In a milonga, a social event where improvised Argentine tango is danced, there is a wonderfully paradoxical element to how the dance’s characteristic abrazo (embrace) creates an intensely private world of only two. A memorable tanda (a set of three or four songs) is not characterised by the kind of fancy footwork one might see on a Strictly episode or in tango escenario (stage tango), but the quality of how you have embraced your partner and how they have embraced you. The abrazo is what makes improvisation possible between strangers who are dancing together for the first time: two people, cheek-to-cheek and chest-to-chest, speaking wordlessly to each other and for each other. You are, of course, also sharing the same space with other pairs: social Argentine tango is danced in a ronda, concentric rings of couples moving in the same direction around the dance floor. I’ve often thought about how a ronda resembles a planetary system when viewed from above: each pair moving in their own embrace, responding to the push-and-pull of other bodies, but always alone with each other, in their own little orbit.

When we were locked down, all of this went away. Two new jobs and two international relocations later, dancing feels like a dream from a past life now that I can no longer imagine the feeling of meeting someone in an abrazo for the first time or the thrill of taking flight in the last ten minutes of a ballet class. I have lived alone for a while, but after these recent upheavals, solitude has taken on a different sheen, especially with friends scattered across different cities and family more than 6500 miles away. As if to mimic the presence of other people, I recently found myself revisiting languages I know and picking up new ones. Thinking in a language other than English and fumbling with unfamiliar sounds seemed to make my own voice foreign and new, helping to fill the emptiness of a studio flat that isn’t big to begin with. When I learn a new word or a phrase, I sometimes translate it into all the languages I’m learning, just to talk to myself in different ways. When I try to think in another language that is not my first, I give myself an interlocutor, a voice that is both me and not-me, and in my solitude, when days begin to bleed into each other with no discernible edge, it gives me new awareness of myself, what I feel, and what I think about.

Take for example what I learnt today. In Korean, the expression for ‘I miss you’ — ‘보고 싶다’ — translates literally to ‘want to see [you]’, and so to miss someone is to desire the sight of them, just as I desire to see my mother again. The Mandarin Chinese expression for ‘I miss you’ is ‘我想念你’. It literally translates to ‘I am thinking thoughts of you’, but when my paternal grandmother tells me she misses me in Cantonese, she drops the noun and adds an intensifier to say ‘I think about you often’, ‘我很想你’. Like Mandarin Chinese, verbs in Cantonese don’t take tense conjugations, so in a way she’s saying that she’s thinking of me in the past, present, and future, just as I am thinking of her endlessly. When rendered literally, the French phrase ‘tu me manques’ means ‘you are lacking from me’, with the main pronoun foregrounding the one who is missed, rather than the person doing the missing. I used to apply this phrase in romantic contexts, but now I think about my maternal grandmother, her passing this summer, and how she is lacking from me in a place I cannot reach, a constant presence in her absence.

Like the French, the Spanish ‘te extraño’ foregrounds its object. Virtually all of my knowledge of Spanish is borrowed from tango music and I cannot untangle the language from its melodies. In Raul Iriarte and Miguel Caló’s rendition of Cada día te extraño más, Iriarte sings ‘every day I miss you more’ over the bandoneon of Caló’s orquesta, and I think about what my feet would do to mark the piano at the end of the phrase. Dancing alone is not quite the same. Translated literally, the Spanish ‘me falta haces’ also means ‘I need you’, and Caló’s orquesta plays for me again. I remember the exquisite violin running through Que falta que me hacés and how in the last verse, Alberto Podestá sings that if he finds his beloved, they will be ‘desesperadamente, los dos para los dos’—desperately, both of us for us. I think about how I’ve danced to this tango in London, Warsaw, Belgrade, and Lisbon, and wonder when I will see those places again.

It will be a while until my next flight (home; in the dance studio) and my next embrace (of my loved ones; a fellow dancer). But in my solitude, I’m learning to befriend and live with these versions of me, who articulate things about myself that I ordinarily wouldn’t. 보고 싶어요. 我很想你. Tu me manques. Te extraño.

Vanessa Lim (@vanessaolim) is a literary and intellectual historian of early modern England, with a special interest in the reception and use of classical rhetoric in the Renaissance.     

The post Talking to Myself appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Stationed outside the door, listening over an intercom and watching ink scratches playing across the paper scroll of the EEG was Captain George E. Ruff. A psychiatrist at the Aero-Medical Laboratory, Ruff had been recruited to administer the psychological testing of prospective astronauts, closely observing as subjects performed physiological feats of endurance and the cognitive labor of monitoring ersatz instruments. Prospective astronauts were not informed in advance of the isolation chamber and given intentionally ambiguous details of its purpose. They were only asked to remain alone in the room as long as they could, usually around four hours.

In the early Cold War, the wars of the future were already being fought by men in isolation. American pursuit of a high-technological strategy imagined far-flung and exotic places – the Arctic, the deep sea, outer space – as new terrains for warfare. Indeed, prior to the founding of NASA, space was imagined by the US Air Force as a military geography where soldiers safely ensconced in orbiting satellites might conduct war at a distance, monitoring the upper atmosphere for signs of nuclear attack and launching intercontinental ballistic missiles of their own. Space, like other ‘hostile environments,’ was replete with unique physiological and psychological hazards. Ruff was adamant that the ‘chief psychological problems [of life in space] will be isolation and prolonged exposure to danger.’ ^[1] Alone and set adrift from the earth, the astronaut might be uniquely vulnerable to the effects of boredom, monotony and loneliness.

Isolation, however, became a hazard of outer space by way of an imagined Communist prison. The ostensibly coerced public confession of war crimes by a number of prisoners captured by Communist forces during the Korean War sparked public anxiety, casting doubt on the reliability and moral character of American soldiers. This crystallised in a cultural imaginary of ‘brainwashing’, involving sophisticated techniques of behavioural modification allegedly deployed by sinister Soviet forces and their allies to plant false information in the minds of Americans and prompt defection to the Communist cause. Quickly becoming a recurrent trope in film and fiction, brainwashing acted as a catalyst within the human sciences, opening new and deep pocketed sources of funding— largely surreptitiously from intelligence agencies— for psychologists, psychiatrists, and social scientists working on related areas.

Prominent psychologist Donald O. Hebb capitalised on these new clandestine funding sources, obtaining a small sum of money from the Canadian Defense Research Board to study solitary confinement. These experiments, conducted by his graduate students and post-docs, used the raw material of McGill undergraduates to model captivity within the laboratory as a form of ‘perceptual isolation’, later rechristened ‘sensory deprivation’. Monotonous (and therefore effectively absent) sensory stimuli such as the ‘four bare walls’ of the prison cell was central to the psychological and neurological effects charted by Hebb’s students: a remarkable decline in cognitive performance, an ominous suggestibility, and, unexpectedly, vivid and bizarre hallucinations.

This work proved to be sensational, spurring countless replications in laboratories across the world. For some, the isolation apparatus offered a medium through which the sciences of mind might be gathered together for interdisciplinary research and brought to bear on a multiplicity of problems where a limited sensory environment was thought to be key— from the regression that might occur on a psychoanalyst’s couch to the ‘under performance’ of school children in urban, low-income environments. For military psychologists, isolation was a test to be passed, a mechanism through which the reliability of the soldier might be measured and observed.

