Freedom as a Border State of Mind

Tõnu Õnnepalu

Lecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, April 10, 2003

There are some rare moments in the time, while freedom emerges. If we want to be more grandiloquent we may call time the History. Or, speaking about someone’s personal life, we may call it Destiny. Those moments, political and psychological, are perhaps the most suitable for writing. I mean the real writing, which is always the emerging of something unexpected, something new, as in the end of the Baudelaire’s poem Le Voyage.

It is a long poem, which starts with an image of a child dreaming on the maps of seas and continents. The world under the lamp of childhood is huge and without borders. And then the old poet says (well, he wasn’t this old in fact – perhaps as old as I’m now, but, like he says in another poem – Le Spleen – J’ai plus des souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans – I have more memories than I would have at the age of thousand years), so, he says: how little is world in the eyes of memory!

For a child the potential of possibilities, the latent freedom is in it’s maximal rate. Then, during the life, the doors of unused possibilities are closing, one by one. The hungry dreaming has been replaced by searching of real sensations, then by dullness, boredom and spleen – the famous ennui. As the potential of freedom has been used up, the life becomes to be felt like a prison. The trials of escape from this prison become more and more violent. As the poet says in another poem, the boredom – ennui – is the worst of all vices, the most powerful source of evil. A bored human being may – just to escape from his own prison – destroy the world, kill and torture.

Or destroy himself. The last part of the poem, which closes the whole book, evokes the Death as ultimate liberator and ultimate door into the unknown and the last remaining possibility for something new. This absurd hope tells us about the inner feelings of the poet, who’s sources of creation are like drying up and who doesn’t find his former freedom any more. So was the freedom, the childhood’s borderless world just an illusion?

Speaking about freedom we are speaking about different feelings and notions, which may not be compatible one with another. Like under many large abstract notion, under the rational notion of freedom lays a dark, powerful and irrational feeling. The answer to the question of existence of free will is more likely negative than positive. Both religious and scientific understandings show the world and human life as more or less determined by something or somebody else but our mind. Of course, we seemingly have a will. But there is seemingly no reason to call it free. We are born with determined genes, we grow up in determined emotional, social and cultural environment. Even our tendency to revolt sometimes against those determinations is most probably determined by similar biological and cultural mechanisms that are guiding our natural conformism. We live and act mostly unconsciously and that seems to be the most powerful argument against the possibility of freedom. Our action may be unpredictable for ourselves, but does that mean it is free? The configurations of streams under the bridge are unpredictable, but we cannot conclude that the water is free.

So we may always close the philosophical questioning about freedom with a bitter agnostic doubt. But we can never totally close the unconscious searching for more freedom. The feelings are not about all or nothing. The feelings are about degree. It may feel colder or warmer, it may feel more or less free. I would say, freedom is a need, one of basic human needs.

There is a need to be recognized by the others, the need of belonging – and there is the need for autonomy, separation. This latter need, we may call it freedom.

I think this need – or rather the balance between two opposite needs – has a quite personal rate. There are people with a very strong need for autonomy. In extreme cases those persons may be rather antisocial and their fear of dependency may cut them off from all human relationship. There are others who are seeking but to lose themselves, to dissolve themselves into the others.

Seemingly, the writers belong mostly to the first category. They have this almost antisocial urge for autonomy and independence. Writing itself is a solitary occupation. It is a kind of speaking alone, speaking to the imaginary others who are just the extensions of the writer’s self. Speaking alone is normally considered as an anomaly, a suspect behavior, a sign that the talker-alone is probably a little wacky. But the writer uses the art as a justification of talking alone. So his or her latent antisocial behavior is more or less tolerated.

Of course, every extreme psychological drive covers it’s opposite. So the writers, as extreme autonomists, the talkers-alone, are at the same time those who want to speak to the multitude, to belong to the whole humanity!

Sometimes I think that the gift of writing is nothing but a tricky skill to use one’s psychological specificity, to convert one’s rather extreme structure of personality to the social recognition.

In any case, the writing seems to hold a specific and very intimate relationship with freedom. Writer’s vital intuition leads him or her to the zones where the feeling of freedom is highest.

It also leads him or her toward the solitude, but the writer notices that only too late, when the point of non-return has been passed. Once an imaginative child whom daydreaming on the map of world leads him to the most remote islands – now a ripe man who founds himself on the island of his own imagination, too remote to tend the way back.

