Alexis Bhagat
Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
You were about to tell us about this trumpet you are making || It’s a trumpet, a huge trumpet. It should take 12 men to carry || Only men? || Twelve people || What’s it made of? This shofar of yours || Wood. Wood and brass. Nothing like a shofar. I went to the Himalayas to learn how the Tibetans make those long trumpets. It will be like that. Very long. And we will carry it across the land || Who are “we”? || Who knows!? Families. The families || This is for a family audience? || No audience. A movement. Footsteps that wake the earth. Chase ghosts.Crumble walls. I can see the movement, like floodwaters, like a swarm. 12 men. 12 people. Then hundreds of people. Then thousands. Then hundreds of thousands walk with the trumpet. Cities are emptied by our passage. We carry it to all of their prisonhouses. Start in New Jersey, by the water. Filthy waters of Newark. Walk out to Camp Hell in PA, and way out to SCI-Greene. The buildings crumble when we blow the trumpet. The walls come tumbling down. We head up to Attica || Isn’t that in Greece? || and then back east towards Auburn. Up to Dannemora, the whole town slides into a lake. Out to Bare Hill, continuing the march. Our footsteps awaken the earth into rage against this violence to life. Electricity moves from sky and lake to the soil beneath the trumpet. We blow at Bare Hill and electricity fills the fences, they pop apart, curl up, magnetized, they form balls. Guns fly out of holsters, sometimes firing. We keep blowing the trumpet until the Earth quakes || Very poetic, but will it be effective? || Yes, what are the goals? And what sort of assessment criteria could you employ to know if you’re reaching your goals. || What is this talk of ‘assessment criteria’? You boys are being hard on Joshua. I get it: it’s a padayatra. || EXACTLY! And what better way to fight restriction, confinement, incarceration then padayatra, than movement? || Its also like padayatra because there’s an element of faith to it. People need to have faith in the trumpet for it to work || Faith in its sound, and the power of its sound || No, faith in their own power, in the power of their footsteps! The trumpet is just a release of all the energy built up from those footsteps |
| So, Joshua, do you believe that if you blow this trumpet the walls will just come tumbling down? || I don’t know. I don’t have faith in that yet. But I will entertain the possibility. I have faith that the trumpet will do SOMETHING. I don’t know what |
| And why just the prisons? Isn’t America just a variety of prisons? One for every class? || Yes, I agree. But the correctional facilities are the most crystalline form of this urge to incarcerate and to raze. If we melt the most solid crystal, the whole system that is built on that solid foundation will topple || You sound very hopeful. I have no hope in hope: you think horizontal arrangements of incarceration are impossible? There are many stable shapes for wicked regimes. Not to say you shouldn’t try. I wish you the best of luck. In fact, I’d LOVE to walk with you and your trumpet, record the sound when you shoot it at the prisons. Will you use it in New York City? You should bring it to Varick Street |
| There’s a prison on Varick Street? || Yes, not far from the Holland Tunnel. A modern above-ground dungeon with no windows. I don’t like to say dungeon with regard to prisons. I completely agree with Foucault’s point in Discipline and Punish that the penitentiary, after the innovations at Auburn, is a beast of the Enlightenment with little relation to medieval dungeons. But dungeons persist--in city jails, medical research prisons, INS jails, Guantanamo. And they reappear here and there in prisons like Pelican Bay or Florence. If you go Varick Street, I will march with you. That’s the INS detention center for NYC. My father spent many awful weeks there |
| He’s not a US citizen? || No, he’d never give up his Indian passport. And, unfortunately, he’d never give up drinking! || We should talk about this when I get back to America || Yes, I will blow the trumpet at that fucking place
The text enclosed is a short fragment from an unpublished novel called "I'd Rather Talk About It" which I wrote between 2006 and 2012. It describes a trumpet which can destroy the walls of prisons, and revisits the geography of a series of walks to prisons which I helped organize in 1999 and 2000.
Alexis Bhagat is a writer operating in the art-world: installations, tape-collages, and radio broadcasts; maps, and talking about maps; cinema concrete, and sound art in movie theaters. He lives in Albany, NY, where he works as the director of the Albany Public Library Foundation, and organizes readings with the St. Rocco's Poetry Collective.