etirabys:

nianeyna replied to your post “depressed and cross, and as always with this mood combo it’s a toss up…”

I miss your baboon comparisons during the week

slightly tipsy and going to take this opportunity to wax on about a baboonish topic. cw the joyful infliction of violence by children against other children

When I was in elementary and early middle school, I used to get into fights – mostly boys, a girl once or twice. Children I hated, who hated me. And occasionally our enmity would explode into hair pulling, kicking, punching, pinching. I was a great pincher, I’d use the tipmost (distal interphalangeal) joints of all my fingers on someone’s arm.

And these fights, they are some of the most viscerally alive, joyous moments in my memory. I would only dimly register that someone was inflicting pain on me – the sheer joy of hurting someone I hated made every bit of me feel awake. It takes a lot for me now to really remember how that felt – I don’t hate like that anymore. But when I’m in the right frame of mind, I remember being thirteen, having someone play a mean spirited prank on me and look smug about it, feeling all my restraint evaporate, and headbutting them so hard that they yelled, not feeling any pain myself. And my blood shivers in longing, remembering that moment when all of my body and mind was in alignment with itself. I can’t get that in a nice civilized martial arts program for adults. It was only possible for me as a child, when I and my opponent were too weak to inflict serious harm on each other.

I think baboons and chimps must feel like that when they’re being nasty at each other. You have the people over you, and the people under you, the people who make you bristle when they get too close and the ones you tolerate or like, the people you fear and the people whose fear of you is enjoyable. I think when baboons erupt into violence against each other, it feels like that: the satisfying snap where you stop stopping yourself, you in agreement with you in violence.