Jacob Wren

from Desire Without Expectation

In my early twenties I had a long period of extremely poor health from which I don’t believe I ever fully recovered. This sentence, while true, has always seemed to me to be the kind of sentence that would make a good opening line for a certain kind of book. A type of book I am fairly certain I don’t actually want to write. I think I want to write about this time in my life, yet in a completely different way. What this different way is I still don’t really know. It is a question I continue to wonder about, as we can assume I will be doing a great deal in the pages that follow. If you find such notions off-putting perhaps you might do yourself a favour by not reading any further. I of course am not doing myself any favours by recommending this course of action so soon, when this book has barely begun. I believe I have always had a tendency toward self-sabotage even though, as I’ve gotten older, I have also continuously worked to avoid it. As you might already suspect, I have not always been entirely successful in such matters. 

There is a quote from Pier Paolo Pasolini I often think about: “If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.” And I am an unbeliever. But the world needs to change and I can’t help but feel that in the end it will be changed by people who believe, who possess a great deal of conviction. What these people who might someday change the world might actually believe is a question for which I don’t yet have an answer. (If we don’t want religious fanatics or fascists to provide this answer we will need to provide an equally potent answer of our own.) During that period in my mid-twenties when my health gave out I found myself searching for something to help get me through the ordeal and I did so mainly in reading. I read books of poetry that I now realize, only in retrospect, I was hoping might give me more to believe in. Hoping that such belief might serve as a counterweight to the daily chronic pain. I don’t think I ever quite found what I was looking for but the fact that, in my hour of need, my agnostic tendencies gave way to such a search is an insight that has never quite left me. When things take a turn for the worse there often arises some newfound desire for belief (or hope.) And in the world right now things are definitely taking a turn for the worse.

When I say things are taking a turn for the worse I assume the reader will know what I’m talking about. But I fear, in writing such words, I might be taking something away from the fact that things have always been extremely bad and everything that is happening now is in perfect continuity with the horrors of the past, for what could be more evil than, for example: over 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade, the worldwide genocide of Indigenous peoples often referred to as colonialism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and I’ll stop here but this is of course far from a complete list.) There is no capitalism without its long history of colonialism. And the worldwide ecological collapse that is already underway would not be occurring if it were not for capitalism. So what kind of belief, what quality of conviction, might be fierce and caring enough to undo capitalism? Or to step in and replace it when it inevitably collapses? (Not a rigid, unwavering belief but rather a belief with considerable openness and flexibility. Nonetheless strong enough to back an unending fight.)

Like many people in recent years, I’ve been reading a great deal about the abolition of police and the abolition of prisons. I personally don’t require any further belief or conviction in order to greatly desire a world without police and without prisons. There is nothing I want more. But I do require a great deal of belief and conviction in order to believe such a world is actually possible and perhaps also to land upon the best possible strategies and tactics to eventually bring it about. Sometimes I think this is because, as I often say, I am too much of an artist for my own good. Not enough of an activist. But I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t hope these reflections would also be of use to others. In my mid-twenties, when my health was in serious question, one way of understanding that time in my life was that it deepened my search for meaning and severed me from the irony that up until then had been my default setting. Another way of looking at it is that it somehow reinforced my already strong feeling that the best way for me to do anything in the world was through art. Since that time I have continuously found myself wondering if I made the right decision.

We need belief and conviction and yet I am a creature of doubt. And of course we also need doubt. Each of my books is generally read by approximately five thousand people (and for some of them considerably less than that.) Five thousand people is not nearly enough to incite the kinds of changes currently required. And reading one of my books won’t necessarily make anyone do anything. And why should anyone listen to me, for that matter. Yet if I’m sitting here writing a book, as I’ve done so many times before, I realize I need to struggle with the questions that feel most pressing. To send this message in a bottle out into a future that may not even exist.

I like books that mix essay with fiction. Why do I like books that mix essay with fiction? Because fiction creates a greater margin of ambiguity and evocation, pulling the work away from mere thought, instruction or opinion. A dialog between conviction and doubt. When I try to write about my own chronic physical pain I always end up writing about something else, I suppose because I don’t like thinking about it. There are so many things I don’t like thinking about. Ecological collapse is something I certainly don’t like thinking about and yet I can’t seem to stop. So far, almost against my will, this mix of essay and fiction is leaning rather heavily on the essay side of the equation. And yet I also think of all of this as a poem.

A few years ago I had an idea for a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. In a detective novel there’s a crime and the detective has to figure out who did it. But in a world without prisons a crime would not be understood in anywhere near the same way. Why would you hide or try to escape if you didn’t face any possible threat of punishment? The answer likely has something to do with shame. But without punishment it is likely shame would also be greatly reduced. How do I know any of this? What does it mean to engage in such pure speculation?

