[For one reason or another, I only truly began to get acquainted with ACT a few months ago. It was genuinely astonishing for me to discover how many of my own understandings and approaches, which I had used spontaneously and without conceptualizing them in my work, exist as part of a complete and coherent system. Here I will allow myself to share a short piece of fiction of my own. I am not a writer. I simply wrote a few things in my youth, sometime in the second half of the 1990s. This is one of them, and I had completely forgotten it until I came across the metaphor of the hole. Archive.org helped in this case, since I had published these texts on a literary website at one point. The story is quite extreme and depressing, and the ending is heavy and oppressive. There is no catharsis in it. The logic of "digging", first as a possibility, then as inertia, and finally as a denial of what cannot be undone, is taken all the way to its limit. The Price is the values, the meaning, and the very essence of what it is to be human.]
THE TUNNEL
We dig. Today I injured my companion’s hand. A long, twig-like, deathly pale hand, threaded with bluish, thick veins. It was those very winding, distinctly throbbing veins that amazed me - struck me by their look and by their unruly, wandering courses. I swung my rusted pickaxe; the soil was growing more and more stony - indeed it had become nothing but rock. I swung, and my companion had swung as well a moment before, but his pick had glanced off the stone and his hand fell exactly beneath the arc of my blow. How lightly the point passed through the pale flesh, slid along the bone, and went on, knocking chips from the rock. A shred of meat sagged slightly downward, pale pink - strangely fresh - then it flooded with blood, which burst forth and ran down, bathing the hand and streaming, pouring toward the ground. We both stared, stunned, surprised; then he slowly tore a strip of cloth from his shirt, tightened it around the wound, and we continued to watch in amazement as the filthy rag darkened, soaking through with blood. After that he slowly withdrew and sat down on the ground.
I stopped digging. I felt strange, somehow absurd. I looked at my hands; long ago I had stopped noticing them. I saw the same pale, elongated, corpse-like hands, along which bluish, thick veins ran like the ribs of a leaf. I pressed one of them lightly; it was soft, yielded easily, pulsing.
We have been digging for so long. I dimly remember that before this there was something else, different; we have been digging an eternity, digging to get out of here. I glance at my companion and at the others. Now I see our hair has fallen out - yes, our faces and skulls are grimy, covered in dust, a dust that seems, until now, to have hidden the fact that our hair, eyebrows, and beards are gone. I stood like that for a long time, looking at the others, inspecting my own body.
It was time for lunch and we sat down by the fire. We suck on small pebbles, brownish ones, which we bring up from lower down, where the ground is full of clay and earth. I look at the dried-out, pale faces of my companions; our eyes have become almost transparent - colorless eyes, at whose center sits a large, black, dilated pupil. I touch my face. How long have we been digging? I’ve forgotten everything else. The only thing I remember is that we are digging a tunnel upward, upward, to get out of here, to reach the surface, to be saved - yes, that, to be saved. There was a cave-in down in the mines and we began to dig, to dig upward toward the surface, to get out, to escape from here. An eternity.
We suck on our pebbles one after another. At some point my companion silently shows his bound hand, soaked through with blood, to the one sitting beside him. He and the others fix their eyes on it; for a while we stop eating. We look. Do the others see what I see?
After lunch we smoke. We smoke slowly, for a long time. We take a few drags, then prop our long cigarettes against the wall; we sit, and after a while we pick them up again and take another drag.
We go back to digging again. Two go down to bring pebbles for supper; one tends the bluish fire with rotten roots. We dig. On the sly I glance at the others. Are we real? We resemble a band of ghosts - ghostly shadows, languidly swinging half-decayed, rusted tools. We dig upward, to get out, to… Will it ever happen? What would it be like?
What was it - what were we, what had we once been? I look around slowly; I think we were strong and healthy, yes - we were full of energy, hurrying to get out, up, up. We dig. I keep thinking of my companion’s hand, of the exposed strip of flesh, of the blood. It clamps my breath; something tightens around my heart. How long ago was that? For a long time I had not remembered anything, had not thought - only dug, as if it had always been this way, as if this is what is and will be. A helplessness comes over me and I cannot lift the pickaxe. We used to sing - yes, I remember that we sang together. Once. Back then.
We were sitting down to supper; later we would sleep, huddled among the stones. The person opposite me had gone still, staring at my companion’s bandaged hand. He had been fixed on it for a long time; he had stopped eating, and it began to unsettle me. I myself started to eat with difficulty. After a while that one spoke slowly, but clearly:
“No longer do we look like people.”
His voice startled me and I jerked. A voice. We had not spoken - no one had uttered a word - for so long. A shock went through my whole body, and when it passed I suddenly understood his words. Yes. The others had seen what I saw. They had seen what, long ago, we had stopped noticing. Ourselves. Us. Someone murmured:
“We’ve been digging for so long. Only that.”
