Revenge

Other centuries, forgotten novels, yellow pictures of great-grandparents, post-war conditions, psychological analyses of sadistic murderers, musketeers, mafia methods and some pretty bad films I've forgotten, that's what I associate with Revenge. Not only old-fashioned as notion but primitive, and I'm not primitive, neither are my beloved ones, so we're not vengeful. Judgements can have this wonderful opposite effect: it makes us "not-guilty". If we find it primitive to revenge ouselves and we know we are not primitive, then we can't be vengeful, can we?
It took me ages to understand revenge as part of a daily exchange. Not big, bloody ones, but more like a sentence, a tone of voice, a little hesitation in responding, a little well controlled indifference in the gesture, subtleties let off with exactness and punctuality.
I think it does actually cheer, relieve, alleviate, ease, solace, comfort us. And balance something that was about to tilt within us. It might keep us on our feet and it may give us back a little, lost worth. What we really want is to be relieved from the pain by the one who caused us pain. Fairly often revenge leads to the opposite but that's another story.

Revenge has other aspects. It is not necessarily something we take or get, it might as well be something we give. An expression, a remark we make, in order to get something back. A reaction, an apology, the kiss we long for. All love stories had a beginning. Scientists talk about the first three months. I find that dispiriting. At the other hand: how long does a conception take, and how long does it last, a second with lifelong consequenses, I get dizzy knowing I'll never rise to that occasion. Whatever is true, I can well imagine that for a long time and maybe forever any deviance from the initial melting together is so painful that it must require some kind of reaction. That could be revenge. On the assumption of course that we weren't so civilized that any such thing was unthinkable.
Then revenge would be meant and used as an instrument for returning to conditions where no revenge was ever an issue.