Rage and Art

The very bad (in every sense) and very telling short plays written by Cho Seung-hui in the months before his murders have been posted online - oh Lord, the wonders and terrors of the New Media - and while their appearance raises a number of questions relating to appropriate use of content (again, in every sense), those who can stomach reading them will see both why Cho's teachers were very worried indeed, and why they could do nothing concrete about their anxiety.

What is the formative relationship between rage and art? I don't think there is a direct one - or rather, I don't think one can truly create (as opposed to express) when so angry as to be uncontrolled. On top of our response to control rage, there's an element of transmutation at the moment of expression/creation that I think helps artists, those who get angry anyway, to take the animal ferocity of fury and use it to propel expression, not guide it. Thus the difference between rage expressed as art - Cho's writing - and rage expressed through art - Guernica.

More to the point, allowing people mired in their own hellish imaginings of personal and familial horror to purchase efficient killings machines easily is a stupid thing, that the Founding Fathers, sons of the Enlightenment all, could not have dreamed of. That the United States would prefer its citizens have the privilege of buying, as in Virginia, one gun a month, rather than have those same citizens - a selfless Holocaust survivor, outstanding researchers in engineering and medicine, students of all stripes - alive to the benefit of the republic, is an indication of something terrible in the American collective unconscious: a will to individual and societal death.