lives. The hostages we take are your own, not ours.â It seemed hyperbolic. The audience was nervous, unsettled by the fury in his voice. Did he comprehend what he was saying? Had he meant to say it? Was he ⦠sincere?
Your hostages, not ours.
We have taken one captive, one only. The exchange is still unequal.
Â
It appears, from the latest reports, that our project may have run into difficulties. This is not positively clear. (It may be a tactic to divide and unnerve us.) The money has been promised, but not the arms, and there has been no word at all on amnesty or the release of our comrades. There is always the risk, which we have tried not to think about, that we were actually observed at some point during the abduction, and followed afterward. That danger was the original weak point in our plan; now, there seem to have been others. Nothing is definite. Morale, for the first time, is low. We have noticed movements, shadows, in the house across the street, supposedly vacant. Our deadline expires tomorrow at midnight, and we disagree among ourselves on the possibility of an extension. The prisoner is eager to join forces with us, but we are less than eager to have him. He could break, easily. We are tired, dirty, irritable. There are decisions to be made, but no one wishes to initiate the business of making them. No one knows what is going to happen â¦
Â
Undeniably, we would prefer to be doing other things, enjoying the mundane pleasures, dining and dancing in velvet palaces, making love on expensive mattresses, watching contact sports on televisionâeverything that had to be given up, expelled from mind, from the territory of hope. We would have slept forever, if it had been possible: but it was not possible. The noise of gunfire woke us. The siren in the street, the crack of truncheon on skull, the groaning of muscle and crashing of blood, in all the unrewarded labours of the world, woke us. The shouts of the dying penetrated into that sleep, dragged us half-blind and staggering out of the lovely dreams, the sheltered nests we thought were ours by right, into this wakefulness, this cold and unforgiving daylight. There was no choice. It was Alex saying,
When are you going to wake the fuck up?
and knowing,
This is the time. Now. You canât pretend heâs not talking to you. To you.
There was no choice. Necessity came to the door, knocked once politely, and getting no answer smashed through ⦠There wasnât time to gather together keepsakes. There wasnât time to say,
Sorry, youâve come to the wrong place, it isnât me you want.
It would have done no good to say it. There was no choice.
There is no romance in this venture now, no glamour, none. It is a job like any other, a matter of seeing the task at hand (straining the eyes to see it) and doing it. The object of the exercise is to do it well. Efficiently. There are many things still to be overcome, left behind. Among them, there is this habit of mind, my own, which persists in language, a crippling attachment to the merely rhetorical. We realize it, I especially realize it, even as we remain in bondage to it. Of all the lessons I have had forced upon me, this has been the hardest to assimilate: that our words themselves, the very cadences of our speech, are the property of others. A poet wrote: âMy tongue shall serve those miseries which have no tongue.â But I am not doing it yet. I am not doing it. My tongue is too much, still, the servant of those masters I would otherwise resist, the ones whose sole hunger is to be amused, diverted, lulled ⦠Even these few paragraphs, scrawled in the dead space of our three daysâ entombment here, even these lines that must be burned and scattered before we leave, are an indulgence, a frivolity allowable only because there is nothing else, immediately, to do.
Beware, even in thought
â¦
It is no hardship, or very little, to give up the material toys and
Your hostages, not ours.
We have taken one captive, one only. The exchange is still unequal.
Â
It appears, from the latest reports, that our project may have run into difficulties. This is not positively clear. (It may be a tactic to divide and unnerve us.) The money has been promised, but not the arms, and there has been no word at all on amnesty or the release of our comrades. There is always the risk, which we have tried not to think about, that we were actually observed at some point during the abduction, and followed afterward. That danger was the original weak point in our plan; now, there seem to have been others. Nothing is definite. Morale, for the first time, is low. We have noticed movements, shadows, in the house across the street, supposedly vacant. Our deadline expires tomorrow at midnight, and we disagree among ourselves on the possibility of an extension. The prisoner is eager to join forces with us, but we are less than eager to have him. He could break, easily. We are tired, dirty, irritable. There are decisions to be made, but no one wishes to initiate the business of making them. No one knows what is going to happen â¦
Â
Undeniably, we would prefer to be doing other things, enjoying the mundane pleasures, dining and dancing in velvet palaces, making love on expensive mattresses, watching contact sports on televisionâeverything that had to be given up, expelled from mind, from the territory of hope. We would have slept forever, if it had been possible: but it was not possible. The noise of gunfire woke us. The siren in the street, the crack of truncheon on skull, the groaning of muscle and crashing of blood, in all the unrewarded labours of the world, woke us. The shouts of the dying penetrated into that sleep, dragged us half-blind and staggering out of the lovely dreams, the sheltered nests we thought were ours by right, into this wakefulness, this cold and unforgiving daylight. There was no choice. It was Alex saying,
When are you going to wake the fuck up?
and knowing,
This is the time. Now. You canât pretend heâs not talking to you. To you.
There was no choice. Necessity came to the door, knocked once politely, and getting no answer smashed through ⦠There wasnât time to gather together keepsakes. There wasnât time to say,
Sorry, youâve come to the wrong place, it isnât me you want.
It would have done no good to say it. There was no choice.
There is no romance in this venture now, no glamour, none. It is a job like any other, a matter of seeing the task at hand (straining the eyes to see it) and doing it. The object of the exercise is to do it well. Efficiently. There are many things still to be overcome, left behind. Among them, there is this habit of mind, my own, which persists in language, a crippling attachment to the merely rhetorical. We realize it, I especially realize it, even as we remain in bondage to it. Of all the lessons I have had forced upon me, this has been the hardest to assimilate: that our words themselves, the very cadences of our speech, are the property of others. A poet wrote: âMy tongue shall serve those miseries which have no tongue.â But I am not doing it yet. I am not doing it. My tongue is too much, still, the servant of those masters I would otherwise resist, the ones whose sole hunger is to be amused, diverted, lulled ⦠Even these few paragraphs, scrawled in the dead space of our three daysâ entombment here, even these lines that must be burned and scattered before we leave, are an indulgence, a frivolity allowable only because there is nothing else, immediately, to do.
Beware, even in thought
â¦
It is no hardship, or very little, to give up the material toys and
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