Angry

Angry.

I don’t know why my feelings have gone so out of control in the last few years. It’s as if they are something separate and disconnected from my “self” with no rhyme or reason to their behavior. Today, lurking just beneath the surface there is this lumbering sort of anger, the kind of anger that builds into violence. I know it won’t get that far, my rationality does rule it, but there is utterly no reason for this feeling.

But it’s there. Just out of reach. Coloring the way I look at things, influencing choices I make, and generally being a pain in the ass. There is absolutely no reason for it. Things are going well. Little is denied to me. I am standing in a center where I can see things spinning around. Yeats’s gyres are spinning through their phases.

Perhaps it’s Phase 28:

Will — The Fool.

Mask (from Phase 14). True — Oblivion. False — Malignity.

Creative Mind (from Phase 2). True — Physical Activity. False — Cunning.

Body of Fate (from Phase 16). — The Fool is his own Body of Fate

The natural man, the Fool desiring his Mask, grows malignant, not as the Hunchback, who is jealous of those who can still feel, but through terror and out of jealousy of all that can act with intelligence and effect. It is his true business to become his own opposite, to pass from a semblance of Phase 14 to the reality of Phase 28, and this he does under the influence of his own mind and body — he is his own Body of Fate for having no active intelligence he owns nothing of the exterior world but his own mind and body. He is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called “The Child of God”. At his worst his hands and feet and eyes, his will and his feelings, obey obscure subconscious fantasies, while at his best he would know all wisdom if he could know anything. The physical world suggests to his mind pictures and events that have no relation to his needs or even his desires; his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts; and it is in this aimlessness that he finds his joy.

WB Yeats, A Vision

That about sums it up, really. It’s strange to me that I have the talent of turning the pages of a book to just the part I need. It seems almost more instinctual than rational. It’s also strange to me that I seem to read at about twice the speed of most of my fellow teachers. Each time we’ve gone through workshops, I’m always left staring off into space while the rest of the people continue reading. Inside my head, I do feel like a straw drifting in the wind.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a fool.