General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou don't think we're really Free, do you?
Fact of the matter is, actual freedom doesn't exist, has never existed, and will never exist in the world. The only delineation is between nation-states with more restrictions, and those with less restrictions. And, in case you've not been paying attention, America is sliding the wrong way on the curve.
With that, I bid you Good Night and Sweet Dreams!
delete_bush
(1,712 posts)lot of thought, didn't it.
CaliforniaPeggy
(156,330 posts)Yeah, we already knew.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)It's like being back in the 90s again...
easychoice
(1,043 posts)Oilwellian
(12,647 posts)you're better of not knowing, really.
Journeyman
(15,435 posts)I'm 59 years old and life has lost none of its excitement. There have always been aspects of society with which I've disagreed, swaths of our culture which disgust me, but life -- its mysteries and its promises -- has always held me enthralled.
As Ralph Ellison famously observed, "my world {is} one of infinite possibilities." After first being "for" society and then "against," I've learned to assign myself "no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times." And in doing so, the world has opened up, and I see it -- as Ellison's thinker-tinker did so many years ago -- I see it as "one of infinite possibilities." And a man -- especially Invisible Men as are we all -- shouldn't accept any other definition. "Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos . . . or imagination."
So yes, the world remains -- as it has been throughout our lives -- "concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful," but when viewed in the proper frame, a world of infinite possibility. And so it is, every day.
ZombieHorde
(29,047 posts)CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.
Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.
No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age--shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.
Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror--everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.
Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.
Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.
The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they'd call it an act of terrorism--so let's take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.
undergroundpanther
(11,925 posts)Her golden apples snare the control freaks so the wolf angels may devour thier souls and howl like thunder criss crossing the sky
.
ZombieHorde
(29,047 posts)Initech
(108,043 posts)littlemissmartypants
(32,806 posts)Carry on.
Response to littlemissmartypants (Reply #10)
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littlemissmartypants
(32,806 posts)Please proceed governor.
Actually thanks.
I needed a laugh.
~littlemissmartypants
Response to littlemissmartypants (Reply #15)
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Javaman
(65,428 posts)littlemissmartypants
(32,806 posts)Response to Javaman (Reply #13)
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Avalux
(35,015 posts)But it can't be given to you by an outside source, or other people. Freedom comes from learning to control your thoughts, and no matter the external circumstances, making yourself happy. That is really the only freedom there is.
littlemissmartypants
(32,806 posts)No Rack can torture me
Emily Dickinson
No Rack can torture me
My Soul
at Liberty
Behind this mortal Bone
There knits a bolder One
You cannot prick with saw
Nor pierce with Scimitar
Two Bodiestherefore be
Bind One
The Other fly
The Eagle of his Nest No easier divest And gain the Sky Than mayest Thou Except Thyself may be Thine Enemy Captivity is Consciousness Sos Liberty.
http://poetryx.com/poetry/poems/2807/
Online text © 1998-2014 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson | Written c. 1862
Avalux
(35,015 posts)Thank you for this.
littlemissmartypants
(32,806 posts)FSogol
(47,543 posts)I'm free to laugh.
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)La Lioness Priyanka
(53,866 posts)its always a fine balance.
(i did not want to watch the video, so am just making a statement about your question)
tularetom
(23,664 posts)Actually, we're not very brave either.
