{"id":10665,"date":"2025-05-10T16:14:21","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T20:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/ocean-vuong-on-anger-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-10T16:14:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T20:14:21","slug":"ocean-vuong-on-anger-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/ocean-vuong-on-anger-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Ocean Vuong on Anger \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTo be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,\u201d Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary<\/a> as a young artist. \u201cThe poets (by which I mean all artists),\u201d James Baldwin wrote<\/a> in his late thirties, \u201care finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don\u2019t. Statesmen don\u2019t\u2026 Only poets.\u201d And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are<\/a>. The transmutation of suffering into love \u2014 the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care \u2014 is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it \u2014 whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness \u2014 is what I would call an artist. <\/p>\n

I know of no one who has articulated this task of transmutation more beautifully than the poet (in the largest Baldwinian sense) Ocean Vuong<\/strong>. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Ocean Vuong. (Photograph: Tom Hines)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a deeply felt New York Times<\/em> interview<\/a> \u2014 a public reckoning, really \u2014 Vuong recounts his improbable beginnings as a writer: how he went from wanting to borrow a friend\u2019s gun at fifteen and, despite his Buddhist upbringing, kill a man (the local drug dealer who had stolen his bicycle and kept him from making his shift on the tobacco farm where he was laboring for $9.50 an hour alongside other refugees and migrants) to reading James Baldwin and Annie Dillard at the community college until he came to see writing as \u201ca medium for understanding suffering\u201d \u2014 for understanding what hurts us and why we hurt each other and how to stop. He reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment, and it was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded\u2026 Because so much was close to me, I always had to look at it. And it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer, and I say: \u201cWhere is this coming from?\u201d And a lot of times, it comes from fear and vulnerability \u2014 you\u2019re too scared, and you have to strike first\u2026 I have great compassion to that, because the doorway through to violence has always been suffering\u2026 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting: You see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense \u2014 it feels like the only path \u2014 but when you step back\u2026 it\u2019s almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you\u2019re like, \u201cOh my goodness \u2014 I can step back, and I can just take one step to the side and go around, and the whole world is in front of me.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

In a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A couple of years earlier, speaking<\/a> at San Francisco\u2019s endlessly wonderful City Arts & Lectures<\/em>, Vuong considered the place of anger \u2014 that handmaiden of suffering \u2014 in art, and in his own work animated by the belief that the poet\u2019s task is to look more closely at this world, a task resinous with the consolations of causality: the more we see, the more we understand; the more we understand \u2014 ourselves and each other \u2014 the less we suffer; the less we suffer, the less we lash the world with our suffering and the more we can transmute the anger of helplessness into something more tender and tenacious. Vuong reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

When you feel the somatic experience of anger, you throw things, you shout (perhaps at the people you love), you\u2019re on the floor (metaphorically, physically). And then, after a while, you have to get up. You have to feed your dog, answer emails, meet a student \u2014 in other words, you have to move towards care\u2026 For me, care is anger improved. It\u2019s part of the same ecosystem. And I\u2019m interested in dismantling the border between these two things, because we\u2019re told that they\u2019re two opposite sides of a spectrum, but I think they\u2019re actually very close together. They inform each other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Because language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents<\/a>, the care we take with language is care for the world. Vuong reflects on the ministrations of words:<\/p>\n

\n

Writers have produced incredible amounts of work with the energy of rage and anger. But, for me, that care that I have to give the sentence is then the medic \u2014 it almost calms me down. It\u2019s hard to be rageful when you\u2019re working with something that needs your care. If each word is a citizen in this world of the text, they are so dependent on me to think clearly and with restraint and with a sense of compassion and dignity to them. And I would lose their confidence in me, in a way, if I were to approach it with too much of myself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Vuong\u2019s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening \u2014 a handle on the door to compassion:<\/p>\n

\n

If you\u2019re not awake, you wouldn\u2019t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what\u2019s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say\u2026 I\u2019m not proud of many things\u2026 but I\u2019m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I\u2019ve ever written in my work was written out of anger\u2026 It\u2019s not that I\u2019m not angry, but I\u2019m not useful \u2014 as a writer, as an artist \u2014 when I\u2019m angry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An essential part of the artist\u2019s task is also this \u2014 to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Ocean Vuong by Nan Goldin for Document Journal<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Couple with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh\u2019s poetic antidote to anger<\/a>, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s excellent meditation on the uses and misuses of anger in an imperfect world<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}