STARING INTO NOTHINGNESS

STARING INTO NOTHINGNESS

By Chaplain R. Lewis

     Grown men dressed in khakis, standing in line for a meal in the prison chow hall, looking blankly into the ground, lost in private thoughts, the only privacy owned now.  They have food, shelter, clothing, but not privacy. They gave up the right to privacy when they did the crime.  Only in their thoughts do they have a private place.
     It somehow gives me a fleeting moment of empathy, even though the responsibility for being here belongs to them.  I don't feel sorry for them really.  There's no time for that.  These men are in the heat of battle.  The outward appearance is merely standing in line waiting to eat prison chow.  But this line is different than standing in one for a buffet.  There is no choosing what they will eat, or the time they will eat, or with whom they will dine.

     If one suddenly looked up and noticed I was watching them, I would look away, if only to preserve their dignity in one small way.  They get watched a lot.  Nothing is private...except their thoughts. They are the truly lonely in a crowd.  His arms are crossed.  The back of the inmate ahead of him is inches away and would make a blank canvas for his thoughts.  Yet he looks off to the side and to the ground.  Maybe staring at the back of the other would be misinterpreted by prison survival code, thus the staring into the ground is safer and further disengages him from human contact even standing in line.  Ground is neutral.  Hard to imagine him able to detach from all the loud talk of some of the other men in chow line.  Those who use noise to distract themselves are also lost in thought in a way, they engage the technique of pretending it's just another day of time in prison.  Not that laughter is unusual in prison. It's human nature to want to laugh, to experience some moment of normalcy as a human being. Men don't leave their humanness at the entrance of the prison.  But laughter has never meant inner peace.
     What is that one thinking?  It could be as deep as imagining himself with his wife or kids, or wondering what he's doing here.  Some of these men are surprised by prison.   Some are business men caught up in a shady deal, perpetuated by rationalization and compromise.  Others were on a downward slide because of drugs and were so zoned out that when the drugs wore off and they started thinking clearly, they found that whatever nightmare they were trying to escape using drugs, had just changed to the face of prison.  Out of the frying pan into the fire.
     Of course staring off into nothingness doesn't always translate into deep thought.  Some of these men never do anything about dealing with what brought them to prison.  The blank stare into oblivion, the zoning out, is an survival method a lot like a depressed person sleeping all the time.  They tune out the noise the people, the thoughts are tepid, their next steps robotic.  They are just doing time.  Some have mastered doing time, without dealing with what brought them here.  It's not so deep.  Some people just don't have an interest in changing their ways.  Crime is an art, a challenge.  In prison they just perfect their art.
     So I watch him pass by as the chow line starts to move.  The Savior is, in an eternal way, watching him too.  Stoked from his private oblivion, the young man moves toward food service, where he can at least feed his body.  I can only pray he will get hungry enough to want to feed his soul too.