Joliet
Joliet is a town, a small river town west of Chicago. In 1673, Louis Jolliet, along with Father Jacques Marquette, paddled up the Des Plaines River. The name reminds one of the history, what I mean is the indigenous people who once lived here, the Illinois native Americans, and the European French explorer for whom the town was named. For most of my adult life, the old Joliet Prison and the 1980 John Landis Blues Brothers film immediately come to mind when Joliet is mentioned in conversation. The Blues Brothers is a comedy, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd are the main characters, and the story line is surreal. While viewing one is suspended between horror and hilarity. What am I feeling? Is it ok to laugh?
Yesterday I visited the ruin of the old Joliet Penitentiary. To walk below the wall and razor wire outside, then inside the walls, and especially the now empty decrepit death row cells prompted a melange of feelings. I felt the hopelessness of men and women convicted of serious crimes who passed through the massive steel doors to be encased within the high limestone walls. The steel gate was slowly cranked open by hand. I haven’t committed a crime, and fortunately have observed the “justice” system at a distance. I have no idea of what it was like to know that one would live for years inside of those walls, exposed to the chill of winter through the limestone, to the steaming stink of summer. I do not know. I tried to imagine.
“Things,” “life” is not nearly as simple, as cut and dried as the exercise of will implied by the words memorialized in the stone floor of the death row/solitary confinement North Segregation building.
It’s Never Too Late To Mend.
The ruin of the old prison at Joliet is a apt icon of what it means to be human – in recurrent succession, laughing and crying.
