The Torment of Others

Dreams were too fragmented to recall, and I dawdled too long before settling down to write today... it is 10:30 already but I am in my ‘office’... I want to finish the book on Jung today. Must remember to bring earplugs tomorrow, there are disturbances here in the library of all varieties...

There’s the woman who has just whipped into this section with her fruit cocktail, the complimentary copy of the Globe & Mail in the other hand, and sniffed, sniffed her way to the back where a blonde woman sat reading quietly. With her bike helmet still on her head, she began to run a verbal commentary as she read the paper, shuffling it with vigour. Then the cursing started, though at first it was hard to tell whether she was telling the articles to ‘fuck off’, or the guy across the room on his cellphone. The blonde woman decided to relocate, and Helmet Talker was left yammering to empty chairs. But it wasn’t long before the eruption of another stream of expletives, and she charged off with the plume of newspaper behind her, firing a final missive telling Cellphone Guy that his voice is sick.

In the wake of her jagged emanations, I sit pondering what brought her to this state of asocial display. The unchecked and uncensored streams of expression is nearly admirable, nearly childlike, except for the aggressive content delivered with hefty doses of vitriolic venom. Bitterness trails her like acrid vapour as she moves from one seat to another around the entire floor, because, as she told anyone who cared to listen, that man smelled bad and probably has AIDS, the sun is too bright and in her eye... An unplanned round of musical chairs thus began, with people quietly but resolutely scattering like rats off a burning ship wherever she happened to alight her caustic self.

Yet she appears healthy, well-dressed in biking gear, expensive-looking sunglasses against a clear complexion, but what lurks beneath? At one point she muttered at length against ‘white men’; does she see herself as another colour, her white woman-ness banished long ago when it could not defend itself again white men? As I allowed myself to imagine her life, I see a young girl, 9 or 10, mouth wide open with a full-body scream, eyes screwed shut, hands over her ears. But if you listen long enough, you’d hear that where her pain (and her scream) is most piercing, a note of something like joy is seeping through the crack. She relishes the screaming, this forceful ejecting of what her psyche and soma cannot hold. This is her aria, her Ave Maria.