the many faces of anger

How many ways can anger be used?

Like a bulldozer.
a rapier
a scalpel
a cudgel
a bludgeon

I seem to be focusing on the ones that CRUSH and DESTROY and SMASH things to SMITHEREENS. (I don't think I've ever typed that word before. It's long, and silly.)

I just watched Analyze This, with Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal. Had to fast-forward through all the violent bits (it's a gangster movie, after all).

But what I *related* to is the directness of the gangster character (when he wasn't lying, cheating or bullshitting).

***
The anger is confused, mixed together with something about - not feeding myself, or not being *able* to feed myself.

It's mixed with being hungry, but not being able to get what I need.

I sense that this comes from my very earliest moments of life, when I was unable to get what I needed from my mother. She frightened me, and the baby's most instinctive, GUT reaction to fear is to scream, to WAIL at the top of her infant lungs.

Not in fear, or pain, or shame, but in ANGER, in FURY, in RAGE at being unable to get what she NEEDS - at her very SURVIVAL being put at risk by this being who is SUPPOSED to be her fount of all sustenance and nurturance.

It is unnatural, this blockage, this impedance. The baby knows this. Hence her scrunched up, terrified, worried little face.




***
She abuses her power.
She claims to have none.

She is oblivious.

She is a piece of toast
that fell butter side UP.

She has been insanely LUCKY
and she has no idea of it.

Nor do my brothers.

Only *I* see the unfairness.

Only this is not a movie, and I can't magically re-write the script at the last minute to save the day.

More importantly, there is no one on my SIDE with whom I can stand up against them, neither within the family
nor without.

I was thinking of the sister in Bueller. At the end, she changes 'sides'.

Why? Is it just that men always rewrite the script so that it supports *them*, at no matter what cost to the woman?

I'm watching Remains of the Day right now, and the Emma Thompson character stands up, in her dignified, yet slightly uppity, very British way, to the Anthony Hopkins character, who is all caught up in 'dignity', and maintaining both his own and his father's, for whom he's found a 'position' at the manor where Hopkins is employed as head butler.

***
The unfairness is: I am expected to care about her, but she is not expected to care about me.

It's like, once the pattern is set, you can't get out. You're stuck in your roles til the end of your days. The only way out is to leave the story.

***
In the movie, the old father is bound and determined to keep the upper hand, even when he's dying and can no longer 'serve'. He uses his last breaths to hammer the nails into the ruins (?) of his son's - what - can't finish the metaphor. Dignity? He seems to go out of his way (like *my* father did) to cause his son pain.

Universal themes.

Doesn't make it any less painful.

Or fury-making.



The trap is
that I can neither fight her openly
nor can I escape her.



I'm caught between protecting her
and not being allowed to protect myself.