Date: 16 Nov 2011 00:51
Topic: Vendetta Against The Self
Modified: 23 Dec 2011 16:02

My experience (and a few very wise friends) have taught me that the seeds of our future are planted in very early childhood. My life is no exception. 

From my first post, you have probably been asking yourself the question, how is it possible that I can love anyone, let alone CJ? How can I love myself, even? I’m not sure I can answer the question entirely in short order. But what I can do, is tell you the story of how I got here, and maybe that will fill in the blanks.  It’s a long story. A very long one. I hope you have time to read.

This one goes back to at least 1970, but I suspect much earlier. Much of this story is supposition, deep inference, and extrapolation from snatches of distant, fragmented, and dim memory. Much of it is dark and deeply tragic, and cavernously lonely. 

This all sounds fantastic and incredibly melodramatic, I know. At least, when I play it back in my own mind. But it’s all true. As far as I can tell, anyway. All I have are memories. This memory is particularly vivid and intense, though very short. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I think, I committed myself to a grudge. A passionate vendetta. A hatred, really. I know this because of the vividness of the memory. I  can still feel the bitterness in my chest, when I conjure the memory.

I was seated at the dinner table, legs dangling because I was too short at the time to reach the floor. To my right, my father sat at his throne gesticulating, and distorting his face. To my left, my mother sneered and snarled. Apparently, I’d opened up enthusiastically about a neighborhood girl, with whom I’d spent the afternoon playing.

“Awwww… Isn’t that sooo cyoooot?!?! George-y has a girl-friend! George-y has a girl-friend! Tell-us-what-her-name-is! Tell-us-what-her-name-is!” She chanted as though we were both in a schoolyard, and I’d just wet my pants, and she really wanted to get me in trouble with the yard monitor for offending her in some strange way. Years later, I would understand that offense, but more on that later. 

“Haha! You? Get out of here! No girls would like you! Just look at you. You don’t do your homework, you don’t wash your hands, you dirty your mothers clothes as soon as you put them on! Besides, you’re practically a baby. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”, as though the two of us were jealous classmates, and he felt horribly threatened by even the hint of possibility that my infatuation might mean that some other soul cared for me.

It began as a searing pain in my head. A bar of cold hard steel that seized my temples, locked my spine, and froze my shoulders. I could feel my ears burning. In my chest, a boiler reached white-hot temperatures, and overflowed into my limbs. They went numb. I knew not to show anything. Even at the age of 6. I knew tipping my hand was dangerously stupid. I said nothing. I stared at my plate. Inside, roiling, surging, swirling, overflowing, erupting like an ancient volcano awakened after centuries of silence. Outside, still, sullen, expressionless as an undertaker. 

A dire thought burst over my consciousness like a black explosion. My eyes narrowed, as I contemplated it, as I felt the power and the comfort of it washing over my body. I heard it echo in my head, loud and clear: “They will never see me love anyone, ever again, as long as I live. I will never, ever give this to them. I will never let them do this to me again. Ever.” 

Somehow, I instinctively knew they would expect me to fall in love in the adult sense one day in the future, to take on serious love interests as I grew, and to take on a wife as I entered adulthood. I resolved, in that branding-iron moment of personality fusion, that  no matter what the cost, I was going to drown them in their own unrealized anticipations. Their long, slow, painful revelation of utter disappointment in me would be my great schadenfreude, my best vengeance. I also somehow intuitively understood, that this would be sublimely effective, as I was my father’s oldest son. 

I offered them the most tender part of myself - my own capacity to love, and be loved - and they ripped it from my hands, paraded it around the room like a gutted sacrificial gamecock, and tossed it on a pyre of their own terror and resentment of me. And somehow, deeply, I got it. I wasn’t conscious of it. But the memory of my response tells me that somehow, I understood. 

You may think to yourself that this is a ridiculous claim. What a minor incident. How could this possibly have lead to a life-long commitment to self-denial in the name of a toddler’s grudge? 

Well, to a child - especially a child who is passionate, a child who yearns to know what is good and true, and yearns to live his values to the fullest, a solemn vow is a solemn vow, and a debt is a debt, and they owed him the debt of his pain. Decades later, I was given an opportunity by sheer chance, to cash in on this debt, after nearly half a life alone. 

I was meeting my parents for brunch at a local blue-hair diner, one Sunday. They always arrived before me, so they were already in the restaurant slurping coffee, by the time I showed up. I hated these meetings. They were always stultifying and frustrating for me, so I always tried to register my displeasure by showing up late. They always laughed that they had come to expect my tardiness, because “that’s just George!” 

I hopped out of my truck and quick-paced to the entrance. Another woman was already in the air-lock. As she opened the inner door, we both stepped through, and as chance would have it, the maître d’ chose to seat the woman immediately, as I made my way down the aisle toward my parents’ table. Their eyes saucered, and their jaws dropped. Then I made my way to their table, and sat down.

My parents looked at each other briefly, vague expressions of bemused disappointment and relief on their faces. Their stature that day was shriveled and somewhat doddering, compared to the thick-fleshed monsters at whose table I’d been transformed into a burnt offering so many decades earlier. 

My father turned to me, my mother with a half-smirk on her face again. I recognized it, faintly. “My, God! We thought you were about to drop a bombshell on us!” 

I feigned ignorance, “What in blazes are you talking about?”

Awkwardly, he actually tried to explain. I felt the anticipation of black glee rise up in me. A little spark of my old hatred flashed over my mind. “You came into the restaurant with that woman. We… your mother and I…. we almost thought…. we couldn’t believe our eyes… was there going to be an announcement?” There was actually enormous excitement in his voice. It quivered in his voice as he spoke. My mother was restraining nervous laughter. 

The little boy at the dinner table rushed back to me. NOW! NOW IS OUR TIME! DO IT! So, I did. I laughed loudly enough to disturb the table behind us, but wryly enough, that it immediately disintegrated the expressions on both their faces. 

“Hahaha! Are you kidding me? Please. Get over yourselves. Her? What in the hell were you thinking?”, I changed my tone to half-joking but I was cemetery serious at this point, “You can just forget it, because I’ll never, ever give either of you the satisfaction of THAT!” 

I felt sick. I was expecting to suddenly find myself towering over them like an olympic giant. I was expecting to watch them shrink in agony, begging me to give them a grandson, pleading with me to give love a chance. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They did shrink. But not in agony. They barely reacted at all.

“Hrmph. I guess not”, my father shrugged, as the two slouched back over their eggs and bacon. 

That little boy and I could both see now, something had gone wrong. But what? Why were they not dismayed? Why did they evacuate their own anticipation so quickly? Not only was the debt not reclaimed, but we both knew in that moment, it never would be.

It would take several more years before I would be able to put the pieces together. What I did not understand when I was a child, was that when I committed myself to drowning them, I condemned myself to drown with them. My impotent anger had become a weapon against myself, at the same time I was trying to wield it against them. 

Even worse, was that I was right to understand that they would only consume any joy I exposed to them, but not because they sought my joy. Rather, because they sought my destruction. Revealing to them that I was willing to sacrifice myself, my wants, my desires, was not  so much a pleasure for them, but a relief - they didn’t have to work very hard at my destruction, because I was willing to undertake it myself, and was doing a fine job at that. Which is why they quietly returned to grazing at our suburban trough, rather than beseeching me to try again.

In the intervening years between that early memory, and my adulthood, the vendetta took on grotesque and disturbing proportions. From the age of about 13 onward, I warred with myself constantly, and left a trail of collateral damage everywhere I went. 

In a subsequent post, I will attempt to describe this war, and how it ultimately led to my early self-identity as a secular monk.