Having performed over a hundred iterations of similar experiments in isolation at the Aero-Medical Laboratory, George Ruff had come to view the project in terms of personality psychology. Isolation functioned much like a projective test; the subject was

confronted with an indefinite, rather unstructured emptiness which he then ‘fills with himself.’ He uses characteristic modes of operation or devices of defense and exaggerates them to become, in a way, ‘more like himself.’ ^[2]

In this fashion, the isolation chamber served two purposes: a simulation of the monotony and solitude that was imagined as definitive of life in space and a medium through which the ‘integrity’ of the astronaut’s ego might be both tested and rendered as data for the observing scientist. What one did in isolation was scientific evidence of who one really was.

Feeling his way around the dark room, Glenn—who would later become one of the first men in space and, later still, the senator of Ohio for some twenty years— soon found a desk and a legal pad. ^[3] Digging in the pockets of his khakis, Glenn realised he had inadvertently smuggled in a pencil and began to document his isolation. Writing in long hand crabbed by the darkness of the room, he mused that

it is so seldom these days that we get a chance to really be alone and think about the things that really count.

After trying in vain to locate the source of a mysterious hum, producing visible sparks of static electricity by ripping pages from the notebook— ‘a good long one that time!’ — and noting that he couldn’t ‘help but think of Helen Keller’, Glenn began to write poetry, a form of ‘mental gymnastics which at the same time accomplishes something.’ In a paean to science, he scrawled,

To mankind’s ever broadening store of knowledge, one must give/ his own peculiar talent, so that all may better live

before, growing bored, he folded much of the remaining pages of the notebook into paper airplanes and threw them across the room.

Much to his credit, Glenn intuited that this was both an exercise in constraint and an empty canvas onto which he was expected to paint himself as an astronaut. Glenn, often referred to by his more easy-going peers as ‘the Boy Scout’ was happy to oblige, already preoccupied with fashioning himself as a square jawed, squeaky clean exemplar of American masculinity. Others proved less creative, finding the experience baffling and using the unstructured time to take a mildly illicit nap. At least one candidate, Pete Conrad, was disqualified for having, in Ruff’s expert opinion, a personality ill-suited to the isolation of space. It should be noted that Conrad was accepted as an astronaut for the Gemini missions a few years later and would briefly hold a record for duration of time spent in orbit, exhibiting little of the imagined effects of isolation.

Whether the isolation chamber could provide a useful simulation of the monotony of space was uncertain, if not doubtful. Several of Ruff’s scientific peers launched withering critiques, citing both the continued presence of stimuli and the relative absence of danger, something certainly endemic to both space flight and solitary confinement. [4] Indeed, the stakes of this simulation seemed remarkably ambiguous to the prospective astronauts under Ruff’s watchful eye. Future astronaut Wally Schirra later wrote, ‘I have no idea how long I was in that room or why I was there, nor did I care.’ [5] For Ruff, this was useful information in itself.

For NASA, isolation ceased to be a hazard of space following these first successful flights. NASA’s official technical report concerning Glenn’s orbit around the Earth states succinctly that ‘no sensory deprivation […] was noted.’ [6] By Gemini and the next round of space flights, this was beneath mentioning. Sadly, Ruff, who had left the Air Force following Project Mercury and expected to have a career within the civilian agency, found himself largely unwelcome in space science circles. Relegating psychiatrists to ‘screening out’ potential mental illness, NASA would not conduct another formal study of the personalities of astronauts until 1987. This study did not include an isolation chamber.

For a brief moment in the late 1950s, scientific interest in isolation cannily dramatised all that remained beyond the reach of the notoriously control-obsessed American space program: the human psyche. Isolation continued to shape the cultural context in which space flight was understood for much of the next few decades. Indeed, the first ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, aired several months before Glenn arrived at Wright-Patterson, featured an ersatz astronaut in an isolation chamber having a vivid and extended hallucination of being the only person on earth, a shattering experience of loneliness. As the unfortunate experimental subject is carted away on a stretcher, an observing psychiatrist speaks into the camera,

we can feed stomachs with concentrates. […] We can pump oxygen in, waste material out. But there’s one thing we can’t simulate. That’s a pretty basic need — man’s hunger for companionship, the barrier of loneliness. That’s one we haven’t licked yet.

In his closing monologue, as the camera slowly pans toward the stars, host Rod Sterling, himself a former test pilot, intones that

up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation.

^[1] Ruff, George E. “Psychological Effects of Space Flight.” Aerospace Medicine, July 1961.

^[2] Ruff, Captains George E., et al. “Studies of Isolation and Confinement.” Aerospace Medicine, Aug. 1959.

^[3] “John Glenn’s notes from isolation room, 1959,” folder 39, box 69, Non-Senate Papers Sub-group, John Glenn Archives, Ohio State University.

[4] Psychiatrist Jay Shurley, for one, was highly critical of Ruff’s work. Shurley assisted with the concurrent physiological and psychological testing of prospective female astronauts—most notably, Gerri Cobb– using his own water immersion isolation apparatus; in his opinion, this was a far superior simulation of the solitude of space.

[5] Schirra, Wally, and Richard N. Billings. Schirra’s Space. Naval Institute Press, 1995, 61-62.

[6] “Technical Results of the First Manned Orbital Flight from the United States,” undated but presumably 1962, Source Files on Project Mercury 1952-1968, Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Archives, 97.

Jeffrey Mathias is an AHA/NASA Space History Fellow and a PhD Candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He tweets @cheffmathias

The post The Astronaut Alone appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Prisoners of war experienced social isolation and displacement for lengthy periods of time, and left a variety of sources describing the psychological impact of distance and dislocation. Kept at a distance from the immediate fighting and the possibility of death in battle, British P.O.W.s nevertheless found themselves separated from their homes, families and normal lives for an indefinite period of time. Boredom, loneliness and isolation were widely felt as prisoners attempted to fill their time and keep in touch with those distant from themselves. As time wore on P.O.W.s began to describe themselves as ‘Stalag happy’, a term used to express feelings of irritability, fatigue and depression related to lengthy imprisonment.

Neurotic symptoms had been observed in prisoners during the First World War, and by 1939 it was accepted that the abnormal conditions of captivity could lead to psychological distress. Adolph Vischer, Swiss surgeon and expert on prisoner neurosis, claimed that while solitary confinement was known to have an adverse mental impact on civilian prisoners, the ‘confinement in mass’ practiced in P.O.W. and internment camps could be just as damaging.

‘Loneliness in the midst of company’ was destabilising, as prisoners chafed at the lack of privacy while simultaneously longing for more familiar companions.

Too long in captivity and it was feared that these feelings of distress would result in permanent personality changes. According to army psychiatrists, prisoners kept captive for lengthy periods were at risk of ‘great changes which prove very much more difficult to reverse’, including but not limited to ‘deep and serious bitterness’ and ‘marked social anxiety or loss of confidence in social relations and situations’. ‘Barbed wire disease’ resulting from prolonged imprisonment and absence from home could produce a myriad of symptoms, but central to this emergent illness was a sense of social anxiety and difficulty engaging with others. Many P.O.W.s described experiencing strange dreams, a phenomenon recently reported in the media among those locked down due to coronavirus [1].

