You can get things done with anger. You become filled with rage, and forget fear, pain, indecision and caution entirely. Tactically, no doubt, this can save lives. Over short periods, it can be invaluable.
Over the course of a lifetime, though, it cannot be productively maintained. It is a blistering, a swelling, an out-of-kilterness, a wounding that is simply blocked from awareness.
I cannot find the exact quote I want, but did find one close, from “Trauma and Recovery”:
The second stage of recovery has a timeless quality that is frightening. The reconstruction of the trauma requires immersion in a past experience of frozen time; the descent into mourning feels like a surrender to tears that are endless.
This notion of timelessness is interesting, as that has been my own experience. I have often visualized that force which leads to evil as converting people into wax figures, motionless, timeless. (It is for this reason, I suspect, that wax figures have been made use of many times in horror movies). I threw the book away, viewing it as pollution, my purpose having been served, but Simone de Beavoir makes the same observation of Sade: his images are just that: image. They have relatively little motion, or development. One travels from one diorama to another.
What are these wax figures? They are souls confined, constrained. They are emotional flows that stopped at a moment in time. They are betrayed innocence, an openness punished with deep grief and betrayal.
How can you free them? Only with tears. Only with sadness. All anger does is keep you alive, but it also forces you to run, to keep running, to pursue someone, anyone, a cause or a vicious vision.
And to the point, it is perfectly consistent with the continuation of emotional stasis. Anger does not facilitate emotional growth. Some of the most childish self absorbed people out there are angry all the time.
Sadness–mourning, specifically–is the path forward. It enables all the frozen figures to take a breath. And sadness, in my view, is the path to genuine compassion and love. To be tender is to understand you can be hurt, but also to KNOW that you can survive wounding.
I cry often. I am the guy that cries when Aunt Mae gives Peter the great speech in Spider Man 2 about how heroes sometimes have to sacrifice what they want to do what is right. I cry when Captain America decides to put the plane into the ocean. I cry when Sam delivers his magnificent speech at the end of the Two Towers.
Sentimentality, no doubt., you may say. I am after all describing two comic books and a fantasy novel. I would argue, though, that the very childishness, the simplicity of these works is what makes them most real. Some people claim to be sophisticated. Externally, this may be true. But I think all of us, at heart, react most to comic book sorts of sentiments. Communism, when it is seducing future thralls, sells utopia, peace, and justice.
In America, we pride ourselves on being the City on the Hill. I am a patriot. I believe in the vision. But at the same time, could not hundreds of Indian tribes look at us as not all that different in our relationship with them, as Panem with the Districts in the Hunger Games? American Indians–who were not native, by the way, only here a long time before us–were very heterogeneous. Some tribes were unquestionably our moral superiors, in my view, and some warranted little but what they got.
I’m wandering. Net: every time I cry, I feel stronger. I feel better able to negotiate the currents of this world openly. Now, I have what I call my blast shield. I can be stone when it comes to emotion whenever I choose to be. I am very confident I could deal effectively with ANY task I was presented with. I just turn my emotions off.
But on a deeper level, I am quite prepared to march into hell to meet the enemies of grief and hatred and anger, and viciousness. I see them. I monitor them. I am not afraid of seeing what is in front of me. I fail often, am weak often, but when I look in the mirror I really do see someone willing to take the Devil on his own turf and win.