Freedom From Freedom

I remember floating at the bottom of a swimming pool in the courtyard of an apartment building in San José, California, in the summer of 1965. I’ve always been able to hold my breath for long periods of time and it felt peaceful at the bottom of the pool. What I didn’t count on was how it might look to someone. When I surfaced, I encountered a man on his way to work who had been startled by seeing me on the bottom. He said he thought I might be drowning and almost jumped in to save me. The memory, like so many of my memories, remains brightly lucid and detailed, still charged with the emotion of the moment, and all the might have beens and should have beens and could have beens. All the alternatives that would’ve resulted in a very different present. The past is always pulling me back, engaging my attention, while simultaneously projecting scenarios in the future. This continual dissociation of the self can be experienced in the mode of lightness (I is another) or of responsibility (its engagement by the past and future). 

        “Sartre has a definition of consciousness as a perpetual decompression of the self: it is no longer what it was, it is not yet what it will be, therefore it has no substance, it is always in the rupture, the separation, the tearing away from the past and projecting it towards the future. The truth of consciousness is necessarily a becoming that advances by way of division, rewinding, spiraling, just like History. Such a truth poses the problem of solidarity with oneself: how can I still be myself while perpetually betraying myself? If I never stop projecting myself towards something other than myself, I only exist in relation to my projections. If I just say, ‘I am what I’ve done,’ it means that I’m already dead, a mummy to myself.” – François Noudelman, “Sartre pense à partir de ses contradictions” [my translation] 

        It’s easy to obsess about other actions one might’ve taken in the past; the alternatives are dizzying. And what would’ve been the right action – the unequivocally, unambiguously correct thing to do, to say – is unreachable. It no longer exists except as an ongoing narrative in one’s memory. The more you alter the narrative the more tortured you become. You can’t change it. You might be able to reinterpret it, but you can’t change it. It is both real and unreal. The emotional charge it carries is real. And unreal. It is both mutable and static. All you can do is look for amnesty. But the amnesty has to come from within. The chronicler must frame the chronicle differently, but the picture doesn’t change. There are no clouds in the museum. Only exhibits behind glass. Dioramas and straw. Cognitive maps in the hippocampus.

        “On the responsible side, you have to be accountable and supportive of your actions: you have done something or not, and you cannot say that this me was someone else. To try to solve this problem, Sartre finds a Hegelian solution, a movement of totalization - detotalization and re-totalization - where meanings are constantly reabsorbed, diverted and redirected by others and by History. The result is a sense which both depends on me and does not depend on me. It is the movement of History, of ideology, of otherness that I live, which means that I am not totally in control of the meaning of my actions.” – Ibid. 

        Are we mistranslating our own lives? What responsibilities embolden us and what responsibilities drag us down? Does art make us selfish? Do perforations token weakness or convenience? Wouldn’t it be nice to crawl into a parenthesis in the middle of our narrative and hibernate for an entire winter? Or go back in time? Drop out of the narrative and surrender to the inevitability of it all? Then return with a sack of drugs and a smile. 

        Everyone wants freedom. Freedom from worry, freedom from doubt, freedom from chores, freedom from tedium, freedom from ourselves, freedom from others, freedom from routine, freedom from guilt and remorse, freedom from commitment, freedom from pigment, freedom from bewitchment, freedom from infringement, impingement and the beaten path. What would it be like to enjoy a minute of freedom? Real, absolute, total freedom. Would that newly opened space leave us with more decisions to make? More possibility? Overwhelm us with possibility? I’ve heard some people talk about how exhilarating it is to be in the military because there nearly all your decisions are made for you by other people. And that is a sensation of total freedom. Is this why people are drawn to totalitarian regimes? To dictators? You don’t have to be yourself in a uniform. You don’t have to take responsibility for yourself. You give that responsibility to others. 

        "Therefore, freedom, Sartre's favorite word, is woven with responsibility and otherness. The truth of free conscience follows the tortuous paths of bad faith and inauthenticity. There are no moral values that would guarantee any of it a sincere uprightness. Value is only an external virtue. How, then, to escape the pretense, the lie to oneself? On the theoretical level, the rewinding of consciousness is a metamorphosis which conveys past commitments and reincarnates them in new projects, new bodies, new situations. Consistency is saved. On the other hand, on the existential level, it is a divided subject, fractured, which compartmentalizes and seeks solutions of continuity, as evidenced by the life and commitments of Sartre. And the connection between these two dimensions, moral and existential, arises from an endless debate with oneself and with others. As the closing line from No Exit says, ‘Well, let's continue.’” – Ibid.