Unease grips me when I see the freedom banners raised, when the word is marketed as enthusiastically and persuasively as the latest dishwasher soap. I am in awe at the utter indefiniteness of freedom, for it can seemingly mean anything, to anyone, at any time. The greatest declared evil is its lack. Without freedom, we are told, only black holes remain. Ominous, roaming, dumb, gaping monsters devouring light; extinguishing even the hope of light.
Freedom must be fought for. Died for. Freedom is human. Freedom is divine. Humanly divine; divinely human. For we are not cogs, nor ants, nor mute stones in river beds being pushed by currents we can neither see nor control. Not born to be oppressed, we must struggle like convulsing fish in a net.
Yet I have always felt freest when all was declared unfree, and the most unfree when all was marching bands, smiling faces, and endless confetti rain. I have told many that I write to be free, that each scribbled word in a notebook was a spoonful of dirt extracted from the tunnel I am digging underneath the prison. Each sentence, a file grinding away at the cell bars.
But I might have it wrong. The shape shifter may have fooled me. Perhaps I am just a Jacob Marley, quietly and ruthlessly forging my own ponderous chain, word by word, link by link; and perhaps one day I will be forced to lug and drag my word chains with me as I haunt the Earth, driven onward into an eternity without reprieve.
I am weary of your vagueness, Freedom – the shapelessness of your lawyer speak and public relations and ritual murders. Freedom fighter one day; terrorist the next. Lies wielded as truths. The formless chimeric dreams you offer from your shadowy depths.
I yearn for the definite – pure form. The honest transcribing of soul to paper. Not Hamlet and his words, words, words, but rather for an end, followed by the original beginning. For true Freedom. For the Word.