They kept me on the surface during the rehabilitation process so that as it happened all actions and reactions were so reduced by little moral nitpickings that it had became impossible to sink to the deepest levels of my being in pure sensuality or melded to my environment. All the invisible territorial markers had to be given their due respect. There were so many of them like invisible circles intersecting or concentric with other invisible circles, I just couldn't keep them all in place in my mind's eye, no matter how much I tried, all the more so because they were neither concrete nor substantive but ideas that others had tacitly agreed on, without informing me. I had to find out about them for myself, by tripping over my own bootlaces as it were, an exercise in ritual humiliation and abuse, which was ongoing because I didn't learn my lesson. I couldn't as these circles were unclear to me, being as if they were marked in invisible ink upon the ground.
My captors hoped to get me and the rest of us out of the infantry stage by means of the new training. These were hoops that had to be not so much jumped through as stepped over, but not firmly or with confidence and rather with a manner of bowing and kneeling.
My previous brash confidence was not rewarded but was looked at with disdain for belonging too much to the infantry. They even told me I had never sunk so low, but in the infantry we'd gone along in the bush on our bellies, often for miles at a time. This time was different as there was nothing to shoot at, only the chance to put a foot down incorrectly, causing an electric alarm to scream out whenever a forcefield was activated. At the end of this training our nerves were shattered, yet this education we were told we needed very badly had only lasted a week. "You've never been so low," they kept saying over and over again, until we could hear the necessary rebuke in our minds even before the alarm had fully sounded. We learned to anticipate it and listen for it.
"You've never sunk so low!" I said, as I impacted on yet another boundary line. I've never sunk this low before.
One morning I woke up it was still dark. I took a walk along the screaming river. I thought the sky looked moody and black, as if the sun would never be awakened. I heard a voice inside my mind tell me that this was it, that it was all I had to look forward to, that the sun would never rise again. It did eventually, despite my gloomy mood, only to fall again so that I'd have the same experience the next morn, when once again the sun seemed to deny me.
It was all for my own good, to rehabilitate me and make me just like everyone else, a definitive example of normal. And all the same, they wouldn't tell me where the circles were, and all the same I kept on stepping on their boundaries, setting off another sound of panic and alarm.
They told me this was all because I didn't love humanity and sheltered no respect for humanity in my heart. They told me it would take some time and a few adjustments to get used to the majestic cry of the alarm, that all the others were quite used to it already, and that only I was taking too much time.
Now that they had me alone to themselves, I believed them implicitly, but not so much as I believed in them themselves, since they were the only ones who could save me. My mental anguish had become extreme as every time I shut my eyes I now begun to hear the sirens in my head. They said this was a symptom of my disobedience in the post-infantry position, and that I'd have to learn to tolerate what everybody else had already been accustomed to endure. It was the pinnacle of normalcy, they said, to hear these loud exhausting noises in one's mind, though without flinching.
Their injunction to do better made me feel like I should bring all my seriousness to bear on the matter of graduating their school, much as I had brought all my commitment to shooting, loving and defending from the enemy in the previous stage of my life. I'd won out then and I would win out again, through sheer commitment, if not courage. Only the latter was something of an allergy to them, as they told me it was my courage that had created the excessive boldness, leading me to step on everybody else's lines. I'd have to have the commitment, they said, but let us dispense with the courage, as that really belongs much more to the former stage and you can do without it here.
I thanked them very much, for what they said seemed logical and wise.
My captors hoped to get me and the rest of us out of the infantry stage by means of the new training. These were hoops that had to be not so much jumped through as stepped over, but not firmly or with confidence and rather with a manner of bowing and kneeling.
My previous brash confidence was not rewarded but was looked at with disdain for belonging too much to the infantry. They even told me I had never sunk so low, but in the infantry we'd gone along in the bush on our bellies, often for miles at a time. This time was different as there was nothing to shoot at, only the chance to put a foot down incorrectly, causing an electric alarm to scream out whenever a forcefield was activated. At the end of this training our nerves were shattered, yet this education we were told we needed very badly had only lasted a week. "You've never been so low," they kept saying over and over again, until we could hear the necessary rebuke in our minds even before the alarm had fully sounded. We learned to anticipate it and listen for it.
"You've never sunk so low!" I said, as I impacted on yet another boundary line. I've never sunk this low before.
One morning I woke up it was still dark. I took a walk along the screaming river. I thought the sky looked moody and black, as if the sun would never be awakened. I heard a voice inside my mind tell me that this was it, that it was all I had to look forward to, that the sun would never rise again. It did eventually, despite my gloomy mood, only to fall again so that I'd have the same experience the next morn, when once again the sun seemed to deny me.
It was all for my own good, to rehabilitate me and make me just like everyone else, a definitive example of normal. And all the same, they wouldn't tell me where the circles were, and all the same I kept on stepping on their boundaries, setting off another sound of panic and alarm.
They told me this was all because I didn't love humanity and sheltered no respect for humanity in my heart. They told me it would take some time and a few adjustments to get used to the majestic cry of the alarm, that all the others were quite used to it already, and that only I was taking too much time.
Now that they had me alone to themselves, I believed them implicitly, but not so much as I believed in them themselves, since they were the only ones who could save me. My mental anguish had become extreme as every time I shut my eyes I now begun to hear the sirens in my head. They said this was a symptom of my disobedience in the post-infantry position, and that I'd have to learn to tolerate what everybody else had already been accustomed to endure. It was the pinnacle of normalcy, they said, to hear these loud exhausting noises in one's mind, though without flinching.
Their injunction to do better made me feel like I should bring all my seriousness to bear on the matter of graduating their school, much as I had brought all my commitment to shooting, loving and defending from the enemy in the previous stage of my life. I'd won out then and I would win out again, through sheer commitment, if not courage. Only the latter was something of an allergy to them, as they told me it was my courage that had created the excessive boldness, leading me to step on everybody else's lines. I'd have to have the commitment, they said, but let us dispense with the courage, as that really belongs much more to the former stage and you can do without it here.
I thanked them very much, for what they said seemed logical and wise.
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