At a primal level, the isolation and emotional deprivation of a prison camp robbed individuals of their ability to act as social beings. Psychiatrist Henry Rollin claimed in 1948 that symptoms in prisoners were produced by their inability to satisfy ‘emotionally saturated urges’. Captives were deprived of relationships which could have provided them with ‘compassion, tenderness, understanding and comfort’, and their natural aggression was turned inwards resulting in ‘inertia, apathy or depression’. The natural urge ‘to make something of life’ was frustrated inside ‘the sterile vacuum of prison’.

The misery could ultimately lead to a total breakdown in morale. Tom Main, psychiatrist and pioneer of group therapies for mental illness, compared captivity to the evacuation of children and wrote that the removal of individuals from their existing community ‘produced among some of the people so displaced a loneliness and confused distress and a dissatisfaction with their new strange society that expressed itself in poor standards of conduct’. Feeling this dislocation, prisoners attempted to keep their connection with families and friends alive by writing home as frequently as possible. Respondents were allowed to send ‘snapshots or unmounted photographs of a personal nature’, and POWs frequently reported that they talked to or kissed these photographs as physical traces of home.

Beyond letters and photographs, prisoners attempted to include themselves in the communities they had left in any way possible. Sundays were known among prisoners as a time for ‘re-living’ their lives at home and daydreaming of spending the day with their family acting out the usual routine. Some prisoners even attempted to synchronise activities with those still at home, for example going to bed at the same time or writing to each other on the same day [2].

On the home front, P.O.W.s’ families were reassured that they were capable of mentally adapting to their new surroundings and enjoying themselves within the camps. The Prisoner of War magazine issued to prisoners’ relatives informed readers in May 1942 that:

Probably all the time their lot is nothing like as bad as you think. They have accepted the routine of their new existence and get as big a kick out of the latest Red Cross food parcel or the new books in the library, or the latest letter from home, as ever you got out of a new frock or the latest Leslie Howard film.

At the same time, relatives were frequently reminded of the importance of letters to the prisoners’ morale and their responsibility to keep in touch.

While those behind barbed wire hoped that liberation would bring an end to their feelings of isolation and ennui, many were sorely disappointed. British prisoners of war spent up to five years longing for their release and repatriation, but many experienced distress on their return. Official reports noted that repatriated prisoners were ‘disillusioned by the contrast between real life at home and the romanticised versions of it which were common in the enforced day-dreaming of stalag life’.

Psychiatrists described this period of depression as ‘the normal reactions of the individual to disillusionment, following a form of social isolation and absence from home’. Having spent significant amounts of time dreaming of familiar company and home fires, repatriated prisoners found themselves craving isolation and solitude. Many reported an inability to tolerate the company of friends and neighbours, even for a few minutes.

In the current pandemic, psychologists have warned that with the end of ‘lockdown’ people may find a return to sociability more difficult than expected. Countries ahead of the U.K. in their release from restrictions have reported a rise in demand for mental health services, as immediate elation is followed by disillusionment and depression [3]. Those expecting to exit their homes to find their relationships and ordinary lives unaltered may be in for a rude awakening.

Repatriated prisoners described a process of adjustment as their horizons expanded beyond the limited world of the camp. G.C. Pether, writing in the Lancet in 1945 to describe his feelings upon being liberated in 1918, said that after years locked away

the sensation of moving as free men was strange and alarming… For so long had the barbed wire confined them that many felt uncertain of themselves if they went more than a short distance from home.

At the same time many repatriates were dealing with a sense of loss, as the world they re-entered was very different to that they remembered. Prisoners interviewed after their return noted that ‘England in wartime was very different from the pre-war England of their nostalgic dreams’. While we may see a further lifting of restrictions in the coming weeks, it will be important to take the post-lockdown world for what it is rather than looking back to a supposedly better time before.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/insomnia-and-vivid-dreams-rise-pandemic-anxiety-180974726/

[2] Claire Makepeace, ‘Living Beyond the Barbed Wire: The Familial Ties of British Prisoners of War Held in Europe during the Second World War’, Historical Research, vol. 86/no. 231 (2013)

[3] https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0425/1134791-elation-then-disappointment-exiting-lockdown-in-china/

Gabriel Lawson (@GabeLawson95) is a PhD student in the Department of History at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on mental health, British prisoners of war and resettlement in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The post COVID-19 and Captivity appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

I have never been in a minimum-security prison but recently I had to self-isolate for a fortnight after returning to Toronto from the United States. When friends asked me how I was after those weeks of quarantine, I said that it felt like moving from solitary confinement to a minimum-security prison. I was joking, but now I am not sure that this could be received as a joke. Since returning, I’ve heard again and again from people that living in lockdown feels like being in prison.

Friends sometimes say to me that this new way of being reminds them of my years in prison and the research I’ve been doing on imprisonment and solitary confinement. I’ve smiled every time, until the other day when walking with a friend she looked into my face and demanded an answer.

“Is it like being in prison? It isn’t, is it, really?”

And we are walking up and down our local streets. People are out, not in groups, and not much side by side, but alone, or two by two, or one or two parents with their children. We are talking about our virtual connection with family, friends and associates in Montreal, in the United States, in Europe and Asia. We report on the new hobbies and skills we have taken up. We can remain in our rooms and be in touch with the entire world, even without the internet – just a radio and an old-fashioned phone breaks the isolation.

How, then, can this self-isolation be like imprisonment? What is it about this new experience that makes people think of prison? Of course, there is prohibition on freedom to move, to act, to be in public space in the usual ways, to interact and get together with others. Isn’t it the same thing, the freedom that imprisonment aims to take away from ‘wrong-doers’?
Yes and no.

In this self-sort-of-isolation you and I are active participants. You and I have our ideas, we have demanded measures to protect ourselves, to protect our vulnerable bodies. You and I have the agency to hold the authorities accountable for the forms and extent of this prohibition. In that way we have not lost our place in the public space. So long as this prohibition has not become an authoritarian decree backed by state violence, we are still citizens of our countries, and by virtue of that citizens of the world.

But a prisoner is not just stripped of freedom to move, interact and communicate. A prisoner’s very being as a citizen, as a full participant in her own affairs and those of the world at large, is negated. Not that she does not have any agency, nor that she is stripped of her voice. No. The prisoner has voice and agency. It is the society, the free people, that turn their backs on the prisoner, make their eyes and ears blind and deaf.

This is one aspect of the way a prison system works: we isolate them.

There is a huge difference between deciding to stay away from other people and being forced into a corner away from people. They are not of the same order. As I think about this, I realise that this practice of self-restraint on our freedom can actually lay the basis for new types of empowerment and solidarity. Now we can relate more intimately to the stranger who moves to the middle of the street as we pass each other.

Such avoidance is not a sign of rejection but of respect; it is giving room. Of course, the fear for the self is always lurking there. But again, that fear is in everyone. And finally, now that it has come to the surface, for everyone and everywhere, we can recognize this fear without shame, without denial, the ever-present ancient fear for-the-self. At the same time, we are experiencing feeling for the others, even for prisoners.

