Writing cracks open a door at juvenile hall

The exploration in philosophy and psychology of the nature of the self is among the most vexing yet enticing of all enterprises. For Immanuel Kant, the self is a form of consciousness that we experience essentially when we reflect upon it. Said differently, it is in the act of reflecting on my self that it reveals itself to me. It is not, in other words, anything that may be called embodied. You can’t lay your hands upon it or discern it on an MRI. In contrast, David Hume imagined that our (sense of) self is pretty much like a body living within our body. It’s the little man in the big man, as John Locke suggested.

William James may well have fired the starting gun for self explorations in psychology when -- seeking to differentiate the notion of the “me” from the notion of the “I” -- he advanced the ideas of the known and knowing self: “I think this is what I am, and I think this is how I know what I am.” However we understand these propositions, each represents a courageous stab at comprehending this elusive yet seemingly palpable thing called the self, this thing we turn to in the act appropriately labeled self-reflection. It is the thing that, in more popular discourse, we call our voice. “To know ourselves,” psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written, “is the greatest achievement of our species.... If we don’t gain control over the contents of consciousness we can’t live a fulfilling life, let alone contribute to a positive outcome of history.”

Which brings us to the writings of a group of young men typically forgotten or, more likely, maligned. The gifted writer Mark Salzman, noted for his previous books “Lying Awake,” “The Soloist” and “Iron and Silk,” traveled twice weekly for months to a Southern California juvenile hall to work with inmates -- murderers most of them -- ostensibly on their writing. A respectful, knowledgeable teacher with the sparest outline of a curriculum, Salzman befriended his young apprentices, eventually freeing them not merely to write prose -- and on occasion remarkable prose at that -- but to exercise their inner voices and explore their known and unknown selves, the very regions Kant and Hume, Locke and James traveled.

With the barest of hints, Salzman offers topics for essays. His class, changing in population almost from week to week as inmates are sentenced and shipped off to state youth centers or county prisons -- some of them to serve life terms -- responds. Indeed, more inmates want to enter the class. Granted, there are all the discussions and yelps and vulgarity one would expect, and the predictable conversations about sex and cars and girls and cars and sexual organs and cars. But at the interstices, Dale, Francisco, Benny, Kevin, Nathaniel, Victor, Patrick and Jimmy regularly stun their teacher with beautiful and telling narratives. (Nathaniel: “My mysteriously forgotten childhood which only exists through stories of my chaotic behavior.... The need to know my past causes me to retreat deeper into myself to ascertain the arcane beginning that brought me to where I stand.”)

Living with what social activist and author Luis J. Rodriguez calls a “smoldering rage,” many of the young writers rail against authority, a culture dominated by rules and punishments or families that forgot them. (Dale: “Deep down inside this angry person awakens.”) They write of incarceration and freedom, of family trips to cemeteries, of being blocked from the glories of nature, of events they rue, of mothers they have disappointed, of fathers they have never known. (Kevin: “The feeling of meaninglessness starts to set deep within my soul as each day goes by.”) In the end, these narratives constitute the products of consciousness explored. Whatever the power or content of an idiosyncratic story, what emerges stands as the construction of a living self, and in some instances a dying one. Salzman, in a word, has called them to their stories, and they respond exactly as his prison archangel, the indomitable Sister Janet who oversees the prison writing program, has decreed.

But what are we to make of these stories? How are we to interpret them? What do they tell us about a population of gang members who have committed violent acts and evoke in us all varieties of ideological and emotional reactions? Why not work with young people before they enter prison, Salzman is asked at a conference. And besides, what do you get out of this, his own father inquires. One suspects the author would agree that art is the child of the self and that one must honor the admonition of Ruth Kluger, author of “Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered”: “Listen to me, don’t take it apart, absorb it as I am telling it and remember it.” Salzman finds joy in the young men’s ability to express themselves despite the tragedy of their individual histories. (Kevin: “I am sitting here on the verge of death, thinking about what purpose I served on this earth, and to tell you the truth, I can’t think of a good reason for me being created.”)

One cannot read these notebooks and not be stirred, just as one cannot read them and not be left with questions. What, in the end, beside the obvious reasons for not asking a person going through adjudication about his crime, prevented Salzman from asking the young men about the horrible events that shaped their life? Did he fear destroying his delicate relationships with them? Did he fear denting a precarious artistic enterprise? Was there some relationship between his work with these young men and his being stuck in the novel he was writing at the time? And what more might he tell us regarding the penultimate sentence of the book, an almost throwaway line wherein he remarks that his experience teaching incarcerated youth made him decide to have children? Did seemingly hopeless boys miraculously provide him hope of some sort? (Francisco: Dear Mother, You don’t know how difficult it is to be a youngster. Sometimes I want to throw myself in your arms and cry, but since I’m so big I don’t dare to.”)

“True Notebooks” is as moving as it is sparse, as revealing as it is concealing, as straightforward as it is complex. In these ways it is just like our very selves. Each narrative offers still more words, still more notes to an etude that must be understood to be the music of the soul, a composition we call our singular voice. Each narrative brings a young man back to his memories and, in a way, back to a life he chooses to reveal to himself. (Unnamed student: “I would really like to know which way is home so that I may be at peace within my inner soul.” Kevin: “For most of my life I didn’t even know the real me until writing helped me dig deep down inside and extract my true self.”)

In the end, this magnificent teacher’s summons to his dedicated students contains a directive for us all: that one must commit one’s self to understanding the experiences and emotions alive with one’s self if one is to know and appreciate that self. Just as significant, a culture too, through its institutions, must affirm its citizens, not abandon them. (Kevin: When I touch down I’ll like sunlight again, but until that day comes, the night sky will be my counterpart.”)

All of which leaves us with an incomplete and voiceless world, not to mention grotesque conceptions of certain groups, like incarcerated gang boys, as well as fatuous notions of the self, which is, as Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche observed, the ultimate topic of all educational and personal endeavors. (Patrick: “I know that maybe, just maybe -- probably once in a decade -- I’ll get an unknown visitor passing by and reading my tombstone.” Benny: “I guess I’ll just wait until I have freedom; freedom to explore myself -- who I really am.”