Thoughts on freedom

How hollow an ideal, freedom; utterly devoid of content. It tells us nothing for life. To be free is not to be virtuous. It means nothing more than the absence of constraint. Free to do what? Free from what? The uses of the word are revealing. It expresses potential, but is itself insubstantial.
A common understanding of freedom is that strange perversion of the golden rule: not to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but to do as you will so long as your will does not conflict with another's. Here freedom is alienating. The will of others is a constraint on your own will; alone, you are more free than you are with someone else. If freedom is the end towards which our social, political, and cultural institutions work, we are truly lost, for we have admitted that community devalues us.
Perhaps a new ideal: "Affect one another." Be the change you want in the world. Parrhesia, self-disclosure. We are most reliably answerable to our own experience of the world, and our experience of the world is shaped by our interactions with our communities. Thus, the way one life brings itself to bear on another is more meaningful than the moral criteria we have thus far contented ourselves with.
I agree with Nietzsche that morality is not transcendentally guaranteed. It is not natural, neutral, or objective, nor should it be. Our experiences do not yield answers to moral questions in any systemic fashion. Everything we understand about nature suggests that it is amoral. Survival of the fittest rests ill on the moral mind.
The order of things is trounced at every turn.
Begin instead with beauty; that which speaks to feeling and experience and life. It is in our apprehension of the world. To hold a moral ideal must first be to experience it as beautify; worthy of further experience.
Sublimity in particular: the beauty of boundlessness! To be overwhelmed by grandeur even as your own insignificance comes into harsh focus. And to experience this powerlessness positively; indeed, to crave it! It is our most honest insight into reality. How limited we are, and how much we will never know.
And so I return to freedom--empty of value and wanting for guidance--wondering if the craving for freedom is somehow bound up in the desire for the sublime. To we not value freedom precisely for its infinite possibilities?
Bear with me when I call this freedom-yet-to-be, for freedom as we now understand it misconstrues the encounter of the sublime. Freedom dares us to dive into that abyss we stare so long into.
The sublime reflects the balance between finitude and terror. As we speak it, freedom holds no such prudence. Freedom demands actualization; it cannot see how opening one door closes another. All its promises arrive at once and, overburdened, we mourn its collapse through internal failure.

Aphorism #1

The Daimon: Pour your soul out. Bleed words. Every entry something vital, as though to mark something deep and personal and vivid on a blank page. Feel the satisfaction as you pour out and the page fills up, no longer blank and intimidating, but an undeniable marker that there was indeed an author.

How long should it take to learn that writing doesn't work that way? No doubt my postmodern friends are in a lather to remind me that the author is dead. Well, Nietzsche said the same of God, but you'd never catch him getting all giddy about it. As it is with gods, so too is it with authors--though they die, they also linger. 

More Old Words

Celebrate the indecision
triumph in the long division
of long nights into everything
you thought you left behind.

When skies unfold and no one's listening
listen to what you've been missing
don't mistake your waking dreams for gold.

Same old everything, you've run these laps before
You're no prophet
You'll stop before you get where you wanna go.

And if you're to scared to make it happen
just give in and you'll start laughing
little kings and queens don't need no thrones.

Old Words

I wrote this about a year ago, found it in a notebook a couple days ago, and decided it's a pretty good representation of where I'm at these days. As usual, I'm impressed by the wordplay but not sure if it means anything.
--
Pen to paper at a moment of loss. Lost words for the gains, hard fought and little seen, for the fine line between crashing and burning brighter than sunrises over desolate scenes. To friends, well loved and woebegotten, whose dreams end and whose lives begin, who awaken now and cannot speak for the labors endured, challenges met, freedom gained, identities lost. Lives forged in hostile fire, ideas made and ideals sacrificed; the firm satisfaction of having done so much for so long and its gone.
To back of the mind, the memories that haunt that are one last lost chance and that final goodbye and that wonder if you could ever feel like this again.
It belongs to you.
In its whole steaming self you made it. You owned it. You can love it like there's nothing else to love.
Not true.
Hold on to your dreams spoken swiftly and never forget, its bigger than that. We all know. Let it be. Don't forget.

A Dense Record of Thought

Some thoughts. Some assembly required.