Constrained to our neighborhoods and homes, we find in ourselves an ability to imagine the intimate experience of people across the world.

When was the last time we collectively stayed conscious for this long about the effects of our actions on other people, on our capacity to make them to suffer?

Can we give that proper recognition as well? Recognizing the presence of another ancient feeling, our care for others? In these recognitions are the seeds of our empowerment and a global solidarity.

Forced isolation, imprisonment, is a move in the opposite direction. Forced isolation thrives on exaggerated fear-for-the self; it disempowers prisoners by smothering them in their ancient fear for their isolated selves; it works by breaking the possibility of solidarity. Does that need more elaboration? I assume not.

At the end of our brisk walk my friend and I look at each other, standing a few feet apart and sending air kisses. Our departure was as incorporeal as our arrival. Arriving at the rendezvous, we opened our arms from a distance; our greetings fell on the ground between us and with their echo we began our walk.

And at the end both of us automatically wrapped our arms around our separate bodies and rocked for just a few seconds. This is like being in prison, visits without bodily contact, with no ability to embrace your loved ones, breath them in, smell them, feel their reality through caresses. Have you ever before felt that, the deprivation of embracing your grandchildren, your vulnerable siblings, parents, your friends? Deprived of giving and receiving a body-to-body assurance, especially at a time and place of uncertainty and danger.

A month ago, I said goodbye to my parents and brothers, flying back to Toronto. This came at the end of week when our hugs had become hesitant. For most of the two months I had spent with them we had all settled in our daily hello and goodbye rituals of embracing. Each in his and her time, allowed his or her body to welcome the hug, to arrive into it and hug back.

Then when the air of uncertainty was spreading around the world, bringing fear of a threat lurking inconspicuously to leach onto the most vulnerable ones, my hugs lost their firmness. My body had to let go of their bodies, my hands and my lips had to hold back their desire to land a kiss, to caress their vulnerability. We all did it; we all hesitated and gradually allowed this sensory deprivation.

We all participate in our decision and our action of holding our bodies away. We all experience its complexities, its tensions. It is a deprivation, it leaves a strange taste in its trace, but in some ways it is comforting. It is for that comfort, that sense of mutual protection, that each of us partakes in the decision and practice of holding our bodies back. This is not like prison.

In prison there is no complexity nor inner tension in experiencing sensory deprivation. This is what prison is, deprivation in multiple layers and degrees.

Prisoners do not decide for or against their corporeally deprived state. A prisoner is the recipient of it.

Year after year, I stood there behind thick dividing glass, watching my parents and my child entering and exiting the visiting hall. Sending air kisses, caressing and pressing on the indifferent glass. Not that you don’t get used to it. You adjust; you accept it if you don’t want to lose your strength, but the deprivation remains deep in your tissues and the tissues of your loved ones.

Twice I saw my parents outside the visiting room. Once during a visit, I told them that I would be taken out to a hospital on such and such date and with gestures I asked them to be there too. Arriving at the hospital my escort directed me towards the Orthopedic waiting area. We were all incognito. The two female guards on other side of me wore no sign on their clothes to distinguish them from ordinary people, neither did I. The male guards easily fitted in among other young men in their various military fatigues; they walked ahead and behind us. I looked at people’s faces, their bodies, their trailing children, I picked up their voices while we passed by them, and searched for familiar faces.

Then I saw them in the waiting area, walking down the hall towards me. They saw me. The shock in their faces gave way to happiness which quickly changed into anxiety. Seeing me and trying not to look at me. I still see their faces walking down that corridor. My dad holding onto my mom’s shoulder as together they veered towards the right. The guards chose the empty chairs on the left side and we sat with me in the middle. My parents sat a few chairs down from us on the other side of the hall. We looked at each other. Now what?

Now sitting a few steps away from each other, four at most. We could get up and embrace each other, holding tight till the world’s end, and we could not move at all. I do not know what showed on my face. But in theirs I could see the struggle they were going through. Colour slowly came back to their faces. I smiled faintly, moving my head looking up and down the hallway. It is hard to sit and do nothing. My mother’s tears fell; the woman beside her said something to her and I could see my mother was telling her what was going on. The woman shook her head a couple of times and looked towards me.

That was the extent of our agency; we decided to be in each other’s presence outside of prison, in a ‘normal’ setting. We accepted the risk and acted on our plan.

It was different than seeing them within the prison walls, through the glass. I saw them as free people, sort of, walking and sitting among the others. Feeling, living the tension of being at arm’s length with an abyss between us: this was our own decision and action. We chose to be in each other’s presence in a public space, but the distance between our bodies was the work of imprisonment.

Shokoufeh Sakhi is an independent scholar and researcher, researching imprisonment and the self, the sociality of the isolated subject and the politics of memory. 

The post Self Isolation as Imprisonment? appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Involuntary solitude has always been a feature of human society. Disease has often been a factor. In medieval England people suffering from leprosy (Hansen’s disease, as it is now known) were stigmatised and shunned. Many were confined to leper-houses but some wandered the countryside, begging. Others, if the disease was not too obvious or debilitating, tried to carry on as normal. But they were subject to severe sanctions.

People suspected of having leprosy might find themselves legally ejected from society. In 1420 the sheriff of Lincolnshire was chastised by the courts for failing to have carried out an assessment of a Boston mercer, John Louth, who

commonly mingles with the men of the aforesaid town and communicates with them in public as well as private places and refuses to remove himself to a place of solitude, as is customary and as it behoves him to do, to the serious danger of the aforesaid men and their manifest peril on account of the contagious nature of the aforesaid disease [1].

Many other communicable diseases, most famously the bubonic plague, forced people to sequester themselves, in their case as a preliminary to almost certain death.

But seclusion was widely acknowledged to have its own dangers. From antiquity onward, people had been warned about the pathological effects of solitariness. Too much solitude was said to breed a host of debilitating symptoms, ranging from depression (melancholy) and extreme anxiety to wild fantasising and outright insanity. In 1621 the Oxford don Robert Burton, in his compendious Anatomy of Melancholy, counselled his readers to avoid solitude, for those that were solitary risked ‘fear, sorrow…discontent, cares, and weariness of life’.

Even people whose vocations drew them to solitude were said to imperil their psychological health. The 14^th century Italian poet Petrarch wrote a famous panegyric to his solitary lifestyle (De Vita Solitaria, 1346), yet even his ‘sweet solitude’ was marred by bouts of acedia, a combination of ennui and gloom from which reclusive scholars, monks and hermits were also said to suffer. Jesus counselled his followers to ‘pray to thy Father in secret’ (Matthew 6:6) but throughout Christian history solitary worship was – and remains – contentious.  Here the risks were as much moral as psychophysical. As happened with Eve in Eden, Satan lay in wait for solitaries, tempting them with forbidden desires. ‘Solitude is one of the devil’s scenes’, John Donne, poet and Dean of St Pauls Cathedral, sermonised on Easter day 1630.

