“You need to write about [rage] sometime.”

It’s not the sort of thing I’m usually prompted to write about. But Rae pushed further, “It’s fascinating the way that you’ve sublimated our usual concept of rage into a container that’s safe and creative.”

She turned back to her journaling. I studied her curled up in the corner of her beige sectional, a light fairy framed in twinkle lights and candles with the Saturday morning dawn still smoky in the windows.

We were both buried in our Saturday morning contemplative writing modes, occasionally surfacing to share a thought, read a passage, ask a question. I cannot for the life of me remember why I shared that one of my shifts into writing mode began with me writing “Let’s rage.” Had she mentioned “rage”?

So, here I am.

The phrase isn’t original with me though my use of it as a creative CTA may be. Years ago, I heard a nu metal band launch into their set list, pummeling the audience with ear-splitting crashes and machine gunning double-kick base pedals. The phrase stuck with me. Something about the invitation part of it. “Let’s.” The jussive subjunctive. A prayer. The front man was a preacher inviting the faithful to join a prayer. Can I call the action a prayer? It issued collective effervescence.

I found myself beginning my writing sessions with it. “Let’s rage” kicked off the early drafting process, staying there until I’d edit it out of a later draft. It was never a license to destroy and always an invitation to create–to create without any intention for perfection, to create as honestly as possible, to create with my raw humanity in its primal power.

I’ve only recently an appreciation for the role that anger has played in my life. And I wonder if “let’s rage” was prescient, knowing that I would someday embrace my anger by finding a container within me worthy of holding its treasure.

Which brings me back to the concept I’m still chewing on, that “let’s rage” is some kind of sublimation, some kind of elevated use of the term that inspires awe and wonder within me.

Why does sublimation retain such flavor?

The word “sublimation” is a tangled process of remembering that “under” does not work as a helpful translation of the prefix “sub” as it usually does. Instead, it’s better understood as “up to” or as we might say in the 21st century “right up to” or “right up against.” Thus, to “sublimate” is to push up against a boundary such as the lintel of a doorway or to push against a boundary stone to test its ancient strength.

I am pressing against the boundary that culture has allotted rage and acknowledging it in its liminal, most elevated space.

And why not provide that moment for rage? For a word that’s often assumed to be destructive and negative and masculine, rage needs redemption. We don’t negatively judge gasoline when it’s powering an engine or electricity when it’s powering our homes and yet both of these can destroy entire neighborhoods when their containers do not hold them or they’re used without containers.

Rage doesn’t deserve to be different.

It is among our primal (s)urges and can power our creativity when we give it direction. The difference lies in the presence and strength of its container.

Herein lies the trick, its wisdom.

Finding a container for rage begins with embracing its validity and innocence within. Rage indicates a cathartic need, the necessity of some purging. It’s on us to funnel it in a creative direction instead of aiming it at people, which is where we often miss the mark. When we aim it at people, we’re seeing rage in a mutated form as some kind of right we can exercise against and over people.

That’s not rage sublimated. It’s not our right to bully and punish others; it is our responsibility to give space for it, to direct it safely as a creative power, a gift.

On the sublimation of rage

On restlessness

When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple