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“And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?” George RR Martin, A Game of Thrones

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I have been writing this for weeks, hoping that anger would make me write without effort.

I started on 28th February, over two weeks ago. Any anger I felt subsided, and I was often puzzled by how small and easy it was.

Once again, I am not the best protagonist of this story, rather passive, rather melancholic.

I felt wrath for a few days, so I named this post, made some notes, and moved on quickly.

Unfortunately, it won’t assist me much, and I need to do the heavy lifting myself.

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I do not listen to rap, but I had to hear about this whole Kendrick Lamar thing.

The only thing that interested me about it was his anger and vindictiveness, which he truly relished.

There are theories that he has waited for this moment for a long time.

Some say that Kendrick calculated all of his moves to the point where it has to be questioned whether we can truly call him the good guy in this story, the one with a moral high ground.

And whether we ourselves can feel like the good guys, enjoying his opponent’s fall to lower lows than anyone predicted.

Nobody really knows, and nobody would like to really see the effect his haunting words had on the man on the other side.

It is probably funnier this way.

Some even claim that Kendrick delayed doubling down on Drake until it felt like he made some dirty moves on him.

Only then would Kendrick look like the man whose right and left cheeks were slapped. Only after that did he succumb to an eye for an eye.

Was it too much?

It is undeniable that we only feel a lot of positive emotions for just wars, with rightful intentions, only Davids fighting against Goliaths, and only people who respect military ethics.

Only the justified anger of a victim.

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“You a master manipulator and habitual liar”

I don’t know about you; I connected with those lyrics from Kendrick’s Euphoria on a very deep level when I felt my unadulterated and quite tasty (albeit short-lived) anger a couple of weeks ago. Those were the times.

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Nobody has a more perfect victim face than me, with my round cheeks, glasses and clouded blue eyes.

Yet, somewhere behind this façade, I have some temper, I guess.

I won’t go too much into the details of this, but sometimes, one can ask if my temper protects my innocent exterior/interior or vice versa.

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Perhaps you have seen Judith Slaying Holofernes, a depiction of female wrath painted by the 17th-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

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When it comes to people, especially women, who lived 400 years ago, you can never be entirely sure what is true and what is a fable or myth.

Artemisia liked painting women reclaiming power, intense and round women in chiaroscuro.

Artemisia was raised by another painter, Orazio Gentileschi, who supported her artistic career. Also, just glancing at her paintings, you can guess that Caravaggio was her metaphorical father.

You probably cannot paint like Caravaggio and be completely sane.

Artemisia infamously, as a teenager, was sexually assaulted by a friend of the family.

People could speculate about how exactly it happened, but for sure, we know that her father decided to take matters to court. The guilt was proven, which is not certain even in current times in such situations.

What personally shocked me was that Artemisia, to ensure that she was telling the truth, was subjected to torture. It was called sibille and involved tightening of ropes around her fingers.

Artemisia did not waiver but probably also did not taste any justice afterwards, as her attacker escaped the city.

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In London, in The National Gallery, you can see her self-portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was also tortured through revolving wheels studded with iron spikes, captured in the painting.

Artemisia-Catherine touches the wheel with her left hand almost tenderly. Her fate was caused by a governor of Alexandria, who did not enjoy her critique of his policies.

While she was tortured, Jesus visited her daily to tell her to keep up the righteous political opposition, and she was also provided with sustenance by a divine dove.

That is way more than most women get while dealing with terrible men. More than Artemisia, for sure.

Nobody knows how much her experiences haunted her, and we can only look for the cues of that in the unsettling shades and contrasts of her paintings from a long time ago.

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The inciting incident of this whole post is related to, let’s say, a man. I do not even know what to say here.

I could write something quite poetic, finding the words to describe his petty lies and manipulations, but even with the two weeks’ hindsight, this whole situation just makes me want to yawn or gives me slight nausea at best.

Another writing mistake has been detected – I probably need more interesting or competent opponents. I clearly do not pay my editors enough.

As I mentioned, I let the anger go through my veins for just a couple of days; I didn’t cry even once, and, honestly, I laughed way more than sulked at the absurdity of that situation.

I am a proud crier, so I would not be ashamed to admit that, even if those were only tears of disappointment. My friends kept asking me if I was okay, and I kept saying yes, even though I knew they did not fully believe me.

But I was. There was no haunting by the memory of his kiss, no shattered self-esteem, just a bizarre realisation that you could know someone for years and not know them at all. It didn’t mean anything.

I think I am way angrier about some aspects of the world’s current political situation and my back pain than this.

I would love to be a more energetic and feisty heroine in this book. As I said before, vengeance stories sell so well.

I really feel like I need to think and work hard on every sentence here instead of streaming my consciousness, as my consciousness would rather take a break.

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As I walk through my life, and keep on walking, I also keep on listening to stories about women wronged by men almost every single day.

I feel anger, probably exaggerated by slights caused by my multiple metaphorical fathers in the past.

The best part, the ultimate joke in all of this, is that sometimes I would tell stories of what other men (as in fathers mentioned above) did to me to a man who seemed to be close to me at the time.

I witness his spectacle of empathy first. The bond tightens, and I will withdraw from making it sound even more metaphorically incestuous.

More often than I wish, this is followed by him doing something similar to me and/or other women three pages later*.

The curtain falls – thus ends Volume 10 of this questionably epic tale of love and loss, which probably lasted around two months.

I stopped believing someone would come and save me a long time ago, but can you at least consider not making it even worse in the least appropriate moments?

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Unfortunately, I find myself drawn to writers and/or people who read my stuff and write extensively about my writing. Yes, I recognise that it might be very self-centred. It is my love language, it is my only real language, I need to live with it. With that self-aware recognition in mind, I cannot stop thinking about a bundle of poems I received a couple of weeks ago.

In those poems, I could only too quickly identify myself, described as an elusive, hurt heroine, more interesting than this emotionless, tired person I have just described in the paragraphs above.

I was supposed to evaluate those poems (they were not all about me, but a couple indisputably were, and it was enough for me to find it very hard to have any opinion whatsoever about them that wouldn’t sound too narcissistic).

They also made me angry because how dare you write about me and do exactly what I do all the time?

Just in a bit more in-your-face way than I would typically do it?

That raises a question: Do I not want my innocent exterior/interior to be used at all, and do I not want to be made rightfully angry from time to time?

And if it ended, how much would I miss it? Do I need this occasional wrath to continue compiling this story for the time that sometimes just feels so long?

It doesn’t let me write without effort, but at least echoes in my head with haunting words that could be used against someone or against me, perhaps in another attempt to get closer.

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*And, of course, not all men, just some that I encountered, and please forgive me this one time of complaining, excused by what inspired me to write this in the first place.

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Daddy By Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

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PS. I feel like everyone knows this Sylvia Plath poem, but I always liked it. For some reason, I have been thinking a lot lately about fascism.

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One More Letter by Halina Poświatowska

I write you a letter –
one more
and still, my words
are bound in the echo of your silence.

I do not want your face
nor your voice
only the empty space you left
to howl in me like wind.

You do not belong to me,
never did—
and yet I carry you
like a shadow in my ribs,
lodged where breath should be.

I should curse you.
I should forget.
But the night is long,
and I still write—
one more letter,
one more page,
one more ghost between us.