“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” 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. The transmutation of suffering into love — the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care — is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it — whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness — is what I would call an artist.

I know of no one who has articulated this task of transmutation more beautifully than the poet (in the largest Baldwinian sense) Ocean Vuong.

In a deeply felt New York Times interview — a public reckoning, really — Vuong recounts his improbable beginnings as a writer: how he went from wanting to borrow a friend’s 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 “a medium for understanding suffering” — for understanding what hurts us and why we hurt each other and how to stop. He reflects:

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… 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: “Where is this coming from?” And a lot of times, it comes from fear and vulnerability — you’re too scared, and you have to strike first… I have great compassion to that, because the doorway through to violence has always been suffering…

It’s interesting: You see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense — it feels like the only path — but when you step back… it’s almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you’re like, “Oh my goodness — 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.”

[…]

In a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.

A couple of years earlier, speaking at San Francisco’s endlessly wonderful City Arts & Lectures, Vuong considered the place of anger — that handmaiden of suffering — in art, and in his own work animated by the belief that the poet’s 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 — ourselves and each other — 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:

When you feel the somatic experience of anger, you throw things, you shout (perhaps at the people you love), you’re 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 — in other words, you have to move towards care… For me, care is anger improved. It’s part of the same ecosystem. And I’m interested in dismantling the border between these two things, because we’re told that they’re two opposite sides of a spectrum, but I think they’re actually very close together. They inform each other.

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

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 — it almost calms me down. It’s hard to be rageful when you’re 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.

Vuong’s 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 — a handle on the door to compassion:

If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.

An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — 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.

Couple with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent meditation on the uses and misuses of anger in an imperfect world.