TUMBULAR 10

More complicated than being seated in a darkened room waiting for a cat.  Even lying in a darkened room with hair infested blankets.  It was more complicated than that.  Half of us had died and it was impossible for us to continue on our own civilisation.  We didn't have the means for that, to invest our energies into generating another culture.  The problem is that the notion of culture itself was losing its traction. The captors held the different view that by sheer virtue of popping out kids they were creating or reproducing a culture for themselves, but we didn't see it that way.  Culture had to be acquired through effort and through the initiation of war.  That was our perspective or it had been before we were captured and put to work, tending to the children of our captors.   Did I mention our view that this was an infantilised society?  All was said to be done "for the kids", but one got the impression that the real kids were the adults who simply refused to grow up.

That was why we suffered.  They were trying to remake us.  As if a hair shirt were not enough, the bedding too was made of hair.  And our pajamas.  A mixture of shit and hair.

It was all for our own good it was said.

I'm not really bitter.  Noni scratched for me the other night on the other side of the door and I am sure I heard her yowl.  It was night so I went over and opened the door,   Before I could reach her she was gone again, into the night.  It was her element and ours and we didn't begrudge her that experience, not at all.

Noni gave us hope when all else failed.  She was to us what God was to the ancient civilisations.  Only more so.   Should she scratch a few more times we would be pleased.

In any case we were put here to reform and would do well to take it seriously.  That's the only way we would get our captives to release us.  First they would train us in their nursery schools, to take care of their children.  By means of this we would relive our own childhood, only in a different, much more tepid mode.   After this we would be trusted with adults, but without ever being allowed to forget that respecting inner childhood was the core part of our reeducation.  And what of adulthood?  Just shit and hair.  And shadows.  And Noni crying in the dark.  This is what we'd been reduced to.

But there were always tumbulations and the expectation that one day our spirits, at any rate, would be released.