Are you filled with anger? Are you filled with lust?

Would it kill ya to trust?

Last Saturday night, November 5, Mimi Parker died from ovarian cancer, aged 55. She was a vocalist and drummer in what is (I’ll say it) surely the greatest band of the last thirty years — and my favorite since about 1996 — Duluth, Minnesota’s Low. I cannot get over this loss; I can hardly believe that it is possible. In the nineties when I was a teenager, Low were there for me at my lowest. They understood my depression and turned me around in a different direction. Experiencing their poignant vocal harmonies upon the sparse tundra of their soundscapes at ages fifteen and sixteen prepared me to receive the art of Tarkovsky and Dostoevsky at age seventeen, all of which then prepared me to receive the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church when I first encountered it at age eighteen. There is a direct line in my life between the art of Low and what I hold dearest and most sacred. When I needed them most, the voices of husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker were like the loving parents I never had (I had parents, but they didn’t love each other and had permanently split by the time I heard Low). Mimi Parker is like the mother of my soul. And now she’s dead. I haven’t gone a day without weeping over this in the week since I heard — Sunday, November 6, in fact, the day it was announced; that’s also my own mother’s birthday, and the date in 1998 when I first learned of the Orthodox Church and was invited to attend.

I could go on for a long time about this band and what they’ve meant to me. This is just my second post in this Journal, though, and I want to do something germane to what I imagine the Journal will be. That shouldn’t be a problem: One of my biggest ideas, and one I’ve yet to develop at length, involves the pattern of thymos and epithymia (the incensive and appetitive powers of the soul) and how it is found throughout human activity and culture. I had cause to bring up this topic in my domes article and my cosmic chiasmus article (published this past week “In memory of Mimi Parker”) on The Symbolic World; I’ve also treated it a couple of times in movie reviews on Letterboxd. I was trained to see the pattern in myself, Scripture, and the world by the philokalic tradition of the Orthodox Church, but, looking back, I think I first encountered the idea — whether they knew what they were doing or not — in the music of Low. It’s a common hypothetical question one hears: If you as an older person could tell your younger self anything that you wish you had known, what would it be? I know I wish I had understood the pattern of thymos and epithymia a lot earlier than I did, so I’m going to write this post as if to my younger self, using a cultural touchstone I know I would have understood.

The song linked directly above is “Lust” from 1996’s The Curtain Hits the Cast, the album that, once it came out and I heard it, convinced me that this minimalist trio I had been listening to for a year and seeing live whenever they came to Pittsburgh was in fact generating the most meaningful and consequential music in my life to that point. True to form, the lyrics of “Lust” are simple:

Are you finding answers?
Are you speaking in tongues?
Are you filled with anger?
Are you filled with lust?

Is it easy to bargain?
Is it easy to last?
Are you filled with anger?
Are you filled with lust?

Would it kill you to trust?

There are no answers in this song, only a sequence of questions.¹ Questions provide the outlines of ideas, though, and clearly this song’s central idea is covered by the only lines that repeat: the coordination of anger and lust. It may appear a non sequitur at first. Their relationship isn’t perhaps obvious to us whose ancient understanding of psychology has been erased and overwritten by the likes of Freud and Darwin. But anger and lust (or more generally, anger and desire) are as frequent consorts as Ares and Aphrodite. They are as natural a pair as Scylla and Charybdis, left and right, weeping and gnashing of teeth (or Freud and Darwin). The dual emotions of anger and lust conform to how the ancients saw the lower passions of the soul operating.

The epithymetic faculty is desire, appetite. The general notion of the original Greek is not difficult to translate. The thymic faculty, however, evades the English language. Thymos as commonly used means anger. But as a psychological term, that which is thymic covers more territory than that. In translation it gets called various things: the spirited faculty, the irascible faculty, the incensive faculty. Whereas epithymia desires, thymos strives. These lower two passions are presided over (or should be) by a third, the logos or rational faculty. These three together comprise the tripartite psychology commonplace in the ancient Hellenistic world.

