Chasing Liberty

As a fleeting sense of pastness stole upon me, I found myself embraced by hands of clock, and pressed down by passing moments, while each number of the day’s hours stole kisses of life from me. I had more silence than I could afford to handle, so I resorted to that old comfort of rubbing my left shoulder with my right hand, until sleep followed by the morning, broke over my horizon. I was looking down on the earth when I found some thread that could connect my latest anxieties. There’s some need, some aspect of mankind that I had for long ignored…

In the last few days, I have often thought of a gentleman whom I once met on a railway station. He talked vigorously to me for about a quarter of an hour to me (though I can say for most part he didn’t wait for a reply)―about his philosophy of life.  There was a current in his voice―a part of me said he was lonely while the other said he was just alone. Perhaps essential condition of man lies somewhere in between―a continuum of mental singularity and physical singularity, on which resides the dreary existence of our being. Betrayed by memory, and encouraged by silence that often sleeps next to me, I tried to imagine that gentleman.  All I remember are his specs, weariness of his posture, tangibility of his laughter and honks of the trains. Now as I have discovered newer areas of thought, I can perhaps make sense of his memory which had for long time plagued me. He was searching for some certainties of life and the beyond of it. Like I am trying to do…

There were many fashionable heads that nodded by my side. Boxed into cemented coffins, these human sheep were trying like me, to find a Christ in that shepherd that was leading us to slaughter-houses… I came back from that death-house and tried to search for some signs of life, in the most morbid of places, rightly beginning with the initial of its only adjective ―metro stations. I had just de-boarded my train and was covering the length of the platform when my eyes were arrested by a figure of such symmetry and concentration, that I stared at him rudely for a fraction of a second. My admiration for that fine specimen of manhood was interrupted by an odd detail of his being. There was more space between his legs than what is usually comfortable. It had perhaps to do with that bag that sling across his shoulders and rested by his waist. In a moment that symmetry and concentration was transformed in my eyes to a mundane struggle of a beaten body to stand up when drawn seductively to the ground.

One of the most misunderstood philosophies of our times is Marxism. The bloody memories of communist revolutions are so strong, that most people run away on hearing the word. To begin with, Marx is not Stalin. In his alienation, Karl Marx tried to find answers for modern anxiety in the denial of our primitive instinct to possess or own. This desire to own and possess is one of the many ways in which we try to build a world of certainties, for physicality is the easiest of the kinds of certainties. All this was in my mind when I looked at the raw earth after my night with the hours. Of late I had been thinking of sex and sexuality (this has much to do with my preoccupation with Michel Foucault lest you think I am some creep!) and in a moment of epiphany, agriculture appeared to me to be the most sexual of activities. It is somewhere there that the initial harmony was broken, where creation meant such physical undertakings, that some of the modern anxieties were first born.

In sleeping next to someone, copulating, creation of beings and kinds (keeping in mind the conditions of tactility and physicality), man finds some position for him to hold onto. He fixes his claws in rugged fixtures and cracks, and boldly claims some coordinates on that continuum of singularities. The debates of meanings of life have always revolved around those established currencies of philosophy- reason, rationality or ethics. But there’s some other background against which this usual drama of ‘thinking’ is played, whose existence have to be acknowledged and suitably named first. It is the background of ‘spirituality’. I use this term with full knowledge of the many connotations that are attached to it, and therefore, would like to define it in order to avoid confusions. The domain of spirituality must be understood as that area of man’s existence, where he has and develops certainties for himself (for let it be understood, that belief in uncertainty is also a certainty and therefore, sceptics are believers of disbelief). I use the verb “has” with complete awareness of the notion of definiteness that it brings with itself to assert that there’s no existence without the domain of spirituality. But then it is not a stratified zone. It gets transformed continuously throughout one’s life. Even the most thoughtfully dead people, constantly revise their certainties. It moves, transforms and evolves. When this domain of man’s existence is ignored or dismissed, we have catastrophes like one that is in the Middle-East at present.

By the end of his life, Michel Foucault began to think of a concept that is still debated by Foucauldian scholars, the ‘care of the self’. Interestingly, Heidegger (or to be more précised his translators do) uses the same noun (‘care’) to explain the creation of Dasein. Also, both trace Plato as the point of juncture in thought--when philosophy began to be too systematic or disciplined. I was much struck by this noun for it is a performative utterance, an action even in speech. There’s something necessarily positive or productive in this ‘care’ for the attempt is to place oneself in the perspective of the cosmic whole. This was exactly something that I had been long brooding upon.

