On Emotional Waves

Day 34

“Adequate rage is the spring of life and can also be the guidepost of your goal” - Davey, From The Max Level Hero Has Returned, a Manhwa by 유도

What is life? Life is movement, is change and choice. What is rage? Rage is an emotion – a way of understanding the world, and of unleashing forces within yourself that push you to move and change. It was once said that if I think, then I am. I think than many an artist, many an aesthetic, and many a person, would also say – If I am, then I feel. Rage is but one example, one way of understanding the world, but it is not the only way the world can be, or the only emotion that we can have. Rage is, I don't think, special in any certain regard. Having been enraged, I can say that the feeling releases energy that you didn't know you had squirreled away and allows you to achieve, for example, feats of great strength – yet feats of great strength are not under purview of a feeling of rage alone. Have you ever been so mad at somebody that you saw red, entirely forgot where you were, or broken things which you later realize you should not have? Rage is overpowering, is sometimes directed at a certain goal and sometimes mindless and purposeless. There are many things we can say about rage, just as there are many things we can say about grief or contentment. Many ways to analyze it, define it, experience and observe it, and so on. Rage has a rather large stature in our mind and our thoughts, where sometimes we think it good and sometimes we think it bad. In short, there is too much to say on it. I could be here all day writing about rage and still I couldn't not have said enough. I suspect that there would always turn out to be a rage that has been unobserved or felt which I know not of, as well as rages which I have felt differently than all other people. Something which enrages me, but no-one else. Yet, there seems to be something constant in the idea of rage nonetheless, just as in the ideas of gladness and ennui. There seems to be something rather human about them, these colorful emotions we have – and yet something about them which is not human at all.

Do we not often say that rage does no one any good? If you are enraged enough to do something, then surely you are also enraged enough to calm down and think about the problem. Going off with a hot head isn't going to help solve your problem, but a cooler head might. That rage is all well and good, but it should be directed to be effective. Rage can lead to us making hasty decisions, and doing more harm then help. We might say, don't get angry – get even. What are all these ideas? A call out to the power of logic. The power of reasoning which is our most special and significant inheritance from our ancestors. It has been said that the ability to be rational is what distinguishes man from the animals – the power to think our way through problems, to speak in words and above all to understand. Emotion has, time and again been regarded as, if not always bad, certainly an inconvenience. It is imagined by some that if we could only think thinks through clearly enough, then we could salve all the problems of the world. Surely there is a way to iron out our disagreements, to come to an accord, fill out a compromise, or work together to see what we can do to fix out problems. Issues of hunger, of death, of war, of justice – is there an answer? The answer, sitting somewhere out there in the realm of possibility? We hope that there may be. Yet how are we to reach it?

I do not know how to solve many problems, and my solutions may even be wrong. I, like many of us, am full of ignorance about oh so many things, and sometimes think that I have forgotten more than I remember, when I am called upon to apply my knowledge. So where does this forgetting go? If a thought or a memory is like a gem, then surely it was once part of the world – what happened to it? For my part I don't know, but I have made some observations; I, like many of us, have been stuck in a rut many times. Siting down with writers block, unable to articulate my thoughts. I have, in my life and mind, gone back and forth again and again retracing the same paths, trying to change and yet – somehow, in a method invisible to me until completed – ended up right back where I started, seemingly having done nothing at all. We feel at moments like this a sense of despair. It's all very well and good to say that its the journey and not the destination that matters, or that the progress of a life happens invisibly and slowly, but that is of little salve in the moment. It does not help my position, now, as it were. Perhaps not now in the strict sense, as I sit writing this, but why is that? In short – if never getting anywhere was once my lot in life, why am I, today, able to write and think? It is, of course, because something has changed. The world has changed.

Technically, as I have drawn it out, to have an emotion is to see the world in a different way. Thus, there is not really such a thing as being purely logical, because there is always another possible logic, or another possible emotion to have. Some people have argued for happiness as being the goal of life. I ask you – would you like to be happy?(Almost certainly the answer is yes) But what if I ask you – would you like to be happy, and never anything but happy? Never to experience grief, never to experience loss, certainly these are precious things. Never to experience fear or lust, are these things worth losing? To never quail at the sight of Proteus rising from the sea, or the sudden crash of a torrent of rain? To never worry or wonder what to do, but simply to be happy?

While happiness in the simple sense might exclude all these, perhaps happiness is more complex. Some people are happy doing work after all, or working out. Some people want to experience great poems or see sights that amaze them. Some people are happy with a quiet and complete life where they have a solid house and home, while others would drown with the occasional burst of Adrenalin. If happiness is a constant high, a euphoria, or is it a wave length, going up and down all the time? I don't expect to find any clear answers, and certainly no answers that many would agree upon. Rather, we all seem to have different ideas of what happiness is, different ideas of the form of the gem of happiness. This is not just how it looks from outside, but also how it feels to have, feels to lose; the effects and results of happiness. The same, of course, might be said of rage. So while investigating rage, or any other emotion or feeling, or bundle of feelings, might only lead into a general and tangled mire, perhaps we can focus our attention on emotions themselves – or rather, on adequate emotions.

