

Which makes it all the more horrifying to realize the number of people our government is trusting into infinitely worse conditions—solitary confinement in detention camps—makeshift gulags—across the country right now—for months, if not longer. 

Some have been abducted to third countries with which they have no prior connection—Cameroon, Ghana, and Eswatini—where they have been detained indefinitely in camps and prisons at the U.S. government's bidding. 

There are no rooftop cafés there. No single rooms overlooking the bay with a walk-in shower. 

If to be deprived of one's freedom and autonomy can make even a five-star resort into a hell—imagine being stuffed into a single room with twenty other grown adults packed so tight you can't lie down to sleep. 

I think of the case of Leqaa Kordia—a Palestinian woman disappeared to an ICE detention camp last year because she attended a protest. 

She remains there to this day, with no sign or hope of release. She has described being confined in a dark plastic shelter called a "boat." 

That puts my sarcastic remark about a cruise ship being a gulag into perspective—here's a person in a real gulag, on our government's orders. 

After experiencing a seizure—something she never struggled with in all her years of freedom—she was confined to a hospital, from which she has apparently still not been released. 

I can accept that my dad had to go through the dehumanizing experience of hospitalization because he had an unavoidable health complication. There is no one to blame. 

But seeing the pain of it, it makes it all the more inexcusable and hideous that our government is putting thousands of people through this, every day, willfully, deliberately, pointlessly, with no legal or moral justification—just to intimidate and retaliate against protesters. 

Or sometimes, not even that. The administration has also been re-arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota as a matter of overt policy—people here in this country lawfully, who entered the country with permission under the Refugee Assistance Program. 

"[A]ll this dignity/ With God's consent/ on thee!" (Thomas Hardy). Who can bear it? Who can excuse it? In this country? In our name? While I live in freedom—others no worse than I am, often much better, are "enjailed in pitiless wire"? 

I think again of men as innocent as I am / Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars, as Hugh MacDiarmid wrote. 

Let it not be so! Not here! Not on our shores! Tell me it's not so!