Dissertation on Hate

For the first time in my life, I learned to hate.

I always imagined hate as something that is equally passionate as love—passionate anger, passionate bitterness, passionate desire for revenge, passionate ill will. Hate was angst and rage precipitating into tears, condensing into sweat and blood, transforming into physical violence unto the self and the other. Hate was death by torture, the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the gas chambers of the ghettos, the dagger of Hamlet and the knife of Cain.

It wasn’t. It isn’t.

It’s much simpler than that.

Of course in the beginning, it may have started from a hint of bitterness. Bitterness is nursed by anger and frustration. This grows into a rage over time and eventually. The heaviness of your heart will tire you and cause your soul to die and lie on the sea of infinite angst.

But you ask yourself, where did the bitterness come from? Bitterness is the inability of man to see beauty in things. He develops this sense of taste when he has grown accustomed to disappointment, rejection, denial, and frustration.

* * *

I cannot remember exactly when I started to hate her. I only came to realize now that I actually have grown this monster inside me as I tired to breathe in the thick impure air of Pearl Drive at midnight. I was contemplating my unfinished play. Finally, I discovered what it was about.

It would be my dissertation on hatred. The story becomes clearer to me now. The protagonist, Leon, could not finish his play—which he claims to the best play he would have ever written. He could not finish it because he is full of hatred. I have known this for a long time. I do not understant why I hadn’t thought of it before. Maybe because from the moment of conception of this play, I hated it. And so, I couldn’t finish it.

A few months ago, I started writing the play which would be the best piece I would have ever written. The play turned out to be my worst, despite my best efforts. Now, I think, I am starting to understand.

My writing, my art, has been my wife, my passion, my life, my true love. Nothing could take me away from it. Not even the promise of a comfortable life. Ever since, I believed that one cannot produce true art without Love. Love is the necessary condition for the creation of art.

That was the reason I could not finish that play—the play I decided to call my best, my coup de gras, my masterpiece. I could not write it because I hated it from the moment of its conception.

I hated it because I fell in love with someone else. I fell in love with her.

I still couldn’t figure out why they had to be mutually exclusive. This is something I will have to meditate upon some more. But for now, suffice it to say that for some unexplainable reason, in order to love one, one had to hate the other. There had to be that binary opposite—something like loving virtue and hating sin, or the other way around.

But now, I think I am ready to finish that play. Because now I realized, I have come to hate her.

* * *

Hatred is the death of the soul. There is a sense of peace in it. But this peace is the peace of emptiness. It is not the pleace of universal harmony or organic unity. It is the peace of a vacuum—the peace of nothingness.

Now that I think about it, hatred is not really something that is directed towards the other. True hatred is self-destruction. Not the violence of destroying existence but the dead silence that comes afterwards. Hatred can only be directed to the self. Because when one hates, one murders his soul.

How?

If hatred were the binary opposite of love, and loving is giving one’s self without expecting anything in return, then hatred is giving nothing. Since it is natural for man to give himself out—to share himself (as his creator shares his Being with him), the act of hating is the deliberate emptying of the self so that he cannot give anything to anyone. Hate incapacitates man to share himself. And so hate reduces man to nothingness—a state worse than being evil.

Now it is interesting to note that Love and Hate have similar roots. Or, to me, love and hate have the same mathematical representation—ZERO.

Love is the emptying of the self in order to share—thus the person is reduced to being ZERO. Because one has given his entirety to another. Hate is similar. Hate is the emptying of the self so as not to be able to share anything. And so again, the person is reduced to being Zero—nothing.

The only difference is that in Love, by giving everything, you are transformed into something more because it is given back to you eventually, in one way or another. True love is always rewarded. In hate, existence is negated. Nature is destroyed. I wish I took my calculus seriously so that I can expound on this further. This could be the material for the other plat I am working on (ZERO).

* * *

This is tiring.

Wonder if I made sense…