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Freedom of a moth
Treacy Ziegler
On the way back to the prison art room from lunch, the prisoner Bradley catches a moth. No, he rescues a moth. Other prisoners were attempting to kill it. In the art room of this high security prison where I am a volunteer art teacher, Bradley says to me, “Come see what I found.” I follow Bradley to a table where he opens an ornate marquetry box much like the box another prisoner, Joe, gave to me earlier in the day. Joe had made that fancy wooden box, surprisingly, from Popsicle sticks. That the box is made of Popsicle sticks is not obvious; the box looks like it is made of expensive wood cut into mosaic patterns stained with coffee or cinnamon that prisoners buy in the prison commissary.
The prisoners have been making these beautiful boxes for years; they are boxes for precious things, jewelry boxes. Some are very large; some are small. Some are made for wives, others for mothers, sisters, friends. Some of these boxes are lined with velvet compartments for rings or earrings. When Joe gives me the box, he tells me, “You can put whatever you want in it.”
Prisoners are not allowed to give volunteers presents, and volunteers are forbidden to accept them. However, the box Joe gives me has been redefined as community service, and the appropriate paperwork has been written up allowing me to take the box outside the prison. I don’t know what “community service” refers to, whether it refers to my community service or Joe’s, and I don’t ask.
However, inside Bradley’s jewelry box, the box he made for his mother and lined with violet velvet for her rings, is a very large golden moth. The first thing I say when I see the moth is, “Complimentary colors; ocher against violet.” I have been explaining complimentary color harmony to the class.
In the moth, I see a tan fuzzy face with brown eyes; the tan face is a shade away from the ocher wings and the brown eyes are in deep contrast to the tan. The moth reminds me of a barn owl — that very strange creature looking both human and alien. The moth’s eyes dart back and forth with what I take to be curiosity.
My second reaction to Bradley’s moth is, “We should draw this moth.” Kate Javens’s paintings of large, ethereal moths come to my mind. Kate is a New York City artist and graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In Kate’s paintings, the viewer experiences the metamorphosis from the visual and physical into the mysterious and sublime.
Listening to the landscape
The most frequent comment I make to this art class of prisoners is, “Draw from life.” Drawing from life instead of the imagination presents the unpredictable. While the boxes are beautiful, making the boxes is predictable. The men follow a pattern, and the mosaic arrangements are sequential, requiring much craft and care. However, drawing a moth rescued from the prison yard does not follow a formula; it follows a personal visual conversation with the moth. As I tell my class, “Cézanne says the landscape spoke to him and because of that, he discovered the unknown through drawing.”
The drawings I typically see from prisoners are drawings rendered from photographs or from their imagination; clichéd hearts and countless big-bosomed women, smiling at the viewer, copied from Playboy-like magazines. These drawings suggest habitual repetition, a retreat.
I tell my class, “You are already inmates in the department of corrections. When you copy a photograph, you make yourself a double inmate. You become an inmate to a photograph.”
A camera can be a cruel, one-eyed guard who, unlike an artist drawing from life, does not make a meaningful distinction between a chair and a person; living and dead; happy and sad. And although a photo may “speak” to the viewer, it does not listen. It does not provide the reciprocal dialogue of which Cézanne speaks when he experienced landscape in the exploration of possibilities.
Despite my suggestions, Bradley has other intentions than drawing the moth. He intuits what is necessary for seeing better than I; his explicit no-freedom, my supposed freedom.
He asks that I take the moth outside the prison. “Free the moth,” Bradley says, “He will be killed in here.” I don’t know if moths are gendered. I suppose neither does Bradley.
I agree to free the moth, placing the moth into my box; the box that Joe gave me. When I tell the recreation therapist of the moth and my plans to free it, he reminds me that while the box has proper papers to leave the prison, the moth does not. To guards, the moth is contraband. The recreation therapist suggests freeing the moth inside the prison. I argue saying, “That is the whole point, the moth is not free in here.”
When I leave for the day, I take the box that Joe gave me containing the moth that Bradley gave me. With the recreation therapist, I walk across the large prison yard to the first set of gates. Like most prisons, this prison has two sets of gates; the gate from the inner prison to the administrative building; a second gate leading from there to the outside. I suppose the double gates protect the administration from revolting prisoners. It is the recreation therapist’s idea to free the moth between the administrative building and the exit building; beyond the point of any potential moth-killing prisoners and before the point of contraband-confiscating guards.
We open the box to free the moth. It flies out of Joe’s box, but, to my surprise, the moth suddenly turns right and, in doing so, retreats circular, back to the inner prison.
Are we moths trained not to experience the sky?
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