"I plead to thee, oh Furies, avenge these heinous deeds. Descend with wings of razors, grant me the vengeance that I seek. I beg for retribution. Let the rivers all run red, punish those who swear false oaths and allow me my revenge."
When I was a little girl kneeling alone behind the closed door of my bedroom listening to my father shouting, my mother’s rage filled cursing, I remember feeling afraid. In those infinite moments when fear began its slow timeless seep into my brain- one sludgy drip at a time, any childlike assumptive sense of safety about the world was corroded into a twisted landscape of dwarfed possibilities. And born of this fear, inevitable by-products, came the oozing slime of anxiety, the undulating burn of fury.
Though years of self-study, analysis, and reading have helped me to intellectualize the genesis of these emotions in all clarity and understanding, this knowing has made little difference in my ability to either redirect or minimize my default emotion- instantaneous insurmountable anger. It is a place I can, and do, drop into in a nanosecond. I cannot say that I am transformed into a vengeful harpy for there really is no transformational process involved--an act that requires an alchemical transition from one thing into another. This is more the reflexive movement of someone throwing off a thin mantle of civility to reveal the thing that lies beneath--the muck of decades bubbling just below the surface.
“Here,” is what I am,” I silently scream. “Here. Have a look. Then take a step back. Better yet, run.” The rage I feel is consuming. The need to apologize, to obfuscate, to deny has grown significantly less important over the years. It is as if an unseen hand has been chiseling away at the flat gray rockface to reveal, neither the graceful shape of meaning, nor a startled glimpse of the glittering essence of mindful purpose, not the opportunity for a momentary psychic swoon into the infinite universe of connectedness--but only this: a small hard mound of black grit. Obsidian scratchy bits that are at the center of my soul. About, and because of which even I, ever the agent of a seething wrath, can sustain awareness only temporarily. Yes, there is fear, but the anger that has layered itself in striations of molten lead--one eruption after another, after another--has made of the fear an inconsequential ash not worthy of notice, a mist of dust to be coughed away, extruded with all the other floating debris of a wasted life.
Once, this fury had a center. Nor did it then feel like a fury, but rather a powerful destiny to which I had willingly shackled myself. There was a centrifugal force that kept me anchored. So simple. My children. First one, and then the other. Individually, and together. I lived for them. My world existed, took shape, became real only because they had been borne. I was as nothing, or of very little substance, before they materialized, flesh and bone, tears and drool, pee and yeasty breastfed baby poop, dimpled elbows, and sticky snot; and later, much later, clusters of pimples, knobby knees, curling hair and soft swellings. Before this wellspring of fecund growth, the occurrence of which gave purpose to a series of heretofore random twitches that had passed for living, I became transfigured into one who simultaneously has, and sustains, life. How much greater a purpose than this? How is there a meaning more substantial? This was granted to me early---too early to realize the magnitude of the gift--though on some obscure level I knew it to be the only truth that mattered.
And then, after the willing giving over of my heart year after year to their combined overarching divinity, (for, to me that it exactly what it was) I was annihilated in the sudden and swift destruction that accompanied the removal, the unimagined disappearance of one half of the whole that had been my world. And with his vanishing, so too did the other half begin to subtract itself from my awareness until all that was left was a nothing that predated the nothing I had been before.
How does this not turn one into a screaming lunatic? How does this not create the pyre, ignite the kindling of rage into a conflagration of howling despair?
