The First And Last Tea Ceremony in Hell

“The collage technique, the art of assembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects), abolish the separation between art and life.”

-Charles Simic, in his book on Joseph Cornell, Dime Store Alchemy (1992)

Prisons ban things.

That's what they do. They ban things for valid reasons: sharp objects, flammable liquids, gang paraphernalia, items that could genuinely be used for nefarious purposes. They also condemn things – & even people – as “contraband” for absolutely no valid reason at all. They do so as a tactic of control & dehumanization. Some staff members get thrills from concocting elaborate nonsensical justifications for deeming things contraband. I'm reminded of how Nietzsche wrote that “I distrust all those in whom the desire to punish is strong”. I'm also reminded of some lines Damien Echols wrote in his book Life After Death, after the prison suddenly banned his Buddhist monk spiritual advisor:

The prison refused to let me see Harada Roshi. Communication between us has suddenly become a “security risk”, even though nothing has changed since the last time. I gave up trying to understand prison logic long ago – Rolling Stone magazine is a security risk, sodas are a security risk, salt & pepper are security risks. The list goes on & on.

Around 8 years ago the prison here suddenly decided to ban tea. For as long as anyone can remember – at least 50 years – boxes of tea bags have been sold in commissary in

Texas prisons. The reason for the sudden ban was supposedly that some guys somewhere were using tea to “smoke drugs”. Is there any validity to this? No telling...

At the time I had 7 bags of tea left. After I used 5, I just couldn't use the last two. As I looked at them, world histories about tea started cascading through my mind... So many Zen stories featuring tea... Battles have been fought over tea! Taoist lore says that the origin of the first tea ceremony was Yin - his sacred offering of a cup of tea to master Lao Tzu when he presented Yin-hi with the holy Tao Te Ching! Oh, but how I have failed to give proper reverence to this beautiful gift of the earth: tea! And now I have only two bags left...

Without having any idea on how or when I would use them, I decided to keep the last two bags of tea. Off & on over the years I would take them out, inhale their beautiful natural scent, trying to discern how they wished to be utilized – no, collaborated with & properly honored in an act of synergistic alchemical creation. Hmm... but the time never seemed right...

Until 8 years later, until recently, as I was creating the work of art The Last Tea Ceremony in Hell / The Book of Tea (Okakura Kazuo)/ Drink Deeply From the Cup of Humanity/ Listen To The Language of Flowers. This piece is many things: a mixed media assemblage, a combine, a Happening, an International art collaboration, Sacred Art, Initiatory Art, a psychosociopolitical art intervention, an historical artifact, & a social life-art-exchange.

Art has always been a natural extension of life for me. Over the months that I worked on this piece, various aspects of everyday life experience helped shape & guide its creation. A major influence for this painting is the work of the artist and writer Valentine Cuny Le-Callet. She is currently finishing her doctoral thesis which provides an

unprecedented in-depth & wide ranging analysis of the issues concerning art in relation to the criminal justice system.

Studying her work & my personal discussions with her regarding these issues helped shape the creation of this piece in many ways. She sent me a sheet of printed images of a set of art cards that she made & tried to send in to an incarcerated art colleague who she collaborated with on her book Perpendiculaire au soleil, The prison in Florida denied them & banned them as contraband.

I invited these images, which were sent from France, to step with me into a space of alchemical transformation. They claimed their rightful place amongst other sacred cards, other arcana & they demanded to be surrounded by golden gilded framing. I constructed the frame utilizing colored pencils, illustration board, cardboard & gold paper that I had been holding onto for years. (A few years back the Texas prison system banned all forms of paper from being sent in).

For other parts of the work, I used pieces of a map of France, reproduction copies of pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's Notebooks and pieces of Japanese rice paper sent to me from England. Assemblage. Social sculpture. Realignment of aesthetic categories.

Necklaces can be religious objects, statement of wealth & prestige, chains of office, talismans & warding charms. They can also be collars forced around the necks of slaves, prisoners & animals... On the left side of the piece is a hand twisted rope necklace that I made upon which hangs a custom gold gilded historical relic.

The said relic is a TDCJ property tag with an interesting origin story.

Whenever a prisoner’s property is taken out of his cell it is placed in red mesh property

bags. Tags are placed on the bags which include identifying information. A person can have his property confiscated & bagged & tagged for various reasons: a transfer, going to a court hearing, having property picked up to give to a friend at visitation, & of course there are nefarious, oppressive & unjustified attack-confiscations.

Around 7 years ago, two lieutenants were playing “shift war” games with one another. They would do things like push extra work off onto the other shift & play staffing games. This is a pretty common thing in prisons. The day shift lieutenant was however uncommonly petty to an absolutely silly degree. No one liked this guy, officers & inmates alike.

