Some people are loud in that they talk a lot or have a high pitched or full throated voices and so people who are usually quiet but occasionally say a good deal are thought as unusual and deep. Other people are quiet in that they say little and that can also be inferred to be people who are deep or maybe simple. Whatever the case, these conditions are considered matters of character, the kind of person a person is, rather than a superficial matter and so not at all obvious as it sounds, but something inside the personhood, some avenue into the sanctity of minds ever imprisoned in their skulls. But people who are sometimes loud and sometimes not are not regarded as another form of character but as an aberration. People are inferred to be disjointed or out of sorts, and so inferred, at the least, as a clue of disquiet, even if it might seem just as ordinary a state of things as the other more consistent tones or characters. In particular, people who scream are thought to be particularly distraught, and it is worth examining a scream as a social phenomenon.
The famous scream is the one given by Edward Munch to his picture of that name. It seems particularly compelling as a voice of anguish represented not by a sound but in a painting of someone with a distorted face, eyes too large and drooping, a mouth opened wide, echoes of the sound indicated by repeated lines, but not saying, since it can’t, whether there is a screech or a howl or just an imbrication of a loud “No!” The interpretation of that painting, which is well known enough to have become a cliche, is that the person is screaming against the existential condition in that it is a protest and a response to the facts that engulf us, whether that there is never enough money, or that love affairs are unrequited, or that people are themselves inside with themselves. What the scream means is that people are tired of bearing with their various conditions and so want an end to it or at least recognize that the condition is a problem to be resolved. Similar sentiments are expressed in the movie “Network” where Peter Finch says “I won’t take it any more.” to indicate being fed up with the way news and media work.He and other existential heroes will not be placated by saying that what is usual is acceptable, the ordinary way things happen. Instead, they are like Melville’s scrivener who replies “I rather not” to all reasonable demands by his employer who then caters what is clearly a demented man until the scrivener dies, brave to the end in thinking he refuses to accept the world as it is rather than a world left undefined by better parameters, and so the story and the situation are without utopian or ameliorative impact, just the refusal to be at peace with what is.
Most of the time, though, screams are deficiencies rather than an insight into the ineffable. A woman I once saw in a crowded subway train yelling to get out when the train had stopped in the tracks was making a practical rather than an existential request, one that seemed reasonable until some other passenger, such as myself, noticed to oneselves that this was a practical problem and soon enough there would be a memory but that the stoppage was sufficiently annoying so that one wished to scream to make the train resume movement. People are generally well controlled. They are aware of the reasons for a stoppage and so put up with it. The impulse to scream is generally suppressed and the rare exception is not regarded as a brave protest against all the inconveniences of life but as that woman’s derangement, her inability to engage in the impulse control that is necessary for any of us to use so as to continue practical life. So screaming is to let that go and appeal to a higher sense of justice or the lack of it, and will be incarcerated in a jail or a mental hospital for having engaged in a scream-- or maybe just that a transit worker will calm her down and give her a glass of water before sending her on her way, she having restored her equilibrium, which means how to conduct oneself as a normal human being. Onlookers, watching the screaming woman, can praise themselves on knowing how to control themselves.
If we think of screamers as types, that is to have stable characters and characteristics, then can be separated silent from loud screamers. People in these two different ways foment or announce or testify to the human condition. The silent screamers are Henry Fonda-like types who quietly observe and comment on the apocalypse about to happen, whether a nuclear war or a great depression. Leading religious figures are silent types. Moses is particularly inarticulate. He has Aaron speak for him and when he brings the tablets with the Ten Commandments with him and finds that the Israelites have given over to paganism, he does not rally his followers but rather in presumably a bit of rage at these people having been offered the law when it was so close for them to achieve that, instead threw the tablets down, breaking them asunder, so that it was necessary for him to go back to Sinai to reassemble them, as if the words had not yet been lifted from the stone in which it was carved and become, as it would become, in words alone, and therefore invisible. Moreover, if you think it was through his effort Moses had consolidated the law, then it was a mighty effort that had to be done twice rather than once and so perhaps for pique that what had been offered as a precious boon had not been appreciated in advance of its realization. How short sighted and feckless were the people of Israel, which always remains as the troubling condition of human nature.
