What Happens to Wrath Deferred?
How do you do anger?
Is how we experience anger a unique identifier to who we are as individuals, like a fingerprint or our DNA? Or is it what connects us to one another, a shared and common thread of experience across people, across cultures, across time? Does it set us apart, or does it pull us into the whirlpool of humanity?
What color is your anger when it moves inside you? Is it red-black Hawaiian lava rolling through the system, boiling the blood, bubbling patiently for that single fissure in the surface through which to explode into the outside world? Or is it ice blue, freezing the system one area at a time, pulling you away from any sense of warmth? Is it black like the bottom of the ocean, so void of light that even if someone else is inches away, you can neither see nor hear them in the absence of all light and the muffling of sound?
What does anger feel like when it oozes through your veins? Does it feel like poison? Does it itch? Or does it empower and embolden, like some forbidden drug? Does it paralyze you?
Many people I greatly respect and admire found professional achievement by harnessing their rage. Star athletes, accomplished lawyers, obsessive entrepreneurs, and possessed artists in almost every medium available have figured out how to place a bridle and bit on their anger, how to hold it with rope or leather as it circles the enclosure, how to break it down to submission without diminishing its power.
I never quite figured out how to make anger my friend or companion. I don’t fear it, because it has rarely if ever broken through the surface in ways that felt wild or unleashed. I’ve never been in a real fight. I’ve never punched anyone, threatened serious violence on anyone (although I have lost my full cool with my children a dozen or so times), or even attacked an inanimate object like a wall or a tree out of wrath.
Many people see this quality and admire me for my calm. Perhaps they think I’m noble, because they struggle to control their own anger, or they’ve known so many whose anger has ruined them. What they don’t realize, but what is undeniably tragic and true, is that my anger is a weak and flimsy thing. The reason I can control my anger is because its power is so limited.
My anger is not Mount Vesuvius. It’s not even the muffled backfire on a ’57 Chevy — hot air and noise with minimal punch or consequence. My anger is a monster under the bed, a ghost in the machine, a spirit in the material world. On the positive side, I rarely feel like my anger owns me. Even on the inside, in the dark corners where no one can see or sense my emotions, anger rarely takes the wheel.
And it kinda pisses me off.
Take this very moment in time, for example. I’m mad. Like, wicked, serious, hoppin’ mad. In a life full of youth and immaturity and stupidity, I can’t conjure a handful of times where I’ve felt this hard-boiled with anger. Yet, to know just how violently it currently bubbles and boils within me, to feel it eating away in my veins like battery acid, and to see how very little of it has even seeped out into the world around me… is deflating. For me, being angry mostly serves to remind me how weak and flimsy I can be.
I am a vanilla-flavored flat tire of vitriol. I am the REO Speedwagon of rage.
William Wallace channels his wrath to (almost) emancipate a people; Billy just seethes to himself, and the world spins madly on.
Intellectually, I know this can be a good thing. I can stay calmer than many in heated moments. I can see reasons for gratitude and sense the feelings of others around me through the smoky sheen of my anger. Intellectually, I know there are people who have watched their anger, their inability to control their rage, ruin their lives, and I’m sure they would love to take a good swipe at me for failing to recognize how good I’ve got it. They’ve watched their belongings get devoured by a Rottweiler, and here I am complaining that my Shih Tsu isn’t mean and scary enough.
In a perfect moment of serendipity, and thanks to inspiration from Twilight of the Gods (link to review), I purchased used copies of a handful of albums just weeks ago, and one of them was The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails. Although I may not be able to find ways to channel these emotions, I can find something like comfort — pissed off comfort — in the gift Trent Reznor has in giving so much of what lurks in our dark corners the noise and voice-cracking growl-screams it deserves.
Reznor’s rage matured with his sound. While still brilliant, the sonics of Pretty Hate Machine makes me feel like I’m reading out of my own sophomore diary. But the advances Reznor makes to his sound over the decade between his debut and The Fragile, the production arsenal at his disposal. He went from having a trusty Colt revolver to the Marine stockade from Aliens.
YEAR: 1999