My companion stood and said:
“I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted so much to be beautiful. And look at this - ” She held out her pale hands, palms up, one wrapped with the bloodied, filthy rag. She stood like that, frozen for a while, then trembled and pulled off the grimy shirt that covered her.
“Look…” She was crying without a sound. Her body, like the hand, was pale, as if cracked through with thick and fine veins; hairless, thin, twig-like, soft. It quivered faintly. “Look… is this me…”
We kept silent, our eyes turned toward the fire. Someone said quietly:
“Very soon we’ll come out above. Just a little more. There can’t not be just a tiny bit left.”
Those words enlivened me and I said:
“Yes! Yes! We’ve been digging so long, so much time - there’s no way it isn’t very near. The surface. The earth!”
“Yes!” another answered me. “Surely just a little. And we will be saved.”
All our voices brightened. Some repeated:
“Yes… saved, yes… a little higher… saved…”
My companion - the girl I had injured - still standing upright, said:
“In this body there is no life anymore.” She pinched a fold of her flesh - painfully soft - “only shadow.”
I bowed my head. Then I remembered something and, turning to all of them, I said:
“We used to sing. Do you remember that - we used to sing, we used to sing?”
“Yes! Yes!” some answered eagerly. “We sang. We sang…” One of them thought for a moment. “…songs, yes - that’s how it was! back at the beginning.”
“We sang…”
“Because there was only a little left…”
“Because we thought there was only a little left…”
“Back then we didn’t yet know we still had so much digging to do…”
“But now…”
“Now, truly, there’s only a little left.”
“Only a little - there’s no way…”
We all grew animated, and I think we were about to, instead of lying down, take up the pickaxes once again, when someone suddenly sprang to his feet with eyes wide open, trembling, looked around at us and cried out:
“We forgot the children!”
At first I didn’t understand him. I didn’t understand what he meant. What children?.. What… The children! All at once I remembered clearly - I remembered everything - and trembling I stood up. We had been down in the mine when the collapse happened: men, women, children… For a while we waited for rescue teams to come. Perhaps they couldn’t know where we were; perhaps they couldn’t find us - and then we decided we ourselves would dig a tunnel, a passage upward. We were only on the first level; the surface should have been very near. We believed that in a very short time - perhaps a day or two - we would reach the top, since we were in a place where there ought to have been only soil.
There were tools there, and we began to dig upward. We left the children - the little ones - we calmed them, told them that very soon we would return and we would all get out into the open air. We told them to wait there, not to go anywhere, so that another collapse wouldn’t happen in the narrow tunnels. They waited for us. We didn’t get out in a day or two. Nor in a week. We dug for so long - years passed, years… we still did not reach the surface, and we could not give up: after all we had dug, surely there must be only the tiniest bit left, just a little more… and the more we dug, the less we could bring ourselves to quit, after everything done so far… They waited for us… day after day.
I was shaking. Horror and panic filled me; I saw the same thing happening to the others. I groaned:
“The children…”
And in terror we ran to climb down, down - we ran, we ran, we ran through corridors dug over an eternity. So late. We ran… Sharp stones jutting from the rock tore at our flesh, but I did not feel them - I had not felt them - because terror was shaking my whole body. The children…
We found them down below, where we had left them - where they had obediently waited - where, when the fire had gone out, they had huddled against one another in the dark and waited in hope for us to come. We found their dried, stiff little bodies, clasped together, mummified - dead for an eternity.
My legs gave way and with a roar I fell to the ground, scraping my fingernails over my bare skull. I wept, I howled - too late, too late… A tearing pain drowned us in tears, ripped through joints and bones, swept away our hearts and our blood - too late… How could we… What have we done, Lord…
In one corner of the chamber a portion of the floor broke loose and fell away into the depths, where it shattered with a crash against the ceiling below. In the place where it had been, the unbelievable, forgotten blue of the sky was revealed. The crowns of trees rustled…
We stood petrified - staring, cramped with pain, chilled through. Someone murmured:
“We’ve been digging down…”
In a trembling voice, from whose depths panic was rising, someone asked:
“Why have we been digging down?”
With difficulty I swallowed the lump in my throat and answered quietly:
“Because… it was hard… hard to dig upward… and… you have to swing the pick upward… and… over yourself… and we were in a hurry… and… we decided…”
I could not go on; tears choked me again, and someone finished for me:
“We decided that that way - ” he pointed a finger at the earth beneath us “ - was up, and that’s the way we’d dig.”
We were silent. Someone, in a shaking voice, turned to all of us:
“But it was easier, wasn’t it?… easier that way… it’s more proper for it to be that way… down…”
Carrying the little corpses in our arms, tripping in the blinding light, like ghosts in our death-white, half-transparent skin, we started upward - toward the surface.
Upward and higher and higher, through the tunnel we had been digging for an eternity. Surely there’s only a tiny bit left. Just a little more and we will come out. We can’t give up now - can we? Can we?!