I need to learn to celebrate the unpredictability of my memory. If I only knew its logic I would feel some recompense. The mere idea that it may have logic gives heart.
Richard Davidson, one of my best friends, asked me about eight years ago my experience with “striking in anger.” My near autonomic response — written though after some reflection — was
I don’t strike; I am struck. I don’t even strike when struck. Neither, however, do I offer the other cheek. I just let the numb red one face whatever’s to come. No, I honestly can’t remember striking anyone in anger. I do recall being struck in anger, for example by the former boyfriend of a girl sitting in the car beside me. I’d rather look, and sometimes of course I don't see (I didn't see him coming, just his fist).
Although by God I have been angry, and I have a considerable repertoire of sublimation and repression. Upon early reflection, my assumption became: I haven’t struck because if I struck the impact would be so dire that prison and poverty were inevitable and the globe was at risk. Superman run amok; an island, not an atoll or a rock, but a real island, blown sky-high with the flash and then the mushroom cloud. Cosmic devastation.
Then a fork in the road (metaphor suddenly wrenched into another warp), and at least three Johns:
- (1) I feel ashamed and stupid and stuck;
- (2) I understand all the many-layered implications of such fantasy, and feel wry humor and sympathy; and
- (3) I’m just tickled pink and scared shitless that I harbor such destructiveness —even if, especially if, the victim is but one other person (a wife, say; or a parent, to really draw circles within circles).
Being angry and facing anger straight on, directed at me, literally make and made me sick. I do damned near anything to avoid it.... been true I think my whole life. Was I emotionally abused as a child? By neglect, not ill will, but yes. Will I remain that child for the rest of my small remaining span? Yes. Who else am I at heart, if anyone, and how could there possibly be room? A smidgen at least.
It has something to do with voices, first and third and whatever. Whose narrative is it? There are so damned many voices; if we listened to them all we would be reduced to schizophrenic coleslaw. If we don’t, we may be gambling with our souls. Some of the voices are true, some false, most misted in partiality and ambiguity. And how long is it incumbent upon us to wait? To even ask that question is arrant foolishness.
It still is.