Something Has Hold of YouChapter 3 of 129 min
The one who is being held
Two chapters of this book have described what holds you. That rather assumes there is something being held, and it is time to say what.
Go back to a quarter to ten. Not twenty past nine, when the sentence came out — the twenty-five minutes afterwards, sitting there with the flatness.
That flatness is the most interesting thing that happened all evening.
Because somebody had to be disappointed. Disappointment is not a mood; it is a comparison. It requires a standard, and somebody holding it, and the finding that it was not met. And the one who said the sentence at twenty past nine was not disappointed in the least. That one felt justified. It had a case. It was, if anything, rather pleased with the bit about the sister.
So whoever was sitting there at a quarter to ten minding, and whoever was talking at twenty past nine, are not the same party.
You have been treating them as one person and calling the whole arrangement me. That is the mistake the rest of this book is about.
Let me do this by subtraction, because every positive description of the one being held sounds like religion, and it isn't; it is just small and hard to point at.
It is not your personality. Your temperament is what produced the tone of voice you had decided against. If the one being held were your personality, there would have been nobody left to mind.
It is not your opinions, which have changed several times, some of them embarrassingly.
It is not your history. You could lose a great deal of it — people do — and whoever is reading this line would still be the one at the kettle.
And it is not your body, which is the easiest to show and the least mysterious. Almost nothing material in you now was in you at nine years old. The whole thing has been replaced around whoever has been living in it, more than once, without interrupting the tenancy.
What is left when you have taken all that away is not a soul in any sense you need to accept tonight. It is simply the one who made the decision and the one who minded that it was broken — and the reason to believe in it is not faith. It is that you cannot account for a quarter to ten without it.
Here is what it is like, from the evidence rather than from doctrine.
It is quiet. Startlingly so. Notice that it did not fight at twenty past nine. It did not argue its corner, raise its voice, or produce a counter-case. It had made its decision once, at the kettle, perfectly clearly — and then it was simply overruled, and it went along, and it minded afterwards. That is its whole behaviour. It states and it minds. It does not contend.
It has no content. This is the strangest part. Ask what it wants and you get something almost embarrassingly plain: for the evening to have gone well. For her not to have been hurt. To be the sort of person who does the thing he decided. There is no programme in there, no ambition, nothing clever.
And it does not appear to age. You know this, though you may never have put it into a sentence. Somewhere in childhood you first recognisably minded something in the way you minded last night — some unfairness, some letting-down of somebody, the hot shame of having been smaller than you meant to be. Whoever minded that is not a younger version of you with less information. It is recognisably the same party. Everything around it has changed; it has not.
Everything it wanted was for somebody else. Look again at what it was after: for the evening to have gone well, for her not to have been hurt, to be the sort of person who does the thing he decided. There is not one item on that list for itself. No credit, no last word, nothing proved — all of which were on the other party's list, in order, at twenty past nine.
Sit with that, because you have spent years assuming the thing underneath was the selfish bit, held down by effort. It is the other way round. The part of you that wanted nothing for itself is the part that got overruled, and the part doing the overruling is the part that wanted things.
And it was right twice. It was clear at the kettle, and it was clear again at a quarter to ten, about the same thing and in the same terms. The only stretch of that evening when it was not consulted is the twenty-five minutes when you were certain.
There is one more thing to say here, and it is the kind of thing a book usually steps around.
The oldest name for the one who is held is a woman's name.
If you are a man, you have a decision to make about that, and I would rather you did not make the obvious one, which is to conclude that this chapter is about somebody else.
The name is not a claim about what you are. It is a residue of what the old vocabulary could do. The thing being described is a position — being longed for; waiting; being come for by somebody who has not yet arrived — and in the language that first described it, the only words available for anybody in that position were a wife's or a beloved's. That is a fact about the language. It is not a fact about you.
And if you felt something tighten reading it, be exact about what tightened, because it was not the pronoun.
It was the position. The position involves needing somebody to come, and you have spent your life being taught that you are the one who comes: you are the one who copes, who fixes it, who is depended upon, who does not require rescuing. That resistance is going to matter a great deal in chapter six, and it is worth having noticed it now, while it is only a word on a page and nothing is at stake.
Nothing in this book depends on your being a particular kind of person, or on your relationship to being a man or a woman being straightforward. The one being held has no sex. The language does.
So: there is someone in there. It is quiet, it is plain, it has been there since before your earliest memory of minding, and last night it was overruled by something with ten heads and no patience, in front of somebody it loves.
Now the hard part, and I am not going to soften it.
It cannot get itself out.
Not because it is weak, and not because you have not tried hard enough — you have tried for years, with real sincerity, and the record is in front of you. The one who is held is the only honest party in the arrangement and the only one with no power in it. It does not contend; that is its nature. The thing holding you does nothing but contend; that is its nature. A party that only ever states and minds cannot out-argue a party with ten mouths.
Which is not the same as its being frail, and the difference matters. Notice what it has in fact done: it has held that position, without maintenance, through every year of your life — through the opinions you changed, the body that was replaced around it more than once, and forty years of being overruled nightly by something louder. It has never once been persuaded. Whatever that is, it is not leverage and it is not weakness either. It is the only thing in the whole arrangement that has never needed anything from you in order to go on being there.
Every method you have tried has been this quiet one attempting to manage the loud one. Resolutions at the kettle. Promises after a bad evening. Being harder on yourself, then being gentler on yourself. All of it was the prisoner negotiating with the lock.
This is not a counsel of despair and the book is not about to leave you there. It is a statement about where the opening has to come from, and the answer is not from inside, which is the whole subject of chapter six.
Tonight
Ten minutes, with a pen. As before: no system, nothing to keep up.
One. Write one sentence saying what the flatness at a quarter to ten was actually about.
Be careful here, because the obvious answer is wrong. It was not about losing the argument. Test it: if you had won — if she had conceded, apologised, agreed about the sister — would you have felt better? Sit with that honestly rather than quickly. If the answer is that you would have felt the same flatness, or worse, then the flatness was never about the outcome — and that is the finding, and it is yours rather than mine.
Two. Write two or three lines describing whoever it was that minded. Not your name, not your job, nothing you would put on a form. Only: what did they want last night to be?
Three. Write down the age at which you first remember minding something in that same way. Just the number, and one line on what it was.
Then stop, and do not show it to anybody. Not tonight, and probably not ever. This one is not evidence for a conversation.
What this is worth:
Nothing tomorrow. There is no remedy in this chapter — the exercise above is a description and not a repair — which may be the first time that has been true in anything you have read of this kind, and it is deliberate: there is no remedy available to the party this chapter is about. That is the point of it.
What you have instead is a distinction, and it is permanent once you have it. You will not be able to go back to calling the whole arrangement me. The next time the tightness arrives behind the breastbone, there will be a faint sense of two parties in the room rather than one, and of knowing which of them you would rather have speaking.
You still will not be able to choose. Not yet. But you will know who you would choose, and that is not nothing — it is the difference between being held and being held while knowing it.
The next chapter is about where all this is happening. You almost certainly think the jail is your body, or your house, or the job, or the particular people you live among — and every one of those is wrong in the same way, and the correction is better news than it first sounds.