A few days before he was scheduled to be transferred off this building he decided to launch a final parting triumphal shot. We were on lockdown & he was running the shakedown. I was on the last section they hit. When we were pulled out of our cells the lieutenant had the CO's put us in hallway booths & shakedown cages all over the building, which was quite strange.

An hour passed. It should never take more than an hour to search a small prison cell. Another hour... Then three, four, five hours & shift change rolled around. Second shift came on wondering why the hell a bunch of inmates were out of their cells at shift change which just isn't something that is done. We eventually got back to our section and: CHAOS!

Our cells were destroyed. Some guys had almost all of their property missing. Justifiably upset, several guys refused to go back into their cells & refused to give back the handcuffs. All of the rank came to the section & no one knew what was going on. They checked the property room where all bags of property are supposed to be kept. Nothing. Craziness.

After some more diligent searching, staff discovered that the first shift lieutenant had taken all of the bags of unjustly confiscated property & placed them in different rooms all over the building. Four or five hours later everyone got most of their property back, but some was still missing.

The second shift rank were all pretty decent & they said they would do what they can to try to find the missing property. Around 5 am two sergeants & some C.O.s came on our section & woke the guys up who were still missing property (including myself) & gave us what was missing. We learned why it had taken so long to find it: the silly first shift lieutenant had actually taken the time to forge property tags so the bags would be harder to find.

There is a printed line on the tag that reads Reason For Confiscation. If a prisoner requests that his property be picked up, the officer will write “offender requests disposition” in the space next to this line. That ridiculous man had written “offender requests disposition” on the tags & hid the bags in the property room amongst others with similar but legitimate tags.

Two of the bags of property that I got back still had these forged tags on them. I kept them as historic documents commemorating an event many consider to be an unparalleled example of a high ranking supervisory staff member, on the highest security building in the Texas prison system, acting like a silly & contemptibly ridiculous, petulant little boy. Such surrealism deserved to be recognized, acknowledged & made part of the historical record!

On the right side of the piece is another handmade necklace which supports a lovely little sacred object: one of the last two bags of tea to exist on Texas Death Row. I

encased it in a gilded frame of gold.

And the ceremony: I invited another guy – really the only other person here who would do such a thing – to participate in a tea ceremony on the upcoming day of the Equinox. I had asked some colleagues on the outside to send me a bunch of information (books, essays, etc.) on tea ceremony & we had been discussing these things over the past few months (along with art). We each agreed to put some things together to share during the first & the last tea ceremony that could occur in this place, on the upcoming equinox.

On that day we engaged in our own individual meditation & yoga sessions. Then I slid him one of the bags of tea & we began the ceremony. It is difficult to try to describe the experience – basically we engaged in mindfulness practices interspersed with discussions & readings. We went over the history of tea ceremony in China, Korea & Japan & discussed the philosophy of “the way of the tea”...

Mindfulness practices on sense perception & sense withdrawal, focusing on the tea, dry, then in hot water then at the first sip. Interestingly, we both had the experience of being rather shocked by our first taste of tea in many years. We had to breathe deeply & flow back into a state of being fully present. A reading from The Book of Tea: Beauty, simplicity And the Zen Aesthetic by Okakura Kakuzo:

It is in the Japanese tea ceremony that we see the culmination of tea ideals... Tea with us became more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life

In what ways do we practice the principles of the way of tea in everyday life: harmony (wa), respect (kei), purity (sei) and tranquility (jaku)? How do these things relate to our interests in art, socio-politics, education, criminal justice reform & therapeutic healing? We read some lines that spoke of how all tea ceremonies & rituals contain “an adoration

of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday life”. We both agreed that we certainly should strive towards more fully internalizing & regularly practicing adoration of the beautiful in spite of being confined in the relentlessly sordid environment.

Another aspect of this Cognitive Art Experience was that I gave Mademoiselle Le Callet a book to go along with the painting: Man And His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung and

 M.L. Von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffe. I particularly recommended reading the essay in the book entitled “Symbolism In The Visual Arts” by Aniela Jaffe. And it seems appropriate to close off with some lines of interest from that essay:

Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved. The effect produced by works of modern art cannot be explained entirely by their visible form...

And yet, without any question, there is a human bond. It may be even more intense than any works of sensory art, which makes a direct appeal to feeling and empathy. It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man, to the spiritual background of life and the world... The modern work of art has abandoned not only the realm of the concrete “natural” sensuous world, but also that of the individual. It has become highly collective and therefore (even in the abbreviation of pictorial hieroglyph) touches not only on the few, but the many. What remains individual is the manner of representation, the style and quality of the modern work of art...

And yet it seems important that the suggestion of a more whole, and therefore more human form of expression should become visible in our time. It is a glimmer of hope... Light is dawning behind darkness.

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