Tetralogue I: Rage

To those who wander, lost and aimless; for the sleepless and the restless.

What follows is in four parts, and I shall post it as such (Part II; Part III; Part IV); although it was written to be—and was—printed out and treated as a single piece. In mid-July AD 2023, I assembled this anthology of sorts for a friend who was in deep emotional and existential anguish, who “wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again.” The friend is around a decade older than me, and yet the animus of several of our conversations resembled: “But Paul, I am not like you; I don’t know what to do.” This synthesis seeks to answer that veiled question. In the span of about three evenings, I wrote what follows. It is not comprehensive as to my unconventional ways of life, but it is a start. I have replaced all mentions of my friend’s name with a generic “friend.” The pictures in each piece were added for publishing here.

Not unlike a theatrical play, the arc of these words is sinusoidal. I recommend against reading any of them, particularly the second, without resolving to read the balance of them. While in four parts, it is a single unit of synthesis, of argument—of apology, in the Greek sense.

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“There is no possible idea,” Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, “to which the mind of man can’t supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.”
- Charles Williams, War in Heaven

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The ungodly are froward, even from their mother’s womb; as soon as they are born, they go astray, and speak lies.... Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths; smite the jaw- bones of the lions, O LORD.... The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his footsteps in the blood of the ungodly. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous; doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth.
- Psalm LVIII

Our beginning is, perhaps, in a rather unconventional place. At first blush, the word perhaps brings to mind only the chintzy poetry of Rage, rage against the dying of the light and other such similarly underdeveloped musings. But I believe this is the place to begin. To continue breathing is to continue moving forward: in that sense, we are not so different from the sharks, which must move forward to breathe. But in order to continue moving forward, that is, to continue breathing, we must, as the physicists say, experience an impulse: we must be pushed. The push may come externally or internally, but it is best to have something internal.

In ordinary circumstances, we may find ourselves flush with impulses, positive and negative alike, impelling us merrily on our way. But when the light fades, and the stars are quenched, and home, much less Home, seems an impossibility: all impulses may fade unto nothingness. People often speak of the fight-or-flight instinct, but as with many so-called dichotomies, there is a third option, one little mentioned. It is surrender, or abdication, or resignation; it is laying oneself down and letting death seize its plunder at its leisure. For the spirit may be so crushed that to even flee is too great a task, much less to fight; and so the spirit lets go.

Enter: Rage. Several years ago, I underwent combat arms training with a friend of mine in the Marine Reserves. Frigid winter air, freezing rain; your hands so cold and stiff you could barely move your fingers, much less feel the trigger and smoothly pull it. After one particular drill involving rapid reloads and running between firing positions—with everyone taking these great heaving inhales of the frigid air, some hands here and there bleeding from numb skin having been worn raw against magazine releases etc.—we clustered around some coffee, burning our mouths and huddling together to block out the wind. And one of the instructors started talking about firefights.

“Do you know what the most important thing to do is if you’re in a firefight and one of the fuckers lands a shot on you?”

“Get behind cover and apply pressure?” A student—an RN—gives it a shot.

“Hell no. You already should be in cover, and you don’t do first aid when the bullets are flying. No. If you get hit, there’s only one thing you need to do: get fucking enraged. You need to be furious. You need to decide—absolutely—that this is not the way you die.”

He pauses, surveying the shivering class around him. “If you take a shot in an artery, you’re dead. You’ll last a minute, maybe two, before you bleed out. But you get shot anywhere else, if you’re within twenty minutes of a hospital in the developed world? You’ll be fine. You just need to shoot your way out to get to the damn hospital. See, criminals and scum like that don’t know any better. They watch movies and TV, right? They get shot, and over 80% of them die on the scene from shock alone. They will themselves into dying. If you tell yourself, ‘This is it; this is the end’: you know what your body will do? It’ll give you what you asked for. If you refuse to die, if you refuse to accept that this is the end, guess what: the body will do that too.”

Thus: Rage. I am using the word loosely, of course. I mean it in a violent, initiative-seizing fashion. The choice to act, decisively and boldly, against uncertain, unclear, and importune circumstances. Put another way, when presented with the tension between fight-or-flight-or-surrender, Rage is to, against all odds and defying all opposition, elect fight. Fight till the end. Why, though, you might ask? Why fight? There has to be a reason why, hasn’t there? And this is what the balance of these words shall answer: the Gordian knot which they shall slash into twine. The Rage, you shall see, is not for anything specific: it is precisely because you needn’t fight. It is by recognizing, and embracing—understanding, standing under—the Truth that you could give up, but that, that being the case, you might just as easily not. It is a stubbornness unto itself, but which is then directed unto the Good and True.

Or: call it martyrdom. Remember that the martyr is not he who chooses annihilation, but he who recognizes when he is called thereto. The Rage bubbles up out of acknowledgement that it needn’t, just as the martyr burns up out of acknowledgement that he needn’t. He could have recanted. The Rage is to refuse to recant. It is to say that you ought to be—nay, are—a channel for Something More, and that that Something More is not yet done with you. The Rage of which I speak is not, as rage ordinarily is, defined as against anything in particular. It is a Rage for, well, continuation: for sustaining, for preservation; that the Good and the True shall yet prevail.

“Pray,” the Archdeacon cried out, “pray, in the name of God. They are praying against him tonight.” ...
“Against what shall we pray?” The Duke cried.
“Against nothing,” the Archdeacon said. “Pray that he who made the universe may sustain the universe, that in all things there may be delight in the justice of His will.”
- Charles Williams, War in Heaven