“Who is more to be pitied? A writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing to say?”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Freedom is a peculiar creature because, with it, comes great responsibility. A free person has more autonomy than someone who is not able to use their body or their mind as they so wish. But with this autonomy arrives the expectation that we must make ourselves useful -in service of those who are not as free, or in service of our gifts. If this is so, does freedom truly exist?
Perhaps not. Or perhaps it exists in terms of what we will allow ourselves to do or not do. Sometimes we place such stringent boundaries and limitations on ourselves that we barely have room to maneuver, mentally or physically. We then blame this on our perceived morals -those same, fluid morals which we would surrender in a heartbeat if that’s what everyone around us decided to do. Those same morals that are conveniently decided by what is accepted in our time.
We reflect our limitations off our childhoods. I was raised to think this way, we say at the suggestion that perhaps our boundaries could stretch if we really wanted them to.
This is the law, we imply -as if those who came before us didn’t break laws to secure the freedoms they, we needed.
We allow this inertia to seep into the carefree spirit of freedom. Anything we could have written in the dead of night when nothing matters, there are no meetings to go to, no one to make room for… anything we could have conjured up in our liberated imaginations hesitates to enter the limited zone in which we have relegated our freedom. We are free but only so much and so far.
We want to write but only what’s allowed. We want to explore our imaginations, except… Christians do not explore the circumstances around abortion. Abortion is wrong. Period. Israel is always right. Period… Sudan? Where’s that?…I heard something bad is going on in the house next door but that’s none of my business… Black people don’t care for the realities of classical musicians. That’s for white people… And decent people just don’t think about [insert taboo topic], let alone write about it…
And so the zone of freedom shrinks, writer’s block sets in and we start to think it’s because our lives are boring. Writer’s block sets in. We will not allow our minds to wander to the experiences of people who are not like us.
No one is even asking us to pick a side. We could write the book and still stick to our original side. No one is asking us to change our faith, core beliefs or identities. No one is asking for a total sacrifice of the self.
All our imaginations asked for is not that we change sides but that we merely look at every possible side, every participating angle. Imagination asked us to wonder -or to wander. That’s all. How much freedom does that cost someone who is already free?
And yet we respond, “No. I am not allowed to go there. What will people say? What will the audience think?”
Tomorrow we’ll say, “I have nothing to write about today.”
And one day, “I have a serious case of writer’s block!”
All the while, the lines we drew around the zone of freedom wait to be challenged whenever we please. We are not always oppressed by an external enemy, a formidable threatening outside force. But by ourselves. We could challenge those limits even today. Right now, if we so choose. Because there is no real war against writer’s block.
Freedom means the free mind can think and write whatever it wants, can go wherever it wants to. Writer’s block ceases to exist in the free mind.
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