I think that sometimes people form the impression that freedom, for an artist, means to be rid of all constraints, to indulge one’s whims or impulses, to have one’s head in the clouds, and to not concern oneself with anything so dreary as one’s moral life. But this impression isn’t accurate, and any artist who subscribes to such a view is unlikely capable of producing actual art (though they might produce something that resembles it, and might even fool an audience for a while).
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Certainly it does not mean acting without restraint or compunction, as if one were merely a consumer of experiences, attempting to ‘get’ from life everything that can be gotten.
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Though perhaps equally accurate, from a Christian perspective, would be to say that it means living in possession of the virtues, the variety of which is simply the facets of a love that discriminates according to circumstance, discerning what is most needed of it, and manifesting as such.
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The Apostle Paul would call this, I think, embodying the spirit of caritas, or love.
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Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t attempt it, or should become discouraged when one inevitably disappoints oneself, or fails to live up to one’s best self, but only that one should not be too hard on oneself, and should keep trying.
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Which isn’t as easy as it sounds, even if you grant it a place of truth (which many will not). For it requires the sort of purity that one obtains only through diligence and prayer.
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Meaning, I want to be alive to each moment, and to respond to it not with what I’ve been conditioned to believe is correct, or decent, or current (though my motions and deeds might coincide with those things at times), but with the honesty of my personality (which differs from your personality, just as yours differs from mine), which reaches its fullest and most perfect expression, paradoxically, only when it vanishes into, or finds union with, the will of the divine, which is to say providence.
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Perhaps what I ought to say is not that I want freedom from all templates (by which I suppose I mean, again, conventions), but that I want to conform myself to each moment not by way of memory or conditioning or habit, but by way of whatever spontaneity most authentically or fittingly responds to it, according to the promptings of conscience and the vibrance of imagination (regulated by intelligence).
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Let me then put it another way, more simply if I can. I want, as much as possible, freedom from all templates (in art as well as in ‘life’), which is not to say I want to grant myself license.
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Which is to say that the onus of interpreting a statement, or getting the gist of it, does not fall so heavily on the reader that the writer is freed from the responsibility of making the statement intelligible to that reader (even if some kinds of writing require more engagement from their readers than do others).
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Although, to ask a reader to take one at one’s word, with regard to the purport of the subject of a writing (instead of compelling the writing to alone do the work), amounts, I suppose, to a defaulting of the writer before the scope of their task. In the sense that the chore of all writing is to convince or persuade by the very art of that writing, and not through a commentary on, or an aside to, that writing.
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If that sounds like a self-important thing to say, well, ok, maybe it is. Although I’d think that such a vibe (if one is there) is more likely due to a want of exactness in the writing, or to my inability to describe the predicament as it is, than to an error in the impulse that led me to utter it, or in its legitimacy as a truth.
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Which does not mean that I abandon conscientiousness, or that the rigor of an ‘examined life’ is irrelevant to me, and that I care little for making myself answerable to it, but that I would remove it from the tombs into which society would have me inter it, and make it vital again, rather than allow it to function mechanistically, or to be replaced by those pursuits and activisms and modes of leisure that have become familiar to us through the language of advertising and social media, and that, even when nobly conceived, can devolve into exercises by which the conscience is soothed, wherein we call for, and observe, instances of ‘progress’ (which in themselves might be necessary and desirable), without waking to the reality of our inner lives.
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For I’m not interested in arranging my life according to convention, which would mean submitting myself to the ever-changing rubrics of some who would regard me, and compare me against what they have decided is necessary for themselves (and by extension everyone), with respect to their orientation to reality, as if their conception of the meaningful or conscientious is incapable of an expression that differs from what they themselves would define.
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Not that I do not value industriousness, for I do, and I know that I need it in spades, or in quantities that are, at the very least, equal to that of my neighbor. But to the extent that the industriousness of an endeavor can be worthy, while the purpose of it can seem futile or mystifying, I think that I should not concern myself with, or let myself be distracted by, whatever convention would say about that which I am doing (or not doing) with my life.
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Which I mean less as a statement of fact than of my own subjective feeling. For I know that everyone has a purpose, regardless of whether they seem, by societal standards (or even by standards they have internalized, and have learned to apply to themselves), to contribute the sort of work that can be described as ‘useful,’ or that can be measured by a currency, and traded on the strength of its valuation, and thus be deemed purposeful by those who would take upon themselves the task of adjudicating it.
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I am writing this entry in a hotel room in a city in a state that is several states south of the state where I live, or where the moments of my life have lately been elapsing, for ‘live’ seems not the right word, at least not to my mind, as it suggests a sense of purpose that I’m not sure I bring to my own existence, except to the extent that I involve myself in a creative endeavor, which this diary aims to be, though even if it fails in that respect (creatively), it is also, I think, such an insistent record of my thoughts, as they occur to me and as I pursue them, that maybe it will become, for however long I sustain it, both my purpose and the evidence that I have one.