Chris at Emptybottle responded to my post about the lack of intimacy in weblogging. Specifically, he questioned my paragraph on anger, and my sentence, …anger is the ultimate camouflage for what’s really going on in our heads and our lives.
He wrote:
Anger is peace, thwarted. Love, unrequited. The face of god, almost touched. The heartbreaking awareness that you (and so, all) just might not get there, wherever there might be. And ranging as it does in denomination, like our coin flipping up there in the air, the anger can be fire banked against the coming night, or a bolus of flaming tar catapulted at those who thwart the good.
I agree with Chris and more, and can match him lost dream for lost dream; and anger can be based on rightousness and a sense of injustice done. All too often, though, anger is more of a mask for an unhappiness, an uneasy state of being, or a need that can never be satisfied. But rather than be sad or reflective or hurt, which can leave us feeling vulnerable and exposed, we react angrily. We lash out indiscriminately, leaving a wake of dazed and battered friends, co-workers, and family members.
(Luckily weblogging has provided a new target in which to wreck our wrath, and usually without the consequences. I wonder if the divorce rate among webloggers is lower or higher than the norm?)
Chris also wrote:
Looking for some kind of truth outside myself, raging against the machine. Now I’m a model citizen, older and less convinced that any truth that could have any meaning for me lies anywhere outside myself and the threads that bind me to other people.
But I remain angry, and I maintain that that is the outward sign of my attempts to be honest with myself. It’s my honesty with the rest of the world, and it’s both personal and passionate.
Is anger an honest interaction with the world — literally what you see, all blazing glory of it, is what you get? I used to think so, and may have even at one point been so, but now, I’m not so sure.
However, there can be beauty in anger, and Chris, Stavros, is a beautifully angry person:
Long may he burn brightest.