This Incite Blog entry will take a different turn today. I'm working on a description of the “logic” of anger. It follows here:
He remembered the very first time he rode a train, the unobstructed views of skies and clouds for hundreds of miles, the sensation that he was being hurtled effortlessly and without external propulsion through earth-space. This feeling embodied all he came to know about the passage of time: that it pushed him along without his permission nor even, sometimes, his consciousness; and thus it held the promise of the surprise of hope, of infinite panoramas of change.
But once he came to doubt the faith of his fathers, he began to see the passage of time quite differently. He perceived it as uniform as a corrugated tin roof over which he was soundlessly pulled ““ across the increasingly-hotter humps of days, gliding into the cooling rifts of oblivious sleep at night. He felt himself held mute, arms tied to his sides, drawn up and down rhythmic, meaningless slopes that slid frictionless under him. To say that he felt himself as powerless against an unfolding fate, was to pauper language. Finally only one thing gave him meaning, stood him up on that tin roof and loosed his bands.
Wrath alone rescued him. Boundless anger, the friend of his bosom. The great universe of swirling, lustrous, granular lava beneath the thin skin of humanity, roiling and ready to erupt into geysers at a slight. How odd it is, he thought, looking at his watch, that when you are not angry, anger seems the most unreasonable and costly of emotions. Anyone could see how counterproductive it is. But when anger is your own treasured possession, it becomes a refuge, comprehensive and precise in its own internal and unchallenged logic.
Nothing can motivate and focus the mind like a sense of injustice, the awareness of one”‘s own offended state. Its history is impeccable in detail, its analysis superlative, its conceptions immaculate. Anger reasons that not only can you sell a birthright, or a relationship, for a bowl of stew; you will find yourself satisfied beyond compare with its savory taste. You can fully expect to be justified in wiping your mouth and saying, “Damn, that stew was everything I hoped it would be.”
