RAGE

What is the appropriate response to betrayal? Rage? Anger? Sorrow? At the traitor or to oneself?

Rage, that is inextricably blind, and similarly mute? No that is not the way.

Alphabetically rage and anger are close. But a letter away. And anger is alphabetically close to danger. Another letter further. Sorrow is a long way off comparatively and if rage transmutes to danger so easily then perhaps sorrow is the proper course.

Anger is more articulate but speaks itself in grunts and expletives. Anger that burns but cannot cauterize the wound? Anger that turns so quickly to danger? No, that is not the way.

But rage and anger come most readily and refuse to leave easily. And sorrow is too readily turned inward. How then to expiate?

I can feel the Gitane stained breath of Genet on my neck laughing gently to himself and whispering under his breath " ... but betrayal is all there is in this life. It is the only thing. Betray before you are betrayed". His words are wise, and knowing, but lacking in hope and a certain humanity.

The memory of Genet jogs my mind. Jogs me toward Iscariot. At bottom it has to be pity: pity for the traitor. Who could read of Genet's life, a life spent in betrayal, and not feel pity for him? Pity for the self hatred that every betrayal, petty or grand, stokes and that is the wellspring for all future betrayals past and future. The self hatred that stops their mouths and eats their souls. Who could not feel pity for someone who trades inestimable treasures as friendship and loyalty for such shoddy trinkets as an easy life or a metre or more of land? Who could not feel pity for that person knowing that the self hatred that they carry within them serves only to fatten them as final strange fruit for Judas Iscariot's lonely tree in Akeldama?