To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning.

The ways in which we tell stories – what stories we tell – has so much to do with the many ways in which we live.

A world without prisons would be completely different from the world in which we currently live, possibly different in every way, and so the ways in which one writes it might also be different, possibly in every way as well.

A detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. A detective novel with a twist and the twist is: there is no crime and no detective. A cross between a detective novel and a poem.

Prison abolition is about race and about class. Rich people put poor people in prison. White people put people who they consider not to be white in prison.

Prison abolition is about thinking and acting differently in relation to actions that cause harm.

The most important and foundational works on prison abolition and transformative justice have been done by people I do not share an identity position with. I will name some of them here: Critical Resistance, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, INCITE!, Robyn Maynard, Syrus Marcus Ware, Andrea Ritchie, Mariame Kaba, Assata Shakur. 

This short list is of course far from complete.

Nonetheless, I am going to attempt to tell a story that takes place in a world without prisons. In fact, I feel every writer or artist or thinker or anyone should write a book or poem or story or aphorism or think a thought that takes place in a world without prisons.

(Maybe I just write this to give myself an out. If I get it all completely wrong, the reader can think: he got it completely wrong, and then sit down to write their own version.)

That was as far as I got. I couldn’t get any further. I had often started books and then gotten stuck. It had happened often. My rule was: if I made it well past the thirty-page mark I would force myself to continue. This was clearly well under thirty pages. But I wanted to keep going, even though I didn’t yet completely understand why. If there was no way forward maybe there was at least a way to go sideways.

It was around this time I seriously began to question the ethics of writing fiction. The ethics of making stuff up. Now is a strange time in my life. (It’s always a strange time in my life.) It’s now fifteen years ago that I decided to “reinvent myself as a novelist.” At the time, I didn’t really believe it would work. Now, in retrospect, I can see that it sort of did. I liked the feeling of reinventing myself. It was a feeling of escape. Of escaping everything else and into the fantasy of being a novelist. Now, fifteen years later, as you can well imagine, it no longer feels like an escape. But – and I ask myself this because I genuinely don’t know the answer – what does it feel like? There are really hard questions about what it means to write fiction that I’m not sure I’ve ever properly asked myself. (And yet, when you start to question what you do to the point you can barely even continue to do it, what then?)

I wanted to give myself rules. No writing about writing. No characters who are artists. No meta-level commentary on the very nature of the endeavour. I have already broken all of them.

This all just sounds like my writing. Where will I find a different sound? Another politics?

Who is the detective? In a world without prisons there would be no need for a detective. The detective would need to be something else.

Does it have to do with conflict resolution? With leading a process, bringing the community together in a circle in search of communal repair? But all this can only happen after you already know who did what. Is there a role for someone when such details are not yet known?

A situation that is unclear, that is murky, that has yet to be revealed.

For some reason I keep thinking: I don’t want it to be a murder. How can it be something other than a murder?

Something happened. No one is completely sure just what it was. What happened needs to be untangled.

I am the one who doesn’t know what happened. I must simultaneously invent and untangle it. Invent a tangle I don’t yet know how to untangle.

And I must do so in a manner that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down.

If at all possible.

Angela Y. Davis writes: “Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.”

In a book it’s easy enough to imagine anything. It is enormously more difficult to make something that might actually be of use.

Along with the question that naturally follows: useful to who? And for what?

To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning.

I remember, in my early twenties, lying in a warm bath with my hand on my right hip saying over and over again, to myself: my hip is going to heal, my hip is going to heal, my hip is going to heal. Putting my hand on the back of my head and saying over and over again: my head is going to heal, my head is going to heal, my head is going to heal. There was severe pain in my right hip and in the back of my head and often there still is. I have examined the problem from all angles yet I still don’t completely understand why. But I have come to understand that, at some previous point in my life, I decided it was better to simply live with the pain than to spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to solve the problem with relatively little success. I have never felt completely certain that this was the right decision. Maybe there was some solution and I quit just before finding it. Maybe I should start all over again, searching from the beginning, as if it was the beginning, going through all the options one by one and once again seeing where they lead. I know one of the main reasons I don’t do this is because I find the process too depressing. And also because, the current evidence suggests, I am able to live with the pain. It is bearable and yet constantly leaves me with the open question as to whether or not this is best way for me to live. 