Seven years earlier Donne wrote about unwanted solitude in words that have special resonance for us today, as we self-isolate to protect ourselves from Covid 19. Of course many of us are not living alone but in households, sometimes very crowded ones, as we long for healthier times to return. But aloneness is the fate of many. In an article posted on History Workshop Online this month, David Vincent and I discussed the impact of this solitariness. Our article begins with Donne’s cri de coeur from his lone sickroom:

As Sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist, from coming…Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

The rest of our article is available to read here.

[1] Euan Roger, ‘Living with Leprosy in Late Medieval England’, National Archives blog, 5^th November 2019.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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In 1824 Mary Shelley published a novel, The Last Man, that conjures up just such a trauma. In this futurist fiction a plague sweeps across continents, annihilating civilizations and causing global unrest. A novel that begins as the collective biography of a circle of friends, loosely based on Shelley’s own, gradually gives way to a tale about the inexorable power of disease, until only one individual remains – the solitary narrator, Lionel Verney.

If, as Jill Lepore has recently written, ‘the plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings’, then The Last Man is not a conventional plague novel [2]. Inspired by the enlightened ideals of a man called Adrian (modelled on Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe), Verney and his friends understand the international consequences of the plague, and the need for political action.

They oppose self-serving populist policies promoted by England’s resident demagogue, a man known only as Ryland. Shelley’s characters refuse to abandon each other, intervening to assist others, and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Together they pursue a final desperate ‘scheme of migration’ to Italy in the hope of salvaging the remnant of humanity.

But Shelley is unsparing in her depiction of the limits of individual agency and the fallacy of personal exceptionalism.

Each person ‘trusted that their beloved family would be the one preserved’, but the plague demolishes ‘that pertinacious optimism which…characterized our human nature.’

The Last Man transforms the felicity of youth and intelligence and love through a narrative which compels the reader to confront the fact that horrible things are not reserved for the poor, the immoral, or the stupid, or those who happen to be in other countries. But while The Last Man uses the plague as a catalyst for its deconstruction of society, culture, and friendship, it is not ultimately a tale of deadly infection. It is a story about an apocalypse of loneliness.

Shelley had explored loneliness before. Frankenstein’s creature is, after all, Romanticism’s avatar of ultimate alienation. The creature’s wretched fate demonstrates the monstrous deprivations of basic sociality: not to share in family is to be tormented by exclusion. But in The Last Man, the experience of familial affection only serves to amplify the pains of solitude. As it progresses, the novel accumulates scenes of death: infants, parents, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Its bills of mortality are unremitting; Shelley presents the reader with the impossible calculus of loss.

The novel’s account of global pandemic draws on her reading of Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a work which tries to capture the impact of contagious disease by shifting between bare enumeration, anecdote, and the isolated perspective of its first-person narrator – the quasi-anonymous H.F. Yet if Journal of the Plague Year provides Shelley with an historical account of the paranoia, confusion, and horror of contagious disease, it also furnishes her with a sense of individual alienation peculiar to Defoe.

In The Last Man’s crowning catastrophe, Verney’s two remaining friends are drowned in a storm. He finds himself alive on the shore of Italy:

For an instant I compared myself to that monarch of the waste – Robinson Crusoe. We had both been thrown companionless – he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world.

The schemes of material accumulation and improvement that Crusoe finds diverting cannot comfort Shelley’s relic. While Defoe’s desert island is reassuringly temporary, Shelley’s castaway’s predicament is permanent.

‘Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum?’, Verney asks.

Such vertiginous sense of isolation, both temporal and existential, fuels the terror of the final pages of The Last Man. Humanity has receded ‘like a tide…leaving [the individual] blank and bare in the midst.’ Plague is merely Shelley’s pretext for presenting the malaise of ‘utter irremediable loneliness’: a condition of pathological intensity.

The Last Man thus deconstructs the optimistic possibilities of transcendence found elsewhere in romantic writing. In her novel Mathilda, Shelley was able to imagine a ‘perfect solitude’ where generous stores of self-subsistence meant you ‘wish for no friend’ because your own thoughts were company enough. Verney, wandering disconsolately from one empty town to another, leaves in each a desperate message: ‘Friend, come! I wait for thee!’ The irony of this long novel is that it is written without hope of a readership, yet desperately seeks an audience.

This tragic predicament – on the cusp between the need to communicate and consciousness of its futility – is Beckett without the jokes. Who is Verney in this empty world? The stark conditions of a friendless futurity dramatically reframe the philosopher David Hume’s lament:

‘Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return?’ [3].

In The Last Man, loneliness is a kind of primal anguish: the reactivation of world-annihilating pain which critics have frequently connected to the traumatic death of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, days after her birth. As Mary Jacobus has argued, Shelley’s writing is ‘suffused with maternal mourning as well as survivor guilt’ [4]. Verney’s grief – denatured and dispossessed – is that of the childless mother.

The Last Man is an astonishing work, but it does not spare its readers. Its vision of the hapless survivor living a kind of posthumous existence resonates with contemporary feelings of climate grief as well as the sense of helplessness as we confront COVID-19. Can such a book assist in this present moment?

Peter Melville has argued that Verney’s despair becomes ‘a kind of antibody that allows him to live with and confront the devastation and loneliness of his tragic fate’. By the close of the novel, Verney’s persistence makes him a monument to human endurance: ‘a figure whose psychical fortitude sustains and produces an enduring synthesis between contrary mental states—between hope and despair—which in turn embodies … the spectral image of good health’ [5].

Framing Shelley’s novel within the current COVID-19 crisis, Eileen Hunt Botting notes that ‘Verney realizes that even if he is the last man on Earth, he must live as though he is not. He must sustain humanity by acting upon his profound sense of the interconnectedness of his fate with other forms of life — human or not’ [6]. If the literature of loneliness inoculates against the risks of enforced, unwilled isolation, it does so by reminding us of what we stand to lose if we forget each other.

[1] Keith Snell, Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750-2000 (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 1.

[2] Jill Lepore, ‘What our contagion fables are really about’, The New Yorker, March 30, 2020.

[3] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), London, 1987, p. 316.

[4] Mary Jacobus, First Things: Reading the Maternal Imaginary (Routledge, 1995), p. 107.

[5] Peter Melville, ‘The Problem of immunity in The Last Man’, SEL: 1500-1800, 2007, 47:4.

[6] Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Mary Shelley Created ‘Frankenstein,’ and Then a Pandemic’, The New York Times, March 13, 2020.

Rebecca Barr (@R_A_Barr) is a lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. 

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Was solitude the ‘palace of learning’ that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid-eighteenth century the debate became fiercely personal during a public quarrel between two philosophical luminaries: David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the 1760s Rousseau faced persecution from state and church authorities in France and Switzerland. Hume gave him refuge in England. The relationship rapidly turned toxic as the convivial Hume sought to manage his notoriously reclusive charge. Solitude became a casus belli in a war of words that fascinated intellectual Europe. But the fracas was more complex than it appeared.

Who are we with, when we are alone? For Hume, no less than Rousseau, the question proved inescapable, in both his personal career and his philosophy. A closer look at two thinkers who, on the surface, were a study in opposites, reveals much about the vicissitudes of solitude in the life of the creative mind.

