“Hey, what’s up man?” Richard was much calmer than I’d be in the situation, befitting his gentle nature. Perhaps it was the Toronto summer air making it easy to ask the little angry man why he was furiously rubbing his boot across Richard’s back tire. We had spotted him while walking from Kensington Market; he had just furiously rubbed someone else’s tire, and I figured he must be attempting to remove something unwanted from the bottom of his shoe. But no, he then approached Richard’s car and did the same.

“Those f’in a’holes,” he replied, nastily, sans quotation marks in his speech. “They’ve given me $400 in tickets over the last two months. No more!” The last two words were presented with a victorious smile, and suddenly he was friendly, supremely so, telling us how he lived in the neighborhood and was tired of local cops harassing street parkers. Instead of keeping his complaints silent, he was doing something about it. He may not be helping out the police force’s monthly quota, though he was sure to bring a smile to many an unknown driver’s face, ours included.

I thought of the wrathful deities in Buddhism, those divine creatures who appear angry and malicious and dangerous; Buddha is often depicted flanked by two, remaining in peaceful repose and telling you to come closer even though they stand with swords upraised and garlands of skulls. The Buddha tells us they are part of the balance, that without them, this would not be our world, not our existence.

Reading James Baldwin’s memoirs, No Name in the Street, I came across this passage, which I quote at length. The book, published in 1972 and featuring reflections of Martin, Malcolm, and the Black Panthers, is very much a treatise on racism and civil rights. I don’t want to appropriate his words, as they were most definitely racially specific. Yet his point is an important one, and we can use it as a meditation on our fear of such demons:

“Bobby Seale insists that one of the things that most afflict white people is their disastrous concept of God; they have never accepted the dark gods, and their fear of the dark gods, who live in them at least as surely as the white God does, causes them to distrust life. It causes them, profoundly, to be fascinated by, and more than a little frightened of the lives led by black people: it is the tension which makes them problematical. But, on the other hand, it must be becoming increasingly clear to some, at least, that all of us are standing in the same deep shadow, a shadow which can only be lifted by human courage and honor.”

Think of the rituals of Haiti, of Morocco, of India: there is an understanding of the necessity of these dark gods. They are honored, and therefore reciprocate blessings. When they are denied, or ignored, their power becomes immense. They stand in shadows instead of being brought to light, and fester inside of our minds and bodies where irreparable damage is done. They can empower us, yet we shun them, and they grow angry, which is their nature. Our neuroses haunt us, all because we believe them to be powerless. We become victimized by our own internal functions, which is where these dark gods exist, and seek to blame everything outside of us, instead of self-reflecting.

This morning a friend of mine, discussing a new documentary on free speech, said that we only want the speech we want to hear to be free; what we don’t want to hear, we want silenced. Words don’t work that way, though.

If Richard and I had not had that run-in with little angry man, we most likely would have assumed he was crazy, or something worse, passing him by on the street with our presumed perceptions. And yet there he was, in the service of others, righting what he believed to be a great wrong. Such lessons are always there to be learned, and this was one I was grateful for.