In the bathtub I would repeat these sentences as mantras. I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to completely believe it, but I suspected there might be some purely psychosomatic aspect to my afflictions and wondered if anything could be changed through purely mental strategies. At the same time, I found myself wondering if such strategies were little more than a mild form of madness. We might give a name to this madness: the power of positive thinking. I thought: if I’m looking to the power of positive thinking for a solution I must really be lost. During this time I read more spiritual things, mostly poetry, to try to help me cope with the physical pain. I do not normally read spiritual materials. I am generally a rather negative person and positivity does not come easily to me. There was another aspect to all this. I’d had a certain amount of artistic career success very early on. I published books and made performances and this work all received a substantial amount of attention. I didn’t really have any strategies for dealing with this attention and also didn’t really have strategies for managing my own artistic desires in a way that would allow me to continue making work I felt good about. It became increasingly difficult to feel I was making the work for the right reasons. I had no way of knowing to what extent, if any, my physical health problems were connected to such artistic dilemmas. 

There are conversion experiences that concern religion. I suspect these are the ones we hear about most often. But what I want to write about is not that, since we’ve heard about such things way too often and, more importantly, I believe there are also conversion experiences that concern art, politics, other things as well. Thinking one’s political or artistic convictions are one way, and then you have an encounter or experience that, quite suddenly, shifts them toward something completely different. I now find myself thinking of such conversion experiences as some kind of mini-utopia. Utopia reflecting a desire for the world to change and these personal experiences being evidence that an individual’s sense of purpose and action can shift – more, and more quickly, than one might at first suspect. Such conversion experiences can of course also set off domino effects, where each person changes the next. But can this phenomenon ever really be said to lead to human flourishing? It has potential, yet also seems to fall short. I worry that writing about it so positively neglects the aspects that most resemble joining a cult.

I have always felt I don’t yet have enough understanding as to how change actually happens. Or to the many different ways change might practically occur. Or to the many different ways positive change might occur, since I have seen many negative and depressing political changes take place during the course of my lifetime. (The names I used to give to the root of these negative changes were: Thatcherism, Reaganism and neoliberalism. But there are different ways of looking at the matter, since all these crises also have deeper roots. And sometimes I wonder if a more straightforward name for it is simply: greed.) How does positive change happen and how can I be part of it? And can I be part of it as an artist or would I need to, at least partly, set art aside in order to work in other ways? 

I look out the window of the train and see a rainbow. The rainbow is short and stubby, also bright and clear. Before that moment I was not looking out the window, I was staring at my computer screen. The rainbow was beautiful so, in that specific moment, it struck me how much better it was to look out the window than it was to stare at my computer. Then I went back to staring at my computer.

There is a sense in which this book is an experiment to be on the side of belief. An experiment which is perhaps destined to fail. But, then again, what if it succeeds?

I want my writing to be honest. I worry that I haven’t been honest enough in my previous books. Wonder what it means to be honest in literature.

I am full of doubt. And often, when I express this doubt, it feels to me like honesty.

But doubt isn’t honesty. Perhaps, at times, my doubt might even be a smokescreen. A way for me not to see the things I might not wish to see. Or a way for me not to admit (even to myself) what I already know.

A way to forego more direct desires.

What might it be like to live in a world that one felt was at least relatively just? I believe this is a feeling people need. And yet no one who is paying attention can currently have this need met. The world we live in is unjust beyond measure.

I do not directly experience this injustice. Yet I feel it very intensely. And have not really managed to transform such feelings into action. Unless books and performances can be considered actions. Which returns us to the question of doubt. 

In this way I could easily go in circles. I am desperately trying not to.

Also, feeling bad about the state of the world doesn’t help anyone or anything.

Faith is a dialog with doubt.

There was a moment in my life, approximately fifteen years ago, when I had a powerful desire to reinvent myself as a novelist. Now I have done so and it basically worked. This is also a kind of conversion experience. I of course knew I didn’t want to write conventional novels, I wanted to write some other sort of novel that expressed some other vision of literature, that might also summon other possibilities for how we might live in the world. Not that I thought this would change anything. Nonetheless, I believed novels – given the limitation of my personality and the areas in which I had the greatest abilities – were the place I was most likely to generate useful questions and possibilities and make them stick. Something to do with the way a story so effectively drags you alongside it. And how everything in human culture has a more or less direct connection to story. How we understand ourselves and the world through a series of stories and – though we may also be able to understand ourselves purely on the level of somatic sensation – when it comes to community and social interaction it is my feeling that stories are always at least somewhat in play. Money is a story. Nation is a story. Marriage is a story. Etc. And yet when such stories are accepted by almost everyone, generation after generation, they become more than stories, they become life as we know it, the status quo, things that are extremely difficult to change. Christianity was extremely effective in changing the story though which much of the world understood itself in ways I consider to be almost entirely destructive. Capitalism has done the same. I often wonder if Hollywood might start to come close to these two monoliths in its impact but probably not. People know movies and television are only stories. People think Christ and Money are real (while at the same time transcending reality.) And they are real, insofar as if you were a heretic during the inquisition you would be killed and if you have no money in our current world you are considerably more likely to starve. The power of stories becomes almost absolute when enforced through systemic and brute power. And yet, with or without evidence, I continue to have the feeling that any story, however entrenched, might someday change.