Barbara Taylor’s article on this subject in History Workshop Journal can be read here.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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Prisons are grey, colourless places. They are designed to facilitate the management and control of incarcerated populations. The Security Housing Unit [SHU] in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison is an especially intense site of sensory and social deprivation. Prisoners are isolated 22.5 hours a day in a windowless concrete box that both separates them from others and exposes them to regular interruptions for “count,” unannounced cell inspections, and the booming noise of other prisoners.

Many prisoners in extreme isolation come undone. “It’s like time broke,” says one prisoner in the Pelican Bay SHU. “You live the same life over and over”; “I don’t remember what my house looked like, what my sister looks like”. Jeremy Pinson, a prisoner at a federal supermax in Colorado, writes, “The silence can drive you crazy. Makes you feel as if the world has ended but you somehow survived and are trapped”. Jack Powers, incarcerated at the same prison, writes, “The world outside is like another planet…I feel like I am trapped within a disease”. [Haney, p.64, 69; cited in Greene.]

Donny Johnson survived more than twenty years in the Pelican Bay SHU. In the world-destroying space of the supermax prison cell, he managed to create a world of vibrant colour, form, and meaning through painting.

Deprived of art supplies, Johnson crafted a paintbrush using his own hair, wrapped around the plastic barrel of a prison-issued pen and anchored in place with discarded mustard packets. For paint, he used the pigment from M&Ms and Skittles that he purchased from the prison commissary, adding a few drops of tap water and swirling the candies around with his paintbrush. This ritual of drawing colour from food, then using this colour to explore and express the mythic dimensions of his own emotional life, opened up a space of freedom for Johnson, even in a situation of extreme isolation and control.

In an essay on his artistic practice, Johnson writes, “Art has dramatically changed my life and widened my scope. I see more, feel more, and so more than I’ve ever done before since I started splashing these colours around… For me, art could be called redemption. I’ve never felt so whole, loved, and creative as I have this last couple of years.” [Johnson n.d, pp. 8-9.]

In my book on solitary confinement, I argue that extreme isolation in prison is a form of violence against the relational structure of Being-in-the-world. I engage with the testimony of prisoners such as Jack Henry Abbott, who condemns solitary confinement as a form of “civil death” that could “alter the ontological makeup of a stone”. According to Abbott, “If you are in that cell for weeks that add up to months, you do not ignore all this and live “with it”; you enter it and become a part of it.” [Abbott, pp.114, 45, 29.]

So how is it that some prisoners are able to find redemption – either through art, or in other ways – in extreme isolation? Does Donny Johnson’s experience suggest that, in some cases at least, solitary confinement is therapeutic? I don’t think so. In my view, the creative expression of both Johnson and Abbott does not diminish the violence of forced isolation, but rather attests to the possibility of sustaining a meaningful sense of relationality, even in institutions that are designed to break people apart at the hinges.

In a series of letters to his pen pal, Steve Kurtz, Johnson describes his artistic practice as a struggle for survival:

When you’re buried alive you dig for your life. Digging where you delve in solitary confinement, into the unconscious, I found a pool of mythic images and painted them with my own DNA. [Johnson 2008, p.1.]

Just as writing became a way for Jack Henry Abbott to survive years in prison by reflecting on his own experience and articulating the logic of civil death, painting became a way for Donny Johnson to escape this logic – if only temporarily – by reflecting on his own emotions and expressing himself in colour and form.

In his letters, Johnson states very clearly that this capacity for self-expression comes at a cost: “I have completely lost tactile touch with the larger world as I languish in solitary confinement for decades and my work compensates for that human need for contact.” [Johnson 2006, p.3.]

He describes the barriers he had to overcome, in a way that recalls Abbott’s own account of the fusion between prisoner and cell:

One wears the mask of hardness as a rule in the prison milieu as a means of survival. At some point, you inevitably become that visage of stone. My art is chipping away at that marble to release the prisoner from the stone. [Johnson 2006, p.2.]

What releases the prisoner from this stone? For Johnson, it is not just the artwork itself, understood as a final product, but the whole process of opening a space for creative self-expression: “The ritual aspect of cleaning the work area, mixing the colours, doing the base, and laying out the brushes and water in milk cartons or rinsing and getting started, prepares the unconscious to unfold in art… At first, I fidget or my leg falls asleep and I shift around. Then I fall completely into the work and timelessness sets in and I’m in that scale world [of the unfolding artwork] and espying it simultaneously.” [Johnson 2006, p.2.]

Johnson’s account of both feeling absorbed in a process and reflecting on this process as it unfolds recalls a scene in Jacobo Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, where Timerman describes his ritualistic practice of “moving a hand or leg and observing the movement, fixedly, in order to experience some sense of mobility” and to deepen his own self-relation in a space that threatened to sever his physical and emotional Being-in-the-world. [Timerman, p.35.]

In her reading of Timerman’s memoir, Laura Doyle suggests that the practice of watching himself move “fascinates him exactly because of the way it slips like a bike pedal on a loose chain – it stretches him across the “hiatus” of being, and in that stretching and slipping affirms an opening, a space for enactment, a condition of anticipation. A doubling and a future.” [Doyle, pp.190-1]

Likewise, Johnson’s absorption in colour and form offers an escape from the regimented time and space of the prison. On one hand, this is an escape from time:

I go into a timeless zone on pieces like a hypnotic trance… I sometimes don’t hear the guard walking by the cell for count.

On the other hand, this timeless zone opens a different relation to the future, or to what Johnson calls “the seeds of growth and potential.” [Johnson n.d, p.8; Johnson n.d, p.5.]

By following the call of an emerging form in his painting, Johnson is able to make himself vulnerable in a way that does not make him unsafe; he can let the prison mask of hardness fall without exposing himself to violence. In Johnson’s own words, “Colour stimulates its own dynamic as I work… [T]he surface coming into form calls for a certain colour to make it right… You have to struggle and let go of an idea to reach its essence… In a way, I’m creating a world and its constituent parts must fit.” [Johnson 2006, p.1.]

By painting, Johnson deepens his own self-relation in a space that systematically undermines the relational structure of personhood. But this practice also helps him to sustain relationships with absent others: “Without the sustaining love of my Mom and [his pen pal] Steve, I don’t know if art would have happened to me.” [Johnson n.d, pp.7-8.]

Award-winning British filmmaker Mike Dibb has made a documentary about Donny Johnson’s artistic practice and his relationships with family and pen pal Steve Kurtz. The film is in post-production, which has stalled pending further funding. If this film sees the light of day, then the public will have a chance to learn more about Johnson’s remarkable journey to self-expression, even in the extreme isolation of a supermax prison cell.

References

Abbott, Jack Henry. 1991. In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. Introduction by Norman Mailer. New York: Vintage Books.

Doyle, Laura. 2006. “Bodies Inside/Out: Violation and Resistance from the Prison Cell to The Bluest Eye.” In Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, 183-208. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Greene, Susan. 2017. “The Gray Box: The Inhumanity of Solitary Confinement,” The Colorado Independent (Sept. 25). Accessed on Oct. 12, 2019 at https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2017/09/25/colorado-solitary-confinement-gray-box-isolation/

Haney, Craig. 2015. Expert Witness report, Ashker v Brown. Accessed on Oct. 12, 2019 at https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/07/Redacted_Haney%20Expert%20Report.pdf

Johnson, Donny. n.d. “Art came late in my life.” Unpublished, cited with permission of the author.

