FURY

Dancing Lord Shiva

Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise – the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, sel-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.

Salman Rushdie in “Fury”