#on freedom
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“So, here we are again, shoveling coal into the tender, or, in my son’s case, pantomiming the motion in the ruins. He loves trains and doesn’t care about trains anymore, ersatz wind in his toddler hair, real wind on his big-kid face as he flies through the pandemic-emptied lot. Here I am beside him, discovering, for the millionth time, the verity of joy, and how it throbs with impermanence, responsibility, and sorrow. The cord has been cut, most surely. But if I can imagine raising him, and continuing to raise myself, as those who might work on behalf of the surround–the common beneath and beyond–the already and forthcoming–if we can love all the misery and freedom of living and, as best we can, not mind dying–then my heart feels less broken, more emboldened. It feels shaped right. Morton says he wants "to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it.” For so long, I didn’t know what he meant. I do now.“
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Seen from the future, might the human prove nothing but a pollinator of a machine civilization to come?”
-Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian from Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
“We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like 'nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear too, of the many 'solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involved the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more 'sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine. We do not believe that everything will be fine.”
-from the manifesto of the Dark Mountain Collective, a UK-based group of artists and writers dedicated to “uncivilization”
“The hard lesson climate change has for freedom…is that the only way humans can stick around to practice it is by ceasing to conceptualize it as the defying of limits, and reimagining it as the practice of negotiating with the various material constraints that give our lives shape and possibility.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“As a problem gets harder to solve, ignoring it becomes all the more tempting. Ignore it long enough, and eventually it becomes unsolvable. Giving up can then seem to deliver a measure of relief, in that it appears, at least for a moment, to liberate us from the agonies of our failing efforts. But such relief cannot last, as the unsolved problem will continue to create problems and cause suffering. This suffering rarely feels like freedom.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“…no matter how hot it gets, no matter how fully climate change transforms the planet and the way we live on it, it will always be the case that the next decade could contain more warming, and more suffering, or less warming and less suffering. Just how much is up to us, and always will be.”
-David Wallace-Wells
“For better or worse, the question of what we tell each other–and what we tell ourselves–has become a staple in the discourse on global warming. The field is teeming with narrative concerns, be they about genre (Are we living in an apocalypse? a horror story? a tragedy? a fable? a farce? a typology?), origin stories ("It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine”), the problem of not knowing how the story ends or develops (climate scientists do not disagree on warming, but they do debate questions of “tempo and mode”), even the value of storytelling itself (Are stories still worth telling or recording if the likelihood of a future human audience for them is diminishing? What can the stories of much earlier humans tell us about our current crisis? What is the relationship between storytelling and adaptation, or storytelling and evolution?), and so on.“
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“This is one of the things I’ve learned about happiness: when you feel it, it’s good to say so. That way, if and when you say later in depression or despair, ‘I’ve just never been happy,’ there will be a trail of audible testimony in your wake indicating otherwise.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“When you’re an addict, if you can imagine life without drugs, it just seems to you like this boring, endless, pleasureless expanse. This desert. But freedom from that grind, freedom from that depression, that despair is like a high every day for me, to be honest. And then it just opens the door to all the ordinary pleasures of life.”
-Michael Clune, author of White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, in an interview on sobriety
“This undoneness is related to what some Buddhists call ‘the trick of choicelessness.’ Most religions have something of this trick embedded within them–a sense that, once you’ve glimpsed or opened to grace, or radical honesty or the noble path or God’s will or basic sanity, or what have you, the choice has already been made. You can turn away, but you can no longer fool yourself; even in relapse or misdeed, you will be haunted by the call you once heard.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“Who I am has little to do with addiction and recovery. Who I am isn’t the first thing I need to know to get better, it’s maybe the last thing.”
-Michael Clune, from White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin
“Let’s face it, we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
-Judith Butler
“My gender does not belong to my family or to the state or to the pharmaceutical industry. My gender does not belong to feminism or the lesbian community or to queer theory…I don’t recognize myself. Not when I’m on T, or when I’m not on T. I’m neither more nor less myself…It is fundamental not to recognize oneself.”
-Paul Preciado, from Testo Junkie
“That day, in the same room as Karen and Raff’s, we screw naked for the first time. Her pelvis is glued to mine, her vulva connected to mine, our organs gnawing each other like the muzzles of two dogs that recognize each other. As we screw, I feel as if my entire political history, all my years of feminism, are moving directly toward the center of her body and flowing into it, as if her skin provided their only real niche. When I come, Wittig and Davis, Woolf and Solanas, La Pasionaria, Kate Bornstein, and Annie Sprinkle bubble up with me. She is covered with my feminism as if with a diaphonous ejaculation, a sea of political sparkles.”
-Paul Preciado, from Testo Junkie
“Freedom is not about breaking or escaping constraints. It’s about flipping them over into degrees of freedom. You can’t really escape the constraints. No body can escape gravity…Freedom always arises from constraints–it’s a creative conversion of it, not some utopian escape from it.”
-Brian Massumi
“This performativity…is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.”
-Judith Butler, on gender performativity
“As I listen, I like to keep Sabina in mind, with her severe critique of the stupid motherfuckers who came and ruined everything, and her staunch, nearly unfathomable conviction that certain forms of wisdom belong to everyone.”
-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
