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It was not so difficult for me to stand and bring forth argument with the athletes, though, those hulky, bulky men who lifted enormous weights and exercised for long hours every day and even at night, for I knew that, regardless of their commitment to and enjoyment of certain acts of violence against other human beings, it was under the guidance of principles of self-defense and was thus predictable. They relished and told long stories of mighty bouts, recounted great bone-crunching episodes of violence, but all their stories and accounts were guided by the wish to point up the principle of self-defense, its necessity, utility and justification, almost as if they were telling little fables or parables designed to say the virtue of their authors’ lives of heavy discipline, their lives of contrived restraint. And of course, because they tended to be much larger than most men and much stronger and more skilled in the ways of breaking bones and tearing muscle and rupturing organs and various membranes, they also tended to regard the granting of protection as closer to the act of grace than they did the actual perpetrating of violence on the body of someone smaller, weaker or less skilled than they. Instinctively, almost, they knew that if they withheld their great power, they would be exercising the greater power, for grace, which is always gratuitous, functions essentially to dignify and glorify the dispenser. It is self-redounding, and for that reason whether it is utilized by the recipient or not matters not a whit to the dispenser.

Over the course of my first year of imprisonment I had often been placed under the protection of one or more of these men, a pure act of grace on their part, awarded to me regardless of my need or particular qualities and given out solely because they were huge and I was not, because they were skilled at various of the martial arts and I knew nothing of these, and because they were extremely strong, especially through the upper body, and I was no stronger through the upper body than any man who has spent his adolescence and young manhood as a builder of coffins. I welcomed this dispensation, naturally, for it meant a distinct falling off of the number of mean and nasty occasions during a day when I would be accosted by one of the madmen or the gangs of flighty youths out looking for someone unable to keep himself from obstructing or hindering them. I also enjoyed the companionship of these large, soberly disciplined, methodical men, and many were the mornings and late afternoons when I would descend the stairs to the exercise room, where they moved about like enormous beasts of burden in the cool, dim light, lifting barbells and cast iron weights, pulling rhythmically on thick rubber belts attached to the walls, studying their development in the mirrors that lined the room. Sometimes a pair of them would meet together on a mat and wrestle for a while; under strict rules and heavy manners, so that they would not injure one another by accident. It pleased me to stand and observe while they went through their numerous exercise programs and afterwards to listen to their conversations about bodies and physical tests of all kinds and even sometimes, especially after the spring, to discuss matters with them, such as the need to worship the dead.

Ordinarily they tolerated my argument with them, which necessarily took the form of disagreement followed by a presentation of my view only, for they did not seem to think the situation warranted their presenting their argument or point of view, and to be sure, they were not always as easy with speech as I doubtless seemed to be, for their response to my argument was usually to throw themselves grunting back into a series of exercises or to whack against the large sandbag several hundred times with their fists.

Once, however, they came to me and urged me to accept an exercise program for myself, one of their own design, and when I declined, with lengthily explained reasons, all of which were of course religious, they became quite angry and heated about it. This surprised me, but it soon came out that a particular pair of them had decided to experiment with my body because it was so approximate to the shape and condition of the body of the average citizen outside the prison, and they felt that if they could design an exercise and conditioning program which was capable of converting my somewhat flabby structure into an iron-hard, machine-like, impeccably muscled structure like theirs, then they would be able to sell their program, like a recipe for a cake to the hungry, once they were released and let back outside again. I did not see anything amiss with their plan, and I even told them this, for if indeed they had been allowed to employ my body in this testing out of their exercise program, I was sure that in time they would have come up with a series of diets, exercises, activities and sports that would have converted my structure into the kind of organism that would have evoked deep envy and marvelling from among practically all men who do not worship the dead. Then they could have come forth with descriptions and measurements of my rapid progress to physical perfection, and their program would have been eagerly purchased by untold numbers of citizens outside. It might have made my two bulky companions into rich men.

But no, I would not allow it. The body is not the temple of the worship of the dead; it is the priest’s vestment, no more. To attend with any great part of one’s time, energy and treasure to the care of this vestment is to leave off the proper use of it, which is merely to signify the office. For we have been granted ordination at birth, and only death can properly remove the vestment and the obligation that adheres to it. Tending to it ourselves, I told them, cultivating it, treating it as if it were some object of worship itself, is to fall into a subtle yet dangerous form of blasphemy. Said the prophet Dirk, We wear our bodies. They do not wear us. For while we can ignore them, they can never ignore us. In life, it is crucial to learn what can be ignored, and then to ignore it. For what cannot be ignored, must be worshipped. (Dirk, xxiii, 12–15.)

As it happened, then, the two who had asked it of me that I let them use my body to exemplify the bodies of the future purchasers of their program, these two had up to then been my most consistent protectors against the raids against me by the madmen and the marauding gangs of youths, who spent much of their idle time accosting the prisoners who often walked about without any clannish loyalty from among the principled violent ones. Unfortunately, my argument against my protectors’ plan for my body was such that it smouldered them angrily against me, so that they withdrew their protection and talked bitterly against me among their brethren, until there was no other protection from any of them forthcoming.