Freedom = Death / Dishonor

This is what I think about our post-Wings of Desire documentary discussion yesterday.

We can forget that in going off the "social script", we're not just achieving some sort of transcendent freedom that allows us to be artistically and emotionally self-fulfilled.  We're also making it so that we can no longer have productive conversations like the one we had yesterday.  Imagine if I had suddenly busted out some serious prana in the middle of the circle while you folks were talking about reclaiming public spaces.  I would have disrupted the conversation, and we would not have accomplished what we accomplished.

There's a reason that when hermits reject society, society rejects hermits.  They're outcasts, pariahs, non-people.  We can't even say that hermitage is a good or bad thing, because when you're rejecting social structures, you're rejecting morality and any ability to make value judgments.  You're not just morally ambiguous, you're morally devoid.  You're doing a dark thing.

When you decide to be a hermit, you're embracing subversion and rebellion, but also total impotence and incompetence.  You could become the pioneering visionary (in which case your experience would be reappropriated by society anyway), or you could be the sludge, the dregs weighing down the boots of wider society, which keeps trucking along in your absent presence.  Not to mention the fact that you can never completely shrug off social structures, which allows you enough social consciousness to understand just how much you've sacrificed and how little you've gained (and/or vice versa...?).

The reason I'm pointing out that the hermit life is not all just happy self-discovery and freedom isn't just to be a debbie downer.  I think it's really important that not only are the stakes the lowest they've ever been for your life, because the pressure to perform for others is off, but they're also the highest you can possibly imagine, because your very humanity is at stake in a big way.

As always, if you think I'm being silly or super, you should say so.

Here are some quotations (that aren't Rilke, sorry).

"There are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside.  If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it.  I deserve it first because I could always get out of it…. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it…. If therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonor, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war…. There was no compulsion here, for the compulsion could have not got hold on a freedom.  I did not have any excuse; for…the peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse.”

-Sartre

Sartre is invigorated by the possibility of freedom, but he also recognizes an equivalence between "freedom" and "death or dishonor"...

“You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed—that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in books, could have made their condition so extreme.  And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying.  Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise.  Loneliness is an absolute discovery.  When one looks from inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky—the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same.  When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that.  Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.”

-Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

The relationship between these lonely people and society (abandonment, disappointment, betrayal) is very interesting to me.  There's a self-imposed victimization that can go along with the hermit life.  Also, the juxtaposition of the deception of being "inside" and the anger that comes from being "outside".  Incidentally, this is a fantastic book, especially if you're thinking about ways in which hermits can be hermits together.  The main character of this book shares many extreme hermit-like experiences with her aunt.

"You do not need to leave your room.  Remain sitting at your table and listen.  Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary.  The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

-Franz Kafka

Kafka echoes the Sartre quotation here when he says, "You do not need to leave your room."  Even a man like Kafka, who often felt the crushing loneliness and the terrifying void of hermit-ness, can still recognize the potential in such a choice.  It's pretty cool when the world rolls in ecstasy at your feet.