For some time, I have been concerned with self-creation. I hold firmly that we are not masters of our own destiny, as though what befalls a person is a matter of choice. Nor, however, are we satisfied with a random world dictated wholly by chance. As always in a clash of absolutes, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The middle ground I stake is that we cannot help what life throws our way, nor can we know what will come from our actions. We can know what we do and why. The antidote to regret is remembering why we opted for one course over another in a moment of choice. Don't mistake retrospection for responsibility. What's past is past; the person you were could not have chosen differently because he or she did not choose differently. We can't change that. What we can change is who we are. How you respond. This is self construction.
The exercise is not simple. We are mired in life, produced by families, friends, cultures and the choices of others. We are born into a world we did not choose. To take a step further, the distinctions between self and other, will and world, or inner life and outer (take your pick) are not so firm as some might like to believe. Self construction belongs to a legion of useful fictions, tools for living. It's a way to resolve the tension between the world as random and uncaring and the world as a theater of judgment for our every action.
The point, then? Live well. Know who you are; know why you are who you are. Do not be defined by regret but by growth. Where you own happiness is concerned, assign neither blame nor responsibility. It is as all things ephemeral (which is not to say unreal). Don't think you've got the answer to life. Just know what you're going to do about it.

Traffic Cops

I hate traffic cops. Arbitrary, unnecessary, discriminatory, disingenuous. Bad encounter yesterday; it inspired this.

-

The continuity of difference.

Moral sleight of hand.

I just don't get it.
Words make worlds and
mine's so fine
most of the time
until it fall fall falls
and I break.
It's not pretty.
I've nothing witty to say.
These days they pass and I ask
what a reasonable man should do.
Aha! That conceit
still with me
as though a reasonable man
is some real thing
not the sum of our eccentricities
divided by our gross.
And what do we want?
It flies in all directions
life lessons, more time, less stressing.

I wondered what to write
and the words kept falling
I play tetris with the fragments
that I'm calling knowledge.
With baited breath I'm making good
on secret promises to no one
that came into this world as lies.
It should be no surprise
that a long walk lets out lost sounds
and winding paths and darkened skies
are a chapel for the faithless
and a good one at that.

You see, I've been thinking.
Because feeling's no good when
you're lost to the world and
I need battle plans not words.
It's a hostile space and
I've a name to make
if not a dollar.
And when the revolution comes
I can't wait to take up arms
or just to escape,
get out while the horrors
get swept away.
I have nothing earn nothing learn nothing
but I'm making it through
and one way or another
I won't be used.

Text, Not Dreams.

Last semester the finals rush moved me to songwriting; a rare thing for me that emerges in the same way as poetry. There's no intention behind it. A string of words congeals incessantly and fights its way out of mind and into text, drawing along with it a threshold of affect I can only ever hope survives the transition into words. It becomes a fixation. Though unfinished, I've sung this song to myself under my breath or out loud to the night sky innumerable times since I brought it into existence. Without further ado, here's that verse:

You make me sleep like tryptophan
and I don't need it.
I'm a free man going to bleed
and I don't care about
your weakness
or excuses
or the bruises that'll
weight down what remain
of all the days you wondered
when your train would come.

Because I'm halfway home
and I'll take my throne.

I sing it in a low register to an imagined bass beat. It signifies the flight from my natural tendency to sit back and go with the flow; an assertion of control to combat complacency with where I'm at and what I'm doing. It's not the sort of idea I usually express, and I think that's a good thing, or at least something necessary.
I think we all look for that place to rest. Some get drunk or high, seeking to forget their troubles. Some put their hopes in love, seeking that completion in another when they can't find it in themselves. I think I look for it in words. Another poetic fragment comes to mind: "The poet's dream is to escape from prison by describing it's bars/but I think I've seen enough bars to give up on dreaming." One more fragment made it into a facebook status: "What's the use of dreamtime when there's no escape from the sunrise?" These probably come across as pessimism. They're not.
A place to rest isn't out there somewhere; you carry it with you. Aesop Rock says "dream a little dream/or you can live a little dream/I'd rather live it/'cuz dreamers always chase but never get it." Dreaming and its uselessness is a new theme for me, and I'm growing to be surprised how deeply I mean it. I've got a lot of big ideas brewing, but they don't mean much until they've fought their way out of mind and into words. Imperfect though it may be, text is better currency than thought.