Getting Angry Vs. Staying Angry

On having and losing a temper, holding a grudge and sneering at interconnectedness

My daughter asked me how I feel most of the time.

It was early, in a quiet moment after dropping her younger brother at a new preschool - tears and Dunkin’ Donuts chocolate frosting on his dinosaur t-shirt. I was walking her to school.

I hate mornings. Hate. I always have. That morning, having cajoled and encouraged and done every other damn thing to get my tiny three-year-old lad through an unfamiliar aluminum doorframe into the care of a 22-year-old woman with more patience and tact than I’ll ever have, I was drained. No matter what the office threw at me, the hard part of my day was done.

But my daughter had seen something about her brother, her father, or about life. Maybe it was the terrifying range of human emotions, which we’d witnessed in about 12 minutes. Maybe she smelled the opportunity for candor - she’s pretty much that sharp.

She asked me how I feel most of the time.

Here on the page, I can equivocate nearly to satisfaction. But in that moment, I was too tired and exasperated to mince words. So I answered plainly, “Angry. I’m angry a lot. It’s something I have to watch out for.”

A temper

My mother says I was a happy baby. And they say memories don’t start in earnest until you’re about seven. What stands out to me about my childhood was being angry. The shitheel kids on my block were angry. My father was angry. Little league was angry. Cold wet fingers in winter felt like anger. Sunburn through maple leaves felt like anger.

Anger itself was so ever-present that the word anger, or even angry was rarely spoken. The word I remember most was temper, which had to do with managing anger, but was far from scientific. A person could have a temper. A person could lose their temper. Either way, watch out. A person who wasn’t much of a threat might have a temper tantrum, to the mild shame of themselves and their loved ones.

Bookkeeping

Anger is a feeling. Anger is a choice. Anger is a strategy. All these can be true within a span of about one second.

There are people and situations that we can’t afford to be mad at. Instead, we’re mostly mad at people we can afford to be mad at. It’s a mostly concealed calculus that leaves us yelling at children, politicians we’ll never meet and the poor. It’s a major reason we need so much so-called entertainment.

More than just the reaffirming of our existing prejudices, or forgetting our failures, we need the catharsis. We need an occasion to get very angry or upset - but not to have to do anything about it. I don’t know if that does more harm or good.

Your face will stay that way

Playing nice with those who deserve our hatred warps us. But so does hatred. Let’s say I get angry. Someone did me wrong. It’s beyond forgiveness. I turn a situation into a position.

I come from grudge-holding people. I learned young and had a flair for it. But once I collect three or so grudges, bam, I’m painted into a corner. Within the parameters created by my grudges, I can barely move. Now I’m really angry and I don’t even think it’s my fault. It’s the world.

I have power, but not as much as I think. I decide to settle those scores. I lash out.

After a few satisfying revenges on people who seem gobsmacked at what I’m doing, I end up alone, taking revenge mostly on myself. This was a bit too much of my twenties.

Anger is not exactly laziness

But it’s not far off.

Anger isn’t open or curious. It’s only explorative when it’s feeling around for a weapon. But anger is incredibly powerful - they just made a movie about a breakthrough of combining scientific curiosity with anger.

Anger isn’t even particularly active. It looks active. It looks active when you vehemently abjure the things you deeply desire. It looks active to demand things you don't want at all. It would require real energy, though, to change direction.

Anger bends the facts to what it wants to do next. It makes a virtue of its own necessity, even if that means destroying every other virtue in the world. Look at the ruins of the great European cities after World War II. Angry, I may just call a necessity a virtue and hope no one who matters to me calls bullshit.

Angry young men versus angry old men

What gets you, kills you and ultimately makes you something unpleasant isn’t getting angry. It’s staying angry.

Meanwhile, in the Bible

Anger is a powerful thing. G-d, the author of the universe, only made it through ten generations of people before He totally lost it and tried to drown them in the tub.

Only after that episode did He come up with - or likely borrow - the idea of forgiveness. And his kids have had to remind Him of the concept more than once since then.

Sublimation

My education was slapdash - I was angry. And when I was at my worst, I read the most. I was looking for a weapon, and a sharp one. After all, I was mostly attacking myself. In the pits of it, I seized on the Freud’s idea of sublimation.

