052: Anger is Good for Creativity

Getting good and angry + Ted Hughes and Hélène Cixous, + Doodle Dispatches + ` the new Substack app for iphone

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Adam Phillips in Promises, Promises

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This week, a friend de facto dared me to put the following video clip in the newsletter, so obviously I am doing it.

Why this particular clip? Because we were talking about how if you want to be creative, you can’t fuck around.

Peter from “Family Guy” and his rage-knitting is our comedic reminder that you have to do creativity. You have to make something out of it—give it form, or sound, or a quality of color or light. You have to perform it for audience, or ship it to a user, or hang it in an exhibition space, or publish it, or stream it on Twitch.

You can’t just sit around knitting in your men’s knitting group/having ideas in your Vermont mind palace. You have to get up and throw down.

But what’s with this link between rage and making things?

When I was twenty-four, a mother of a toddler, pregnant with my second child, just graduated from college, and living, for the second time, on the military base at Fort Knox, I started having a recurring dream in which which a rotating cast of characters would be describing me, to me, in ways that were unjust, untrue, unfair, or cruel. It got so bad that I would wake myself up yelling at them to shut up.

Because I was a military wife, I had access to what some people might call socialized health care, which meant that a wide range of medical and mental health services were available to me at no cost. (Other than that my husband might have to die for his country.) So, after the fourth or fifth time that I woke up in the night, yelling at phantoms, I went over to family services and signed up for a therapist.

Marta was everything you could ask for: German, pretty, zaftig, with a husky, smoker’s voice and a ready laugh. She wore Doc Martens and asked me straight away how was my sex life. We had some great conversations. One time, she asked me “why do you think you’re so angry?”

“I’m not angry. I just have these angry dreams.”

“Why do you think you have angry dreams?”

“I don’t know. That’s what you are for.”

“I don’t know why you’re angry, you will have to tell me.”

“I’m not angry.”

We went round and round.

One day, she switched it up.

“Why wouldn’t you be angry?”

I didn’t have an answer for her.

A couple of years later, I was living and working at a Connecticut boarding school with my newborn and my pre-schooler while their dad was on an unaccompanied, year-long, U.S. Army tour in South Korea. At some point, the dreams started happening again.

I went out and found another therapist.

Sigmund (I swear to God I am not making it up, this was his real name) was everything you could ask for: German, pleasingly handsome, and with a strong, but sensitive affect. His office featured a zen garden and a dream catcher, very apropos. Sigmund practiced an early form of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and so it was that I learned how to descend, much like Carl Jung has described, into a semi-conscious state populated by interesting signifiers. Each week, I would go to this place in my mind and tell him what I saw.

One week, as we were wrapping up, he sighed audibly. “Your anger,” he said. “It’s quite something.”

”What do you mean, my anger.”

“I think it saved you.”

“Saved me?”

”Every week, no matter what else you describe, there is always a rock wall, it’s something you go looking for . . . it’s your bedrock. It’s a protective wall of anger. It’s old—you describe it in striations—you’ve been building it since you were a child. It has probably kept you alive.

This time I decided to pay attention.