The Bitter Intimacy, Rage as a Crucible for Love and Art

“ SILV. But love, they say, is a tender thing, that will smooth frowns, and make calm an angry face; will soften a rugged temper, and make ill-humoured people good. You look ready to fright one, and talk as if your passion were not love, but anger.
HEART. ’Tis both; for I am angry with myself when I am pleased with you. And a pox upon me for loving thee so well—yet I must on. ’Tis a bearded arrow, and will more easily be thrust forward than drawn back. ”

“ Vexation and anger, a burning sense of injury, and desire for revenge, on the one hand, and feelings of love, resistless and uncontrollable, and bearing, in their turn, all before them, alternately get possession of the soul, harrowing and devastating it in their awful conflict, and even sometimes reigning over it, for a time, in a temporary but dreadful calm, like that of two wrestlers who pause a moment, exhausted in a mortal combat, but grappling each other with deadly energy all the time, while they are taking breath for a renewal of the conflict. ”

“ It is terrible to be wroth with those we love. Anger against them is deadly to ourselves. It "works like madness in the brain;" it involves heaven and earth in a gloom that nothing can lighten. But when that anger being just, and such as we must not depart from, is crossed by those unspeakable relentings, those quick revivals of love, those sudden touches of tenderness that carry all before them, what anguish is equal to those bitter sweetnesses? Lucy felt this as she stood there with her husband's hand upon her shoulder, in utter fatigue, and broken down in all her faculties. ”

“ Other passions gain a footing in the mind by slow degrees: anger's conquest is sudden and complete, and, moreover, it makes all other passions subservient to itself. It conquers the warmest love: men have thrust swords through the bodies of those whom they loved, and have slain those in whose arms they have lain. Avarice, that sternest and most rigid of passions, is trampled underfoot by anger, which forces it to squander its carefully collected wealth and set fire to its house and all its property in one heap. ”

“ All this bitterness and wrangling—it’s all part of the same thing—part of our love for each other. It’s the exasperation, the rage, of frustration. When we’re apart we suffer so, and in our suffering we blindly try to hurt each other. ”

“ If you knew, Edmée, if you only knew what struggles, what conflicts, rend my bosom; what tears of blood my heart distils; and what passions often rage in that part of my nature which the rebel angels rule! There are nights when I suffer so much that in the delirium of my dreams I seem to be plunging a dagger into your heart, and thus, by some sombre magic, to be forcing you to love me as I love you. When I awake, in a cold sweat, bewildered, beside myself, I feel tempted to go and kill you, so as to destroy the cause of my anguish. ”

“ You have stripped the bloom from my existence, stolen the most sacred emotions of a young, trusting heart, wished to take from me honor, faith, all that affords support and protection to a woman, torn the wings from my soul to chain me, and then, when you wished to disown me, to say 'fly away.' Oh, treacherous soul-murderer, beautiful and winning as no other can ever be, for whose creation an angel must have mated with a fiend, I love and hate you with equal fervor! ”

“ It is the protest of the wronged and ignored soul. It is the outburst of the pent and prisoned soul. All the ache and agony, all the secret wrong and silent endurance, all the rejected love and wounded trust and slighted truth, all the riches wasted, all the youth poisoned, all the hope trampled, all the light darkened,—all meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters. They surge and lash and rage, a wild storm of harmony. ”

“ Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a man can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in love of the kind I have just depicted. ”

“ But again there are others, and their number is legion,—perhaps you and I, reader, may know something of it in ourselves,—who have an instinctive habit of repression in regard to all that is noblest and highest, within them, which they do not feel in their lower and more unworthy nature.
It comes far easier to scold our friend in an angry moment than to say how much we love, honor, and esteem him in a kindly mood. Wrath and bitterness speak themselves and go with their own force; love is shamefaced, looks shyly out of the window, lingers long at the door-latch. ”

“ No, the evil is not from hunger, nor from love, but from rage. If we lived peacefully, without getting into a rage, everything would be nice for us. But, as it is, whenever a thing does not go exactly right, we get angry, and then nothing pleases us. All we think about is how to revenge ourselves on some one. Then we forget ourselves, and only hiss, and creep, and try to find some one to bite. And we do not spare a soul, --we even bite our own father and mother. We feel as though we could eat ourselves up. And we rage until we perish. All the evil in the world comes from rage. ”

