anger – Page 2 – Little Bristling Soul

reitsc:

1. Revenge is a mirror. I find my image marred in its reflection. An image is recurrence, just as an echo is the return of my voice, divested of its origin, its intervals descending into silence. Revenge is an echo whose volume only rises.

2. Money and spite, like Adam and Eve, are halves of a whole. (The name Adam breaks from the Hebraic adamah, meaning ‘ground’, the red earth from which he was made and into which he will return. Adamah is sired by the Semitic adam, meaning ‘red’. Dam is ‘blood’. Anger, shame, jealousy, fear—emotions that hasten the heart, like bombs in the body but which linger like a fever, feelings of fire and heat that make our blood burn—are each an ample engine for revenge. Revenge is the eternal, animal, incendiary inner essence.) For every vengeful person, a wound is a due, a slight a fee, an offense remembered signed yours truly by the object of their malice: for every vengeful spirit’s posture is YOU OWE ME.

3. What follows is that, feeling hurt, I am thus empty; being owed something must mean that I lack that thing. The desire to get even then fills my hollow, this rising up of desire itself a process of revenge, much like the pain of hunger and the desire to eat—a clockwork lack, its animal response. The rouge arises with each gonging of the wound, in memory its harmony repeats, dissonant, distinct, its smoke ascending with each flutter of the flame, a blossom in the lungs, quickening the heart, the breath, the eyes and mind myopic in its plumes, I’ve been overcome, put down, made less, littler and worth loathing. I’m trembling. But I go on, no reason to console me except the reason of get even, get back, strike harder, be proud, have cunning, purity, patience, but above all don’t care and don’t slip. All with a grip of death to hold a grudge so heavy I sink my own ship.

4. Hungry, hurt, hunted, I become a hunter.

5. An act of revenge implies an equilibrium, a zero state, a calm horizon. A balance disturbed such that my retaliative act is an act of restoration. Revenge is a mirror because payback’s a bitch, karma’s a bitch, life’s a bitch and then you die: YOU DESERVED IT. This leap from lacking to possession, from being owed to paying someone back and therefore having that thing (since how can I give what I lack?), is the same leap we make from depth to surface, from body to glass, person to image…

6. forgiveness, humility