At the intersection of music and screams, few vociferations parallel in either length or energy TOOL front man Maynard James Keenan’s legendary scream in the The Grudge, from 2001’s Lateralus. Spanning 25 seconds from the 6:58 to the 7:23 marks of song, Keenan’s scream embodies both the pain of holding on to an angry grudge and the power of releasing it from the body in a soul-born, eruptive reveille. The scream is the emotive culmination of the song’s wrestling with the righteousness of anger and the fear of letting it go. Lyrics, interwoven with the Saturnine symbol of generativity and tyrannical power, warn of the damage wrought when we are unable to forgive, desperate to control, wearing grudges like crowns, clutching them like cornerstones, justifying denials that grip to lonesome ends.
The Saturnine symbolism in ‘The Grudge’ is far from the first time Keenan’s lyrics wander into Jungian archetypal terrain (e.g. 1996’s Ænima album, whose songs contain direct references to ‘the shadow’ and ‘the anima’). Symbolic, archetypal references call experiencers of art into the heavy ideological shadows under which all humans labor. Laboring under and oppressed by the weight of Saturn’s shadow, those animated by the will to power are blighted in spirit, dragged down like a stone. In the words of Jungian Psychologist James Hollis, “power in itself is neutral, but without eros it is haunted by fear and compensatory ambition, driven to violent ends.” Grudges are combustion for corruption in the power complex.
Dimensional and multifaceted, Saturn’s story is masculine in symbolism and energy, a story of light and shadow. Saturn’s light is generativity and fostering of civilization. Saturn’s shadow is violence, power, insecurity, and jealousy. Saturn is associated with a litany of bloody tales. Holding on to power often requires blood sacrifice, letting go generates growth and love. Carl Jung once observed that where power is, love is not. Holding on to grudges can create a tremendous sense of power and control, unleashing a cascade of violent isolation from Self and Other.
Indeed, the more we hang on to grudges the lonelier we become. Grudges with ourselves restrict and suffocate our capacity to explore our own mystery with earnest eagerness and awe. Grudges with others build the proverbial wall meticulously, calculatingly, brick by cold & ugly brick. Time, focus, and patient diligence are required to build and maintain the stone edifices of the enduringly unforgivable. Perhaps it was synchronicity that the musicians of TOOL required over six months to compose a complex song structure ripe with dynamic and geometric time signatures and juxtaposed emotional soundscapes that match the devotion and perseveration needed to mold cornerstone grudges.
Grudges define, grudges confine, and we sink deeper into isolation and despair until we choose to let them go. When we transmutate angry energy into motivation to give away the stones of gold and fading grudges that anchor us to stagnation we are born anew, spat out like a child, light and innocent. The choice is clear, hang on to anger or be humbled again. To let go of anger, to transmutate anger, is to humble ourselves, to recognize that control is at best illusion, perhaps delusion. When we, as individuals and as a society, are unable to forgive our scarlet lettermen, we exist in a prison of our own calculations equally unable to forgive ourSelves. As another music legend noted, “when we lose control, we reap the harvest we have sown,” and the harvest of lifelong grudges and anger is a sickly crop of poison fruit that ushers in isolation and ruin.