The thing is, however, I already knew a lot of this when I was younger. I had read Plato’s Republic a couple times early in college; in my early life as an Orthodox Christian I encountered the idea in ascetic literature, and I remember my godfather talking about thymos. But I didn’t see how it applied. I didn’t see how the pattern played out in everything shaped by human psychology. I didn’t see how it affected my life.

A light went on a couple years ago when I was rereading the discourses of Abba Dorotheos of Gaza. In the course of a commentary on a poem by St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Dorotheos references the teaching of the tripartite soul, attributing it to St. Gregory. Now, in the original Greek he just names the three faculties as, translated literally, “the epithymetic and the thymic and the rational,” but the 1977 edition that I was reading didn’t translate them literally. The translator wasn’t an academic but a Benedictine monk who just wanted to share the text with others. For this passage he went with a loose paraphrastic translation: “The soul, St. Gregory says, has three parts. One is the seat of attraction (desires, appetites); another is the seat of repulsion (anger, passion); the third, the seat of reason (intelligence).”²

Thinking of epithymia and thymos in terms of attraction and repulsion — which struck me as completely correct — blew open doors for me in my mind, and all of a sudden I could see a host of connections. I’m not going to be able to write about all of them at once, but let me at least give a couple insights. Thinking of thymos in terms of a repulsive power is major. When you are sitting on your couch and craving ice cream, it’s the epithymetic faculty that does the craving, that locks its powers of attraction onto the object of its desire. It’s your thymic faculty, however, whose job it is then to repulse all the obstacles between you and the object of your desire. If there is distance between you and your freezer, your thymos repulses that obstacle by getting up and overcoming that distance. Your thymos thereby is the provider. Your logos, meanwhile, is supposed to be overseeing this whole volitional process… but you know, sometimes in this passionate life, things just don’t work out that way. The undertow of desire can pull the logos under and make it serve its whims. Or the madness of anger, the drive to repulse all obstacles for the sake of supremacy over others, may likewise subjugate the logos to achieve this aim alone.

It’s like a bar magnet. This analogy is central to my understanding of how the thymic and epithymetic aspects of the soul are interrelated. One side attracts, and one side repels. If you look at the vectors of a magnetic field around a bar magnet, you’ll see they all get pushed out of one end, the north pole, and then pulled into the other end, the south pole. The north pole is like the thymos repelling the vectors; the south pole is like the epithymia attracting them. In Homer’s Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis, existing on either side of a narrow strait, provide us with the same image in mythical form. Scylla is a thymically aggressive beast with six heads on six long necks as if along vectors repelled from the body and diverging into separate paths. Charybdis, on the other hand, is an epithymetic whirlpool of suck, attracting all vectors into its insatiable abyss.

But the soul is simple, and it’s important to talk about the tripartite soul in terms of faculties and not parts. Again like the poles of a bar magnet, the faculties of thymos and epithymia are contained within each other. When we talk about the lower passions of the soul, we’re talking about the polarization of the soul. Magnetic charge exists on an atomic level. If you were to break a magnet in half, as though to separate the two poles, you wouldn’t get a south pole in one hand and a north pole in the other. You’d get two equally bipolar magnets, albeit each half the size of the original. I may be jumping ahead of myself by bringing in a political analogy, but relative to each other the political left is epithymetic in character and the political right thymic. If the two actually managed to tear apart from each other, the problem of polarization that contributed to their divorce would by no means diminish. It would throb as strongly as before, further stressing the two separate parties each with its own particular bipolar psychosis.

