Live Free or What?

1.

You cannot be in the United States for long without running into the word “freedom.” In fact, the concept of “freedom” extends far beyond the literal and specific (i.e. democracy) into a glorious and mythical abstraction.

The sentence:

We are free.

is wildly incomplete. Sure, compared to some (if not many) countries, our citizens enjoy many liberties, but to claim Freedom Absolute feels a bit excessive.

It’s as if our patriotism commandeered the word directly from the Christian religion, where freedom is comparable to enlightenment–a glory-to-God kind of freedom.

Galatians 5:1 reads: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (The yoke of bondage being sin and/or the law, depending on which Bible version you prefer.) At some point every abstraction runs into this same, ambiguous muddle. Outside of a context, what is it exactly? (i.e. how can you measure it? know it? define it?)

2.

I like the concept of freedom, and, in a way, I feel like most of us pursue it.

And though most of us can agree that freedom is desirable, we all seem to look for it in different places and in different ways.

To one, freedom may mean lack of relationship (the old ball and chain variety). To another, the lack of financial obligation. Freedom could mean mental health (e.g. lack of addiction) or a breaking from the past. In fact, it seems the easiest way to understand the word is by what it is not: Enslaved. Contained. Controlled.

3.

Jonathan Franzen recently (semi-recently) published an extensive and vigorous novel that encircles this word (and concept) again and again. The book’s named Freedom and its at times hysterical, at times despairing, love story crawled so low to the ground–so real with human grit (and lack of sentiment), it was often difficult to read.

My dad hated the book. He found its realism distasteful.

Plato would have agreed with my father. For only art that inspired good was allowed in his Republic.

“Why would I want to read about ordinary people making bad choices?” He couldn’t finish it, he said. He saw nothing in those pages to strive for, no inspiration to take away.

My sister nodded. “Exactly. And if you would have finished the novel you would have seen that it’s a book about forgiveness. That’s what you take away. I thought it was beautiful.”

As she said this, I sat up straighter in my chair. Could this be it? Is this true freedom–Forgiveness in some shape or form, whether it be forgiving or forgiven.

4.

I’m sure I don’t have to elaborate on the role forgiveness plays in the Christian paradigm. But, the Christian faith is not alone in this. Forgiveness plays an integral role in many religions.

Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, the list goes on. I found this particularly lovely quote on the Forgiveness Wiki page (Yes, I used Wikipedia. I’m busy, these days. My research has got to be quick.)

“Love the creatures for the sake of God and not for themselves. You will never become angry or impatient if you love them for the sake of God. Humanity is not perfect. There are imperfections in every human being, and you will always become unhappy if you look toward the people themselves. But if you look toward God, you will love them and be kind to them, for the world of God is the world of perfection and complete mercy. Therefore, do not look at the shortcomings of anybody; see with the sight of forgiveness.”
— `Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 92

Forgive each other, the weather, fate. Forgive the moment, the shoulds, the should nots. Forgive the past, debts and imbalances, the times when there was never enough.

5.

Forgive and forget. This way of thinking leads me to consider, perhaps the least-free character in modern literature: Funes the Memorious. Jorge Luis Borges describes the character as unable to forget anything, and I mean anything–down to the tiniest detail. The short tale begins and ends with the man sitting in a dark room, every sensual undertaking (visual, aural, tactile) painful to him.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

. . . Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact. Babylon, London, and New York have overawed the imagination of men with their ferocious splendour; no one, in those populous towers or upon those surging avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the unfortunate Ireneo in his humble South American farmhouse. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep.

So we aren’t bad off as all that, and while I think Freedom Proper will prove elusive to most of us–at least in a permanent sense, I imagine we can acheive it in small momments. In those small moments of grace, when we forgive the world everything and simply exist. Those moments are enough to keep us hungry for more, I suppose.

Forgive and forget and be free. One of many paths, I’m sure, but one I’m happy to have found.

In the Absense of Should

1.

Some years ago, when I had time for such things, I wrote on a slip of paper (and later taped it to my mirror):

There is no such thing as should.

Sure, if you want to talk context, there is a should. For example, if I want to feel healthier, the ideal thing for me to do (i.e. I should) eat healthfully and exercise. But this should can only exist inside the constraint of the goal. If you take the goal away, the should vanishes.

There is only is.

2.

We are not as familiar with the ecstatic existentialist as with her ever-gloomy counterpart, but when we begin to explore this philosophy, we can’t look long before we encounter it–that exuberant exhale that comes when the impossible ideal is expunged.

When Jenny Lewis croons, “The absence of God will bring you comfort, baby,” it may feel counter-intuitive. God is the great comforter, right? Both believer and unbeliever tend to agree, and yet here, someone professes restfulness in God’s nonexistence?

And Camus, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” (many an existentialist’s manifesto) ends his essay on the futile underworld laborer so:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the greater fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights i enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Just how could Sisyphus feel happy without purpose, and how could this Jenny character promise comfort devoid of that omnipresent keeper?

3.

There’s an anarchy to it: this smashing of ideals–those platonic perfects in the sky. Inherent in the act lies an exultant cry for freedom.

So, maybe the God example is too much, too ultimate. (I personally like to think God exists in one form or another.)

Allow me to reference a smaller, less mythologized ideal: The perfect female form. (Though, I suppose,  ever-changing, this is well-mythologized, too.) Corporations bank on the idea of the perfect female body. Clothing lines, makeup companies, the entire diet industry. I can’t fathom the kind of money that this ideal makes for some people.

But imagine, as a woman, the exhilarating rush you would have annihilating said ideal. And I mean just destroying it, so completely, you never imagined it to exist again, never compared yourself to it, never deprived yourself for it, never judged yourself against it.

It would probably feel good, right? It would allow you to focus on real things like your body’s healthfulness, or the taste of food, or how awesome it feels to have legs that walk and arms that reach and a heart that beats.

4.

There is no should mother. No should house. No should dinner or state of cleanliness.

Unless I have a specific goal in mind, I can leave those shoulds behind.

Which is what I told myself this Monday, when the Orthopedist strapped my two-month old into a Pavlic harness–a snug fitting twist of sterile straps built to restrain his legs from movement. They pull his legs up and out into an odd and vulnerable split he will hold for the next three months of his life, without break. His diagnosis (Hip Dysplasia) happened so quickly I had no moment to conceptualize its weight. I was too busy concentrating on the doctor’s instructions.

And now everything’s different. He won’t be able to roll over. I’ve had to bag all his clothes. He can no longer wear them. I can’t play this little piggy on his toes (They’re stuffed into clothed-over stirrups) or give him baths.

For the first couple days, his crying was at times vague, at times frantic. He seemed confused and uncomfortable, but he adjusted quickly, and three days later, we find ourselves aching for a new norm. We all just want to get used to it.

And what helps, at least it helps me, is when I think of all those things he should be doing, and I should be doing, the memories we should be making, the way his body should have been formed–well, it helps to think those shoulds don’t exist–that all that really exists is now, and this baby, and if I can forget all the shoulds (those ideals) that rush into crowd us, I can look down at this baby (who is sleeping on my chest as I write this), with his legs hitched up, out, and stationary, that everything is maybe, quite perfect indeed.

I leave you with the parting words of Wendell Berry’s poem, Observance:

                                              the perfection

of his forgetting allows the sun

to glitter

          —the light

flows away, its blue and white

peeling off the green waves.

His mind contains

the river as its banks

contain it, in a single act

receiving it and letting it go.