This is kind of shameful and painful, which might be why I’ve taken so long to write about it.
It disturbs me that some people think I’m angry when I’m standing up straight, calmly laying out my problems. These people don’t know anger. It disturbs me that some adults get scared when someone angrily raises their voice. These people don’t know anger.
I used to be angry so much. Much angrier and much more often than anyone else I’ve met. Destructive with demonic fervor. Burning rage. Explosive fury. People thought I was insane. I have been told so many times that I couldn’t control myself. The disturbing thing is that I could. I’ve been told so many times that I wasn’t thinking. The disturbing thing is that I was rational. The most disturbing thing in the world — aside from the fact that nobody cares, there is no meaning or purpose to be found, and we are infinitely small, of course — ok, the second most disturbing thing in the world is rationality bent on destruction.
I don’t get that angry anymore. The feeling is so alien to me that it just now occurred to me that I might have something to say about anger. That rage was part of the emotional register I could actually use in analysis. I’ve written a lot of fiction (most of it terrible), but I can’t recall ever having a raging character. I’ve written a lot of nonfiction (most of it terrible), but I can’t recall ever having a raging character. I have unconsciously shut off that entire dimension of emotion, it seems. The realization that I might actually have another string to play on is exhilarating, but also scary.
I never set fire to a school or mutilated a cat, but material dimensions or economic estimates are poor measures of character. It was so bad that people were convinced I must be temporarily insane. That I “snapped” with disturbing regularity. That I must have “blacked out”. And so on. I am sure their minds would turn inside-out if they ever understood that I didn’t. That, in fact, I was perfectly conscious of what I was doing and simply desired destruction. That afterwards, I didn’t regret it. (I now regret the destruction, but not the anger. I wish I had directed it elsewhere, but I can’t even now deny the validity of the anger.)
I’m sure there are others like me, but I’ve never met anyone who understood well enough that I could confidently say they had experienced it themselves. From reading on the internet, most so-called experts on “anger management” haven’t a fucking clue what it feels like, either. I’ve met plenty of people who were so disturbed by conventional anger that they could never have witnessed anger of the sort I refer to. I am now, years after the last time I was that angry, thoroughly alien to the concept. I remember it, but it feels like nothing else in my memory. Like an emotion concocted on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy and implanted into my memory. Completely foreign. Ever remember an old memory that used to be vivid and find that you remember tags, like “happy” or “sad”, but you can no longer feel the emotion associated with the memory? Try that, only you don’t even recognize the emotion, like if you remembered that you felt “blarghq” regarding a memory but you have no idea how “blarghq” feels. In some senses, “anger” feels as empty as “blarghq”.
I’m sure I can’t convince you, I don’t know how, but I’m pretty sure most of you reading this have never experienced this peculiar kind of rage, and many have perhaps never even witnessed it in others. I don’t imagine myself to be unique, nor do I intend to yap on about how nobody understands me; I imagine, rather, that I’m part of a small tribe and it’s hidden and scattered and I happen never to have met anyone else of the tribe in my journey through life thus far. I’m not sure I’d like to, either, because it’s a tribe defined by the most negative emotions imaginable.
I never put the feeling into words when I was experiencing it with some frequency. It was so primal the idea never occurred to me that it even could be put into words. I’ve long since given up trying to explain it to anyone. It is, I suppose, an out of body experience. Or perhaps it’s more of an extended body experience. Your body becomes amorphous: its boundaries are not where the external world perceives them to be. You don’t lose reason, you simply direct it to a single objective: destruction. Destruction is part of your body. When you smash a chair, the chair is part of your body; its splinters are your fingers, its parts are your boundaries. Ironically, I’ve been chasing mindfulness, not realizing I once had it: no matter how much you meditate on something, you cannot become as aware of it and as exclusively focused upon it as raging anger is focused on destruction. It’s a bodily experience: since every last bit of destruction is part of your body, and your only desire is to extend it as far as possible, to expand to titanic propertions, you must wreak havoc with your hands and feet and voice. Thankfully, no one handed me a loaded gun when angry, but I am sure destruction-at-a-distance wouldn’t have satisfied me; much better to physically hit something with the gun, punch with your weapon as an extension of your hand, than to use it as a mechanized conveyor of bullets, which must by necessity leave your body to hit their target. That sort of destruction doesn’t fuel the beast; the amorphous blob, at the very least, is continuous, it doesn’t stop here and start over there again. The only satisfying destruction is by direct contact.
Cliche though it may be, anger tears you apart from within. You don’t feel that until after, though. Inside real rage, there is only one thing that is tearing, and that is the desire for destruction, but no amount of it can ever satisfy you. I would destroy something, then go back and destroy the pieces, then walk away and come back and destroy the pieces of the pieces if I was still angry. If I could, I’d have then burnt the pieces of the pieces of the pieces and possibly punched the ashes as well, just for good measure. Nothing is ever as totally destroyed as the destructive impulse wants. Nothing is as spectacularly exploded as the explosive anger demands. It is a fire that fuels itself, that exponentially increases until it’s burnt through your heart, and then you fall down, and the rage is over. That’s the thing that still sticks in my mind: the appetite for destruction. No, scratch that. The physiological need for it. It’s like a tight choke: resistance is panicked. Destruction is the only resistance, otherwise your head’s gonna explode. Or turn itself inside-out.
I’ve said before that I never hated anyone. In light of the above, that may seem surprising, but rage is not about hate. A fireball is an apt, if overused picture of it. A fire has no fixed shape, and it’s always looking to expand. Where’s the “center” of a flame? Nowhere or everywhere, and that’s the experience of extreme anger too: your locus of self seems fluid. Insofar as you feel you have a self at all, it extends far beyond your physical body. Your self is one with your destruction. The impulse isn’t one of sadism, exactly: expressions of pain from others do not satisfy it. Only destruction does. Chaos. Upsetting of order. Hence screaming and breaking, and yet destruction simply reveals the order hidden under the surface, and so to satisfy the urge for disorder one must destroy the newly unveiled order, which only brings to the surface an order hidden beneath that again, so that the impulsive desire for creating disorder can never be satisfied.
Honestly, I’m afraid of anger. Real anger, not the sort of thing that people who haven’t seen real anger call anger. I’m afraid of what might happen if that beast overtook me as an adult, because I can only imagine it would be so much worse than what happened before. The most disturbing thing about this nightmare, though, isn’t the paranoia about losing control. No, I fear not losing control. I didn’t lose control, and that’s the scary part. The scary part isn’t being possessed by a monster but being one.
Have I been a monster? Am I a monster, since I can’t even now completely deny or decry that part of me? Have I painted a picture of myself as disturbed beyond humanity? Could you guess my past if you saw me angry, the sort of anger ordinary people experience, but not real anger? Is true rage the substance or means of psychopathy? Should I even have published this?
Rage hasn’t brought me anything but pain and suffering. Perhaps, at a distance, I can use the experience for some kind of transformative, creative purpose. I’m not sure how. I mean, I just realized it was something I could actually think about. The whole thing has always felt obviously noncognitive, so much so that the idea of thinking about it or putting into words that feeling which belongs only to the moment, never occurred to me. Not even in passing. I suspect I’ll need time to make compulsive destruction into anything constructive.
Oct 20, 2010