Because the poles are contained within each other. Take the example of an especially tyrannical man, a hypercompetitive man who strives to repulse the influence of others and establish himself as dominant. It’s almost a cliche to observe how psychologically needy he is. Catch him from the angle he never shows and see what a gaping hole of suck there is at bottom. Every Citizen Kane is secretly ruled by the gravity of some childhood desire. Conversely, think of a woman subdued by desires so voluminous they’re riddled with contradictions and impossible to meet. The constant pull of demands — even demands unstated or merely suggested — could rip to shreds anyone who would show her any love. People might learn to stay away, and a woman calcifying in such a state might simply become known as a resentful shrew, like a female Citizen Kane; she would in the end be known for her anger more than her desire. The poles are contained within each other.

A later song by Low, “No Comprende,” off 2015’s Ones and Sixes, might be useful to introduce at this point. There’s no Spanish in the lyrics; the title is a poetic reference to not understanding someone (like not getting their language), and the song is about marital strife. The miscommunication between husband and wife dramatizes the conflict that can occur between thymos and epithymia.

Alan, the man, motivated by thymos, resents being kept “talking in a circle.” He wants to “cut to the solution.” He strives for control. The wife’s empathetic way of communicating, born of epithymetic desire, is interpreted as “making assumptions” — Iain McGilchrist’s depiction of left-brain and right-brain behavior is very apposite here, but I can’t get into that now. Once the conflict is established in the song, the problem deepens when the husband becomes fixated on controlling particular objects in their life and the wife’s behavior regarding them: “You can’t just throw it in the trailer. / You’ve got to stack it so it’s stable. / Got to wind up all the cables.” All the while the wife, taking in the big picture with her appetitive focus, aches for love: “Our house is on fire / You better get out now / House with desire.” As the song reaches its breaking point, she just repeats at length, “Desire / Desire.”

So much conflict between the sexes can be understood through the lens of this pattern I’m trying to introduce here. Hopefully I’ll be able to write more about that some day. Thymos and epithymia do not have to conflict, though. The great usefulness to seeing this pattern of polarization where it exists is that in the philokalic tradition of the Church we also have the patterns of solution to the problems. I really hope to be able to write about that. When epithymia is solved by love of God; when thymos is solved by love of neighbor; when the mind descends into the heart; when the soul is united in one prayerful activity; when according to the logos the epithymia’s attraction to the good and the thymos’s repulsion of the evil become one Spirit-fueled Godward motion, we really do observe an endless supernova of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.

But to ground such lofty aspirations in our commonly lived experiences, let me come back to Low and eulogize this marriage which has brought so much light into my life.

On the same album with “No Comprende,” later in the track list, is “What Part of Me.” The song is an acknowledgment, despite their conflicts, of the interpenetration of identity that has resulted from their love. In the end they were married for 32 years. I am still grieving this loss.

Mimi was the heart and soul of the band. She and Alan have admitted in interviews that he is the agent of chaos in their creativity together, and she an agent of the beauty that manages to embrace the chaos and lift it up. Like thymos and epithymia, he’s the centrifugal force, she the centripetal force. With her gone… I’m trying to express to you how particularly devastating this loss is. Alan and Mimi aren’t breathing together anymore. Mimi is gone… and Alan is still with us — those of us who have had their marriage as a focus of attention and a source of uplift now have Alan and their two children’s tremendous grief before us instead. We just heard in “What Part of Me” of their interpenetration of identity — and death rips that away? The ache is too much. Even if we believe in the Resurrection, even if we believe that Alan and Mimi will breathe together again, I don’t think we can get there without acknowledging and bearing this present grief. “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (Jam. 4:9–10). The lust and anger, the cupidity and wrath, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, they can be overcome. They are overcome. Death is overcome.

Would it kill you to trust?

1. There are no answers in this song, only a sequence of questions… Unless you count the lack of answers as an answer to the first question, “Are you finding answers?” No, because there are only questions in this song. But then… if that’s an answer… then yes, I found one answer, an answer to the question “Are you finding answers?”, the answer to which is… Wait. The answer can’t be yes if in order for it to be yes, it has to be no. So, no? But then wouldn’t that be an answer?

2. Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings, td. by Eric P. Wheeler (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977), p. 229.