Unknown Depths of Anger

    I once knew a man who dearly loved his wife & sons, and loved to take them skiing, hiking, canoeing, fishing, camping. My family and I gladly did all of these with them. He was a very honest, hard-working, sincere, 'straight-as-an-arrow,' 'by-the-book' fellow. He'd happily chat except about anything to do with religion or spirituality. These were strictly off limits, and we never learned why. All his hard work seemed to pay off when he landed a strikingly lucrative job as one of six in-house lawyers for a multinational lumber company. But within a month or so, his boss asked him to sign off on a document that our friend knew was shady, so he refused to sign. This immediately got him fired.
    His whole world collapsed. He abandoned his family, changed his name, joined a religious cult, and moved to Europe. When his existing worldview crumbled, he 'flipped' to its opposite.  

 

David Whyte’s poem “Anger”:

    "ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
    What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
    Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague. 
    Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
    But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be understood fully at the very spring of its birth: it is an invitation to find a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence."

 

      I emailed Whyte's poem above, as well as the link to his imho wonderful interview (bottom of this page) to a relative who is on a spiritual path, as well as an old friend whose dogmatic belief is that we live in a cruel meaningless mechanical Cosmos, and who has, on a couple of previous occasions, become very angry when I suggested otherwise. I had (naively) hoped that Whyte's nuanced, compassionate understanding of anger might soften my friend's rigid armor.

    My relative's response started like this:
    "I watched 5 minutes of Whyte and stopped.
     Not because it's useless but because it resonates so well and connects with so many thinking points that I had to put some down before resuming. ..."

    My friend's response started like this: 
    "I have read the "poem". This guy, Whyte, has trouble with language. For example, when is a poem, a poem? And when is anger, anger? He keeps ..." 
    My friend made no mention of the interview - probably too angry to notice the link, or the mention of it in the subject heading of the email. Coincidentally, David Whyte is a well-known, highly-respected poet, with multiple published books, so the "trouble" may not be in Whyte's use of "language."

    Whyte's interview skillfully addresses anger about aspects of life we cannot control, and much more:

    Interviewer: “… the intersection between powerlessness and anger. When we’re made to make contact with that sense of helplessness or powerlessness, our immediate response is rage, anger. Can you unpack that?”

    David Whyte (DW): “Well you can immediately see its actual practical physical evolutionary necessity, in rage and physical defense in people you love. So the inability to actually be able to do something about something that doesn’t involve physical defense (invokes frustration & anger). What's actually needed involves another kind of deeper cradling, or holding, which our physical bodies are unable to do. We have to be able to hold another person in our heart and our mind. And that heart energy is often what we feel lies below the horizon of our inner line of resistance. So opening the heart is always a very powerful path for a human being to take. 
    Albert Camus, the great French writer & philosopher, had a beautiful invitation. It was just one simple line, ‘live to the point of tears.’ This is not an invitation to maudlin sentimentality. This is asking you to feel things, right to their Essence. If you just have an edge of dread about something, then feel that dread more, don’t resist it. Get to the center of it until it starts to change into something else. 
    The Greeks had this beautiful word, which we don’t have in modern English, which is, ‘enantiodromia,’ and it means the ability of something, once it becomes its absolute essential self, to start changing into something completely different, and quite often its complete opposite. Which is why immovability always changes into incredible fluidity, once you’ve got through that. So to be able to feel things until they actually start to have a life of their own, and start to mature … 
    This is a received understanding in psychology, that parts of us when they’re traumatized, stay stone-like inside you for good reason, and refuse to grow older, until that trauma has been resolved. The traumatized part doesn’t want to move on until it’s healed. And maybe it would be very destructive if it moved on prematurely. So finding the parts of you that are stuck – is a wonderful thing actually. It’s not a pejorative thing. And to feel the stuckness even more, to get right to the heart of your stuckness, your inability to say it, and then you start saying it, it’s quite remarkable really.”

    Interviewer: “It’s brutal though. I find that there’s something beautiful and brutal about it.”

    DW: “This is why in all real Warrior Traditions, there’s always been a parallel discipline of poetry. You look at Samurai, the Japanese tradition, Chinese tradition, Indian tradition, and in the West we have the first World War poets like Sassoon. Poetry is the way in for anyone at all, man or woman or anything in between. But for men, it’s a real doorway. We all instinctively understand what poetry represents. Even people who’ve hardly read a line of poetry in their life, will come away from a football game saying, ‘it was sheer poetry, that touchdown!’ We instinctively understand about the verve and vitality and mutability and movability and tidal forces of the world, if you can capture these in speech (poetry). And if you can capture these in movement on a football field, why couldn’t you catch it in your own voice? So I would say, besides the practical activity of something that concerns all heterosexual young men, which is getting into real conversations with young women, I would recommend poetry rather than a Maserati.

    It can be comforting for a young man to know that under this inability to speak my emotions, underneath this inability to feel what I feel, underneath this inability to bring those two poles together, feelings, emotions and articulation, there’s something really quite astonishing waiting for me. The great German speaking-poet Rilke said, ‘Stretch your well-disciplined strength between two opposing poles, because inside human beings, is where God learns.’” 
    David Whyte "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or44UlIKQuE SUPERB interview imho - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

David Whyte - "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning"