Friday 29 October 2010

Freedom

Freedom comes in many guises. Like many words it is easy to say but what it means is harder to fathom. It is freighted, weighed down, deep by experience, history and myth, surround it like dense fog. To approach it, fathom it, we can turn to dictionaries, philosophers, songs, movies. ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing' left to lose’ in ‘Me and Bobby Mcgee.’ While in Braveheart, William Wallace makes the following speech ‘Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!’
That it is better to die by living, rather than live by dying, is the classic existentialist position.
Sartre a leading exponent wrote that ‘we are condemned to be free’. Our freedom lies in having to make choices, in taking responsibility for ourselves. We cannot blame others, our parents, society, God or evade it by pleading the unconscious. We are not blind puppets, dancing on the end of someone else’s string – it really is up to us. To recall Shakespeare we are actors on a stage, ‘players’, with our ‘exits’ and ‘entrances.’ Playing ‘many parts’ through ‘seven ages’ we start with sound, as infants ‘mewling’, schoolboys ‘whining.’ Before, we become lovers ‘sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad’. Sound is shaped, words arise and we continue as the soldier ‘full of strange oaths’, and then the justice ’full of wise saws’. In the ‘sixth age’, the ‘big manly voice’, is ‘turning again toward childish treble, pipes’, with ‘whistles in’ its ‘sound.’ From speech, back to sound,and then lastly silence.
Sound is our medium, shaped sound our speech. Our voices carry us into the known world and beyond. It is the connecting pattern vibrating between us, if we let it be, as sound. Sounding the depths we fathom our own freedom. We find, our own unique, individual voices, in speech and language. We communicate, and become human. Language is here connecting. It is the gift by which we give ourselves, find ourselves, find love, find friendship - love and friendship are cognate with freedom. The fog has lifted, as it sometimes does and in the clarity of the moment, freedom, love and friendship are together, united in language, three in one, a trinity to aim for. A trinity, experienced last week, with my fellow Dark Angels, to all of whom, my thanks.