Fury (5 page)

Nearly every religion devotes some attention to anger. In their book
Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History
, Peter N. and Carol Zisowitz Stearns assert that Christianity and Judaism take “a middle position on the subject of anger.” In further reading I found more proof that although Christianity generally considers anger a sin, it also allows for a loophole called “righteous indignation” or “justified anger,” which William Leslie Davidson describes as “the right to abhor, and to give expression to our abhorrence of, injury and injustice, cruelty, impiety, and wrong.” Judaism also contends that anger at the sight of a wrongdoing is holy. According to the Torah, “A wrathful man stirs up discord, but he that is slow to anger appeases strife.” The emotion is misguided only if it kindles temper, which supposedly gives way to recklessness.

The Stearnses suggest there is “considerable praise for anger in Islam.” But the Qur'an says power resides not in the ability to strike someone else but in the ability to stay cool under pressure. “Most hated to Allah is a person who is fiercely hostile and quarrelsome.”

For the Stearnses, Buddhism is the only religion that prohibits anger absolutely. Although their conclusion isn't quite right, it's easy to see how they came to it. “Anger,” the Buddha said, “is a poison and an obstacle to enlightenment.” And Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, founder of Buddhism's New Kadampa Tradition, writes in his book
How to Solve Our Human Problems
, “[A]nger is everyone's principal enemy. . . . Anger never helps us. . . . All anger ever does is . . . bring nothing but unhappiness.”

Given Buddhism's supposed anti-anger stance, I find it particularly funny that I've recently gravitated to it. No doubt it appeals to my inner cholerophobe. I like the specificity with which Buddhist teachers seem to speak about rage. In psychological books, I've mostly found vague and conflicting definitions of the emotion, such as “anger is a negative phenomenological feeling state” or “anger is the emotion into which most others tend to pass.” Christa Reiser writes, “Often, there is no explicit definition of anger.” Buddhism, on the other hand, really seems to pin anger down to a dissection plate. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso defines anger as a product of a “deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities and wishes to harm it.”

That harm didn't even have to mean wishing you could wipe the snippy scowl off somebody's face. It could simply mean wanting to criticize him. It could mean envisioning—just for a second—a scenario where he dies alone, penniless, forgotten, and riddled with regret so that he might know just what “emptiness” is.

By August 2, I am deep into the habit of exaggerating the Lark's bad qualities. “He's just sociopathic,” I hear myself tell a friend on the phone. “Con artists have more empathy. Wild animals have more self-control.” And so I decide to try
tonglen
—a practice in Tibetan Buddhism that is also known as “sending and taking.”

“Tonglen practice helps cultivate fearlessness,” I'd once read in a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. “When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.”

Tonglen
is a meditation and an oft-prescribed remedy for anger. To perform it, you are supposed to sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Envision your enemy. Then, with every inhale, you imagine relieving him of some of his fear, his frustration and contentiousness. With every exhale, you pretend you're sending him well-being, confidence, love, piece of mind.

The Dalai Lama claims to do
tonglen
every day, giving special attention to the Chinese officials who torture and murder Tibetans. “I visualize them,” he says. “I draw their ignorance, prejudice, hatred, and pride into myself.”

The point of the meditation isn't to change the world so much as to change your perspective. The Dalai Lama goes on to add, “You cannot actually give away your happiness and take other's suffering on yourself. But the practice will certainly increase your compassion.”

Buddhistly speaking, compassion is the Holy Grail. It's the no-fail antidote to rage.

I decide to sit, pretzel-legged, on my bedroom floor. I nest one hand into the palm of the other the way I've read about in meditation books, and let my thumb tips lightly kiss. I try to tune out the sounds of the afternoon: a dog barking, a garden hose hitting the hydrangea bush, a honeybee ambushing my window screen. I try to forget the hour: noon in Boston, 5:00 P.M. in Brighton. Slitting my eyes, I relax them until the world softly blurs. I breathe in and feel my lungs shiver. There's a flicker of panic in my chest. Something about this makes me feel vulnerable.

