Wild Thing

The big game is a big deal.

My husband has suddenly become a football fan. Throughout our 47 years together, he often talked about his older brother, a high school football hero, and his own unsuccessful attempts to play, but never sat down to watch games on TV. Till now. He sits, head craned forward, holding his beer and his cat, cheering for whatever team he’s decided is the underdog, periodically leaping up to scream and startling the cat.

I’ll walk by, doing chores, and occasionally find myself glancing at the screen. The vision of thousands of people screaming themselves hoarse is for me, almost more mesmerizing than the ballet/drama on the field. At one point, the camera cut to two screaming women, jumping up and down, pumping arms, mouths wide open in jubilation, reminding me of a theatrical production of The Bacchae I saw years ago. Ecstasy, terror, rage, maybe even some form of lust were all on display in the stadium.

These events offer permission to express our deepest emotions in community. Rising from the core, they propel us to rush the stage, to fall to our knees, to grab a stranger, to dash into battle. Elvis and Beatles fans would literally faint in ecstasy at the sight of their idol. (Maybe girls still do, but I’m dating myself.) While horror, lust and rage play out in the movies, we try to moderate or even stifle these primal urges in our daily lives, squeezing our bellies and buttocks, gripping our flexors, looking for all the world like we are fine, just fine, when really we are one step away from Edward Munch’s The Scream.

Recently, a friend of mine was angry about something her husband had done. She just kept saying, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.” Joking, I told her to run around the house, waving her arms and screaming. She got back to me later and said, “I don’t know why, but that helped a lot!”

Back in the 70s there was a movement called Primal Scream Therapy. I think it didn’t last because while screaming makes you feel better in the midst of a crisis, just screaming doesn’t actually heal you from past crises. You have to be screaming in the moment. And let’s face it that’s when you feel like screaming!

We like to think we are evolving past all these “primitive” urges. Yet, here they are, just waiting for permission, in spite of our mindfulness meditations, our cold showers and nervous system reset strategies. In one of the original Star Trek episodes, there was a society that was all “love and light” till dusk, and then everyone went wild in a frenzy of violence, chaos and lust. One of Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms is called Chaos, and after Chaos, comes Stillness. So go on, run around the house screaming your head off, go to a football game, put on some wild music and whirl, It’s part of the human experience.