Violent thoughts

Fit via vi.

Three words I found while reading Virgil’s Aeneid in the summer of 2007 with Professor Phillips at the College of Charleston.

“The way was made by force.”

I feel myself sigh. It’s a powerful phrase—a violent punch of words—that emerges from a very violent scene. Achilles’ son is crashing his way through Priam’s palace to where the royal Trojan family has taken refuge in the inner chamber. He wields a double-bladed ax and will hammer the thicken oaken door off it’s hinges before slaughtering the entire family. It’s when he gets to that door and furiously crosses the threshold that Virgil summarizes his movement. A sentence born from violence for violence. You can even see the etymological root of “violence” in the word I’ve translated “by force”: vi.

Photo by The Chaffins on Unsplash

I’ve signed this phrase into many journals, inside the front covers of books. Not as a way to glorify violence but as a short motivational slogan to act powerfully when the goal stands clearly ahead: go for it, carry on, you’ve got this. I’ve screamed it at the top of my lungs when finding myself jobless, aware of mounting financial responsibilities, and feeling incapable of handling the uncertainty of whether I could learn what I must learn without knowing what that necessary thing was that I must learn.

Go for it. Carry on. You’ve got this, Michael. You’ve got this.

I’m finding myself struggling with the phrase. It’s born from a bloody scene, and I’m not interested in promoting the violence that subjugates the powerless, that promotes dominator-servant structures—especially violence against weaker groups. Patriarchal masculinity promises power at the price of emotional self-mutilation. Don’t feel and you won’t be afraid. You just have to be stronger, strike first, draw first blood.

Fuck patriarchal masculinity. It has promised immortality and stolen our souls.

Is the phrase worth keeping?

I don’t know what is required to redeem a word like vis. It controls and preserves the poetic image—tightly. Its clarity parallels the focus of the warrior.

I think my real struggle is that I don’t have a ready replacement. I don’t have another way to describe what I’m feeling called to do. The passion I want to live my life with is violent, forceful, but not for the subjugation of any one people. I hope to write violently for their liberation. I want to use my education, my demographic constellation to liberate, to celebrate and support the magnificence that humans—especially those who come from less stellar positions of power in our society—are capable of. It’s the awe of human potential for good that I want to go for with full force, violently.

Martin Luther King, Jr’s march from Selma to Montgomery was a violent march made by men and women bent on good violence.

Jesus’ march to Calvary was a violent march made by a man bent on doing good violence.

Rosa Parks’ decision to stay seated on the bus did violence to an unjust law, good violence.

Malala’s choice to go to school was a violent transgression of an unjust law. Every act required violence to injustice.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

The way has always been made by force, by people so in love with the good and the beautiful they’d stop at nothing to have it.

Take courage, my heart, to violently do good for those who may not be able to do it themselves.