A knock sounds at my bedroom door. It's my father, with some transparent excuse for checking in on me. He just wants to tell me that he's going next door to borrow a garden tool. Or to ask me if I intend to use the car. Or to tell me that there's hot water on the stove on the off chance that I want some tea. I mumble a small barbed reply and, hearing the door close behind him, go back to the dirty business of
tonglen
.

Through my closed eyes, I try to envision the Lark. For some reason, the night after the Kent Music Festival comes to mind first. In the early morning hours I'd awoken to the light of a desk lamp, the sound of a jazz record doing the whirling dervish, and the Lark staring out the bedside window.

With a wince, I picture him as I saw him that morning. His eyes are heavy with some tense and conflicted emotion. His brow furrowed, there are soft lines around his eyes. It's painful and absurd to visualize him in such intricate detail. I see his concise freckled nose and the sandy stubble that peppers his cheek. In memory, I watch his lips part slightly, as though he is about to recite whatever resolution is taking shape in this head. My breath cracks in my chest. What had he been doing awake at that hour? I see the pen between his fingers. Beneath it is the curling green notebook where he jots ideas for song lyrics.

Remembering
tonglen
, I try to imagine the book is filled with his troubles and hang-ups; his current anxieties and past traumas; the reasons why he held his heart so close to him, like an animal guarding its fresh kill. I picture myself prying the book from his hands. With every inhale, I imagine tearing a page from the spine and balling it up in my fist.

With
tonglen
calming me, it's easy to remember the better parts of our time together. I remember the way the Lark had entered my life like, well, an alien landing. He'd materialized all at once, like someone beamed across a vast distance and time, foreign in every way but somehow recognizable.

One stifling June day in 2006, an e-mail arrived in my electronic mailbox. How to describe something that changes everything? Delivered by a social networking site, in many ways it was a plea for advice. In two days, the Lark had written, he was flying to Nashville to record his band's second album. That said, he had written the lyrics of only two of its songs. He'd procrastinated. He was panicked. He asked me what I thought he should do.

The Lark's words were vibrant and confessional and tender. Later, when I asked him why he'd contacted a total stranger, let alone divulged so much information to her, he'd seemed to blank out, as though failing to see why it might seem unnatural. When I'd pressed, he had tried to jog his memory aloud. “I wrote you because you were fit?” he'd joked. “Because you were on our mailing list even though we'd only played New York once? Because you were looking for someone to teach you to play drums and I thought I'd volunteer? I remember you liked loads of really great music. Your profile was hilarious.”

I'd had an equally unnatural flutter of déjà vu the moment I'd read the Lark's opening words. Given the trouble my own career was giving me, I surely identified with the pressure he was under. But there was something deeper in the Lark's message that appealed to me. His easy expression of his feelings tapped into my own. Had he approached me with these questions in person, I might have seized up in the face of such human fallibility, which echoed my own and would have put me on guard. But the Lark had found my emotions through their only known entrance and exit way: written words.

Borrow, I'd typed back.

 

Lift something from bathroom graffiti, or newspaper headlines, or the marginalia that you find in secondhand books. It's just storytelling, right? And something tells me you, mister, are quite the storyteller. At any rate, beg, borrow, steal, churn it out. I'm not the least bit worried about you.

One year after this first correspondence,
tonglen
also forces my thoughts back to the Lark's lovely face. He comes to me in a procession of images.

At my front door for the first time—when he'd arrived in New York for the sole purpose of seeing me. His eyes had been at once relieved, curious, frightened, and overjoyed, and his arms had been laden with small, tender presents for me (an etching he'd made, a copy of Laurie Lee's
Cider with Rosie
, a tiny brooch in the shape of a sparrow). I see him on the tip of Roosevelt Island, among the brilliant glare of the skyscrapers and the dumb hovering of Circle Line cruises, where he later claimed he'd first wanted to kiss me. Then, without warning, these images give way to another one. The Lark sitting in my bedroom window on the night of our fight in Brighton, smoking a cigarette to its freckled filter, his slim legs crossed at the knees and a hostile aura hanging around him.

Our fight was sparked when the Lark failed to respond to my casual mention of staying in Brighton on a more permanent basis, taking over the lease on my flat when my flatmate moved to Hong Kong in the fall. Reflexively, I'd filled the silence with talk of my work.