Television has just given me some excellent examples of the Wood element in action, and appropriately all to do with the issue of Gordon Brown's anger. I felt different forms of anger rolling over me from the screen as people discussed Andrew Rawnsley's book. First there was Peter Mandelson, with his cold, cutting, Metal anger, slicing knife-like through a journalist's questions, then we had John Prescott, his in-your-face Wood anger bursting across the room at us, and then Rawnsley himself, rocked out of his calm good humour by a day of onslaught, showing a more Fire-like anger, but with strong tinges of Wood within it. Finally, there strode Gordon Brown across the screen, his emotions tightly dammed up inside him, only to be released in an outflow of Water-type anger in the House of Commons. This was indeed nature raw in tooth and claw.
What this reinforced for me was the fact that when we are angry we cannot hear what anybody else is saying and just want to lash out, like children having a tantrum. To anybody watching it could appear amusing to see people losing control in this way, but I would have been frightened if I had been in the room with any of them. An emotion out of control like that is frightening, because the person expressing the emotion is out of control.
As an amusing addition to my blog above, I have just read the following in today's Observer: "On Newsnight, the former deputy prime minister didn't let us down. "The big problem.." Jeremy Paxman began to say, when Prescott ... almost leapt out of the screen. "The big problem is him!" he interrupted, gesturing towards the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley. A proper ding-dong ensued on the matter of Gordon Brown's alleged bullying. It may have been a bit like Ashley Cole volunteering as a character witness for John Terry, but so what, it was wonderful television." So I was not the only person to find the TV last week riveting! From Nora
ReplyDelete