But what is the ultimate aim of that ‘care’? Perhaps to live a more realized life. But that would be a vague answer for I had to find something more exact, if my inquiries are to be fruitful. I revisited that figure from the metro station. I tried to understand that memory piece. If his memory had to stay in my mind, it better make sense. In deviating from symmetry and concentration, in letting his physicality to be interpolated by more space than what is necessary, he appeared to be in certain bondage, to my mind. That figure, that posture didn’t generate a sense of ease or, precisely the freedom. So, perhaps the essential aim of all spiritual drama is to achieve a sense of liberty. There’s a bench on the campus, which is placed at a location where it has no earthly reason for being. Surrounded by wilderness on three sides with a ground so raw underneath, that one expects the earth to open up at any instant and swallow it. When I first remarked at the oddity of its location, my companion observed that it’s a fine place to ask existential questions. I saw that place this morning and was reminded of that conversation. To my mind, it has become a metaphor for liberty. A set of binaries clash in its presence… which makes it a tangible matter―a fragility defended by moments against the onslaught of the hours. 

Liberty is composed of freedom but freedom is not liberty. Freedom has, (to borrow a term from Heidegger) certain thingliness about it while liberty is a condition of the spirit. The physical nature of freedom is the first of the steps that leads to that condition of spirit called liberty. Each has to aspire for it on their own, in a struggle and quest that is personal and often, private. Therefore, all historical movements that aspire for liberty stop at the physical threshold of freedom, though often its mothers and fathers had had achieved that condition of spirit, at some point or the other in their journey. It is so because liberty is a singularity… Numbers never achieve it.

Liberty has a notion of temporality attached to it. The time of liberty is measured in fractions of seconds and rarely reaches its maximum count. So, it is in moments that we are free. Many define happiness against the same temporal restrictions as I define liberty. But then there’s a difference of phenomenological kind. In happiness, the world appears more than what it is; this may explain the abundance that is displayed under the influence of its cousin, mirth. Every material object appears enhanced, fuller than what it is. While in liberty, something of opposite nature happens. The physical onslaught of the world is diminished to the extent that one can imagine floating or even flying above it. While all this drama is played in our inner selves, our outer selves remain do not remain unaffected. Most people display a tension in their gait, when they suffer with one. On the contrary if you have reasonable number of moments of freedom in your life, the earth is likely to ease for you.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines liberty as being set free. This means that there was something that bound one in the first case. What are these bonds? Ties that pull you or restrictions that hold you. It is both. We are pulled, we are held. The movement is either charted or debarred for us. In essence, there’s certain un-realization or fakeness in being, a weight on your shoulders. Heidegger defines pure being and pure nothing as the same. But then there’s an essential difference in what he aspires for and what I am trying to conceptualize here. For Heidegger it is in the anxiety that the material world slips off from our fingers, and slowly negates to zero, no thing. I am not talking of world slipping off from our fingers, but us rising above (not against) it. For me liberty is not no thing, but being no thing.

What essentially is this bondage? I associate it with certain sense of lack, a lacuna, too many absences. But if there’s some sort of lessness, that is bondage then liberty must be moreness. This is contradictory to what I have been hitherto projecting. If matter is added, things are likely to become heavy not light. So addition must be of the kind that the sum is not more than what was before. This sounds more paradoxical than the one before it. This cannot be so, and therefore the premise is wrong. The essential operation should not be of addition but alignment. The lack is not of Absence but disorder.

Many claim that they experience freedom (some masters say even liberty) in articulation, in saying. That brings the essential debate back to the question of language. Do we master language or does it master us? What does not exist in language, hardly finds representation though many such things do exist. Perhaps the enterprise of desynonymization is one such attempt to free ourselves from the bondage of language, and therefore is such an important kernel for development of thought. Many thinkers have contemplated over the role of silence in expression. If speech binds then perhaps silence can release us. By silence I don’t mean unsaying. Silence says when speech doesn’t. Can we make silence say? That’s perhaps the whole idea behind the alternative conception of the humanity.

On my first evening in the hostel, we were joyfully shaken by the cries of a peacock.  I rushed to my balcony to spot him. After some fruitless attempts, I was able to spot him―hidden under a lush of leaves, situated on a high branch of a jamun tree, facing west, it cried to make everyone hear him.  To be similarly at heights― to yell, to cry, to call without inhibitions―wasn’t the whole existence for him another of his feather? Foucault believed that crying is manifestation of our animal past for in the babbles that we are reduced to, we relive our languageless evolutionary past. A moment of animality when culture, society and millennia of civilization don’t intrude upon you... Perhaps that's why Whitman's 'barbaric YAWP' was the ultimate statement of liberty. It then struck to me, as to why poets often identify their souls with singing birds. And perhaps I do the same by thinking of him in my moments of repose and meditations.

You cross from one end of the world to the other, cover the globe in chases but nothing lightens the heart that has been weighed down by birth. Having certainties help to release you from these bonds and take part in that quest for liberty―to find that sweet melody that is the last breath in life. I walked down a busy market on a Sunday morning, when out of nowhere a child appeared on the horizon. On the road of a busy market, that child ran like she owned the world, with a guardian that was leisurely following her. I could see the world receding behind her. By the time she passed me, I had taken a seat in my mind where wilderness enclosed me in three folds, as some melody played in my ears.

I look for mermaids to sing a song for me, in the drought-ridden Delhi.