Johnson, Donny. 2006. “Dungeon Art.” 12/16-17/06. Unpublished, cited with permission of the author.

Johnson, Donny. 2008. Letter to Steven Kurtz 9/28/08. Unpublished, cited with permission of the author.

Timerman, Jacobo. 2002. Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Trans. Toby Talbot. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen’s University Canada. She has published widely on the politics and philosophy of carceral spaces.

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The effects of isolation on the human mind have long fascinated psychologists, philosophers and artists. But it was during the Cold War that isolation, or at least a version of it, came under considerable scientific scrutiny. For a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, sensory deprivation (SD) research was an established and well-respected field in North American behavioural sciences. SD experiments set out to examine the effects of a severely reduced stimulus environment on the human mind and had theoretical applications related to brain physiology, perceptual, motivational and psychoanalytic theory as well as clinical and practical applications.

After a brief heyday, the discipline all but disappeared in the 1970s as critics drew links between the military funding that supported much of this research and techniques of psychological torture. Of the dozen or so texts on sensory deprivation at Senate House, former Princeton professor Jack Vernon’s Inside the Black Room was the only one targeted at a non-specialist audience. That such an audience should exist was hardly surprising. SD experiments had appeared in films such as The Mind Benders (1963), The US television series The Twilight Zone (1958), and on the BBC’s A Question of Science (1957). Each of these, with greater or lesser degree of sensationalism, set out to examine its supposed mind-altering effects.

Fascination with sensory deprivation at the time was captured by Vernon’s copywriters, who wrote on the back cover:

What happens to a man when all sensory stimulation is cut off for a certain period time?… These questions are vital in a world concerned with space travel, solitary confinement and brain-washing?

But, for me, the front cover of this edition posed an entirely different and unexpected question: What was Johnny Cash doing on a popular psychology text from 1966? Curiosity, or procrastination, having got the better of me, I was able to find the original image by photographer Don Hunstein (1928-2017) online, who served as Director of Photography at Columbia Records for over 30 years. After making an inquiry through a website dedicated to his work, I received a response from Don’s wife DeeAnne.

DeeAnne informed me that Don had been a good friend of the graphic designer Germano Facetti, who often used Hunstein’s images on covers for Penguin books. Facetti’s decision to put Cash on his cover was perhaps more than opportunistic. As head of design at Penguin, Facetti is remembered for transforming the publisher’s art direction during his tenure (1960-1972) and gained a reputation for his ability to capture the essence of a book with a single image, providing what he described as, ‘a visual frame of reference to the work of literature as an additional service to the reader.’ In this case the subject was Jack Vernon’s ‘black room’, a sophisticated light and sound proof chamber in the basement of Princeton’s Eno Hall.

One of Vernon’s student volunteers described their first experience inside this space:

I entered the cell that was to become the deepest darkness I have ever known.

In Facetti’s monotone image, Cash can be seen either disappearing into or re-emerging from this sensory void, evoking a sense of mystery about what lies within and the changed person that might emerge from the chamber. The three dimensional cube enclosing the portrait adds to the sense of literal and psychological confinement, but may also refer to the red geometric shapes many subjects claimed to hallucinate whilst inside the chamber. One of the surprising results of sensory deprivation research from this period was that without visual referents or patterned stimuli, the mind appeared to spontaneously generate images of its own.

Part of the early fascination with sensory and perceptual deprivation experiments revolved around whether, in this disoriented state, the subject could be made more suggestible, susceptible to indoctrination – or in the parlance of the time ‘brainwashing’. That Vernon’s aforementioned student should choose the word ‘cell’ – as opposed to ‘chamber’ or ‘room’ – to describe the experience is suggestive of the ways in which volunteers may have consciously or unconsciously associated SD experiments with imprisonment.

In Inside the Black Room, Vernon describes another student who made this association explicit. Having stayed in the chamber for the maximum of four days, the politics student requested to stay longer. On further questioning the student revealed that he felt there was a high chance that he may one day end up as a political prisoner when he returned to his native Turkey, and that he wished to train himself to be able to tolerate solitary confinement.

The association between SD and the prison provides the most likely explanation as to why Facetti chose to put Cash on the cover of Vernon’s book. When the Penguin version was published in 1966, Cash had already gained a reputation for singing about and sympathising with the experience of incarceration in the US penitentiary system. Whilst early hits such as ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (1955) and ‘Transfusion Blues’ (1960) contrasted a romanticised image of a care-free and cold-hearted outlaw with a life of confinement, later songs such as ‘San Quentin’ (1969) and ‘The Man in Black’ (1971) took direct aim at prison conditions, treatment of prisoners and US policies of incarceration.

But Cash’s most memorable interactions with the American prison population came during the numerous concerts his band performed inside prison walls, preserved in two successful albums, ‘Live at Folsom Prison’ (1968) and ‘Live at San Quentin’ (1969). At San Quentin, Cash sang, for the first time, a song named after the prison about the destructive experience of incarceration. Lyrics such as ‘San Quentin, I hate every inch of you/ You’ve cut me and you’ve scarred me through and through/’, were met with raucous applause from the audience who demanded a second rendition immediately after Cash sang the first.

On the ‘Live at Folsom’ record, Cash can be heard striking a more optimistic tone with ‘Grey Stone Chapel’, a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley who was sitting on the front row. The songs refrain ‘inside the walls of prison my body may be/ but the lord has set my soul free/’ describes the role of religious devotion in the struggle for the free mind within an incarcerated body – a topic of central interest to our research project.

Cash’s prison concerts were performed against a backdrop of scandals, public outrage and calls for reform within the US prison system, of which he became a leading spokesperson. In 1972 he even gave evidence alongside former convicts at a Senate hearing on prison reform, where he relayed some of the worst stories of corruption and abuse inmates had told him.

Despite the outlaw image he cultivated, Cash himself never spent more than a night in a jail cell. The graphic designer who used his image on the other hand had experienced a horrific period of captivity during the Second World War. Captured as an armed member of the Italian resistance in 1943, Facetti was deported aged 17 to a labour camp in Mauthausen Austria, where 100s of prisoners died each day at the hands of the Nazis. After the camp was liberated in 1944, he gathered drawings he made alongside photographs and documents salvaged from the camp in a small box.

Bound together with fragments of his prison uniform and identification tags, the box is the subject of a short documentary, The Yellow Box, by Tony West. Facetti could not have known in 1966 that Cash would go on to have such an influence on US prison reform. Perhaps, however, he hoped that like Cash’s music, and like his own yellow box, Inside the Black Room might shed light on the experience of the incarcerated.

