Transcription
I was working at a prison only a little bit. I worked with this crazy psychologist. He used to put jokes on his multiple choice tests. He was a really eccentric guy, but I really liked his courses. He taught a course on creativity, and he was also a prison psychologist. He was an eccentric guy, and for some reason, he liked me—maybe because I was eccentric too.
He invited me to go out to the Edmonton Maximum Security Prison with him a couple of times, which I did. That was a very interesting experience because I was trying to figure out what role each individual's behavior bore to the pathology of the group, or something like that. I went out there and met a little guy, smaller than me. I was a little bigger by then, and he was a pretty innocuous guy.
What had happened was I was out in this gymnasium. It looked like a high school gym, which is really quite telling in my estimation. There were all these monsters in there weightlifting, and they were monsters. I remember one guy was tattooed everywhere, and he had a huge scar running down the middle of his chest. It looked like someone had hit him with an axe.
I was in there wearing this weird cape that I bought in Portugal, along with some boots that went with it. It was like an 1890s Sherlock Holmes cape, and it was really from the 1890s. This little village was up on a hill, a walled city, and they sold these things. I don't think they'd changed the style since 1890, so I thought they were really cool.
I was wearing that, which wasn't perhaps the most conservative garb to don if you were going to a Maximum Security Prison. So anyways, I was in the gymnasium, and the psychologist left. God only knows, I mean, that's what he was like. All these guys came around me, offering to trade their prison clothes for my cape. It was like I was being made an offer I couldn't refuse, you know?
I didn't really know what to do, and then this little guy said something like the psychologist sent me to come and take you away. I thought, well, better this little guy than all these monsters. So we went outside the gym through some school doors into the exercise yard, I guess. We were wandering along, and he was talking to me. He seemed like a kind of innocuous guy.
Then the psychologist showed up at the door and motioned us back, which was kind of a relief. I went into his office, and he said, you know that guy that you walked out in the yard with? I said, yeah. He said, he took two cops one night and had them kneel down. While they were begging for their lives, he shot them both in the back of the head.
I thought, hm. The thing that was so interesting was that he was so innocuous, right? What you'd hope is that someone like that would be very much unlike you, let's say, and certainly wouldn't be like someone innocuous that you'd met. What you'd want is that the guy would be like, you know, half werewolf and half vampire, so you could just tell right away that he was a cold-blooded killer.
But no, he was this sort of ineffectual little guy who was certainly not ineffectual if you gave him a revolver and the upper hand. So that made me think a lot about the relationship between being innocuous and being dangerous.
Then another thing happened. I met another guy out there, and a week or two later, I heard that he and a friend of his had held another guy down and pulverized his left leg with a lead pipe—just pulverized it. The reason for that was that they thought he was a snitch, and maybe he was.
That time, I did something different. Instead of being shocked and horrified by that, although I certainly was, I thought, how in the world could you do that? Because I didn't think I could do that. I thought there was a qualitative distinction between me and those people.
So I spent about two weeks trying to see if I could figure out under what conditions I could do that—what kind of psychological transformation I would have to undergo to be able to do that. That was a meditative exercise, let's say. It only took about 10 days for me to realize that not only could I do that, but it would be a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be.
That's sort of where that wall between me and what Jung described as the shadow started to fall apart. That also was very useful because I started to treat myself as somewhat of a different entity. I hadn't been aware up to that point, you know, because I thought I was a good guy.
There's no reason for me to think that because you're not a good guy unless you really made a bloody effort to be a good guy. It's not easy. So you're probably a moderately bad guy, and that's a long way from being an absolutely horrible guy, but it's also a long way from being a good guy.
I had a little more respect for myself after that because I also understood that there was a monstrous element to the human psyche that you needed to respect.