“ When anger and the desire of revenge distend the veins, flush the face, stiffen the arms, brighten the eyes, [2] bewilder the mind, and lead it to the commission often of criminal acts, the soul feels a sort of delight, but it is of short duration; and the momentary excitement is followed by a profound depression whose effects, if oftentimes repeated, differ not from those of concentrated resentment or pent-up hate. The man who is given to outbursts of anger is sure to experience a rapid change of the organs, in case he does not die in a fit of rage. ”

“ Consciousness is extinguished; and hence the expression of the poet—Ira brevis furor est—"Rage is a brief insanity"—is strictly and pathologically true; because consciousness, the condition upon which all sanity depends, is for the time absent from the man. Hence, too, the ordinary phrase, that rage transports a man out of himself, is closely and philosophically correct. Properly interpreted, it means that the man is taken completely out of the pole where consciousness abides, and vested entirely in the opposite pole where passion dwells ”

“ In rage, it is notorious how we 'work ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. ”

“ Perhaps, with time, I shall be able to transfer that energy toward the thinking of constructive thoughts. Anger cannot be felt without sustaining internal damage; a raging emotional fire surely must char the mind. ”

“ Whatever will increase ideals and new desires, achievements in school which allow a better opinion of self and build up the sentiment of self-regard, of fairness and justice, are at work at the very root of anger consciousness. The study of the mental situation 96from which anger arises allows every reason to believe that when there is a lack of potentialities to anger, it may be built up in this indirect manner. The student who lacks good healthy resentment when the proper stimulus is at hand evidently is weak in the sentiment of self-regard, desire to achieve, or sense of fairness. ”

“ The malevolent affections are Anger, Resentment, Envy, Revenge, and Hatred.
Anger is the sense of indignation occasioned by real or imagined wrong. When excited by actual wrong-doing, and when contained within reasonable bounds, it is not only innocent, but salutary. It intensifies the virtuous feeling which gives it birth; and its due expression is among the safeguards of society against corruption and evil. ”

“ For he finds his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all. ”

“ It does not seem coincidental that once Rock n’ Roll shed any misgivings about the pleasures of the “secular” world, that self-destructive hedonism became as much a part of the “Rock n’ Roll lifestyle” as the music itself. Far from creating a new society and new vistas of perception, it can be argued that from the 1960s onward one of the defining features of Rock n’ Roll is an unceasing body count of talented musicians destroyed in their prime. ”

“ But very often also it is the alibi under which a taste too mediocre, too clumsy and too little sensitive to seize the sense of a rich and delicately expressive music, hides itself and seeks its revenge. Then it cries down pedantry and the abuse of science, it cries down the fugue. After all it is surprising to find Jean-Jacques making himself the mouthpiece of this lack of understanding, this semi-inertia of feeling, and upsetting all the accepted notions of art merely to set up such a disposition as the real judge and sovereign umpire of good music. ”

“ Ere thy light hath vanished by;
And 'tis when thou look'st divinest
Thou art still most sure to fly.
Even as the lightning, that, dividing
The clouds of night, saith, "Look on me,"
Then flits again, its splendor hiding.—
Even such the glimpse I catch of thee.
THEN FIRST FROM LOVE. Then first from Love, in Nature's bowers,
Did Painting learn her fairy skill,
And cull the hues of loveliest flowers,
To picture woman lovelier still.
For vain was every radiant hue,
Till Passion lent a soul to art,
And taught the painter, ere he drew,
To fix the model in his heart. ”

“ Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. ”

“ Amid such fleeting emotions nothing so resembles love as the young passion of an artist who tastes the first delicious anguish of his destined fame and woe,—a passion daring yet timid, full of vague confidence and sure discouragement. Is there a man, slender in fortune, rich in his springtime of genius, whose heart has not beaten loudly as he approached a master of his art? If there be, that man will for ever lack some heart-string, some touch, I know not what, of his brush, some fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry. ”

“ Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the highest manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, of intuition. It is the highest form of expression, of history and prophecy. It allows us to look at an unmasked soul, to fathom the abysses of passion, to understand the heights and depths of love. ”

“ How the theatrical cry of passion now pains our ear, how strange to our taste has all the romantic riot and sensuous bustle which the cultured populace love become (together with their aspirations after the exalted, the elevated, and the intricate) ! No, if we convalescents need an art at all, it is another art—a mocking, light, volatile, divinely serene, 9divinely ingenious art, which blazes up like a clear flame, into a cloudless heaven! Above all, an art for artists, only for artists! ”