To what extent sensory deprivation experiments have contributed to the scientific understanding of incarceration is a complicated question. Early research, particularly the perceptual deprivation experiments carried out at McGill University in the 1950s, suggested that the effects of inhabiting a depatterned environment were inherently pathological. Certainly, studies in this area have shown that under the right conditions SD can induce high levels of anxiety, depersonalisation and perceptual distortion. Such data has often been used by critics of solitary confinement as well as methods of psychological torture such as the ‘Five Techniques’ used by the British Army in Northern Ireland or the methods of so called ‘enhanced interrogation’ used at detention centres such as Guantanamo Bay.

But other research into this field has shown that under the right conditions sensory isolation can have therapeutic potential. Flotation tanks, for example, once seen as a faddish new-age trend, are undergoing clinical trials as a treatment for both acute and chronic mental disorders. In fact, research on SD from the 50s and 60s has shown that the technique can produce a diverse range of responses which depend on a complex ecology of interacting variables, some of which are beyond the control of the experimental situation. The subjective experience of SD is not only influenced by the physical and temporal dimensions of the experiment, but also on the subject’s personality, mood, physiology and various other social and cultural factors.

SD experiments have given some insight into the unusual effects of extreme isolation, but we should be cautious when attributing these results to the significantly different experience of involuntary incarceration or other forms of isolation. Understanding these experiences often requires a far wider lens than the experimental setting can provide, taking into account broader psychological, social, and cultural factors. Perhaps, after all, Facetti’s choice of Johnny Cash on his front cover reminds us of the need to pay attention to the individual stories and experiences of incarceration and solitude and the complex histories that shape them.

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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…the company of many is grievous unto me, and… contrariwise, solitariness is a great comfort and ease… for I feel it a great travail to my mind, to understand other men’s talk, to frame fit answers thereto… But when I withdraw myself into my lodging either to read or write, or to repose myself: then I recover my liberty, and let loose the reins thereof, in such sort, that having not to yield account of itself to any, it is altogether applied to my pleasure and comfort.

Annibale takes issue with his friend, deploying Galenic humoural theory to caution Guazzo against the dire medical consequences of social withdrawal. Humoural theory held that healthiness depends on a balance between four bodily fluids (humours): blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Melancholy arose from a superfluity of black bile, to which solitaries were famously prone. Annibale warns Guazzo (in an odd choice of metaphor) that ‘like unto the fly which flies about the candle’, by opting out of society Guazzo will not ‘consume and starve’ his melancholy but ‘nourish’ it:

For thinking to receive solace by means of a solitary life, you fill yourself full of ill humours, which take root in you, and there lie in wait ready to search out secret and solitary places conformable to their nature…and as hidden flames by force kept down are most ardent, so these corrupt humours, covertly lurking, with more force consume, and destroy the faire palace of your mind.

Not satisfied that he has yet persuaded Guazzo to abandon his reckless plan, Annibale goes on to regale his hapless friend with tales of solitaries who, becoming ‘lean, forlorn, & filled full of putrified blood’, ‘fall into such vehement and frantic fancies [fantasies], that they have given occasion to be laughed at, and pitied’, until finally they terminate their miseries by ‘making themselves away by the means either of water, or fire, or sword, or by throwing themselves headlong from on high’.

The prospect must be terrifying; but Guazzo stands his ground, insisting that solitariness is a ‘Paradise’ to him and marshalling in his defence the poet Petrarch’s famous championship of solitude in his De Vita Solitaria (1346-56). Annibale is ready for this however, pointing out that ‘notwithstanding all the praises he [Petrarch] attributes to the solitary life’, the poet fully acknowledged that ‘without Conversation our life would be deficient.’ For Petrarch, Annibale continues, ‘was no enemy to good company’; nor should Guazzo be so, lest he end up mad or dead or, worse still, subhuman. Solitude was a ‘poison’ for which social interaction was the essential ‘antidote’:

And therefore it may justly be said, that who so leaves the civil society to place himself in some solitary desert, takes as it were the form of a beast, and in a certain manner puts upon himself a brutish nature.

Solitude is one of the most complex concepts in our cultural repertoire. Endlessly protean, its meanings have varied radically between periods and settings, or even within the same period and setting. Tracing its history is very challenging. But certain texts offer illuminations. Guazzo’s Art of Conversation is one such text. The ‘solitude’ decried there is that of the social refusenik, the individual who for a variety of reasons – spiritual, intellectual, temperamental or, as in Guazzo’s case, medical – turns his back on human companionship in favour of an isolated existence.

Solitaries of this ilk had been regarded as unnatural, immoral and pathological for millennia. Exceptions were acknowledged, but only among the god-like – saints, philosophers, creative geniuses – and even these were not exempt from criticism. For ordinary mortals, a reclusive life was malign and deeply perilous.

Yet alternative versions of solitude were also available. When, in The Art of Conversation, Annibale rightly points out that Petrarch did not eschew ‘good company’ he understates the poet’s position. In fact, good company was at the heart of Petrarch’s solitariness.

Book 1 of De Vita Solitaria describes his ‘solitude’ as a state of warm companionship with a small group of learned male friends (but no women, who Petrarch regarded as ‘poisonous’ to solitude), reading and conversing together ‘without complaint or grumbling, without envy or treachery’. ‘No solitude is so profound, no house so small, no door so narrow,’ Petrarch declared, ‘but it may open to a friend.’ To those critics who, knowing his reputation for reclusiveness, had charged him with misanthropy, he replied that he had never urged anyone to ‘despise the laws of friendship. I urged them fly from crowds and not from friends.’

Yet in Book 2 of De Vita Solitaria Petrarch praised hermits and other holy men whose total isolation was ‘most favourable’ to divine communion: an ambivalence reproduced by many early modern writers as they shuttled between a ‘solitude’ of absolute aloneness and the convivial solitude of likeminded intimates. In 1518 the great humanist scholar Erasmus highlighted this ambiguity in an imaginary dialogue between a Carthusian monk and a soldier. Like Annibale in The Art of Conversation, the soldier reproves the monk for his unnatural ‘Lonesomeness’, to which the monk replies that monastic life is necessary for his ‘perpetual study of Innocency’,

…and besides, if you call that Solitude which is only a retiring from the Crowd we have for this the Example, not only of our own, but of the ancient Prophets, the Ethnic [pagan] Philosophers, and all that had any Regard to the keeping a good Conscience. Nay, Poets, Astrologers, and Persons devoted to such–like Arts, whensoever they take in Hand any Thing that’s great and beyond the Sphere of the common People, commonly betake themselves to a Retreat. But why should you call this Kind of Life Solitude? The Conversation of one single Friend drives away the Tedium of Solitude. I have here more than sixteen Companions, fit for all Manner of Conversation… Do I then, in your Opinion, live melancholy?

To ‘live melancholy’ is what we now call ‘loneliness’: a condition widely described as a major health risk in terms not wholly unlike those employed by Annibale in The Art of Conversation. We have no words today for a Petrarchan solitude of friendship, although perhaps that is what social media offers to some of us. The language evolves[1]; but while the vocabulary and its historical settings have changed, cultural anxiety over solitary selfhood, the ‘I’ in relation to itself and others, is stronger than ever. As in Guazzo’s day, ‘solitude’ remains a perennial concern, and a perpetual puzzle, at the heart of western culture.

[1] I describe one of the biggest shifts, the abandonment of a discourse of moral evaluation, here.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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