The map of seas and continents is a perfect image of exploration the outside world, the cosmos. By some vicious way this exploration turned towards the inner world of self, into the huge space of unconscious. There, on the limits of this inner world, are burning the lighthouses of freedom. Like all lighthouses they are warning the sailors of some danger. Here the dangers the lighthouses are warning of, are the reef of solitude and the huge sandbank of boredom. But for the seeker of freedom there is no possibility to turn back, somehow he is already ensorcelled by those magic beams, he doesn’t see anything else.

Now, speaking about freedom, we reached up to an extremely deterministic image. This inevitable drive toward the confines of unconscious, what has it do with real humanistic freedom, the free will? Still it has.

As I told at the beginning, there are some moments in personal life and in the life of community, when freedom emerges. It emerges from the personal and collective unconscious towards the personal or collective will. It is a moment of decision, it is a moment of boarding the ship. Then the ship leaves and your are not any more so much the master of it’s destination. Those moments of freedom doesn’t happen too many times in one’s life. For a writer, it may be the moment when he or she decides to start to write. Perhaps you may renounce the writing as the whole thing? But you really cannot write otherwise you write. The photo has been taken, now you develop it, your inner world appears, becomes the outside world of writing, of the written.

This schema may seem tragic in its determinism. It is tragic only from the personal point of view. But life is not a personal affaire. Personally we are all losers, we all lose all sooner or later. Life goes on, like people are used to say.

Writer’s personal encounter with his personal freedom on the limits of his personal unconscious does not remain his personal affair. Once written down, this antisocial experience may be socially useful – used at least.

Now it is time to turn toward the recent political and historical experience of my country – the experience of liberation. It was a moment in the life of whole nation, when freedom emerged for a while. At that moment the solitary experiences of writers (dead or alive) became socially crucial.

At first, through the years of social oppression the feeling of freedom had been mainly hold in the art and especially in the writing. Now this poetical knowledge was ready for unexpected practical use.

But also the personal experience of artists and writers was ready for political use. As the question was then urgently and mainly about the freedom, the artists suddenly occurred to be the experts.

In the very fixed and rigid Soviet system, the artists were the happy few who enjoyed certain independence in their life, due to the specificity of their work. Perhaps – like I said already before – they were the people whom feeling of freedom was the strongest one. Now they happen to be better prepared to the suddenly emerged political freedom, or better to say, they were prepared to see the freedom in this vacuum that was left by the vanishing power. They were less surprised.

Perhaps the artist’s intuition not only leads him or her toward the higher degree of freedom, but also makes the artist more apt to detect the movements of freedom in the social history. This foreseeing is just an ability to feel the subliminal, latent movement in the collective unconscious. It doesn’t mean you can tell the future. But you sometimes act like you could tell it.

To speak about my personal experience, I was somehow sure, in the early eighties, when I decided to become the writer, that the freedom must arrive. I mean, my personal freedom. It just couldn’t be otherwise. I hadn’t any idea how it must happen, but I was somehow sure it should happen.

At the beginning of eighties, when the Soviet regime seemed to be somehow eternal, I told to my friends and even wrote in poem, how go one day to Paris and write there a novel. I studied French. I knew that I would never belong to this rare Soviet nomenklatura that allows to go legally to Paris. No, it had to happen otherwise. I didn’t know that it will need the breakdown of the empire, but when the breakdown happened I was not at all surprised, I only knew: now my moment had come.

This personalization of nation’s history may seem arrogant and stupid. I don’t think that all the historical events took place just for my good pleasure. Nevertheless, it was the moment, while my personal need for freedom found its unique possibility in the huge collective movement.

The moment of freedom is always short. It occurs, when the old state of things (or the old state of mind) ceases to be, and the new state has not yet consolidated. Crossing the border, leaving the harbor, the plane’s take-off – there are moments, while the feeling of freedom reaches its higher degrees. These are also moments, when this feeling – or the freedom itself – may start to frighten.

As the freedom emerges from the depths of unconscious, it always brings on surface many things. Writing is never writing just about the beautiful things. The inner world is full of dangerous monsters. Also, while the freedom emerges in society, it brings from the deeper layers of collective unconscious many bad things on the surface. The rise of violence, the emergency of greed, desperate individualism, self destroying behaviors.

Liberating one’s good forces we always liberate also some bad forces.

So freedom starts soon to frighten. Both society and persons start to try to confine it. Ten years after the liberation the word of freedom is not any more on everybody’s lips. Not at all.

Kind of political reaction is inevitable. Now the wind has turned and the political speech goes rather on the order, on the limits. The rare moment of freedom is over and the writer is banned again from the center of the society to his remote island, where he can freely go on with his solitary research of freedom. So freedom is not a normal state of things, nor the normal state of mind. Normally, it stays somewhere outside.