In Stir

Jailtime means waiting.

Waiting for morning,

then waiting for night;    wanting to eat,

waiting for visitors   and begging for sleep.

-- Susan Stern, With the Weathermen (1975).

Jailbreak monostich

(Opening page;  fugitives  hiding  in the tall grass):

the jew’s-harp twanging

of the grasshoppers    in the broomweeds

(A page later, the author  revises  the imagery.):

Crickets in the roadside grass

sounded like wind   in loose telephone wires.

[ -- Edward Anderson, Thieves Like Us (1937)]

¡Bienvenidos en Uruguay!

Enjoy your stay!  (however brief …)

Terminaba así una saga que comenzó cuando en enero de 2014 llegó totalmente en secreto a Montevideo, Clifford Sloan, un abogado egresado de la Universidad de Harvard, a quien el presidente Barack Obama nombró en 2013 para que se hiciera cargo de la difícil tarea de negociar con países que estuvieran dispuestos a recibir a los cautivos. Y aún antes de la llegada de Sloan, la buena relación entre el presidente José Mujica y el vicepresidente estadounidense Joseph Biden había generado un buen ambiente para que Uruguay hiciera el favor que Estados Unidos estaba pidiendo.  …

-- http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/presos-guantanamo-llegaron-control-medico.html?utm_source=news-elpais&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Presos%20de%20Guant%C3%A1namo%20llegaron%20bien%20y%20est%C3%A1n%20bajo%20control%20m%C3%A9dico&utm_content=08122014&utm_campaign=Resumen%20Matutino\

ShadowMan kind of spooks me, actually

Los recién llegados recibirán un documento de identidad transitorio. Tienen algunas ofertas para trabajar en la construcción y en tareas rurales.

Mujica ha asegurado que llegarán en condición de refugiados y por lo tanto podrían irse de Uruguay al día siguiente de llegar si así lo quisieran. El gobierno no aceptó el pedido de Estados Unidos de limitar la libertad de movimiento de los liberados, dijo el mandatario.

One wonders whether, upon crossing the Rio Grande, they will be asked to state their business, or simply waved on in the interests of Diversity …

~

This evening’s NPR report on the matter  typifies the level to which journalism has sunk.  It was all about feelings and beliefs, not facts.   The station acknowledged that certain (unnamed) persons harbor unspecified “concerns” (using the word one might employ, as regards the shaky health of a pet hamster).  But, by way of countering what much of the audience -- not so dumb as they deem us -- was likely already thinking, the reporter hastened into the breach with an extraordinary gambit:  that she “believes” (her term;  not “has learned” or “knows”, but using a term that can equally well be applied to the Great Pumpkin) that “recidivism” among people jailed for terrorism  has been “actually less than for the general crime population”:  which is like comparing apples to a random medley of oranges, pinapples, and breadfruit.   For certain infractions, the rate of re-offense is no doubt far greater than for, say, assassination:   in the case of jaywalking, probably close to a hundred percent.  (Once having tasted the illicit sweetness of flouting that old Kantian maxim, “Cross at the green -- Not in between”, the perpetrator will jaywalk again and again.)

This is not a matter for beliefs, feelings, or hunches.   It is a matter of public record that a significant number of detainees released from Gitmo, or released/escaped from detention in Afghanistan or Irak, have gone on to leadership positions in Al-Qaeda.   Indeed, one of the best-known of them appended the epithet al-Kûbi (“the Cuban”) to his nom de guerre, in winking reference to his proud status as an alumnus of that flagship campus of Jâmi`at Yûsuf (“Joseph’s University” -- i.e., ‘prison’; an allusion to the Torah story, retold in the Koran).

Prison Mathematics (sentence extended)

We earlier spoke of the prison experiences of the stellar mathematicians André Weil and Neil Koblitz (“Adventures on Algebraic Geometry”).  It turns out that the author Arthur Koestler -- though not himself a mathematician --  likewise had fruitful recourse to math while imprisoned;  and, like Weil and Koblitz, was in prison for (roughly speaking) an unjust war (in this case, that of the Nazi-backed Franquistas against la  República in the Spanish Civil War).  As recounted in an excellent biography:

Koestler concluded that his hours spent by the prison window  scratching equations  had brought mystical insights into another realm of being.  He was filled “with a direct certainty that a higher order of reality existed, and that it alone invested existence with meaning.”  Koestler likened it to “a text written in invisible ink;  though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed  was sufficient to alter the texture of one’s existence.”

-- Michael Scammel, Koestler (2009), p. 150

From this metaphor, Koestler drew the title of his psycho-political memoir, The Invisible Writing.

[Footnote:  One might include Galois -- another anti-tyrant -- in this company.  Though not imprisoned, he carried out his last great work  under effective sentence of death.]

[Post-footnote:  We are each of us, actually, under sentence of death.]

[Update 23 November 2013]  From the memoir of a front-rank mathematician, and refugee from Soviet oppression:

While in prison, Weil wrote a letter to his sister Simone Weil, a famous philosopher and humanist.   This letter is a remarkable document;  in it, he tries to explain  in fairly elementary terms (accessible even to a philosopher -- just kidding!) the “big picture” of mathematics  as he saw it.  Doing so, he set a great example to follow for all mathematicians.  I sometimes joke that perhaps we should jail some of the leading mathematicians  to force them to express their ideas in accessible terms, the way Weil did.

-- Edward Frenkel, Love & Math (2013), p. 96

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Other historical examples:

     Poncelet in prison, reviving projective geometry.

Not everyone is so tough:

Brouwer would spend many a university holiday in the army.  The most lasting effect of his military training  was that it ruined his health and his nerves.

-- Dennis Hesseling, Gnomes in the Fog:  The Reception of Brower’s Intuitionism in the 1920s (2003), p. 28

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