The anatomy of hate

Crimson sparks shooting through my bursting veins, flames mercilessly erupting from every fibre of my being, churning my mind into an endless abyss, anger and resentment being my sole companions. Whenever I let my emotions overpower me, whenever I succumb to the mighty forces of my crippling ego, whenever I fall to my knees before the haunting shadows within, the same words always cascade upon me like relentless rocks. The same five words are hurled at me, tackling the exploding animosity with a splash of cooling serenity, stabilising the broken pieces of my mind’s constitutional parts. My mother, the greatest symbol for tranquillity and peace, always tells me “Hate is a strong word.”

Younger me always rolled her eyes when she heard these words for what felt like the millionth time. But now, it dawns upon me that my mother was right (don’t tell her). She always knew, and what I now realise, the complexity and multifaceted nature of the word ‘hate’. Hate is intricate, interwoven with a myriad of factors. Thus, whenever I hastily yell, “I hate my teacher for burdening me with excessive amounts of homework”, “I hate the woman on the road who spilled hot coffee all over my white dress”, “I hate the barista for messing up my daily coffee order”, or any other explosive declarations fueled by a monstrous rage, I shake my head and laugh at my own idiosyncrasies, reminding myself that I am merely enduring a brief period of overwhelming feelings which paralyse my rationality, nothing else. I reiterate, to myself, that hate is an emotion, a phenomenon which takes countless ticks of the clock in order to cultivate its fiery essence, it requires consolidation from every aspect of the triggering issue due to its labyrinthine nature. In the course of my life, there will be infinite such instances, wherein I feel sudden bursts of malice. However, despite my initial assumptions, those events will soon fade away from my mind, as newer and seemingly more pressing circumstances will push them away, erasing their fading hues from the canvas of my subconscious.

So what really is hate? This is a question which has puzzled me for longer than I can recall. I’ve spent far too many nights, wherein sleep eluded my wandering mind, gawking at the eurekas and epiphanies of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, masterfully inked onto paper.

Yet, the answer has confounded me continuously, to the extent that it has become one of the only constants in my life- the inability to define terms in a manner that encapsulates their entire essence. I’ve used this quote in numerous pieces before, and I will do so yet again because it truly is one of the wisest phrases ever penned down by man, “to define is to limit”. Maybe by forcing myself to restrict my understanding of hate, I unknowingly caused the clouds of uncertainty to develop, leading to a hazy and incomplete perspective, halting me from obtaining a holistic paradigm.

Yet, despite the anatomy of hate being vast and indescribable by even the most talented of poets, there is one scenario that floats in my mind, every single time I ponder over the term hate and its true implications. It’s an extract from my favourite book, The Secret History, and it describes an intellectually stimulating conversation between a classical Greek professor and his students, centring around the nexus of complexities stemming from that tiny yet relentless voice etched into our heads. 

“The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.”

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which after all we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing?”

“But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self ? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?”

Hate envelops my mind as something strictly fluid and non perceivable; like a paradoxically iridescent ineffable phenomenon rather than a tangible word. Yet, it manifests itself in the most fundamental aspect of our lives, the relationship one has with their own self, the sole relationship that lasts from the first blink of an eye, till the very last.