freedom costs money

The other day, I rationalised the motivation behind what I believe is the next wave of suicide bombers by applying it to my own situation. I can understand how it might happen. I was a bit miffed for some (probably hormone related) reason and I wrote this little nonsense.

Hope it makes some of you angry.

Motivation.

Quite a concept these days isn’t it. With the advance of modern thought and the decline of spirituality, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a good enough reason to do anything. Which is perhaps why the people I love sit around smoking weed and talking about revolutions instead of actually, er, revolving. It’s pretty painful to see and it stops them falling into that coveted category of people I both love AND respect. Imagine a Venn diagram: one circle: love, one circle: respect. Can’t help but admire their intelligence, bravery and that slightly more abstract quality: coolness but respect has never been quite forthcoming.

This would be comical or irritatingly superior were it not for the tendrils of pain that bind us small like a Chinese princess’s feet and tie us together like flies in a web. I watch them not working, not functioning, not creating, not dreaming, not smiling, not sleeping and it hurts. It hurts them to go through it, it hurts me to watch it.

Where do I fit in? Even I’m not sure and it’s been almost a year since I moved into the student house we all share in a university city: snobbish, affluent, comfortable. Perhaps I’m just playing at the whole thing: the drugs, the lack of possessions, devotion to creativity as opposed to frivolity. Or is creativity and extreme of frivolity? I’m afraid to embrace the lifestyle fully because I know I’ll never be one of them (I’m not one of anything) and that possibility, if it stays a possibility, is just about dealable-with. If I was to jump in to this dream life I’ve managed through luck, recklessness and hard work to obtain for myself, I’ll be spoiled forever. If it came to an end, I’d never be able to go back to how I used to be: blind, doped, suppressed. I’ve grown wings and that means I will never fit back into my cocoon.

I’m not one of them. But the head of the house tolerates me and the other three love me. I love them too. With all my heart. If they weren’t a part of my life, I’ve stretched my heart to fit in all the love I feel for them. Any other love it might try and admit after the event would be like a pearl in a jewellery box instead of an oyster shell: it would rattle and chill and ultimately fail and die. These people are the closest thing I’ve ever had to a family. They are the first people to ever not call me strange, to see me as anything other than a comical novelty ‘what WILL she say next?!’ The first people to encourage and accept me as opposed to tolerating or limiting me. I owe them my life.

I want to do something for them to match what they’ve done for me. I’m living on bonus time. My life belongs to them and recently, I’ve seen a way I could use the gift they’ve given me to provide them with something true to hold to, a message of hope and power that will echo throughout their lives for as long (or as short) a time as they last. It’s a price I will willingly pay. I was taken from hell and set above it all where I could see clearly and what I saw gave me peace. I saw the truth. A quiet truth that is constant, if invisible to many; it doesn’t need our attention or agreement to be.

But it’s a bold move. And pretty unethical too: it will involve ignorants/innocents in my personal sacrifice. But I’m not prepared to be moulded into a sensitive, cosseted fleshbag by the media like everyone else. It might sound funny but think about this: Animal hospital. That show pretty much epitomises what’s gone wrong with our sensibilities recently. There exists in this world a staggeringly high proportion of people who give to the RSPCA but give nothing to save humans and environments worldwide. Come the cataclysm, they’ll be crouched in their cellars with their fat dogs and bottled water wondering what they hell went wrong: weren’t the always kind to old ladies and kittens? Maybe if we stopped carrying the dead wood, we’d have a better world? No elderly animals survive in nature. Most young die.

It’s easy to squash this argument in most people because you can make the (excellent) point that most of us have received medical attention as children without which we might not have survived. Therefore by advocating such a world order, we are effectively signing our own death warrant. I know that’s true. In a state of anarchy, I’d be toast. I’d be raped and hung. I’ve got no strength or practical skills to protect myself or anyone I love. I’m soft, sensitive and self-congratulatory just like all the other highly evolved mammals walking the streets clapping one another on the back. I know these dreams of anarchy and a return to natural savagery are a dream. Before we naturally run out of the resources we need to maintain this sanitised artifice of a society, we’ll probably let off a nuke and poison our planet forever. Then it’ll be too late for the vines to creep up the skyscrapers and the buffalo to return to the superhighways. And even if there was a way: would we really want to sacrifice this heightened awareness, this intellectual dimension to our understanding of life that our society enables us to enjoy by supporting its nuclear physicists and poets? I’m not sure a lot of people would.

But we do experience echoes of the peace that comes with simplicity of motive. There. We’re back to motivation. Mountain climbers will tell you (or try it yourself) that when it’s just you and the environment around you things attain a clarity that isn’t possible in a busy street or slumped in front of the idiot box. If a mountain lion chews you up, it did it because it was hungry, not because it hates you or wants to hurt you. There are times when I despair of humans and their complicated poisons that I find this thought quite comforting.

Anyway. There’s something I can do for these people that I love. I don’t have to watch them suffer any more. I don’t have to watch them torture themselves with self-conscious denial of their powerlessness. I might be able to make them question that powerlessness. I don’t have to watch the world hurting them, just living in it, hurting them like a hayfever sufferer allergic to the very air they are breathing. And while I’m about it, they’ll know who they’ve been living with, finally. They’ll know that even though they found it easy to dismiss me because I haven’t sunk to the same depths as them, I had more power to actively fight back than they did. And I know how arrogant and conceited that sounds. I also know that it’s true.

Fuck, though, I’m going to miss him so much.