Jesus is also a quiet screamer. He speaks to small numbers of people in an elliptical, esoteric style, except when he offers the Sermon on the Mount, which is about a sublime vision of people transformed rather than about the agonies of ordinary life. At His trial, He still seems reluctant to say what He is all about, as if He were not sure what he was or had become or what would give the populace His credence. But why did He not behold himself? There was nothing to lose, He being certain to be convicted. What is left is that He remains mysterious, letting other people point out His signifigence.
The clergy, on the other hand, are grand screechers. They bemoan and pontificate and wax eloquent about how the situations in life are terrible, and that the basic fundamentals of the world have gone astray, and that the reason for that is the dreadful nature of people/s character. The laity should be blamed for it all and that only a change of heat will make or restore the world to its natural and proper alignment. While the solution may be faulty or even perverse, the realities of life are not overblown, though thee are some of the clergy, both Jewish and Catholic, would insist that most people lead commendable lives and so it is not at all clear why there is a need to alter the way things are, as happens when the author of Harold Kushner’s book “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” becomes an apologist for God and says cancer and drought and death are not God’s fault, just nature’s, and so there is no one to complain about, as if there were no transactions to take place between actual life and the metaphysical sphere. If there is no way to take note of a disjunction between human consciousness and the world, what is the point of religion anyway? In that case, such theologians and clergy are not screaming, just placating people to make it all go away. But religion without screaming is empty.
It is familiar enough to say that great religious leaders have quiet screams and that the clergy have loud ones, that to include boh Martin Lither and Martin Luther King, Jr. who were eloquent and outspoken, even if elevated into the superstardom of clergy. It may be able to further the discussion of the nature of screaming by suggesting that the third term of religion, the laity, also screams. The laity have had a bad rap at least since Kierkegaard who thought most of them hardly Christians at all in that most of them attend church services so as to engage in socializing with one another and making business connections and barely touch with or even reject the notion that religion is full of fear and dread rather than a comforting hand whereby people are like children in that they are patted on the back by clergy and say “there, there” to their booboos. Ingmar Begman has the clergyman lie when the character is made to tell even the Queen, especially the Queen, that God is comforting. But the laity are not fools. They find ways to distort words so as to allow themselves to find comfort as an answer to their screams of anguish at the death of loved ones and the general suffering that prevails in the human condition. They want comfort because they need comfort unless the human condition is hopeless and there is nothing to do but scream about it. So Catholics like Joe Biden and many other educated and sophisticated Catholics regard simple verbal affirmation to a creed as sufficient basis for belief even if he also protects the right of women to choose abortions, and members of the Catholic laity know that annulments are divorces under some other name and children who are born again realize they have not been transformed except for the ceremony of it when they go up to the alter and say they have become saved. It was what all their friends were doing.
A young priest I knew who was troubled by celibacy and convinced that new research would show that miracles happened, was very engaged with pastoral care rather than in liturgy or theology, just as a rabbi I knew who thought the toughest part of his week was comforting the dying at a local old age home. There wasn’t much to say so he engaged in small talk. The priest said to me the story of an aged parishioner who was cursing the saints for the woes of her life The priest told me that he said to her that the saints were strong and could bear up under the abuse if you needed to express angrily to them for the burdens she bore, the saints, perhaps. sharing the burden for her. I don't know if that was good theology. Maybe she should not curse the saints even under those circumstances, but the priest understood that this was at the heart of the matter, which was to abide with the scream as an expression of the real anguish of the human condition. That is why the laity come to religion, not for menorahs and Christmas trees.
People find it embarrassing to scream, and treat them as secrets confessed on special occasions and therefore relieved by offering them up through the subtrafuges of doctrine and liturgy, where people can say they are inherently evil or that some water can rid some of it from them. Otherwise, that fragile sense of a person’s own confrontation with the inevitable and ineffable is done in private, like going to pee or saying blandishments to the dog. Too private to announce-- except, that is, in the very public displays whereby ritual and doctrine are rendered. Everyone has a chance to scream, and that is normal and so seems miraculous.