Freedom

So do we have freedom? Are we actually free?

We have the freedom to laugh at our lack of freedom, the fact that we have no freedom, and that we’re even lost without freedom.

Is this our freedom: sitting around talking shit?

We’re hopeless. But we’re hopeful in the way we share our hopelessness. In our capacity for hope.

Is that it – is that all we get, a fucking capacity for hope?

The conditions for hope are there.

Why, because we can talk about our hopelessness? Because we can say how shit everything is?

The worst is not, so long as we can say, This is the worst: that’s what Edgar says in King Lear. Hopelessness is not, so long as we can, We’re hopeless …

The way we’re hopeless is very old hat. It was a European philosophy cliché from 1940. It’s been done. By Jean-Paul Sartre or the theatre of the absurd, or whatever. It’s all mapped out for us, our so-called hopefulness. It’s all become a cliché now: despair, hopelessness, the usual existentialist bullshit. Especially anxiety. It’s all been done, written about, dramatised, or whatever. There isn’t any room for us. Everything we feel and think and say is a cliché.

So let’s kill ourselves, or has that been done, too?

It’s all been done. We’d better just live on, which we will do anyway, in total mediocrity.

Anyway, the time to actually kill ourselves is long past. We missed that appointment, like we missed everything else.

At least they had war and stuff in 1940. And communism. At least they could nurture revolutionary dreams. See we should really have lived during the Russian revolution. Or the French Revolution. Or some revolution. When things could change. Instead of just getting worse.