We all have various feelings at various times. We can, in the course of a single conversation, feel happy, sad, exasperated, pleased, amused, pulled down, tripped up, or any other such thing. Some of these are not traditional names for emotions that we have, but they are all emotional. If I may, the different feelings all have a different feeling to them, and we feel this difference. Even without names for all of them, we can tell that one differs from another. That something changes, in the middle of and throughout, a single conversation. Even if we do not notice this, as the conversation recedes from the present, we can recall that conversation – and who among us does not have a conversation which they feel differently about now, then they did? Maybe it is a regret about something you said, or didn't say. Perhaps we, thinking back on it, learn something new about the conversation again that we did not know yesterday. Perhaps we are enraged, or saddened, by a memory.

Sometimes these emotions, and changes of emotions do not effect us overly much. They, and the changes in the world that they represent, arise like a sudden fog in the night, but upon the barest touch of force or light, fade away like ghosts at dawn. They, in short, don't matter, or at least don't appear to. This is called being in a rut, being unable to escape, being stuck in a cage able only to pace your five paces, and nothing more. So how do you escape a cage? You can try unlocking it, either by yourself or with the help of others. - mental therapy, of one sort or another. You can attempt to cut the wire by a judicious application of force. - physical changes like drugs, or a shift in situation. Or, my personal favorite, you can make the cage disappear – Change yourself. Change the world. These are all, of course, then same method, just considered in different ways.

I feel that the benefit of mental therapy and physical changes are well documented. There are experts who know much more than me about that sort of thing, and with more support for their veracity – and occasional dangers – then I am able to write about here. And as I've said once before,I'm not readily able to talk about something that isn't me. Thus, while I can talk about therapy and a forced change of scenery, those events are very local and specific to me. My experiences may help, but I am not sure that they would inform. However, the third method, of a very spiritual sort of activity, is one that I feel we do all the time. We just don't always notice.

To feel adequate rage appears to me, to be to feel such a rage that something changes. Not necessarily a big or small change, a change noticeable now or blossoming later, but rather a deep change. Of course, all changes are deep in some way, but just as a great rage can push you in direction, a great fear or a great regret can push you back just as fast. Thus, I don't mean a technical change like a grinding walk in the rut, back and forth along the same paths you have gone before; but rather the step that takes you just a bit too far.

You all know what I mean by 'the step that takes you just a bit too far'. Its the action that takes you beyond the pale, the moment in which you have both slipped the leash and somehow, surprising even yourself, gotten on the other side of the wall. The moment that you recall hearing certain words, having a sudden flash of insight, or just going mad. The acceptance of it, the realization, out in the open or in the back of the head, the moment that you had a choice to leave, or to get back in the cage.

Not all cages are bad. Sometime we need a force to protect us or a branch to hang upon. Retribution, after all, often gives strength. Cages can be like being a child- that while sometimes we need protection, sometimes we also need to grow. There is no one answer I can give here, no rule, and only advice that is specific to me. Maybe it is helpful, maybe not – I don't know, perhaps the cages you have seen and the ones that I have seen are the same, or different. Certainly they have many things in common, and man can understand man though. What I do think is that, technically, speaking, to live is to have changes in the world. We know things exist because they are, because they be, and because they do. We know that we exist because we recognize that there is something unknown in us, and in our lives, which changes. I think that these changes can appear to exist in such a way that they are repetitive, that they rehash old issues without actually doing anything to solve them. That we can think ourselves free within a limit, within a cage and a boundary. That we, often, do no know who we are without some sort of a supporting structure, and that sometimes this structure takes a pattern. Patterns can become too strong, unraveling and re-raveling the messy tangle of the world and forcing it to appear like its always the same, not matter where you look. An adequate rage, like an adequate despair, an adequate love, or an adequate question can disrupt this pattern. It doesn't break the pattern, doesn't brute force your way out of the cage, but makes the pattern disappear. Makes you realize that cages have holes. Holes which you can sometimes walk right through, just like an open doorway. If to be dead is to not change, to always say the same thing evermore and to never enforce your will to act, like a rock that chooses not to speak, then we are often dead, and just like a dead man, perhaps an adequate lighting bolt, and adequate rage, can wake us back up.

Thus, an adequate rage can be the spring of life. It can be the reason you know you are alive, the reason that you are alive, and the point of being alive. I do not intend to encourage you to think that rage is necessary for life, or that you should aim to be enraged. Rather, I mean to say that adequate rage can be the guidepost for your goal. If all you feel is rage, then that is being stuck in a rut. If you never feel rage – then perhaps that's because you are well adjusted. What I feel is important, however, is that you can feel rage, that the possibility remains open. If you cannot, if you find yourself unable to have a different perspective, to have a different feeling, to have a goalpost, then I think that you are probably in a great deal of trouble.

I told a professor of mine once that the only philosophy I felt was really worthwhile was philosophy that could bring you to tears, or to a screaming match. Rage is, of course, only one path and perhaps not the path for you. It is certainly not the path less traveled, or the path that you hope to find yourself on frequently. Screaming, after all, tends to hurt after a while, and we all have reason to whimper sometimes, anyway. But neither is a 'high emotion' the pointless, the endless, or the always malignant path. Don't listen when someone tells you to calm down when what they really mean is stop caring, and be careful that you don't throw a fit that doesn't lead anywhere. Don't become trapped in a cage made by others, or a cage made by yourself. Live. I say, go ahead and have the occasional rage, an adequate rage, a rage to make the world tremble, and a hot rage, then a cold rage - because storms, as well as calms, have their place in the soul.