Freedom Alcatraz
One way to look at art is to think how long the things you see and feel will stay with you once you've seen them.
Not when you're actually looking but later on, on the way home, and then again the morning after, after you've seen the art.
Connections are then made all over the place, and what you've seen links up to a narrative that's both within you and far beyond what you've ever felt before.
It could have been you in prison, or a loved one who was just trying to do the right thing. Or someone else you knew who committed a crime and paid for it with their life.
Walking through the beat up old buildings on Alcatraz, seeing the remarkable pieces the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei has made out of the courage of his own and other people's political choices, my own self-imprisonment began to be revealed to me and then was slowly transformed, at least enough to be thought more about tomorrow and the day after that.
I was now free to go up to the main penitentiary, where the rest of the Ai Wei Wei exhibit continued, and to walk past the rows and rows of abandoned cells to the dining hall. There I could write a post card to as many of the political prisoners Ai Wei Wei'd depicted in one of his installations as I'd like.
Sometimes freedom's so sad it seems like it's not worth it, but it is, you have to do something about it, if only a little bit. I wrote a postcard to PFC Chelsea Manning, currently sentenced to 35 years imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.