We recently watched a series on television where a Sicilian grandmother places a curse on a man’s family for mistreating her granddaughter. And sure enough, a couple of generations later, two identical twins are born, one of them psychotic. Their lives are miserable. The curse worked.
My questions are, Why did it work? and How did it work? The simple answer, of course, is that it worked because it’s a movie. And I believe that in real life, a curse can work if the person upon whom the curse is inflicted knows about it, and he falls into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I get that. And I understand that some people might believe other people are cursed, and they treat them accordingly, fulfilling the curse. Racial prejudice may run in this vein.
But what about a curse that is uttered to the universe, and no people know about it? Does it have any power?
The opposite of a curse, I suppose, is a blessing. Setting aside the semi-automatic “God bless you!” after someone sneezes (a practice that started, I read, during the plague years as a way to ask God to prevent the sneezer from getting the plague), how is the blessing supposed to work? Divine intervention? If so, is that the enforcement mechanism for curses as well? Again, it may be that if a person knows he or she is blessed, that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by optimism. And if others believe a person is blessed, well, they may confer the blessing in the way they interact with him.
(And of course there is a great southern expression I learned in Gainesville: When you say to someone, “Bless your heart” using the right tone of voice, what you are really saying is, “You are pathetic and need all the help you can get.” Those of you from the South may want to confirm this . . ..)
What about curse words? It’s easy to see “God damn you!” as a curse, in ways we have been discussing. But how about “Fuck you!”? If that’s a curse, what’s the intended outcome? I assume that “curse words” are words used when cursing someone, but I’m not sure how “shit” fits into a curse, unless there is a missing verb in the imperative mood.
(By the way, isn’t it charming that the word “mood” is used as a grammatical term? A question can be posed in “the interrogative mood,” and questioning is indeed a mood – as evidenced by my opening questions. And don’t you tell someone what to do when you are in an imperative mood?) (Please forgive this English teacher digression.)
Back to cursing. (Instead of typing this, I should have written it in cursive . . ..) Despite the uncertainties about whether and how curses work, I still think it useful to issue a well-placed curse from time to time. What can it hurt? And I know from personal experience that it feels good to lay down a curse or two.