Kidron St. James
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ALIENATION
The Stigma: there is no sense posturing around that. Not now. Deal with that later. The truth is, if you hurt like blazes, if the pain in your gut is bad enough, you crave tough answers to some of life's hardest questions. It's ungraceful. Yes, exactly, you're a big bag of self-pity; but I tell you, it is part of the territory, only for awhile. You analyze your situation to death: 'Why me...me, of all people?' You fantasize something sharp so you can slice open the skin of reality and slip out through into interstellar space. But something new every day postpones your decision to kill yourself. 'Tomorrow maybe, I'll do it,' you think, falling asleep.
You talk to anybody who cares. You find out who your true friends are, and you sense God nearby, very close, listening. Then He starts talking heavy stuff about His Sacrifice, forgiveness, atonement and rebirth. You think that all that might take a lifetime to grasp and you are right. You know things you will never be able to put into words. Faith. That's what God is fanning, a fire in the heart. All your words and acts come from that fire and that is where He sits speaking His answers, at your center. Little by little you understand Him. Believe me, I know you bask in the heat sometimes in tears and the light of wisdom reflects out eventually to the circumference of your entire life. You eventually overcome, from the inside out. You get a new conscience, a new fire pit. Certainly, you act on your faith; because, everybody acts out what they believe, or what they fear, but you do not fear. Because you obey God's principles, you are an impregnable fortress. You make it through this adventure but, this time you won't come back around to repeat it. You become expert at building the survival fire, guiding friends and family through your really rotten situation. They stop hurting too.
RESTORATION
In his youth, Kidron St. James aspired to become a missionary, but he became an award winning graphic arts communications professional. Near the summit of a twenty-two year climb in his career, at the age of 40, he suddenly fell victim to his own sins, to take another kind of journey through the very worst really rotten situation, the wilderness of prison life, 'living among a tribe of devils.' For the last ten years, he taught computer graphic arts design to students in vocational graphic arts, to whom many in society refer to as punks. Compelled to illuminate to family and friends the dense, opaque society behind the fences, year after year he wrote volumes of explanations in letters, until one day he began organizing the principles and concepts of survival, centered around the Survival Fire, a fire of words. Kidron St. James now writes like the missionary he wanted to become, a man whose heart has been broken, whose sins have been forgiven, whose conscience has been reconstructed, whose wisdom from hard experience bears scrutiny. Anyone in prison can benefit from Survival Fire.
CHAPTER 1ALIENATION
I feel disconnected, disassociated, isolated in this remote, far-fetched milieu. Society sweeps me away off into the dark. In here, it seems, I can not touch real life. Try as I may, I can not in any way construe this dustpan relative to life.
I wonder if I will soon crack under pressure, or, worse, if I have already gone mad. I grope for familiar points of reference. I feel peevish among my own thoughts. No longer can I ignore and deny implications of wholesale self-deception. It worries me sick. Groping over the uncanny perplexities of a sticky web of self-doubt, I wonder if I can find the edge. I do not trust my own emotions; I refuse to feel anything; but, I freeze. I let my heart fly. Then I weep. And I burn in the fire of my own desolate hell.
Primal scream? No effect. Pour out my guts in passionate letters? No effect. Tears? No effect. Angry dissent? No effect. Silence? No effect. Prayer? No effect. I feel utterly detached in an irrelevant cosmos spinning in a strange galaxy of insipid non-relationship.
I am ashamed, but I am relieved my friends can not actually see me here, because I can not trust their affection. I am incapable of believing them sincere. They patronize me, I think, saying nice things because, 'that's what you're supposed to say to a crazy person.' I loathe myself, an evil being, an object of divine hatred and vindication.
I am cut off from what I believe is essentially me.
Who now knows me sensual, sensitive, affectionate, loving? Those who reflect and dramatize these secrets no longer live with me.
How can anybody know me successful, smart, creative, a professional? I can not drive my powerful, shiny car from my affluent neighborhood to my all-important work where I earned my paycheck. I no longer possess possessions that define me, or speak the unspoken language of images with others of like-images.
Who now knows me by all those identifying things? My plants, my books, my magazines, my favorite knickknacks, my sweaters, my furniture, my wall hangings, my guitar, my back yard barbecue spit and furniture, my pets, my games, my kitchenware, my albums, my hobby tools; somebody is selling them for me at a garage sale. A garage sale: What a fitting epitaph for my life.
Who now knows me a family man? My children can not affectionately hang about my neck and pester me for their allowance. My wife and I can not set our table together for friends for barbecued ribs and corn on the cob.
Who now knows me social and romantic? I can not dress up, splash on some exotic scent, whisk my wife away to our favorite beach-side restaurant, and take her in my arms and swirl around dancing in the moonlight.
Who now knows me by my habits? Nobody will appreciate how neatly I folded and stacked my bath towels, and arranged the shelves in my garage, and filed my canceled checks, and trimmed the hedge.
Who now knows me religious? I can not occupy my place under the stained glass window.
Who now knows I love nature? I can not take my camera to the water or the woods. I can not take my children to the zoo.
Alienated from my favorite things, from my own images, from myself, I no longer glitter, make noise and reverberate in life. As far as real life is concerned, I no longer exist.
Essentially, I am dead. Figuratively, I am in hell.
(162 pages)
