Anger

The value of anger is that it asserts the chasm and the dependency between Self and World. Anger is the difference between the World-as-it-is and the World as I would wish it to be.

I have been angry with my father for the past few days... I passed through grief, the "torrent" I referenced in a previous post. Then settled into exhaustion for a while. But on Monday I visited his gravesite and felt angry. The flowers were gone. The headstone is not yet in place. He had only an index card in a plastic holder: Name, date of death -- April 13, 2007.

And I thought to myself that this man never did speak to me as a peer. He tried to protect me -- a man in his forties. Tried to protect me from his doubts, his dark moments, his fears... But all his "protection" did was to put an insurmountable distance between us. He could have said at some point, "I feel that way, too," or "I felt that way at one point, and then this happened..."

I understand that I am and always will be his child... But would it not have been worth more now to establish that commonality with his grown son?

Or perhaps I never did learn to ask him the right questions.

So I feel anger, and that anger makes the world more real to me. It makes the world matter, just a little bit more. It makes my own efforts at understanding, and my own actions in that world relevant. The shared fabric of humanity must indeed be shared. The alternative is a nuclear model of reality that continues to seek a core, an atom of the ineffably physical, never finds it -- atoms to electrons to quarks, etc. -- and is left with dust dissolving to nothing.