Liberty Casts the Queen of Cryptic Typeset, Part 1

In love and in war, freedom isn't free.

When people typically think of conceptual ‘Liberty’ they often go directly for concepts associated with choice and consent and other manifest sunny resting destinations. Places visited by cooing doves, peaceful basking lovers or an ecstatic religious practice with little to no conflict from interlopers.  You’re right to associate it with freedom from external intellectual rivalries, jealousies and other forms of thorn bearing punishments.  You’re right to possess an innocent fantasy of conceptual liberty. So that your deep-seated soul can enjoy integral human happiness. There is a sacred place for Liberty in every breathing person on the earth. One may be driven to protect such a paradise.

From what?  From what, indeed.

This libertine reverie is suddenly interrupted by conflict. Just your typical horny, goatee sporting reprobate, a card carrying Los Angeles, Agent of Chaos. Yes, he’s there waiting for you, strewn out on the back pew of Sunday church, like a self-satisfied stray cat. He’s hoping to turn over the naiveté’ of the visitors section. He’s there, just in case there is a slow, wounded meal in transit that won’t run very fast. “Piece of cake!” he says.

People, and often powerful people with powerful desires, may confuse what they want with someone else’s choice and consent.  Never is this dynamic more colloquially demonstrated than between the free woman and a man who would confine her to domestic service.  For those who determine that marriage is a practical gift they give to another person, Congratulations! Society is with you.

For others, is it falling into an endless well of anti-romantic power plays. Let’s just be honest, these are robberies of personal liberty far down that well, with no bucket and no rope.  Over the millennia this manifests as lovers hidden from parents, family, spouses, infidelity, concubines, kept side-pieces, their children and the coercion of commercial sex services as an involuntary exchange.  It is also the source of very high grossing tragic-romantic star-crossed tales of love, sex and death, typical of Romeo and Juliet or Moulin Rouge.

Often people feel as if there is wall between them and such mayhem. That such stories are driven by outliers and myths. No one from your backwoods High School would ever die from an involuntary tangle as the love interest among the upper echelelon.  Or maybe you secretly hope they do, so that the great dramatic cycle of human tragedy didn’t leave you behind.  That is why people run out and buy the biographies of Renaissance musicians, like The Gesualdo Hex.  They may be genuinely perplexed, as in, “What the hell happened there?”  

Did someone really have to *die* to get their point across?! Someone did, and that is the point.

Films like Cloud Atlas cover a broad gamut of karmic connections to illustrate what may be told to anyone at your local Holistic and Psychic Weekend Seminars.  Oh, that would be exactly when a body worker and a Syrian tarot card reader tell you that The Colleague who decided to eyef**k you at the airport was outta line, but he’s also nailed you for 23 lifetimes. He also happens to be holding a god-awful grudge. So, he’s not letting up on the gas until he destroys you and everything you love. Thanks, that will be $85. Feel better! How about a massage and a Reiki infused lollipop when you think about that free funeral in a New Jersey landfill for being the unpitiable coerced mistress of a Very Bad Man?

The point is that romantic love on a Sunday afternoon is a most beautiful gift you give to someone you cherish by elective choice.  However, for every rare specimen of chosen free love, there is a man or woman struggling in the fetters of a humiliating or endlessly lacerating marriage.  In prior societies, the only way out was suicide or death by fire. People in horrible marriages can get help from pastors, counselors and financial solutions planners.  There are so many ways out. Our society is progressed enough when a man and a woman no longer can make it work, they work to end it in family court.  Then, a man becomes a freed man with some kids and a mortgage and a woman is a freed woman who can rake that guy for alimony to pay for her anti-aging hormone therapies and tenuflora women’s “health” retreats.

See? After a few years, the sand is out of the sensitive parts. Everyone learns that the beat of life keeps thumping.  You just need to get up, dance with someone new and keep the time.  The Sun comes up every morning.

What did we really learn?  The same thing disabled veterans learn.  Freedom and liberty come from costly fights, where you lose limbs. You won’t always be thanked for your service, but you do deserve a medal.  They should whistle and bow and throw roses at your sacrifice. The right people understand that it was a war. You walked away with your life. That matters.

Think of those formerly well-disposed lovers who didn’t do it right. They couldn’t afford the position of fighting with valor in and out of a marriage. They ended up in a landfill or prostitute roadkill in the House of Cards.