Sunday - Freedom
Mol and I lay down together for a luxury nap and put a Sedaris tape on to relax into the sunny afternoon. I couldn't sleep, though, and I lay awake, smelling the new season and remembering the sun-filled living-room of 12 Gorham Ave, the house where I grew up. There was a living room on the first floor and my parents' bedroom on the second; both were the same shape, with lovely bay windows which must have been south-facing by the amount of light they got. I hope that someday the group home will have a sun room. Our rooms now are too multi-use and/or crowded to get the perfect slanting light flooding in and pinning everthing down in the proper way. Our current set-up is particularly shielded from the windows, with the tech console largely blocking the one without the grates.
But back to the story. It's that kind of day, with thoughts wandering in and out easily. Beautiful, and hard to reconcile with the grim backdrop of war spouting from the TV. We have been hiding out in the cool comfort of cable. Earlier today we watched "Legends of the Fall" and marveled at how such a pompus piece of crap could ever have been made with a straight face. I mean, truly astounding, and worth watching just for the bafflement. The last line is "It was a good death," all serious and somber, delivered by a Cree Indian, and the indulgence of Brad Pitt's pretty-boy fantasy that he is a real wild-man (only in Hollywood!), not to mention the Anthony Hopkins' hambone turn as a half-paralyzed stroke victim! We were rolling. Ahem.... anyway...
After the Sedaris ended (finishing with the hilarious "You can't kill the Rooster"), I was remembering back to a conversation we had after the February 15 March. The Saltines had reassembled (sans Liem Jrs.) to defy our hateful child-president, and, after the parade, gathered at my parents for spaghetti and chat. In my crowning moment of the evening, I held the entire table for several minutes arguing that there we are caught in a crisis of the relationship between freedom and necessity. I said, basically, that our dealings with friends and peers are often queered when we seem too "needy"- that this is seen as invalidating free choice and throwing the relationship into question. In other words: if you need me, how can you choose me? There is a leap that we must make if we are to survive and be happy; where necessity, rather than being anathema to freedom, provides freedom the very ground it stands on.
I realized just now that I am somewhat caught in the chasm, and I felt compelled to get up and write about it.
A few days ago, Molly finished reading Kingdom of Fear (Hunter Thompson's latest) aloud to us. It was brilliant, Thompson on his game, and it has called up the peculiar mix of joy and dread that is his trademark, and it has entered into the queer mix that is my thought in this period which, for lack of a better word, I am calling "transitional." He is a challenging author, like Kafka, and he always sets me back on my heels, calling into question what it is that I hold dear. His is a machine that works, and it is a fast and terrible machine indeed.
Two days ago, I was feeling like my way of doing things isn't working, that I can't make the fucker run right, make it run into itself and turn into liquid light and run like fucking quicksilver and shoot into everything else all at once. Call it a symptom of passage, or the inevitable fall-out of a few days of dumb job-attendance. Anyhow, at that moment, it felt like everything that I had ever done was all being gobbled up by a terrible sink-hole of me and shit, and the whole lot was turning to stone and dooming every leap into action, slipping into my synaptic gaps and blocking the circut. Yer basic self-hating hysteria, you know?
It's not just the job, though. This fucking war is making a mockery of us. It was unstoppable from the beginning, waiting to happen, wanting to happen, primed and inhuman. The bombers were in their bays and the soldiers were in their barracks. Nobody who was part of the machine gave a fuck what anybody else thought -- what Europe thought, what the rest of the world thought, what the people of America thought -- and nobody who was not part of the machine was nearly powerful enough to stop it.
They say it is necessary to defend freedom. I say we are free to defend necessity. I guess that is the point I have been searching for: freedom and necessity both exist, and they do relate to each other. We can never get far enough away from necessity, rich enough or confident enough or whatever enough. It is a lie that even prompted us to try, and foolish and stupid. What is most necessary is our relations with each other, and fuck you if you don't want any part of that. These villans are trying to sell us a bill of goods -- like "this will be the last necessary war," "Iraq will become a beacon on a hill that will inspire the world to love freedom," and then, then, we can get to the good stuff. But it will not work that way.
Human need will not go away, but we are free to fulfill it any way we choose. This is the flourish of freedom, this is the pride of being alive. This is the magic of human expression. I did this, and everyone can know it.
It is time to face facts. "All players show all cards." The world economy is in the crapper and the American Dream is dying. Capitalism is disintigrating before our eyes, and we have to decide if we want to go down with the ship. We cannot survive alone, there are no individual life-rafts. We must build them together. This is true and this is necessary -- but we are free to do whatever we want about it.
Posted by Sam at March 23, 2003 03:31 PM