When I think about a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons, I have to admit there is something that doesn’t sit quite right with me. How can it be okay to imagine a world without prisons when so many people are unjustly incarcerated at this very moment? How can it be anything more than an idle fantasy? And when the racist institutions we call prisons are disproportionately filled with Black and Indigenous inmates, how can a world without prisons be usefully written by a white person? And then should I put the idea aside, simply forget about it, or continue to follow the pain of these difficult questions? Because I do believe a world without prisons is absolutely required and how can we get there if we’re not able to imagine it? So then why a detective story? Simply because detective stories are things people very much like to read? Or because a detective story in a world without prisons is a paradox and I have the questionable belief that paradoxes are often productive. A paradox offers no relief to someone who is currently incarcerated. But there might be some stories which, at certain moments, do. I don’t believe those are the kinds of stories I am particularly able to write. Once again it’s a matter of experience. I said I was trying not to go in circles. I’m still trying.

I understand the desire for revenge. I have felt it, though I have rarely acted on such feelings. Instead I have let the desire for revenge fester within me. And yet, at the same time, I have never felt that if someone who hurt me was hurt in turn, it would make me feel any better. I have felt the desire for revenge but also see such desires as basically pointless. Sometimes I wonder if a sincere apology would make me feel better. Perhaps most of the apologies I have received didn’t quite feel sincere. Or I didn’t know how to take them in. I often find myself apologizing to others. I fear I might have gotten too good at it.

The existence of prisons, on one level, must have some connection to the desire for revenge. On another level they are racial capitalism’s mechanism for punishing the poverty it creates and managing surplus populations it has no use for. And white supremacy’s way of ensuring white people remain in power. Growing up during the cold war, one of the arguments I most often heard against the Soviet Union was that it sent all dissenting voices to the gulag, an argument that conveniently sidestepped the fact that the U.S. has the largest per capita prison population in the world. The pot calling the kettle burnt. And yet the desire for revenge, the feeling that if someone does something wrong they must be punished, is clearly at play in all these dynamics, if only as propaganda. 

If I mention the former Soviet Union it is because I find myself wondering to what extent Prison Abolition and Transformative Justice can replace Communism and Socialism as the words we use to describe the world we are fighting for. If we start with the premise of a world without prisons and without police – however difficult it might be at first to imagine – what other changes to society would we need to make in order to get us there? For much of the twentieth century, Communism and Socialism were the words, concepts and histories that represented the most hopeful leftist frontiers of possibility. But the twentieth century is now over. Human cultures haven’t always had prisons or police. If it was possible before it might be possible again.

The necessity of going in circles. The pleasure of going in circles.

Progress is a lie. A straight line is a lie. The idea that there is somewhere to go, also a lie. The further we go the more we come back around to where we began.

Like the seasons. (Though the seasons are now going somewhere. Perhaps they are going away. Or will they someday, on a much vaster almost unimaginable timescale, eventually end up back where they began?)

I worry what I’m writing is trite. Some sort of fake profundity. I want this to be a risk I am willing to take.

The twentieth century was full of the feeling that humanity could progress, until such feelings no longer felt sustainable. Atrocities and images of atrocities eviscerated a certain style of scientific hope. I fear this takes something devastating and makes it trite.

Change comes with backlash. Regression renews the desire for change. All trite.

For how many more sentences am I willing to take this risk?

I feel stuck and want to know what it’s like to come unstuck. So much of my life has been spent feeling stuck.

I most often avoid thinking about the extent this situation is simply the result and reality of poor health.

Chronic pain gives a feeling of stuckness.

And I take this feeling and make literature from it. A bottomless well of stuckness. A circle not a straight line.

How to change this kind of circle for some other kind? (One that’s less trite? Less stuck? More open?)

In my early twenties, when my health first collapsed, I gravitated toward what we might call spiritual poetry in order to cope.

Rumi. Hafez. Things like that. I have not revisited these sorts of poets since that time. There is no reason for me to be embarrassed for having read those poems yet I am.

I want a novel to be like an essay and also want a novel to be like a poem.

I want it to be like anything except a conventional novel. Anything is better than that. And yet nonetheless, paradoxically, I still want it to be a novel. Go figure.

The word “novel” perhaps only signifying that it is a book people might be interested in reading.

A way in which the status quo influences what I wish to call things.

The same thing with a different name is a different thing.

To write a book and call it music.

The writerly desire to escape from words.