Sublimation is sexual desire placed into the service of a seemingly unrelated effort. Makes sense. If part of your house was always on fire, it might be smart to put a chimney over it.

But there’s another side to it. While sublimation describes the predatory dynamism of the mind on the attack, it also impugns the credibility of the attacker.

I liked sublimation because it cast anger as a tonic, or a fuel. I liked the bronze statue of Manjusri in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was the tutelary deity of enlightenment. He was pissed off, with his dozen hands full of skull-bowls and swords, tongue flicking over fangs. He wanted answers. He wanted enlightenment.

The real problem with anger

What’s enlightenment? Not fucking this. But a really angry guy can feel like he’s already there. Anger is energy. It’s bracing, focusing.

The world is uncertain. Even if I did my homework, it keeps on going, changing. Angry is how I am when I know enough and have had enough. It’s the feeling of being certain and right. And getting angry is as close as it seems any of us can get to being certain in this century.

The real problem with anger is that it can feel like what’s best about you.

Yelling on the street

Even at this late date, when I try to do something like my best, anger is always close at hand. It hears me yelling and thinks it’s back in business.

I yell frequently. There’s advising a child to retrieve a mozzarella stick from a pizzeria floor. There’s corralling a scooter from the middle of an avenue while ensuring the kids stay on the sidewalk. There’s saying put on your shoes for the 75th time that week.

Then there are the things I can’t get mad at, like the dignity-eroding ceremonies of making a living - the business-casual camouflage, grinning on cue for a video call or simply biting my tongue for ten of my nineteen waking hours.

I’m still angry - and that’s hard to say out loud, or to write, after so much good luck and so much hard work, after so many vital human things have worked out so well.

No candy!

My son is three and he gets mad as hell. Sometimes he feels like he’s owed candy. Sometimes it’s tactical - getting angry in anticipation of punishment.

Sometimes his outrage works. For example, I’ll say no candy. And he yells and screams, throws a toy or tries to hit me. Often, I’m trying to do five other things at the same time, or I don’t have a great reason for refusing the candy, and so I say fine, here’s the candy.

But even then, he won’t be placated. Even when the solution benefits him and our talk of a compromise or even a bribe shifts to talk of a punishment, he remains firm. He’s cutting off his nose to spite his face. He refuses and declare, No candy!

While his self-defeating intransigence is a terrible trait for a person to develop, and while it makes my life more difficult in the moment, I can’t help but be a little charmed.

Lock and key

Something is repressed. Always. Attention is always necessarily limited. Consciousness is always bounded. Private conversations are always limited, and public discussions even more so.

What gets repressed is the 99.999999999999% of our own experience we miss by being locked in on either trying to kill or trying not to kill each other. This is why anger is important. It’s the lock and the key at the same time.

Anger is leads us out on a limb, like my little boy refusing the same candy whose refusal had spurred his tantrum. The goodness of angels is unimportant. But the lives of saints are often grisly. They propose something perhaps as large as if the likes of us can do it, then anyone can, down to the hydrogen atoms in the sun. Heaven’s not so far, but it’s not clear how to reach it, either.

Cosmic intransigence

Everything is connected is a seemingly harmless bromide. You hear it a lot. It doesn’t cost much to say. But, man, it makes me angry. It’s like being told to calm down. Being told that everything is interconnected is like being told seriously, please sir, calm down.

And if you want to you could make the argument that all things are connected, though I’m suspicious of your reasons for doing so.

As a notion, I yank against its tug. I rage against the approximating, smoothing-over implied by interconnection. I renounce my kinship with the stapler, the asteroid and puppy. I resist the hermetic or holographic reflection of all within each.

But I’m not entirely insensible. I can see how my resistance to the smothering sameness of everything being interconnected is itself ultimately a reflection the whole, which itself insouciantly resists the smothering sameness of the pre-primordial nonexistence.

But I do not accept this kinship. Maybe what I have most in common with the cosmos is that I just can’t help myself.

Selected Bibliography

The first really good poem I ever wrote (audio) about anger and the impossible possibility of forgiveness, music by Matthew Dublin